> The point I actually want to make is that speech absolutely does and should have consequences.
Nothing said by any of the people I'm talking about justified the consequences they suffered.
Nothing said by any of the people I'm talking about justified any negative consequences at all, in my personal opinion.
Of course, people are equally entitled to speak their own opinions. But laws against defamation are compatible with freedom of speech. And on the flip side, freedom of speech is a philosophical concept which stands independently from the First Amendment or any other law or constitutional provision in any country. Threatening people with the kinds of consequences observed is threatening their ability to speak freely.
The natural consequences of speech are a) change in others' opinion; b) more speech from others. If saying X could ruin my life, then it cannot plausibly be argued that I am actually "free" to say X.
James Damore should not have lost his job, because he said nothing wrong. Where people claimed he said something wrong, even on the occasions where they could point at something relevant, it simply did not make the argument that they claimed it did.
Again: I know, because I have read it (and the media coverage). It's also still available on his personal website, along with numerous archives.
> The "mr-hank" python convention example frankly seems incredibly minor. Someone got offended and complained and someone else apologized and then a whole bunch of people argued about how offended any person actually should be.
And people lost their jobs when they should not have lost their jobs. People were subjected to firestorms of social media "criticism", and had their names dragged through the mud, for no good reason.
> his speech was stupid and offensive enough that I wouldn't want to work with the dude.
There was nothing wrong with what he said. It was objectively correct, and it was objectively completely different from how others characterized it. They were objectively lying about what he said. I know this, because I read what he said, and I read what others said about what he said. Their characterizations were incorrect and they had no real justification for making those characterizations, except for ideological blindness.
There was nothing that merited him losing his job. If you don't want to work with him, that does not merit him losing his job. If you don't want to work with me, that does not merit me losing my job. If I don't want to work with you, that does not merit you losing your job.
> And more to the point, you shouldn't be allowed to silence my response to his speech.
Nobody did so, and nobody proposed to do so. If by some chance you are his former employer, terminating him was not a "response" that could be "silenced". In every other case, nobody is supposing that you shouldn't be able to think he's an idiot, or call him an idiot (since that wouldn't meet any reasonable standard of defamation, at least in the US). But they are supposing that he should not have lost his job.
> This is a good thing
No, it is not. It was fundamentally unjust. Being fired — and having everyone know why it happened — is a serious consequence that was not merited.
> and I vehemently disagree with this idea that people's responses should be censored.
This is irrelevant. Nobody's response was censored, and nobody proposed to censor responses.
Termination of employment is not speech. It cannot be "censored". It can, however, be called out as unjust, and cited as evidence of a trend of unjust extrajudicial punishment.
> Do you think any part of this was unjust in some way?
Yes; the part where his name was dragged through the mud and he lost business by the fiat of people more powerful than him (the agency etc., not by letting the market decide) even though his "misconduct" was nothing illegal and did not even result in any civil action that I'm aware of, although it did result in protests at his comeback tour (per the Wikipedia source). From what I recall, he proposed some sexual acts in an entirely reasonable context for doing so, in a highly self-deprecating manner, that his partners were not interested in, and he took "no" for an answer without a problem.
> The term "cancel culture" was always intended to be a pejorative,
Yes, because pejoration is merited. But they are the ones who decided to call it "cancelling" and to refer to its targets as "cancelled" (also "over") in the first place.
> intended to shame and disparage the people involved in speaking out against those in power.
They should be critiqued. The people they speak out against overwhelmingly are not "in power", as demonstrated by the fact that they commonly lose their jobs.
If the mere existence of an epithet to describe their unjust conduct, is "shaming and disparaging", then so is that conduct.
> Did it occasionally apply out side of that? Sure, but very rarely to any serious degree.
It happens constantly. I know because I have friends who would happily constantly show me new examples if I decided to spend the time listening.
> the whole "gamergate" thing where some dude
His name is Eron Gjoni.
Somehow, I can remember this despite not having had to think about it for years; yet eleven years later out of countless exchanges I've had to get dragged into, I cannot recall a single instance where someone on your side of the argument mentioned the name voluntarily or otherwise demonstrated awareness of it. I can recall numerous instances where I asked them if they know his name, and they all sidestepped the question.
