Mob justice over what people said years ago is very dangerous. And due to the global nature of the internet, it is very hard to get the mob off your back. It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff they tweeted as a teenager. It seems in the modern world felons deserve redemption, but bad tweeters do not. Not to mention that cancelling people over what they said in the past is so stupid, that if applied consistently, will lead to funny scenarios. For example, if teenagers should be punished for their past tweets, why shouldn't be Joe Biden for saying on the record that he doesn't support same.sex marriage in the 2008 VP debates. This is not even counting what opinions biden held in the 20th century.
It seems that we have come to a point where you simply can't speak on certain topics, neither in the affirmative nor in the negative, and so most people end up saying what will keep the mob at bay. Case in point, all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces.
How many of them have still been denied after showing genuine remorse for their views? Nobody is owed a college admission.
> all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces
Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to women's spaces.
Nobody is universally "owed" anything but we do a lot of good and prudent things anyway because it's entirely within our capacity to execute good and prudent acts and we're sometimes better off for it. And yes we sometimes do bad and despicable things because sometimes impulse overrides reason, but that too is in our capacity to put a handle on and reign in, so we do, or at least we ought to.
So maybe there's a better way to articulate this dichotomy than the lazy argument of "You're not owed $thing"-which doesn't solve anything for anyone except the speaker's own ego.