Great blog-post. I find it pointless for this 'cancelling-cult' to even be a thing. It achieves nothing but destruction and it is beyond medieval standards.
It's like the mob wants to find a new villain every week, because of a somewhat past 'crime' on Twitter or a mistake that we disavowed our younger-self online and they still force us to apologise for it.
Even when we begin to apologise, it is never enough and they go to great lengths to cancel anyone who either doesn't agree with them or basically just want to be part of pushing 'this game' too far. No point in apologising or reasoning with them if they aren't go to accept the apology. They'll just continue the witch-hunt and move on to the next villain to be thrown into the lost and banned.
This cancelling-cult has got to stop. It has gotten out of control.
I know, right? It's gotten to the point where even men who do nothing more than admit to harassing women and pressuring them into sex has resulted in actual consequences!
Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter.
It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shucks."
He absolutely disputes the allegations of, rape which are at the crux of the his larger cancellation.
> So I wrote up a statement saying I had slept with women at events and sometimes I was a dick. The statement was heavily (and perhaps hastily) worded in an effort to convey my understanding of the gravity of hurting people and my desire to set a good example. The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.
As much as I love anonymity online, the lack of accountability for people doing this stuff is almost a worse evil now that people can hold clout. This sort of stuff should hold people criminally negligent of the use of their personal influence.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist.
No, of course not. They just read the tweets about the article.
You never read actual sources! That runs risk of accidently seeing something that contradicts your preconceptions of the facts. Then you'll be stuck having to rationalize away the cognitive dissonance.
He loses work due to false accusations of rape. Wait, you say, they just misinterpreted his words! Well, they also accused his wife.
> The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist. The online world expected her to divorce me and when she didn’t many more people who claimed they would support her, shunned her.
And, depending on what the media actually said:
> I think my low point happened when the story was picked up by some bigger online blogs. Not because they made things worse or that I have any delusions about their journalistic integrity (I was never asked for a comment by any media outlet or blog that shared this story).
People should take note of the parent post's behavior. It is exactly this careless misinterpretation and willful ignorance, amplified through a community, which causes toxic dogpiling.
Even for as creepy as Kevin Spacey is/was, all accounts of his cancelling are tossed out in court for lack of evidence, or pending his own lawsuits against these people. Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone. It reminds me a lot of the movie Jagten with Mads Mickelson. A whole community despises you and vehemently wants nothing to do with you all based on rumor and speculation. Without even a legitimate means to protect yourself.
> Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone.
Ehm... https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevin-.... There were eight people working on the "House of Cards" who alleged/confirmed he was predatory. There is of course still a chance that it's one big witch hunt, but this is definitely not a case of 100 Twitter random users making a lot of noise.
You missed the point. While the entire thread talk about how people can easily accuse others on the internet without evidence, someone posts a link containing accusations and we're supposed to automatically assume it's true.
But hey, now some guy on hacker news says his friend witnessed it...
Sure, I will ask my friend if he wants to write a sworn affidavit and have it notarised. But until then you're just going to have to trust that there are hundreds of people who witnessed Spacey's behaviour.
> But until then you're just going to have to trust that there are hundreds of people who witnessed Spacey's behaviour.
Or you can go to Wikipedia to find a list of accusations (sourced with articles written by journalists) and evaluate whether you find the claims credible based on the journalists/newspapers/people/accusations involved.
I think it's perfectly okay to claim that all of these people involved are lying and it's just a big conspiracy, but at least provide some arguments to this specific case instead of vague "oh, but can we actually trust words on the internet???".
I can do that too for having a mushroom induced trip about being abducted by aliens. Still doesn't make it true and I left out the part that I was tripping on mushrooms but forgot.
I recognize the context of this response, but Twitter can be really great.
I follow a lot of interesting people - as a result my information on Covid was more accurate and months earlier than anything in the main stream press. Sometimes not just 'more accurate', but the main stream press was actively and entirely wrong and a handful of smart people on Twitter were right. [0]
You also can interact with other interesting people, make friends that you can meet in real life (many live in the bay area), learn new things, etc. You can get an accurate sense of where some trends are going.
It can be a great place, but requires a lot of manual curation. Don't engage in culture war, block people often and immediately if they comment in bad faith, curate your feed with friendly people. Don't get drawn into petty emotional arguments. Try to be nice.
To be fair, the problem is less about the platform or the medium and the simple concept of optimizing for engagement. Regulate advertising to the point where it's less profitable than letting customers pay for services and suddenly the incentives to promote toxicity for engagement's sake disappears.
> Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shucks."
There is such an asymmetry between how it feels to get piled on and watching someone else piled on.
If I was watching a stranger get their teeth pulled I can almost physically feel the pain. Watching someone harassed online is more like, "the internet sure can be mean" and then I move on.
My hunch here is this illustrates how our social systems aren't designed for a world the size of the internet.
It's a good hunch. The intellectual among us often treat their imaginations as if the imagination is reality, thus neglecting natural--as in nature--limits and boundaries to the human condition. Not everything we can imagine is right, possible, or desirable. Twitter and social media in general are manifestations of this.
Originally, the Internet (including, but not limited to, the World Wide Web) was a place where nobody was interested in who you were as a person. It was and is geared towards structuring and disseminating knowledge.
In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.
That's a very tunnel vision view of the early web. You're ignoring BBS's, AOL, usenet, IRC, etc. which were all created with the explicit purpose of people connecting and talking to other people. You can go even further back to things like Community Memory and the Homebrew Computer Club--computing has firmly been embracing people connecting to other people since the early days.
Sure you could connect with people, but you wouldn’t connect with Firstname Lastname, you would connect with some nickname that you were associating with some cool stuff they had written about.
It was not inherently about people, it was about what those people managed to bring into virtual existence that was interesting, and it was that you wanted to connect with.
That's an odd strawman. I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.
No. Because we all behave incorrectly and cause harm -- most of us at some points in our life, serious, grave, harm even -- we should not cast out anyone who has from society and say "well, if you don't want to be cast out from society don't behave incorrectly." Because we all would be. (Someone that runs a red light can run over a pedestrian, and sometimes do, it's not thing separate from causing grave harm...)
This isn't talking about "forgiving" at all, in fact. i think the only person who can "forgive" someone who has done harm is the person they have done harm to, that's not even in the capacity of anyone else to do, is it?
This is, by the way, very related to "abolish prisons/policing" stuff.
When someone has done grave harm, and the recommended response is to try to keep anyone else from employing, doing business with, or even socializing with them -- what is the goal, what do you expect to accomplish? Preventing them from doing further harm? Repairing the harm done to those who had harm done to them? Making it less likely others will do harm? Just pure vengeance? Which of these are accomplished, how well, by this technique? What kind of community or society is creating, knowing that we will all do harm and all have harm done to us?
>> I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.
> I wouldn't be poor in the first place!
> I wouldn't be sick in the first place!
> I wouldn't be in their shoes in the first place!
I have never been a sexual predator and will commit to never being one in the future. This is something I would wager the vast, vast majority of the public can commit to too. This is not something weird or out of the ordinary.
This is really the chief danger here - it's the ability to retroactively label anything as predatory. You don't actually have to be guilty; in fact, what's perhaps the most dangerous aspect is that you don't have to have even been a party to the matter, innocent or not. Someone who just plain doesn't like you can levy an accusation, and even if you've literally never interacted with them in your life, you're guilty. I've seen it happen firsthand.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
This behavior really has nothing to do with the nature of the crime at hand; it's been used to discriminate against people by race, by gender, by interest, by religion - by just about anything. Giving human beings the ability to arbitrarily punish other humans, without recourse, is obscenely dangerous.
I hear this said a lot today by people I grew up with. No dude, I was there. I remember how much you loved to tell racist jokes. Not one example, dozens.
The point is: In a society in which we have violent factions opposing one another on an single basic idea, what sins are truly and permanently unforgivable by a society? We would all seem to agreed that a legal framework is more valuable than vigilante justice, but people on all sides admit the courts don't work all the time. What is the right choice? And can offenders reform?
For example, I'm of the (extremely unpopular) opinion that we're too hard on sex criminals. The framework the US has put together doesn't just not help reformation, but in many ways encourages recidivism by limiting employment and housing options. But what's the right choice? Am I right because I'm backed by dozens of studies by social scientists? Or is the local parent mob right to "protect their children" by keeping laws on the books that keep sex offenders in the fringes of community? If a child molester gets off on a technicality, is the victim's father who murders him a hero or a villain?
What about other crimes? In China you can go to jail for 10 days without prosecution for possessing pot. Here in NJ I can smoke a blunt on my front lawn as a police parade goes by and I'm fine. Who is right?
IDK, I'm just rambling at this point. This whole debate is so stupid and circular and hypocritical and fluid on all sides.
Some people had the norms change out from under them. In the past the societal norm was that Women were supposed to be shy and demure and pretend to be uninterested in sex. The men were supposed to take charge and "conquer".
Nowadays we know this is dumb and causes tons of unwanted harassment. People changed and made the world a better place, which was great. Then we went back and started prosecuting people for doing what they were told they were supposed to be doing at the time. This is why we have grandfather clauses in the law.
The difference between Sexual Harassment and Flirting is if the other person is into it.
Should everyone who has ever behaved inappropriately in that area lose their employment when their behavior comes to light? Does it matter if they've since stopped behaving like that? Where do you draw the line? Should they be excluded from productive society altogether if one instance of misbehavior can be found, at any time in the past? Is that best?
Surely that's up to their employers to decide. I don't think anyone should feel obliged to employ Noah Bradley just because you happen to think that his apology is sincere.
Your point well taken, but my issue is not so much that these companies decided to terminate his employment. I think that was cowardly and in essence caving to an imaginary mob, but let's leave that aside.
My contention is that this whole spiraled up from discovery of some bad behavior from the past, that seems to have been inflated into an exaggerated character assassination.