Eleven years later it is consistently people on your side of the argument bringing up the topic, while proudly demonstrating ignorance of even the most basic facts of the matter. It is not Gjoni's original supporters having some "remember the Alamo" moment. They don't need to.
The "some dude" rhetoric is demeaning. So was the treatment of his allegations, which were a) severe; b) credible and reasonably evidenced; and c) not even remotely like the misogynistic nonsense maliciously and falsely attributed to him. I know this because I have read them. They are still publicly available, by the way. (Also, Zoe Quinn is not a "journalist", and never was.)
Gjoni was known at the time to have strong progressive values, and expressed those values before, during and after his post with the allegations. In fact, a significant portion of the claim depends on attempting to apply those progressive values fairly, and holding Quinn to her own standards. He shows more kindness and charity than I could imagine most people being capable of in the same situation.
His case is by any reasonable measure far stronger than that of any of the women who complained about Louis C.K. At least if we're presuming that men have equal rights, that their sexual consent is important, that people should generally be expected to meet the standards they apply to their sexual partners... again, the actual words are public information; you don't have to take my word for it. I am not linking them because I assume it will get my post automatically filtered. I have seen that happen elsewhere on the Internet. I suppose I take a risk simply by writing both names.
> Instead it took people complaining about powerful people being sexist/racist
This is not what happens. The targets are broadly speaking not powerful, and the allegations of sexism and racism (or anything else) are broadly speaking unfounded.
> Termination of employment is not speech. It cannot be "censored". It can, however, be called out as unjust, and cited as evidence of a trend of unjust extrajudicial punishment.
This is the key point of this argument and it boils down to the idea that freedom of association is somehow less meaningful or more able to be limited than freedom of speech. It's not. Even in a business context.
> If you don't want to work with him, that does not merit him losing his job.
If I'm his employer, then yes, this merits losing his job because it's literally the definition of why people lose their jobs. Because people don't want to work with them. Whether that's due to things they say or things they've done is irrelevant.
The thing is, speech matters. You can't arbitrarily separate the world into "speech" and "actions". The nursery rhyme about sticks and stones is incredibly untrue. Speech is the predecessor of actions and it tells you both what someone intends to do and what they want you to do.
If every single company in america signed some kind of agreement to never hire James Damore, or the federal government passed some kind of law forbidding his employment, then yes, that would be extreme and unjust. Instead he just got fired and had to interview at a new company. Hardly an existential crisis.
This again goes to my original point, Damore is in a fairly privileged position and didn't actually suffer that much, and yet we're supposed to use this as an example to justify silencing people.
The thing that gets frequently glossed over is that all of these situations where people are "cancelled" are merely reversions to a neutral position. Hiring someone, and by extension keeping them employed, is an action you take. Firing them is merely stopping that action. Same thing with inviting someone to come give a speech at your college or anything else. Cancelling the invitation is merely reverting to the original, neutral position where no action had been taken. It's not some kind of massive injustice if rescinds an invitation, no matter if that's to a party or to give a speech.
Gamergate is especially ironic since it was essentially an attempt to cancel someone that started all of it, it just turned out to be based on a ton of false accusations and then escalated into frankly criminal behaviour.
The whole purpose behind the "cancel culture" meme is an attempt to prevent people from reacting to speech. I think that's wrong and damn near evil. Speech can be incredibly impactful and being able to speak and act in opposition to it is sometimes the most important thing anyone can actually do.
Like most things in life, it turns out that why you're doing something actually matters quite a bit. There are people in this world who absolutely deserve to be "cancelled".
> This is the key point of this argument and it boils down to the idea that freedom of association is somehow less meaningful or more able to be limited than freedom of speech.
When I look up explanations of the concept of "freedom of association", I don't see anything about employers' rights to "disassociate with" employees by firing them. Rather, I see abundant discussion of employees' rights to unionize. Here's what my government has to say about it (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...):
> Freedom of association is intended to recognize the profoundly social nature of human endeavours and to protect individuals from state-enforced isolation in the pursuit of their ends (Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada, [2015] 1 S.C.R. 3 (“MPAO”) at paragraph 54). It protects the collective action of individuals in pursuit of their common goals (Lavigne v. Ontario Public Service Employees Union, [1991] 2 S.C.R. 211 at page 253). It functions to protect individuals against more powerful entities, thus empowering vulnerable groups and helping them work to right imbalances in society (MPAO, supra at paragraph 58). It allows the achievement of individual potential through interpersonal relationships and collective action (Dunmore v. Ontario (Attorney General), [2001] 3 S.C.R. 1016 at paragraph 17).
