Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
*edit
this very post will be down-voted
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.
If I post "the Republic party interfered with Donald Trump's impeachment investigation by not allowing witnesses to testify before Congress" on my social media I'm sure I would get some backlash; that does not mean that I have been cancelled. It means that I've chosen to post decisively about an issue that might not be as black and white as I consider it to be.
Basically what I'm saying is that I personally don't feel or notice a lot of "cancel culture" within my own life, and I'm trying to better understand where people feel like it comes from. Data might not be necessary, but it might also make the impacts more clear. I'm just wondering about how to frame the issue in a way that makes sense to me.
I guess you think these are all examples of perfectly rational things to say that cannot be disputed, but let's just take "all lives matter". Sure, no one can disagree that "all lives matter", but saying this implies that you think this in response to "black lives matter" , and Pinker himself articulates the issue with this well:
"Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/05/the-purity-posse-p...
Got any data to back that up?
I think the "all lives matter" is a anti-slogan to something important so I wouldn't say that. I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really disputed. You can gender identify how you'd like though.
I think the hormone blockers is a complex issue and I'll leave it at that.
But I recognize that if I held radical ideas (which the ones you pointed out are either on the edge or beyond it), I very well might get fired for expressing them in a public forum if someone showed that to my companies HR. To deny that is just me being blind.
To be clear, I took my job with that explicit knowledge that, any public information on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, or here would be scrutinized. I don't like it, but I also went into that with my eyes wide open.
It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.
If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.
For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.
Read Matt Taibbi’s recent article for starters. David Shor(a junior data scientist), a Mexican-American construction worker etc.
12-year olds kicked out of school and ostracised for saying the n-word on some random TikTok.
You really must be kidding when you’re saying “normal” people aren’t affected.
I honestly have no idea. I'm not on Twitter or Reddit and I religiously avoid confrontation on Facebook so maybe I'm just out of touch. My anecdotal experience suggests that apart from a few outliers the impact of cancel-culture on regular people is overblown. I don't know what statistics I'd look at to determine if that's broadly true. It seems like every time I hear someone say something like "Now I'm not even allowed to express opinions or state facts anymore!" what they actually mean is "Now when I say kind of horrible things online in a deliberate attempt to be confrontational people yell at me on Twitter!" I see a lot of what I would consider radical-right and sometimes downright hateful opinions expressed on Facebook, and the people expressing them aren't getting cancelled, fired, or even called out. Mostly they're just being congratulated by their filter bubble.
I have definitely scratched my head at some of the high-profile 'cancellations' for things that seem pretty innocuous. It seems like this mostly only happens to celebrities who have positioned themselves as liberal thinkers, though. Definitely a problem for them, and I don't envy the PC pitfalls they have to navigate. But to be fair it happens on both sides of the political spectrum - recently I've seen a number of right-leaning folks on my Facebook feed "cancelling" the NFL for the national anthem thing, or for considering renaming teams with culturally insensitive names, etc.
[1] Not that things that are only problems for celebrities aren't real problems, but I think it changes the discussion a bit.
[2] A recent example I saw of something I would consider dangerous and hateful was a screenshot of a Facebook post with a picture of a noose and a caption about teaching criminals and looters to fear the law again or something equally horrible. The profile picture was an older white woman and indicated she worked at a school. Two things stood out to me here: 1) It could easily have been faked, in part or in whole. She should have an opportunity to defend herself (the whole point of the legal system) assuming she's a real person and the profile itself wasn't entirely fabricated as outrage porn. 2) If it was real I would definitely not want my kids attending a school that would keep her on staff.
In my filter bubble the people posting things like 'Black Lives Matter', suggesting that we use people's chosen pronouns, or indicating that maybe our current justice system is anything other than absolutely upstanding and unchangeable are the ones being called out. They're still not being fired for their opinions, though.
A professional soccer player was fired because his wife made racist posts [1]. Not him, his wife. Of course, that is still something happening to a celebrity (even if a relatively minor one), but the precedent that a person can be fired because of something a family member said is chilling.
(Of course, given at-will employment, it was legal to fire him for this – being married to a person with shitty views is not a protected class – but, not everything legal should be socially acceptable, and firing someone simply because of their spouse's opinions should not be socially acceptable.)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/05/aleksandar-...
I specifically addressed this with my opinion which I feel confident won't get me fired in my comment. I could have been clearer in saying, I don't believe that the idea that sex males are not sex females is a radical idea. Gender wise I'll respect anyone being called whatever they would like to be called.
I don't understand the gender issue, I don't really think I need to. I do respect that people have complex feelings which are made easier by me addressing them in the manner which they prefer. It's no sweat off my back as long as it doesn't impede the scientific study of sex differences in order to better treat and identify diseases specific to sex.
Yes. [0] There are many examples. Jon Ronson wrote a book in 2015 called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" that profiled, IIRC, a half of a dozen different people, just normal people, not celebrities, who were dragged publicly on Twitter and MSM and lost their jobs, etc...
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...