My contention with the grandparent comment is that "just don't be x" is not really an option if we are seeking redemption for past sins.
I think the point in this case is pretty simple. A company can't employ this guy and also credibly claim to be concerned about creating a safe environment for women at conferences and other events. There's nothing 'exaggerated' about that.
Sometimes actions have long-lasting consequences. Apologies can't magically wash those away.
There is an assumption being used by these companies, and Twitter generally, that I disagree with: "Once someone has behaved in a certain way, they can never be trusted not to behave in that way again".
I think people are judging on a case by case basis. But in general, if you do something very bad, it is very difficult to persuade people that you've genuinely changed. How could it be otherwise?
Try thinking about it with Noah replaced by one of HN’s favorite ‘bad guys’. Facebook periodically puts out statements saying “Oops, sorry, but don’t worry – we totally respect privacy now”. How long would it take for you to believe that Facebook had really changed? How would you feel about a privacy conference accepting sponsorship from Facebook, and justifying this decision by pointing to one of the apologetic statements?
Whats the difference between having sex and being a sexual predator?
Do you just make things up as you go?
The frightening thing about "cancel culture" isnt that its new or eye-opening. Its has always existed, sandboxed, in places called school playgrounds. The world have adults has this annoying thing called due process. Filing cases, going to court, giving evidence etc etc.
Now that the playground rules are stating to proliferate into adult spaces, companies - surprisingly - have started to use playground platforms to make -what used to be - adult decisions about who to fire, who to buy from, whose services to use...from a 240 character platform. No due process, no due diligence, nothing. Just tweets.
I mean, "angry mobs" have always existed as you said yourself. They didn't seep into "adult spaces", they've always been there. We don't need to blame Twitter, the Internet as a whole, anonymous communication platforms or anything else for human nature.
The fight against cancel culture is a fight against people doing things. It's literally that. "Cancelling" is just a framing device for a myriad of behaviors and reasoning behind those behaviors. If this post gets downvotes, "cancel culture". If OP's post gets a bunch of negative comments, "cancel culture".
TL;dr- There's never been an egalitarian, logic-only meritocracy, in human history, and people getting upset that there isn't one is as reasonable a choice as other people deciding to "cancel" someone.
I recently had a mentally ill family member try to work up a mob to get another family member fired from their job over some perceived slight. This person was able to get attention from media figures on Facebook who were interested in writing a story. They attempted to make noise on Twitter using the employer's account.
I don't think anyone had tools like this at their disposal in the 1990s. You could call up someone's employer and lie about an employee saying something bad about immigrants at a birthday party and they'd probably just hang up on you or threaten to call the police for harassment.
I was commenting on the causal relationship. The fact that vigilante social pressure is easier today is technically true, but not really addressing my point about the fact that people wanted (and did) do this. Your example is a guess. I promise you, in 1990 if I wanted to ruin someone's life, I could have (go check out the movie Fear).
The Salem Witch Trials were cancel culture. Jim Crow lynch mobs were cancel culture. The Red Scare was cancel culture. Same idea, new execution.
> Whats the difference between having sex and being a sexual predator?
I don't think it's necessary to answer this because "sexual predator" was literally Noah's description of himself and his behavior (in those words) in the apology post that led to Wizards no longer wanting to work with him.
So that worked well for 'slatestarcodex' didn't it? It is not enough.
The first step is to delete your Twitter account.
Downvoters: So the New York Times did NOT TRY to de-anonymize SSC? Are you sure? [0]
That is the extent of this issue and it is gone beyond universities and it is now dangerously in the workplace and used against those who want to remain anonymous.
Flaggers: Why is this now flagged? Is it because it is true? [0] Oh dear. So privacy is dead then and it is now a 'crime' for people like SSC (somewhat accepted opinion of HN) to remain anonymous? OK.
Let the cancellations continue then and we'll see what happens if we like it or not.
That's not compatible with people whose livelihood directly or indirectly relies on having a large and/or dedicated audience on Twitter or other social networks, or people who by the nature of their livelihood are public figures even if they're not active on social media.
Which isn't to say that your advice is poor advice!
A YouTube personality I follow got cancelled not long ago. They responded by exiting Twitter, but there were complications. One of the things they mentioned that had never occurred to me is that as a published author, they had a contractual agreement with their publisher to maintain an online personality.
They had to come to special terms with their publisher to modify contract because the nature of cancellation is such that at the time, there was basically nothing they could say that would improve their "brand," so the purpose of the contract stipulation had become counterproductive. But as parent notes, this is a real problem some people have, depending on their profession.
The key word is definitely performance. But people generally don't call actors liars for doing their job.
One should not pretend that social media is a place to broadcast your unedited inner-most feelings. It's media. Even if you are honest, it doesn't mean you're good enough at expressing yourself that what you intend to come across actually does. If you don't feel you'd be confident expressing yourself millions of people on prime-time television, you shouldn't feel confident expressing yourself to millions of people on twitter.
> But people generally don't call actors liars for doing their job.
That's a fair nitpick, actually. What I meant to emphasize is that the truth should have no bearing on your performance, except to the extent that it affects which performance you elect to give. As the saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, nor should they.
These days it seems somewhat more difficult to be anonymous online. I'd be better off having a username of numbers, such as yourself. I have published a few writings online but if I really wanted to throw that into a blog I'd definitely construct a new online persona to do it.
I've tussled accidentally with mentally ill individuals online and experienced harassment that was bordering on dangerous. I would not be quick to put myself in that position again.
I don’t understand your comment. He was cancelled over actions IRL. Whether he had a Twitter or not, other people do and they know his name and where he works.
He was cancelled because he wrote a public apology on Twitter and that's how people found out about him. Twitter is completely to blame here - maybe along with being so naive to think that writing an apology on Twitter is a good idea.
I think there’s a bit of selection bias here. There’s no evidence he wouldn’t have been fired for his actions if he didn’t publicly apologize. Many people are fired for the same actions, we just don’t hear about it.
Don't blame knives for killing people, blame people who kill people.
I think the issue here is that Twitter came too quickly into our lives, and people did not have time adapt to the new reality.
Three hundreds years ago people would happily join a mob on a square trying to burn a woman because she is a witch or a traitor or unfaithful. Today people would just tell them they are coo coo and continue with their business.
After a couple of years people will learn to react to Twitter cancelling mob the same.
I find it a little odd that in the original apology he refers to himself as a sexual predator but in this blog post he was a “womaniz[er]”.
The term womanizer generally refers to people that have lots of sexual encounters with different women, and has a strong connotation of “I’m very attractive to the opposite sex and am sometimes careless about which sexual advances I accept”
“Sexual predator” on the other hand indicates the use of force or coercion in order to initiate sexual contact, the use of professional or financial pressure to obtain sex, unwanted sexual behavior directed at folks that don’t want it, etc.
The wording in this article kind of seems like he got canceled for being too cool and getting laid too much, which is what he meant to say but accidentally wrote “shitty, creepy sexual predator”(0) in his apology instead. What a typo!
The term Sexual Predator has been expanded to cover a lot more in that circle. It's similar to how anybody who has sex with a celebrity is technically raped because of the power difference. It's impossible to give consent when your partner is more important than you are.
The handouts on here handwave the issue at the end "consider how holding a position of power might influence the situation" but some people advocate that any power imbalance inherently makes consent impossible and they will attack people on Twitter over it.
“I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about.”
I do not get the impression that he apologized for having sex with people while also being guilty of being prominent in his industry. I’m not entirely clear how “any sex with a celebrity is rape” is a salient point here.
Aside from his stated specific behaviors that are generally accepted as being under the “old” umbrella of sexual predator, I suppose it is entirely possible that he meant to call himself “a sexual predator” under the “new” definition that somehow applies to any sexually active person that is wealthy or employed as a manager.
I genuinely am just now learning about this “new” shift in definition as my understanding was that the term was applied to people due to their behavior towards others and how they’re experienced by the other involved parties. Expanding it to mean “anybody with money or status” doesn’t seem useful aside from maybe diluting the phrase’s meaning in such a way that it provides cover for actually abusive people.
yeah, just go sit in the back of the bus, don't be uppity, it should be enough we gave you rights, don't throw that back in our face by exercising those rights.
I'm a bit sceptical about this because it talks very little about what happened that caused OP to get "cancelled", and an awful lot about how they came back from it. I do understand, first-hand, the trauma that comes from being cancelled (although I have like 1500 followers on Twitter so you could argue the stakes are less) and there's no doubt that it is a bitch. But there is something to take away from it - or at least there was in my case - which was that I, in fact, was an asshole. That does not seem to be the overarching narrative of this post, and I do not see a lot of learning they have done from being cancelled.
In conclusion, kudos to the way you bounced back but I really wish there was a bit more introspection into how you see your past behaviour in the light of being cancelled.
> “I was terrible to women,” Bradley wrote. “I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about.”
This is literally the first I've heard of Bradley, and I have no knowledge of him outside of this HN post. That's a pretty self-damning quote, though.
Yep, it is. I was trying to take full ownership of what I was like and overplayed what I had done in an effort to not seem like I was downplaying it. It's dumb in hindsight but there it is.
I don't know if you overplayed it, or if if you were dumb.
You had in the past done some terrible things, you agree.
The internet these days tries to utterly destroy people for having in the past done terrible things, with no way out.
This does not in fact make it less likely for people to do terrible things; it does make it less likely for them to admit to them (even to themselves), to apologize to those who have hurt, or to do what those they have hurt need for repair and redress.
So, that's not great, all around, it's true. It's a problem. This response does not actually reduce harm, it just further treats people as disposable.
But if, say, the people you had hurt needed/wanted to hear you say it like that publicly? Then you did the right thing, you didn't do a dumb thing. You owed it to them regardless of consequences, because of the harm you caused. And I respect it. And I think you can feel good about owning up to the terrible things you did, instead of feeling dumb about it, it's the right thing to have done -- which doesn't mean you have to think "the internets" (or your friends :( ) response to you was appropriate.