An employer is a "more powerful entity" than an employee, inherently.
Cancel culture is used to pressure employers to fire their employees, for reasons that the employer doesn't even inherently care about but that would create a perceived risk to the business' bottom line, due to those applying the pressure. It is businesses receiving phone calls demanding that they shun the bad person, without any expectation that the business actually investigate the claim.
But the concept of freedom of association, too, extends beyond law. If you unjustly vilify me, that inhibits my ability to associate with those would would otherwise associate with me but for whatever it is you've convinced them of. (And vice versa, of course.)
> The thing is, speech matters. You can't arbitrarily separate the world into "speech" and "actions". The nursery rhyme about sticks and stones is incredibly untrue. Speech is the predecessor of actions and it tells you both what someone intends to do and what they want you to do.
This applies equally to those doing the cancelling.
> Because people don't want to work with them.
I am using my speech to explain why I consider it morally wrong to not want to work with them: because they haven't done anything that justifies that reaction.
> The thing that gets frequently glossed over is that all of these situations where people are "cancelled" are merely reversions to a neutral position.
Under capitalism, being unemployed is not a "neutral position".
> Gamergate is especially ironic since it was essentially an attempt to cancel someone that started all of it, it just turned out to be based on a ton of false accusations and then escalated into frankly criminal behaviour.
I already explained what is wrong with your understanding of the event in my previous comment.
> There are people in this world who absolutely deserve to be "cancelled".
There are people who deserve comparable repercussions for their actions. That is why the justice system exists.
> The whole purpose behind the "cancel culture" meme is an attempt to prevent people from reacting to speech.
No, this is not the purpose. I say this as someone who uses the phrase. Please do not try to explain my own intentions to me.
There is clearly no further discussion to be had here.
> No, this is not the purpose. I say this as someone who uses the phrase. Please do not try to explain my own intentions to me.
This may not be your intention, but these actions certainly do a lot to help the people whose purpose it is to silence criticism. That's my point. Intentions certainly do matter, but so do results.
> If you unjustly vilify me
The word "unjustly" bearing a whole lot of weight in this sentence. Do we agree that people can be justly vilified then? And then suffer the natural consequences of that? Because that's basically my point in a nutshell.
It's great to make the theoretical argument about "extra judicial justice" and "laws should be used to decide these things", but there's no practical way to adjudicate every single human interaction with written laws. It just doesn't work. Instead we have a system where people are allowed to speak their minds and other people are allowed to tell them to shut up. I wouldn't call it perfect, but I haven't heard much in the way of viable alternatives.
> Under capitalism, being unemployed is not a "neutral position".
Sounds like your issue is with capitalism, not cancellation.
Nothing said by any of the people I'm talking about justified the consequences they suffered.
Nothing said by any of the people I'm talking about justified any negative consequences at all, in my personal opinion.
Of course, people are equally entitled to speak their own opinions. But laws against defamation are compatible with freedom of speech. And on the flip side, freedom of speech is a philosophical concept which stands independently from the First Amendment or any other law or constitutional provision in any country. Threatening people with the kinds of consequences observed is threatening their ability to speak freely.
The natural consequences of speech are a) change in others' opinion; b) more speech from others. If saying X could ruin my life, then it cannot plausibly be argued that I am actually "free" to say X.
James Damore should not have lost his job, because he said nothing wrong. Where people claimed he said something wrong, even on the occasions where they could point at something relevant, it simply did not make the argument that they claimed it did.
Again: I know, because I have read it (and the media coverage). It's also still available on his personal website, along with numerous archives.
> The "mr-hank" python convention example frankly seems incredibly minor. Someone got offended and complained and someone else apologized and then a whole bunch of people argued about how offended any person actually should be.
And people lost their jobs when they should not have lost their jobs. People were subjected to firestorms of social media "criticism", and had their names dragged through the mud, for no good reason.
> his speech was stupid and offensive enough that I wouldn't want to work with the dude.
