zlacker

>>tosh+(OP)
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and saying how dangerous it is (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-d...), and yes there are certainly such examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get overly freaked out because of rare events?

Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.

>>andrey+AN
I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.

Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.