I'm glad you are figuring out a way out of the hole, and I'm glad you have figured out how to stop treating people like you did in your youth. I respect the way you tell the story without trying to excuse or escape the harm you caused in your youth.
your mistake was apologizing and playing into the game at all. Extracting an apology from the accused is part of the cancellation process. Now they don't have to justify at all - they can point to your own admissions and say 'see even he agrees he's a sexual predator'. Now you can be blamed for your own cancellation, so any action against you is permissable. You admitted to 'preying' on women. You gave them an excuse that will never die.
The mob is never satisfied. The mob will never accept an apology. The mob will never stop.
You can never address a mob. They are only chasing you, or you're part of them. The target of the mob is dehumanized and blamed for their own persecution. That's you.
> I really wish there was a bit more introspection into how you see your past behaviour in the light of being cancelled.
I don't get this comment. The author says explicitly that he was an asshole in the past, that he changed who he was, and that he apologized privately to the people he had hurt. What more do you want?
He has also admitted to “pressuring women into sex” in other posts. Does apologizing just wipe all that away? How would he know if he apologized to every person he hurt?
I think this quote from the article is a good example:
>I don’t think I can fully describe the heart-wrenching pain of seeing your life & career crumbling around you and feeling utterly powerless to stop it. I thought I was fast approaching my inevitable and permanent end. I don’t cry often, but I cried a lot that night.
The author has harsh words for his previous behavior, but the question I have is about the sentiment at the center of his reflection on the experience: if he had agency in the attacks on him. I certainly believe that he does not think he does.
A lot of this comes down to deeply personal questions about how to address misbehavior and what we expect from other people. I do not know the details of what Noah did or what the people he mistreated want, but in his incomplete account I can certainly think of things that jump out to me.
- He says that no one has accused him of raping them. I personally know people who were raped and never accused their rapists. It was not worth the trouble or they did not have the social capital or they did not want to pursue law enforcement. How much introspection Noah should have depends a lot on the specifics but is it certainly not clearly enough to say that you didn't do something because no one accused you. That's not reflection.
- At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone.
- He says, towards the end "If you’ve been cancelled and want someone to talk with who won’t shame or judge you, shoot me a message." I mean...I suppose I get what he means, but it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior. I am all for a path to restoration, but if I am to believe in reform I would like to see a more complex understanding than I get from this essay. I believe any real path to restoration must include judgement about past misdeeds.
I think about the Dan Harmon apology for the sexual harassment her perpetrated against a coworker[1]. It has its own flaws and, to a degree, I think it overly-centers Harmon, but one thing I think it gets very right is that Harmon made sure to apologize in a way that was accepted by his victims and was detailed about his misbehavior. He is clear-eyed about the way that he took advantage of his power, how selfish and small his motivations were, and how much damage he did to his victims. His apology feels merciless to his past self in a way that I do not see in Noah's account.
Now maybe Noah has fully satisfied his victims and they simply do not want to go public and ofc that changes my understanding of this situation. But I do not get the same unceasingly unsympathetic treatment of Noah's past behavior. He seems like he wants it to go away rather than make it part of his story and, I think, that approach feels less fully-engaged than others that I've seen.
Ultimately accounts like this, where we are all judging behavior of strangers we haven't meet in past events we did not experience, are always questionable. I don't feel certain at all about Noah. I also think it is easy to read this account of his experience and be uncertain about how he has changed. He mentions, at the start, that cancelling "those who are attempting to grow is such a counterproductive and potentially dangerous trend" - but I do not understand from this article how he is attempting to grow. Instead, I see a disagreement about how to deal with his past behavior.
I think he did in the sense that he could have chosen to respond in different ways. He could have said, for example, something like: "I admit I behaved badly in the past. I have changed who I am so I don't do those things any more, and I have apologized in private to the people I hurt. That's all I'm going to say about it." And then just ignored whatever happened on social media after that.
The question is whether that would have affected, for example, his getting fired and disowned by companies he had worked for. I don't think it would have, because I don't think the companies that fired him were doing it based on any evaluation they did themselves of his behavior; they were doing it based on fear of social media.
> it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior
I don't think that's what he's saying. The things he was accused of on social media and which caused companies to fire him were not things he had actually done in the past, but accusations about things he had not done in the past. So I don't think he's complaining about being judged on what he actually did. I think he's complaining about being cancelled on the basis of things he had not done, simply because social media never stops at what you actually did, but always goes on to accuse you of things you didn't do, and you have no way of defending yourself. And he's saying he won't judge other people based on things social media says about them because most of the things social media says about anybody aren't true.
(Note that if you disagree about whether, for example, he actually raped someone, naturally you'll disagree about the extent to which the social media cancellation was justified. But the fact is that he says he didn't rape anyone, so what he is saying is not what you are describing. He's not saying that rape isn't bad or that he wouldn't judge someone harshly who had raped someone. He's saying he won't judge someone harshly just because social media accuses them of raping someone.)
I think you point to the basic question here: is it fair to only judge him for the things he has apologized for and taken ownership of, or would it be moral to form and act on our own opinions?
If you feel it's only appropriate to judge people on the behavior they admit to, then I think your read is correct. That also, to me, feels like it becomes tautological - it places the locus of power on the accused and the onus of coming forward on the victim.
We want some level of responsibility on the victim. False accusations exist (though research suggests they are extremely rare). I don't have good answers - but someone asked what more someone could want and I answered. There are parts of how he talks about the experience that make me uneasy. I can understand that unease making others uncomfortable.
The line I would draw is one of looking for reflection on personal behavior. As I said in my post, I'm not comfortable accepting his description of the events as the end of it and I do not see any understanding of why that might be in his answer. I don't think he needs to have intended to commit sexual assault to have done it and I don't think someone needs to accuse him (privately or publicly) for him to reflect on the possibility.
I said elsewhere that I would work with him, but I would certainly understand if people didn't feel comfortable about it. I guess I've seen many people leave companies or not get hired for far more mundane interpersonal mismatches. It is really hard for me to take seriously that cultural fit matters at work, but that people must accept a former abusers' representations they have changed.
I also just want to say:
>[the companies fired him] based on fear of social media.
I have no idea if this is true and neither do you. I have seen external embarrassments handled in different ways and I am skeptical it was this simple. Of course, I could be wrong, but there are plenty of prominent figures who had accusations made against them and they either kept their jobs or found new positions.
> I think you point to the basic question here: is it fair to only judge him for the things he has apologized for and taken ownership of, or would it be moral to form and act on our own opinions?
I'm fine with forming and acting on your own opinions, if they are based on reliable information.
What I'm not fine with is cancelling someone without even bothering to find out reliable information, which is what appears to have happened in this case.
> At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone.
I agree with this, but here we're not talking about just disliking someone. We're talking about cancellation--someone's livelihood is taken away (he was fired, from multiple jobs). Just disliking someone does not justify doing that. We don't have a right to have other people like us, but we do have a right to make a living, and we should have legal recourse if false accusations impact our livelihood.
I believe he does have legal recourse against false accusations. Slander and libel law is pretty old and well-established. Also, outside of protected classes, we have a legal system that assumes people do not have a right to be hired.
I think each employer would need to make their own decision. There is nothing in his account that would make me uncomfortable working with him. But, I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections. I favor those, but they aren't really related to 'cancelling' people.
> I believe he does have legal recourse against false accusations.
He does if he can prove damages. In practice that is extremely hard to do, even if we leave out all the additional difficulties associated with accusations made by anonymous people on the Internet.
Also, the only legal remedy is compensatory damages and punitive damages from a successful lawsuit. But who is he going to sue? Twitter? They'll just say they aren't responsible for false accusations made using their platform, and AFAIK that position has already been upheld in court. And beyond that, we come up against those difficulties I just referred to: how do you find people in the real world corresponding to various Twitter identities and get them into court? And what do you do if they turn out to be judgment proof?
> I think each employer would need to make their own decision.
I agree. But the decision should be based on reliable information. What's more, I would say it should be based on reliable information that is related to the person's job performance.
> I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections.
To the extent that "cancel culture" has an impact on people's employment, the two are related. Of course a company isn't going to come right out and say "we fired this person because we were afraid of being shamed on social media". That doesn't mean there isn't causation involved. Would Bradley have been fired if there hadn't been a social media firestorm? If someone had just privately informed Wizards of the Coast (or any other company he was doing artwork for) about what Bradley had done in the past? That's the key question, and I'm not sure it's addressable by more robust employment protections, since there's no way to prove causation even if it's there.
Sometimes people don't want to talk about it. I know society likes to paint people in terms of victims and culprits but people _can_ change. When this happens, sometimes you cut off those parts of your life and then you don't go back. It's hard enough to forgive yourself at times and it takes strength to realize what kind of person you were back then and try to reconcile that with now.
Here's an example of that learning: he obviously has turned from some sort of jerk into someone whose wife didn't want to leave him after all of this happened.
Fair point! I guess I was writing this to people who have already heard the story. But I do get into what happened and why it happened in the podcast I recorded, if you're genuinely interested (and have some time to spare).
Put simply, there's a lot to cover here. There's a lot of history, context, perspective, etc. and covering it all would take, well, probably a book. I couldn't get it all in this article, but maybe I should have included a little more on the lessons I learned before and why I had already changed. Next time.
this is typical of people self-labeling as, and seeking pity for, being 'cancelled' in my experience...
What happened is quickly glossed over in vague terms with a half hearted apology and treated as a mere unimportant sideshow to the real problem: I faced consequences. Ignoring the pushback or saying 'well I could have provided more detail about what I learned as a person' isn't actually explaining what you did wrong. There is a big gap between 'acting like an asshole' (to use your language) and 'being a sexual predator' (to use another headline). Those details matter - because they frame the rest of the description of what happened. It's the head nod to 'I'm sorry if anyone was offended' so we can get to the real topic...