There was nothing wrong with what he said. It was objectively correct, and it was objectively completely different from how others characterized it. They were objectively lying about what he said. I know this, because I read what he said, and I read what others said about what he said. Their characterizations were incorrect and they had no real justification for making those characterizations, except for ideological blindness.
There was nothing that merited him losing his job. If you don't want to work with him, that does not merit him losing his job. If you don't want to work with me, that does not merit me losing my job. If I don't want to work with you, that does not merit you losing your job.
> And more to the point, you shouldn't be allowed to silence my response to his speech.
Nobody did so, and nobody proposed to do so. If by some chance you are his former employer, terminating him was not a "response" that could be "silenced". In every other case, nobody is supposing that you shouldn't be able to think he's an idiot, or call him an idiot (since that wouldn't meet any reasonable standard of defamation, at least in the US). But they are supposing that he should not have lost his job.
> This is a good thing
No, it is not. It was fundamentally unjust. Being fired — and having everyone know why it happened — is a serious consequence that was not merited.
> and I vehemently disagree with this idea that people's responses should be censored.
This is irrelevant. Nobody's response was censored, and nobody proposed to censor responses.
Termination of employment is not speech. It cannot be "censored". It can, however, be called out as unjust, and cited as evidence of a trend of unjust extrajudicial punishment.
> Do you think any part of this was unjust in some way?
Yes; the part where his name was dragged through the mud and he lost business by the fiat of people more powerful than him (the agency etc., not by letting the market decide) even though his "misconduct" was nothing illegal and did not even result in any civil action that I'm aware of, although it did result in protests at his comeback tour (per the Wikipedia source). From what I recall, he proposed some sexual acts in an entirely reasonable context for doing so, in a highly self-deprecating manner, that his partners were not interested in, and he took "no" for an answer without a problem.
> The term "cancel culture" was always intended to be a pejorative,
Yes, because pejoration is merited. But they are the ones who decided to call it "cancelling" and to refer to its targets as "cancelled" (also "over") in the first place.
> intended to shame and disparage the people involved in speaking out against those in power.
They should be critiqued. The people they speak out against overwhelmingly are not "in power", as demonstrated by the fact that they commonly lose their jobs.
If the mere existence of an epithet to describe their unjust conduct, is "shaming and disparaging", then so is that conduct.
> Did it occasionally apply out side of that? Sure, but very rarely to any serious degree.
It happens constantly. I know because I have friends who would happily constantly show me new examples if I decided to spend the time listening.
> the whole "gamergate" thing where some dude
His name is Eron Gjoni.
Somehow, I can remember this despite not having had to think about it for years; yet eleven years later out of countless exchanges I've had to get dragged into, I cannot recall a single instance where someone on your side of the argument mentioned the name voluntarily or otherwise demonstrated awareness of it. I can recall numerous instances where I asked them if they know his name, and they all sidestepped the question.
Eleven years later it is consistently people on your side of the argument bringing up the topic, while proudly demonstrating ignorance of even the most basic facts of the matter. It is not Gjoni's original supporters having some "remember the Alamo" moment. They don't need to.
The "some dude" rhetoric is demeaning. So was the treatment of his allegations, which were a) severe; b) credible and reasonably evidenced; and c) not even remotely like the misogynistic nonsense maliciously and falsely attributed to him. I know this because I have read them. They are still publicly available, by the way. (Also, Zoe Quinn is not a "journalist", and never was.)
Gjoni was known at the time to have strong progressive values, and expressed those values before, during and after his post with the allegations. In fact, a significant portion of the claim depends on attempting to apply those progressive values fairly, and holding Quinn to her own standards. He shows more kindness and charity than I could imagine most people being capable of in the same situation.
His case is by any reasonable measure far stronger than that of any of the women who complained about Louis C.K. At least if we're presuming that men have equal rights, that their sexual consent is important, that people should generally be expected to meet the standards they apply to their sexual partners... again, the actual words are public information; you don't have to take my word for it. I am not linking them because I assume it will get my post automatically filtered. I have seen that happen elsewhere on the Internet. I suppose I take a risk simply by writing both names.
> Instead it took people complaining about powerful people being sexist/racist
This is not what happens. The targets are broadly speaking not powerful, and the allegations of sexism and racism (or anything else) are broadly speaking unfounded.