The real topic is claiming victimhood when the consequences of one's behavior come out. No challenge of facts, of what others are saying, simply an acclimation that you are put upon based on your evaluation of the consequences. By bypassing all of that, you are starting from the idea that you (and your wife) are really the victim here and building that narrative very intentionally. These types of articles are basically an argument by assertion that accountability is not important.
Cancel culture is not real - the term 'cancel culture' is an attempt to recuperate[0] the language of equal rights and justice to protect people from the consequences of their actions. You're sitting here writing a blog post about this. It's on the front page of HN, you posted about it on your twitter. Please...
Do you believe every man is a liar? Can a man change their spots? Is it acceptable to attack someone in the court of Twitter, victimise them, hurt them, and hurt their friends and family?
Should society try to help everyone learn to be better, or should society righteously punish those who trangress the invisible boundaries of decency?
His narrative is certainly believable, although I am in no position to judge your accusations against him.
I fear to even answer you, as I am sure others are, because perhaps you are someone to start a crusade against me for no reason more than you have the ability to do so.
All adults need to take some responsibility for his his actions: he is steeped in a society that tacitly accepts womanising in its media (think “Two and a Half Men”), a society that has accepted sleezing as a valid sport (jock culture). Neither you nor I accepts such hideous behaviour, but clearly we are not yet winning against the wider society of the world, and what should we do with those that get sucked into red pill culture?
I am not apologising for his behaviours, nor am I defending myself by proxy. I do fear for where “cancel culture” is trending towards silencing any discourse. (Disclaimer: I am a white guy who isn’t in the US. I try to always do my best, although I am as fallible as any other person).
Edit: perhaps this comment would have been safer made using a throwaway account?
No, I believe we are all our own unreliable narrator
> Can a man change their spots?
Absolutely
> Is it acceptable to attack someone in the court of Twitter, victimise them, hurt them, and hurt their friends and family?
begging the question. I am merely commenting on the credibility of accepting an argument about victimization from someone who demands that we bifurcate that from how they have victimized others. There is one reality and yet we all have our own. You aren't entitled to demand your reality be adopted as the only one.
I'm a white guy too, I've never felt the need to opt out of discourse out of fear of being canceled. Cancel culture is designed to silence discourse...but not in the way you think. The term was created out of whole cloth and is designed to silence critique. It is a label applied to exempt behavior from critique. Discourse requires critique, cancel culture is designed to be a singular label to ensure ideas from certain people (i.e., you and me) are not subject to critique. You can note that this entire thread has treated any critique of the author as largely akin to a violent attack on them. What kind of discourse is that?
'Cancel culture' is a bad faith argument, not something you need to fear.
It is a narrative created specifically to make you feel the way you describe in your edit when there is no evidence to support that. You don't need a throwaway...just like I'm totally identifiable from my account history while continuing to say dumb things, I manage that by (mostly) being respectful of people. Cancel culture is right wing propaganda.
You are victim blaming here. If you have good reasons to believe the victim was attacked for a good reason then state it, otherwise don't blame the victim.
I admire your willingness to write that article, although I doubt your wisdom in doing so.
So far anything I have seen that directly or indirectly argues against cancelling invites a vortex of political bullshit to descend upon the writer, and you are already tainted so you are seen as a legitimate target for more abuse.
I can easily see how I could be falsely accused, and how difficult I would find to recover from that, so I can empathise with your decision to open the wound again.
> I do not see a lot of learning they have done from being cancelled.
That's the mob mentality speaking. Just because a bunch of assholes on the internet took something they said out of context, and refused to acknowledge that people other than themselves are not objects and are capable of changing over time, that doesn't mean the person they targeted needs to "learn" anything except that people on the internet are assholes.
I don't understand. If they are capable of changing over time, surely they are capable of looking back on their past selves and acknowledging what was wrong with them?
The post says that there isn't much learning to show because he's not that person any more, and being cancelled happened long after he had already stopped doing the bad behavior.
I looked into this briefly (against my better judgment). He stated in his apology that he was a 'sexual predator' and that he 'pressured women into sex'. So yeah, a lot of organisations now don't want to associate with him. It's nice that he's sorry for what he did, but actions have consequences. And the line between pressuring people into sex and raping them is very, very fine.
Well, that's what he says now. We only have his word for it.
If you put out a statement saying that one of your past statements was inaccurate, then that's hardly likely to increase confidence in the accuracy of your current statement.
Ultimately, people criticised him for doing things that he himself admitted to doing. As those things were pretty awful, I don't see that he really has anything to complain about.
On the other hand the rule of “if you’ve ever been a dick in the past, your life and career should be destroyed proportionality be damned” seems like a societal failure.
I agree, I'm not saying you should have your entire life uprooted because you said something stupid on Twitter when you were like 13. The situation in this case is a little different. Again, don't be a dick or try to avoid it when possible and I don't think you will have to worry about being canceled.
An immigrant _tenured_ professor in Canada got suspended for saying that Canada is not racist on her blog. Was she being a dick? Does she deserve the “consequences”?
At what point do we stop saying “oh these are isolated incidents and not a trend”?
As a Canadian, yeah that's a pretty awful thing to say. Canada is definitely racist -- and I'd go so far as to say that it's safe to assume that everywhere and everyone is racist to some extent.
Supporting the idea that you (individual, organization, country, whatever) are not racist makes it convenient to ignore efforts to combat racism ("why should we combat racism when there isn't any") which should be universally supported.
So yeah she was being a dick. As a representative of Mount Allison, they decided her behaviour was problematic, which they are in the right to do. Just because you're a powerful person with a fancy title doesn't make you immune from consequences of shitty behaviour.
If you don’t mind me asking, did you grow up in Canada? When you’re saying that Canada is racist do you have any experiences of living in other countries to compare with? Can you point out specific examples of Canada being a racist country? Nowhere is perfect, but allow me to say that Canada (and even the US for that matter) are vastly less racist compared to many places. I can see someone who grew up with different experiences be bewildered by the assertion.
Do you not find it ironic that an immigrant non-white professor is being criticized by mostly white Canadians for her views and different experiences? Actually yeah maybe Canada is racist after all.
> Can you point out specific examples of Canada being a racist country?
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in Canada.
There's a whole Wikipedia article on the topic[0], some of which is covered during the common Canadian education. Other examples are commonplace knowledge. In particular, Aboriginal peoples have generally been treated quite poorly throughout Canada's history. This is further evidenced by the recent headlines, if you don't live under a rock.
I do have experiences in other countries to compare with, but I am not interested in comparisons, and I really don't know what that matters. I don't know any of that has to do with my statements.
> Nowhere is perfect, but allow me to say that Canada (and even the US for that matter) are vastly less racist compared to many places.
Sure, Canada (and the USA) might be "less racist" compared to other places but that doesn't really mean anything. I think very highly of Canada compared to my experiences in the rest of the world, and I'd like to add I did not feel this way until after experiencing other parts of the world. The more I experienced elsewhere, the more I appreciate how good Canadians have it.
But that doesn't mean it's a bastion of equality and its people without prejudices. We can always do better.
Thank you for your response. In some ways I have a reverse experience: I grew up elsewhere and then moved to Canada (I did get to go to school for a few years). I was blown away by how accepting and open the Canadian society was. Trust me, you have a very good thing going. Even with the examples you give, you realize that teaching about racist historical mistakes in school is far from the norm in many other countries.
Let me offer an analogy. You might think that some aspects of the Canadian government are corrupt, while I on the other hand would grant that there might be some issues but would emphatically agree that “Canada is NOT a corrupt country”. Would you still say something like: “Supporting the idea that you (individual, organization, country, whatever) are not corrupt makes it convenient to ignore efforts to combat corruption ("why should we combat corruption when there isn't any") which should be universally supported.”? Would you still agree that it’s right to cancel someone over saying that “Canada is NOT corrupt”?
Because I see very little difference between the two situations.
I believe I understand your perspective, but there's a few things being conflated here.
Regarding the example you provided wherein the professor was fired from her job:
- You're entitled to your own opinion, you're welcome to publish it, etc.
- Your opinion can be bad and others may dislike you for it. That's fair. You are not free from repercussions.
- A tenured professor is a representative of their university, an employee. They are a face of the school, they teach classes, etc. As far as I'm concerned, no employer should be subjected to bad PR solely because of your shitty opinion. If they want you gone, tough, that's what you signed up for.
- It sounds like the university took this seriously and launched an investigation. Seems like the right thing to me. No one should be subjected to an environment where they do not feel safe or comfortable, let alone paying university students. How should an Aboriginal student feel?
Next, the fact that you see very little difference between opinions on racism and corruption in this example is pretty concerning. For one, race is a protected class, but like birth gender, sexual orientation, etc. affects everyone. It's an intrinsic part of the individual, the identity. A more apt comparison might be "Canada is NOT sexist" which I don't think would receive a response surprising to anyone.
I don't think any individual stance on corruption, at least in North America, could be considered remotely controversial. Except, maybe, to people who have been personally impacted by corruption, which I imagine is a small cohort, but the same would apply for practically any topic.
Looping back around, I dislike the notion that "it's right to cancel" anyone. We're not executing people without trial. People aren't (usually) going to jail or dying. In your first example, it seems the professor chose this hill to die on, instead of apologizing or attempting to show some empathy. Their choice.
The mistake you and others here frequently make is that people are not logicians in isolated environments. People are emotional, have vastly different experiences and varying degrees of education, and a variety of communication skills. Life, or Twitter, isn't a structured debate, even if you'd like it to be. If you piss a lot of people off, you're going to have a bad time. The very connected world in which we live changes things. If you have a controversial opinion that might piss people off, maybe don't share it somewhere easily discovered by said people. Or better still, maybe consider why they might be pissed off and reflect on your choices.
Yeah I think I understand this viewpoint but I fundamentally disagree with it. I would absolutely prefer to live in a world where academics are free to express controversial opinions that would be debated on their own merits, and not shut down because some people are made uncomfortable. “Canada is not racist” clearly falls in this category for me - it’s a far cry from something like “Hitler was right”.
In practice this would look like strong protections for academic freedom and the administration would take the side of free expression instead of pandering to the offended. I find it troubling that you’re ok with the “bad opinion” being silenced to make people comfortable instead of debated on its own merits.
I guess you’re assuming that the Aboriginal student in your example would have the opinion that Canada is in fact racist? I don’t know if this is a widespread opinion but if it is they would be entitled to expressing their viewpoint and hopefully the professor would learn something new about the country. How is shutting them up instead more productive? This doesn’t decrease the amount of racism at all.
It’s precisely because people are often emotional and are often not capable of a rational debate that we should dedicate extra effort to protecting academic freedom. If we don’t then in the long term we all lose if we have to walk on eggshells and can’t freely debate the full range of opinions.
Let me ask you this: if we’re not allowed to question if or to what extent systemic racism exists, how do we ever know when we fully conquered it? Does it just become an article of faith? At that point, what does this have to do with scientific inquiry and universities at all?
Edit: regarding your example, no I don’t think that Canada is sexist either. Canada consistently ranks in top 5 or 10 countries for women’s rights and labor equality (roughly equal to the Nordic countries). Why do you think it’s controversial to say that Canada is not sexist?
I thought it might be kind of obvious but I think I tend to forget that things posted online are missing some critical context. So anyways, I really I don't want to be dismissive of fair and valid criticisms but its hard to articulate my opinion on the matter in a short and semi-awkward format like HN. Basically what I am trying to say is that my point is probably a little more nuanced then it seems.
That being said, I do think that there are circumstances in which being "canceled" might not be warranted. I have not heard of the case you are referencing specifically until just now. I read the article and found the prof on RateMyProfessor and overall they do not seem like a shitty person, however I would still like to read the "confidential" report the school conducted even though that is probably not possible as that might change my opinion. Also I am not Canadian and most of the Canadians I know/have experiences with do not outright strike me as racist. Of course current trends I have seen in both the US and Canada have lead me to rethink that people/areas are not inherently free of racial prejudice and if Canada has a somewhat similar history to the US, there is most certainly a bit of racism.
I digress, I think canceling can be a problem for situations like the one you referenced and I do not want to undersell how shitty it can be for someone who is on the wrong end of it. In some cases in may be warranted if the proper mechanism for fairness or recourse are not working. I guess it just kind of depends.
If you find yourself the target of a cancellation attempt, never give in. Never apologize. If you do, the problem isn’t going to go away, it will get worse. No apology is ever enough. No punishment is ever enough. There is no way to redeem yourself in the eyes of the public. Apologizing is making yourself humbled and vulnerable to a mob that does not deserve it. You will roll over to expose your belly in submission asking for mercy and instead get your guts torn out and burned.
Instead you must harden. Deny everything. Gaslight. You will know you have won when the mob grows tired and cynical from their inability to destroy you.
When the dust has settled, all that will matter is that no one came forward with hard evidence, only he-said-she-said bullshit.
You can downvote me all you want, it does not change the truth.
Yes. The first step is to NEVER EVER apologise. With the mob, they will create libellous accusations and label you everything under the sun until they eventually spin your character into 'a Nazi'.
Perhaps they were playing too much Wolfenstein VR and they see Nazis in everything.
As you can see with the OP and the comments in this thread, it seems there is little to no redemption anyway. So apology is not an option. Especially on your own Twitter account.
Not really sure why this is downvoted, as it is absolutely correct.
Human beings are still barely-evolved monkeys, with a keen sense for, and penchant to exploit, perceived weakness.
Apologies to third parties never make things better. Rather, they signal weakness to the mob, which emboldens them to pile on harder.
Absolutely, you should apologize to the specific people you've hurt, as I gather the original poster did. NEVER apologize to random unaffiliated people looking for outrage fuel. It always ends badly.
I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know.
100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.
We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.
“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.
I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.
This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.
Especially if you can make a tiger by simply clicking a share button.
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
“””Another great Chinese expression is "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿為馬; zhǐlù-wéimǎ) which is based on the story of Zhao Gao which goes as follows:
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.”””
A lot of it is that journalists will amplify it as well if they are one of the 100 who sees it. Seen journalist job postings where checking Twitter for stories is part of it.
Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population.
Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily.
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
My anecdotal observations do not match yours. A large percentage of the younger people (under 30) that I know are on twitter several/many times a day every single day. These are not tech workers, nor are they journalists, they're just college students, graduate students, and adjacent.
Incidentally, I deleted my Twitter today. 4600 followers in hell, which is quite a lot for a Czech language community (10 million speakers only), but I can no longer tolerate the toxicity.
Yes, journalists are overrepresented there and yes, their journalism often degenerates into "we are covering what happened on Twitter".
But the worst offenders in terms of toxicity aren't journos. They are ... well, tormented human beings who love to dish out some misery to everyone around. Usually under a superficial veneer of a respectable goal.
So long and thanks for all the tweets, but I am not coming back. After leaving Facebook in July 2019, I felt almost liberated; I expect the same to happen now.
That (better) framing would probably need to involve making a distinction between legitimate (eg investigative) journalists versus primarily-twitter-covering psuedo-tabloid journalists, which is rather fraught at the best of times, since most authorities (formal or informal) have a obvious incentive to misclassify legitimate journalists as tabloidists, and a less obvious incentive to misclassify tabloids as legitimate journalism. (This gets much worse if you try to do anything material with the distiction, thanks to [0].) Not that it's impossible, but I'm not optimistic.
Besides, there were plenty of clergy who were otherwise fairly decent people.
Due to a decline in income from advertisers many traditional media have fired a lot of journalists. The remaining ones are under great pressure to produce articles. So it is not surprising that the quality of journalism has declined.
I think one can insulate themselves from the worst of the noise with some very selective follows/blocks/etc,
But anyway, re: your comment on the worst offenders, a related quote that came across my twitter this weekend-
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats" - Aldous Huxley
If you know how to play the game, this is a huge asset. Marc Andreessen said in a New Yorker interview that he ignored Twitter until he realized that the media were obssessed with it. Andreessen Horowitz the VC firm started relatively late compared to some others, but it shot to the top of mindshare because of the constant stream of coverage they gave Andreessen and his intentionally outrageous visions of the future.
Elon Musk does this as well, just without any pretense of subtlety.
That’s because Elon is essentially cancel proof. True freedom is to not have to care what the mob thinks, but sadly they vast majority of us have to answer to someone.
I suspect there is a general 'content ecosystem' where these different 'organisms' each contribute their part to the ecology. From my--not particularly expert--view teenagers aren't specifically the ones who blow things up, they're more like the mooks who act as megaphones for the general drama. There's another clade of user who do the actual stirring up of drama and they largely seem to be not especially successful members of some creative field like acting, stand-up, art, etc. Definitely careers that attract personality types who highly value approval/adulation.
There's another clade of credentialed or 'pedigreed' professionals, such as activist or non-profit people, 'community management' people, professors, journalists, etc. who seem to have some function in legitimizing and mainstreaming the drama of the day, possibly creating rationalizations for why it's good along the way.
I'm sure Twitter, internally, is already aware of these dynamics. But it would probably help the sociology of it out a lot if that information was more well known.
All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get out of the way. Alas we don't have any riot police so they get to just rip up peoples lives however they want.
That IS what direct democracy is. Those who are the most motivated are a mix of earnest intellectuals and furious emotional reactionaries. The rest stay uninformed and apathetic, voting with the most outspoken they identify with or not at all.
Why couldn't other countries just implement the same system? Is there something magical about Swiss people that makes them handle direct democracy responsibly that other populations doesn't have? If you talk about their finances, sure that wont replicate, but there is nothing preventing their model of democracy from working.
> Is there something magical about Swiss people that makes them handle direct democracy responsibly that other populations doesn't have?
This doesn't have to be anything magical. Do you believe there is no cultural difference? Or do you believe culture doesn't matter to a democracy system?
What's your point? The internet mob views the rightness of such things as being beyond question, an actual direct democracy doesn't. Seems like good support for the original point.
You also have to blame companies/hr for being so reactive and possibly our governments for not taking action to insulate society against the impacts of internet mobs on peoples’ pursuit of happiness. The fact that 100 people on Twitter can get somebody fired just by calling them a rapist with absolutely no proof is a social/societal failure. I highly suspect ending this person’s contracts cost the companies more money than the PR/threat of loss of 100 Twitter users business. Is nobody at these companies that participate in canceling people mature enough to let the storm blow over? Which leads to the social element, good legal systems require the accusers to bear the burden of proof. I think it’s possible that there’s a legal framework by which we could consider it unconstitutional fire somebody for somebody else’s character opinion, essentially firing someone without evidence that they create a hostile work environment or are not performing their duties. Look at CA, you cant use somebody’s criminal record against them when making a hiring decision. That law exists for exactly this reason: incarceration evidently weighs an undue burden on the incarcerated as they try to integrate back into society. And thats for people who’ve been convicted. We’re talking about mob driven allegations.
This is one of those rare instances I would say there should be a law that prevents a company from firing an employee for something they did not attached to their work.
To do that you'd need to roll back corporate feminism. The reason this guy got cancelled is the feminist culture of "always believe the victim" which is basically the same as "always believe an accusation". Anyone who points out that women can and do lie about being raped i.e. an accusation is not automatically true, is immediately trashed by feminists as a woman hater, and they make it quite clear that it's a "pick us or them" type situation, which in turn makes it difficult to treat the topic rationally. This poor guys situation is the inevitable result.
The art world is especially exposed to this because it's full of leftists, so you're really asking for a roll back of identity politics as a whole. Good luck with that. If you figure it out let us know.
> so you're really asking for a roll back of identity politics as a whole. Good luck with that. If you figure it out let us know.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and try to push back. But yeah I feel the hopelessness when I get in a jaded mood too. My friend has a hypothesis that since the 3rd wave has taken hold, we'll only see a swing back once the tactics start negatively affecting the progenitors of the rhetoric, which it eventually will because the rhetoric is not internally consistent.
What gives me a sliver of hope is that people are talking about the negative impacts and how irrational the situation is now with a seriousness and subtle urgency that never used to exist. 10 years ago when I had these conversations it was all hypothetical "that will never happen cmon don't be such a bigot you kinda sound like you're victim blaming" type of responses. How quickly it's become "shit that happened uh oh.. um..".
> You also have to blame companies/hr for being so reactive
Have you read his original published written apology [1]? I can't think of a company that would want to keep someone who in their own words was a "Shitty, Creepy, Sexual Predator" at recent work & industry events.
Maybe he is too charitable in his assessment, but the reality is the rapist allegations are not true (entirely mob escalated nonsense) and from what I can gather largely the reason he was "canceled". I suspect the shitty creepy sexual predator label is simply the author internalizing the mobs reaction. There's a very very fine line between "creepy" and "has game" and it usually comes down to how attractive you are which moulds how other people happen to perceive your advances.
> but the reality is the rapist allegations are not true
Wizards didn't fire him for being a rapist[1]. It's great he isn't a rapist! But why should his company ignore that he publicly apologized for doing sexually inappropriate things at work events?
The only reason Wizard cared was because there was an associated twitter shitfest. Why didn't they simply ask Noah to stop making sexual advances at “work events” if it was really a pervasive problem outside of the twitterverse affecting employees at the company? It’s not illegal to hit on someone. Inappropriate is such a fuzzy definition it can literally mean “he gave me the up down”.
> Why didn't they simply ask Noah to stop making sexual advances at “work events” if it was really a pervasive problem
Wizard's had a business relationship with him and were liable for his behavior. They didn't owe him anything. Your company isn't your friend, if you want a friend buy a dog.
It doesn't work that way. Companies are not liable for the alleged misconduct of their employees unless we're talking about specifically being on the job/clock when the misconduct occurred. Given Noah contracted, the company isn't liable in the first place and even if he were an employee, I doubt what Noah does at parties (I have found no references to the problematic behavior happening at specifically work events) is relevant to the job description.
> Companies are not liable for the alleged misconduct
It's not alleged, he published a written apology.
> I doubt what Noah does at parties (I have found no references to the problematic behavior happening at specifically work events)
These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events. Yes companies do not want their employees to be sexually inappropriate with other employees, vendors and community members at their conference's and workshops.
> It's not alleged, he published a written apology.
The point is it's not legally problematic. He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term. There's nuance here.
> These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events
Do you have a citation on that last part? I can't find any info indicating they were work sponsored events with vendors and the like.
> He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term.
His apology is Screenshoted in the above link.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about".
You really think this doesn't meet definition of sexual harassment? It seems pretty clear he admits to "unwelcome sexual advances" and creating "a hostile or offensive work environment" https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment.
nit: I can't find source material indicating these were actually industry events. The article mentions they are, but that's just twitter "journalism". If you are at a happy hour the Friday night on the first day of a conference, is that a work event? Probably depends on who you ask and their bias.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what you or I think about Noah's behavior. We would probably come to the same conclusion, you and I, if we were sitting on a jury together presented with facts. Neither of us want sexual assault to go unpunished. The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice. If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations. A twitter shitfest is not the appropriate mechanism.
> I can't find source material indicating these were actually industry events.
The initial tweet cited in that article specifically mentions "Massive Black afterparty" a arts studio, and "workshops" and "conventions".
>If you are at a happy hour the Friday night on the first day of a conference, is that a work event?
If it's in your field and sponsored by your company or vendors? yes.
If its a a random event you are anonymously crashing? probably not.
>The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice.
Ignore the mob spreading false rape allegations, it's a red herring. He apologized/admitted to being sexually inappropriate at work events, that is grounds to terminate for cause.
> If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations.
Sexual harassment is a civil violation not a criminal violation. Police do not investigate sexual harassment and people do not go to jail for sexual harassment... You are right we have mechanisms such as his employer terminating his employment or suing for damages.
>There's a very very fine line between "creepy" and "has game" and it usually comes down to how attractive you are which moulds how other people happen to perceive your advances.
That was not my point. Furthermore attractiveness is subjective. Point is if that dude hit on you and you wanted that outcome, then it’s not problematic. If he hit on you and you didn't want it, then, these days, that’s all it takes for it to be problematic at least in the opinion of a few twitter users.
This mode of operation is not realistic if you acknowledge humans get attracted to each other. If we approach society by making trying to hook up with someone a social crime, what does society look like?
The whole problem is that Twitter crusaders created a false reality in the first place. It's not super productive to speculate on the details--we don't know them. What we do know is that no legal action was taken. Given the outburst, one would imagine there would be a lawyer willing to help the alleged victims press charges had any real problems existed.
> What we do know is that no legal action was taken. Given the outburst, one would imagine there would be a lawyer willing to help the alleged victims press charges had any real problems existed.
By his own written published apology he acted inappropriately. Real problems existed thats why he apologized. That no one sued him for tort is irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant when we're talking about social policy and one's ability to perform services for a company. A company can't fire you because you voted for candidate X. They can't fire you for saying you support candidate X's agenda, either. It doesn't matter if a bunch of people consider such an action inappropriate and you later apologize for associating with candidate X because you have come to see things differently now.
It's a very similar situation: Noah liked to be forward with people. It wasn't a problem. Later, somebody decided Noah was too forward. Noah apologized. What's missing (unless you know more than I do) is the determination that Noah committed real sexual harassment. A "sorry I was inappropriate" is not the same as "this man harassed women in problematic ways".
If Noah had actually committed sexual harassment there would be legal ramifications because sexual harassment is a real problem that society cares about. For me the distinction between social justice and legal justice matters. If a mob is free to extol its own judgement on people, then we do not have justice. We have mob rule.
What's interesting is that if Noah had been convicted of sexual harassment and served his punishment, then it would be illegal in e.g. California for any company to weigh that information into future hiring decisions. So Noah is actually more damned for simply apologizing and trying to do the "right thing" than he would have been if he denied the allegations.
> "sorry I was inappropriate" is not the same as "this man harassed women in problematic ways".
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about"[1]
He clearly admits to harassing women in problematic ways, for which his employer fired him[2]. It's pretty bizarre that you think it's not "real sexual harassment" because he wasn't sued. Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? They are an incredible pain the ass for both sides. I know I personally wouldn't want to waste 2+ years of my life on one for something like this.
> Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? They are an incredible pain the ass for both sides. I know I personally wouldn't want to waste 2+ years of my life on one for something like this.
That's the point. It shouldn't be easy to call someone creepy and get them fired. If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route. Invoking mob justice is a rash shortcut. I don't care if the mob "got it right" or not. It's not how we do justice. If I go shoot people who appear to be the type that have committed a crime, it doesn't matter if I happen to usually "get it right" and only hurt criminals. I'm still a vigilante operating in an extrajudicial capacity and engaging in activity that endangers people.
I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly. He might legitimately be a creep. But I also know what it's like to be in a situation where suddenly a bunch of people have formed a very negative opinion about you and are interested in publicly demonstrating as much. The threat of losing friends, the respect of peers, etc., is very real and the desire to simply admit perceived guilt and try to damage control is strong and causes rash behavior. With respect to this thread, I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Have you ever met a narcissist? Without external input, given enough time, they will bend the interpretation of any scenario into one where they are not truly guilty. I have no idea if Noah fits that bill, but when I think of people who do, no friendly discussion is going to convince them of their errors despite how they act in the moment. You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
> It shouldn't be easy to call someone creepy and get them fired.
Thats not what happened. He wasn't fired because someone said something on the internet, he published a written apology calling himself a "sexual predator" etc.
> If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route
People shouldn't be able to report negative behavior, they have to sue for damages? That would be an extreme view.
> I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly
In regards to the rape allegations from "pressuring someone to have sex" but that is still sexual harassment in a work environment.
>I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
By his own admission in the parent article he was an asshole and regrets his past behavior he just doesn't want people to think he said that he raped anyone, which is fair.
> Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Sexual assault is not something he is accused of but the stats are something like 31% [1] of them being reported to the police.
>You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
Getting rid of ad based social media would go a long ways to ameliorating this though.
Cancelling is ultimately an extremely valuable service for social media. Increases engagement like crazy, and ultimately can serve as leverage politically. "Yo, we could start boosting x cancelling narrative wink wink."
Worth noting: Twitter's trending algorithm doesn't appear to have a concept of a denominator either.
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
We actually do know what, or who, the denominator is. A large majority of tweets come from a small minority of tweeters: roughly 10% of tweeters account for roughly 80% of all tweets on the platform [1].
If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc.
This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles.
There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
I think he means Twitter, the corporation, knows how many total users they have. Although having worked with analytics groups for a long time, I'm not sure that's necessarily true either.
I'm convinced we should simply stop lending folks using twitter to voice their opinion any credibility at all. It was cool, trendy and thoughtful to limit a response to a certain amount of characters, to compress your message.
But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.
Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet.
Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
It should be obvious how twitter the company could provide a good estimate, with their server logs.
It should also be obvious how the twitter userbase has no idea, because that's exactly the problem.
So do you understand the separation now?
If not, then which part is the problem?
And you're getting downvotes because all of this was already explained, and it looks like you initially misunderstood and failed to process the reply you got and then go reread the initial post.
I meant Twitter the company. Twitter has the data for who was shown a tweet.
Twitter doesn’t have a dislike but they have signals like amount of time spent, skipped over, etc. I wish they would add a frown option.
If I tell a joke to a dinner table and get 6 frowns and 1 laughing person that means the joke isn’t very good. In the Twitter ecosystem, that’s a great joke.
That may be a problem, but fixing it is just giving a credit score to rumor mongering. I think believing every accusation before any evidence is given is the main cultural problem.
False. Twitter has become a sporting arena for the game of virtue signaling. That's the purpose of Twitter now, doesn't matter who is right or what Twitter itself knows about who drives these cycles.
Remember that this is how the Mao cultural revolution began, silence is violence. If you're not virtue signaling hard enough the spiral collapses in on you and you yourself will be destroyed. It wasn't just some top-down systemic action that did so much damage, it took everyone working together to cause so much death and destruction. We saw this happen in Stalins regime too, everyone has to prove their loyalty to the party/ideal or risk being canceled. Eventually no one left standing is pure enough.
From Bidens commencement ceremony by Amanda Goreman, first paragraph:
“When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.”
Quiet isn't always peace. Let that sink in. America's cultural revolution has already begun. Cancel culture is going to burn this country to the ground, those who don't speak truth to it let the mob win. But those who stand against this will be also be burned at the stake just like those who stood against the cultural revolutions in China and Russia.
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. This thread is mostly, though not entirely, managing to stay on the substantive side. Jumping straight into the flames is not a good idea and is destructive, if not outright vandalism. HN isn't for this so please don't do it here.
social network lack of structure is their main issue .. it's freeing until you start to see all the work to ensure sanity then you start to miss the slower / hierarchical layers that used to exist.. the natural brakes.
Absolutely. It's all about context, and these platforms do a terrible job of allowing one to see the big picture.
Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
Twitter polls are anonymous. Anytime you see a toxic thread you can throw in a poll asking bystanders whether they think the thread is going in a helpful direction. It's helpful to remind people that the polls are anonymous.
I don't know the guy, and I don't know what happened. That's why I certainly don't want to side with anyone in this specific case.
But boy, cancel culture and this whole social justice warrior crap makes me so glad that I moved away from the U.S. many years ago to saner parts of the world.
Obviously that is going to get me downvoted to oblivion here on HN. But hey.
Getting a large shitstorm on the internet out of something is a global phenomenon, however, getting fired and blacklisted from future jobs because of an internet shitstorm (which to me is the key part that distinguishes 'cancel culture' from perfectly reasonable outrage or criticism) is not universal, companies reacting like that is much more pronounced in USA than elsewhere. In many parts of the world the exact same actions of an artist and internet reactions to them would not result in anywhere close to the consequences described in this article.
This post is a great example of how to attack something (cancel culture) while also acting like a victim (downvote me). This is a powerful technique that seems to be getting more and more common in society.
I still don't understand "cancel culture." It seems the equivalent of a random person saying "I put a voodoo curse on you." What non-mythological power does it invoke? Does it ever lead to mainstream, widespread shunning?
The next part I don't understand is the weak culture of profuse and repeated apologizing and contrition for a "microaggression." This is something Bill Maher harps about from time-to-time.
Finally, the culture of competitive, and sometimes crybully, victimhood is tedious and nauseating. Why does everyone have to outdo themselves to be the biggest victim? Are you "The Man" to be collectively punished and assaulted if you don't have enough victomology points?
> "Does it ever lead to mainstream, widespread shunning?"
It seems like the answer to this is yes? or at least enough to have serious life consequences for those that find themselves on the wrong side of it.
Losing your job, losing your spouse, losing your reputation, it's basically a form of ex-communication that can have serious consequences.
Mob justice is not a great thing independent of specific instances, there's a reason we moved as a society to courts - they're not perfect, but they're better.
Cancelling also conflates two things often, but the mob response is similar.
There are people 'cancelled' because they discuss ideas that others disagree with. I think this is the most objectionable. Then there are people cancelled for (often, but not always sexual) behavior - this is more nuanced in the sense that the action may be (but is not always) wrong, but the mob justice is wrong too. There is also a wide spectrum of behavior here that ranges from mild to actual crime, and in the public 'mob justice' sphere (rather than a court) often nuance is lost and the truth is lost too.
We have a criminal system, courts, and the presumption of innocence for a reason.
The "You're Wrong About" podcast recently had a very good episode on the topic of Cancel Culture[1]. For me, one big takeaway was how the modern form of this phenomenon is largely localized to a small group of people - primarily on Twitter. Thus I was not surprised to see Twitter be ground zero here as well.
> I had apologized privately for everything, but I hoped it might show my sincerity and commitment to being better to address it publicly. So I wrote up a statement
First mistake. You can’t give in to this stuff. It does not make it better. It makes it worse.
I just assume at some point in my life, if I achieve my dreams, I'm going to get cancelled. If you have big aspirations, you should assume this too. Start preparing mentally for it.
The best approach I can suggest is "If you're going to get cancelled, get cancelled for something you really believe in, not some shitty thing you tripped and fell into."
In short, don't have the crowd be the first thing that tells you you're someone you don't want to be.
It’s much easier not trying for anything like that. You can live a comfortable life without ever trying to make waves. Leave politics to the psychopaths.
I heard it from the original claim:
"Remember the bald headed crusty assed "well known" artist who went around groping female devs, and ended up having his face bit after trying to pour drinks down the throat of a girl whose already very intoxicated at the Massive Black workshop after party ?"
(https://twitter.com/BettyDesuJiang/status/127450059571858227...)
My only misdeed in this thread was having missed the part in the OP about that '48 laws' thing.
What I'm seeing in this whole mess is an admitted 'sexual predator' (his own words!) trying to portray himself as the victim, and I'm disappointed that so many people here are buying it.
They are perhaps aggressive, or maybe you could find a reason to argue that the claims they are citing are unreliable, but what part about their posts are "trolling"?
It’s barely into the first section. Just admit that you’re commenting in bad faith and don’t try to defend yourself by feigning special distaste for “self-pity”. Have some integrity internet people.
Why do you care? Also, are you really so dense that you can't recognize that anyone who would have this as a desktop really feels incredibly powerless and is trying to convince themselves that they aren't? If you know people who are really actually powerful, it's hilarious to think they would have something like this on their desktop.
> anyone who would have this as a desktop really feels incredibly powerless and is trying to convince themselves that they aren't?
Why would he feel powerless? He was (apparently) a name in the MTG art world and the Noah Bradley of the apology considered his previous self to have been on a 'self-centered hot-shot ego-trip'.
People often create their persona as a defense against childhood trauma. Indeed, many people never really figure out why they are creating the life they are, and never realize that what is propelling them is something that happened long ago. What you become in life can never really fix those internal scars, though.
> Noah Bradley fucking sucks. I have had him blocked for years and greatly dislike his online persona.
What a fucking psycho. Imagine hating someone so much as to spend multiple years connecting dots to ruin their life. It's as if A Beautiful Mind was about some neckbeard living in his basement.
Where are you getting "multiple years connecting dots to ruin their life" from? I interpreted it as someone in an adjacent part of the same profession ("commercial art for nerd things") being not-really-surprised to find out a disliked person did something terrible.
(Has that never happened to you? Never found out that somebody you knew or worked with did something terrible and went 'huh, yeah that checks out'?)
> The 48 Laws of Power mess
I feel like an idiot about this one.
> I’ve read the 48 Laws of Power and I found it an interesting book. I naively saw it only as a way to understand & categorize the crazy power plays historical figures have made. I made some desktop wallpapers to remind myself of those various laws because I have a poor memory and wanted to remind myself of them while I was reading a bunch of history books. I didn’t make this clear and people dug this up later while I was being cancelled. They inferred that these were laws I based my life around and viewed everything I had done (including my apology) through this lens.
> I kick myself for this one a lot. I should have realized that it didn’t look like I was sharing a useful resource but instead a handbook on how to be a sociopath. To clarify: I don’t think this is a good book to base your life around. I think it can be used abusively and I see that now and I was too wrapped up in the “more knowledge can’t be a bad thing” to see how likely it would be that people would use it badly.
It's an interesting book, who cares? Knowledge can be used for good or bad purposes. There's nothing implicitly wrong with "power".
There's nothing even wrong with reading any book. Just because you read "mein kaumpf" doesn't mean you agree with Hitler, it might just mean you're curious how the most evil man in history became that way.
(I've read that 48 laws book btw. It's "amoral" -- none of the advice is suggested be either good or bad, but simply effective)
I recently gave a test lecture about a topic in statistics, where I showed a meme that a statistics professor I follow shared on her Twitter feed [1]. I thought it would be safe to include as it didn't get any negative reactions on Twitter and was already being used by a professor in her university class in the US. After the talk I immediately got called out by the women's representative on the hiring commission, who asked me how I would think students would react to such a meme. I then explained how it makes fun of the statistical property of the mean being easily "attracted" by outlier data points, as opposed to the median which is usually not as sensitive.
She did not explain what she saw as problematic. Maybe that a couple in a relationship situation was shown or that an attractive woman was in the foreground, or that the man openly expressed his attraction towards the other woman. I apologized profusley and tried to explain that I'm not an insensitive or sexist person, which she seemed to imply with her remark though.
I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore. The lecture was directed at B.Sc. students at a university in Europe BTW.
Personally I can say it feels quite bad being called out like that, especially as someone who has never (consciously) done anything discriminatory against women or minorities. And as someone who's quite sensitive I can say that it definitely has a chilling effect on me.
based on the fact that you're even writing about it and really reflecting so deeply makes me think that you're probably NOT that kind of person. and that is why all of this crap is so dangerous. actual decent people are collateral damage and anyone is up for dismantling.
my question to those who read this comment is: given all that has happened regarding canceling disgusting people (i.e weinstein) and potentially more controversial ones that maybe didn't deserve it (e.g aziz ansari) is it a net negative or a positive for society?
Seems fine to me, but without actually having someone's objection explained it's difficult to say. The problem with these situations is that actually I've definitely witnessed situations in the past where I've seen something problematic/racist and even after explaining to the person what's wrong they still come out saying "I still don't see the problem". I'm not saying you're in the wrong in this particularly case- just mentioning that that's also a thing.
It wouldn’t bother me personally, but it’a a little crude and objectifying. Whether it’s funny or offensive depends on the audience. I think you got a clear signal that at least someone found it offensive, which means others probably did as well, so I’d recalibrate my behavior based on that feedback.
Also, keep in mind that context is important. That meme may come off very differently coming from a popular, well-established female professor who is passing along a student creation after class than dropped into a formal lecture, especially if they don’t know you well yet.
I think that's one of those things where "wrong" becomes rather subjective.
If you've been strongly sensitized to feelings of actual or potential distress due to unwanted sexual attraction, or the sexualization of the (in this case) female body, or whatever the problem might have been, it's probably seen as wrong or at least problematic. The sensitization might have happened due to personal experiences, or due to hearing a lot about such experiences from other people, or, well... *looks around on the Internet*.
If you haven't been strongly sensitized that way, there probably isn't anything particularly wrong with that. Most people would probably have some kind of a middle ground perspective where e.g. physical attraction, and its expression (and humour about it) is part of normal human experience. The same people might see it as lewd or inappropriate in other contexts, or if expressed in other ways, or when it's too much. It might sometimes feel uncomfortable, and the extent to which people tolerate (and want to tolerate) that varies, as does the line where people begin to deem it "not right".
Which part of the spectrum is right or wrong is not an objective question. Right now lots of people (at least in social media) seem to be rather preoccupied with the former, perhaps because legitimate problems have often been overlooked. Some people who are in the former end of the spectrum are being rather aggressive. The anger is often understandable, although that doesn't mean they're objectively right or that you're wrong if you don't follow the same line.
With that said, people who were already sensitive about not causing ill feelings were probably not the actual problem in the first place.
I remember posting this exact meme in an article on my blog and then cross-posted to a different site. Was asked to remove it from the site due to "how it objectifies women and perpetuates shallow stereotypes". I didn't give a fuck, but I removed it because they make their rules. Of course, I left it on my blog.
The professor who tweeted that is from my own Alma Mater, which to be fair, is not exactly a bastion of cultural "wokeness" compared to other schools. That's a good thing in my book, but things that fly at NC State may not fly at UC Berkeley or even UNC. I have no idea how European sensitivities compare either, though I had thought that you all were less sensitive than most.
Still, I'm a woman and I see absolutely nothing wrong with using that meme in that context. The teacher who shared that meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong. The student who created the meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong.
It's an amusing and memorable way to teach a concept, which is great.
I wonder if the "women's representative" on the hiring committee just felt like she had to find something to say to justify her presence there.
Did you give a source citation on that meme? It's not guaranteed, but I do wonder if you would have been left alone if it had been readily apparent that this meme was created and shared by women scholars.
>I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore.
As others have said, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
You did not get cancelled for questionable comments online, or wrongthink, or whatever. You got burned for being a sexual predator. Stop making posts about it online, stop downplaying what you did by saying "I was a different person". Learn to live with the consequences of your actions.
I asked you what that means to you, not what it means to him.
I don't think hitting on woman or convincing them to have sex is sexual predation. 'pressuring woman for sex' can mean many things. People under attack by a mob do many stupid things, including thinking that 'admitting and apologizing' will somehow stop that abuse.
You accused him of being a sexual predator. What does that mean to you? how do you know what happened meets any definition of that word to you? Don't take these pressured confessions of wrongdoing as credible - they're people desperate to save their life. They may say anything to do so.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I pressured them into sex. I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about" [0]
The terrifying thing about this article is that after all of this, he's still on Twitter, and still feels like he has to be on Twitter for the exposure it gives him.
Maybe if he wasn't so self-loathing in it the consequences wouldn't have been as extreme. When the mob comes for you its best to just ignore it rather than give in to their demands. He called himself a sexual predator, what kind of impression does that give?
A sidenote, this happened at the same time as the Smash bros community was experiencing a "metoo"-ish moment, and it dragged a lot of nerdy hobbies into the mix. Many innocent people were cancelled last June, and not all of them managed to get out from the hole like Noah sadly.
Honestly, the biggest mistake people make is issuing public apologies.
So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans.
There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse controversies simply by ignoring them! There is no reward for being self-aware or apologetic. But there are rewards for unyielding self-righteousness.
I have yet to see a well-defined playbook for mitigating the Twitter Eye Of Sauron turning on a person that has a better success record than chance. Different things have worked for different individuals (including issuing a public apology, see https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/influencer-apologies-2020-sh... for a collection of them and the result).
It may be the case that cancellations are too circumstance-specific to say what works and what doesn't.
It may be before the online mobs grew large enough, but Tim Hardaway dealt with his homophobic comments well enough to convince everyone that he had a change of heart, and was not just trying to manage the fallout (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/02/16/ten...).
Doing or saying nothing only helps if you're innocent until proven guilty. An apology just helps to clarify the situation once the issue cannot be ignored. It will not make the mobs change their minds.
Apologizing on social media does not diffuse anything. It attracts attention and those who missed the initial controversy typically try to use the apology to exact more "consequences".
Public apologies should never be done. If you want to apologize, do it in private to the alleged victim - do not do it in public.
In the classical music world, there is a recent example of a composer getting canceled for a complete misinterpretation of an Instagram post. His publisher demanded he apologize, in fact, it provided a pre-written apology for him to just sign. He refused to do so, and his publisher dropped him entirely, which basically ended his career, at least for the time being. So, some people are compelled by employment reasons to apologize, and the apology does work in terms of keeping one’s job.
The relationship between a composer and his regular publisher is not one of employment. And publishers regularly refuse to work further with authors when said author does or says something that the publisher feels will make it look bad. Lawsuits don’t typically happened unless a contract has already been signed for the creator to provide a new work to the publisher, while if the two parties are currently between contracts, there are no grounds for a lawsuit.
You put scare quotes around "controversy" because we all understand that there's no real controversy to it. Miranda remains as culturally powerful as he's ever been. Sometimes people apologize because they think it's the right thing to do, without expecting their apologies to manipulate detractors into withdrawing claims. And, as we can see from this post, sometimes people have the opposite expectation.
Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to lists like "a list of people who tweet stupid things". It went on for a couple of days. The good thing is that I am a nobody - I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled. But the amount of negative emotions and energy directed at me did affect me for a couple of days. After that event, I sympathize much more with people who have been cancelled (earlier I tended to support those doing the cancelling even though I did not tweet/comment myself).
Yeah Twitter is very toxic. I got on a few lists as well.
I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.
It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.
I completely believe that whatever happened to you was totally unreasonable, but try to understand that from another person's point of view, the broad "you must be against freedom of speech" thing is "toxic", just as you have experienced "toxic" behavior from the opposite side of the issue.
I understand all that, and agree. Separately, I'm saying that labeling people on one side of this issue as "against free speech" is a common quip, and is also toxic. It's similar to labeling pro-choice people as pro-murder.
I expect people on Twitter to fall into that hole, and I don't engage with Twitter for that reason. I have more respect for HN users. For example, the sibling to this reply refers to me, saying "These people are a lost cause. They cannot be convinced of the value of free speech." I'd like to keep sentiments like that at bay here, and I have hope for that (see the fact that the comment I'm referring to is dead).
Ah, I see now. Sorry I didn't understand that when I replied. On re-reading your comment, that is on me. You were clear.
Sorry if that term offends I didn't realize it did.
Here we don't have "Free Speech." As such, we have freedom of expression in our bill of rights. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." So to use the term "Free Speech" in New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to advocate for an American version of free speech. Many are actively against that.
That said, I'm sure many simply want to place new boundaries on speech and feel the result still maintains free speech. To them, I can see how it would be offensive to be accused of being against free speech.
Also, thank you for your willingness to get to the bottom of this. You have opened my eyes to how my comment could have been read. HN is a much better environment.
The deal with cancel culture is power, if you're canceling Joe Schmo, or if you keep canceling someone well after they've lost everything, well then that's just bullying.
Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?
I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.
What you are mentioning regarding the case of Stallman’s cancelling is the same pattern I have seen applied against every other voice that has a dissenting opinion of the current culture that dominates social media.
No. Spacey, Weinstein, and Epstein, to name a few, felt the opposite of manufactured. Repressed? Those stories took years, or decades to break, even with high profile advocates.
Now, you might say that they didn't have a "dissenting opinion of the social media culture" - but their actions would show otherwise.
None of those characters were individuals who were cancelled based on their opinions against the dominant culture in social media.
Also, they weren’t cancelled, they got charged with one or multiple felonies, which is different, and there are plenty of apologists for their behavior.
For example, this was a real tweet that got taken down.
I agree that what Stallman said was misrepresented, and perhaps the later stages of the "cancelling" were more manufactured, but the initial anger that popped up on various MIT mailing lists felt very organic to me. A bit mob-like, definitely driven moreso by emotion than a good-faith reading of what Stallman said, and probably amplified by people who disagreed feeling afraid to speak out. But I wouldn't describe any of it as manufactured.
Wasn’t one of the MIT students seeking to strip Stallman of his positions, claiming that she had only heard of him acting inappropriately (as she was too young to ever interact with him herself), yet when challenged on the matter, refused to provide any specifics?
Yes, IIRC the Medium post that made the situation go viral beyond MIT was written by a student that just compiled other peoples' stories about Stallman, not based on any of her own experiences. Personally I can't imagine initiating calls for someone's head without first hand knowledge, but I don't think she had any hidden incentive to make the post. My guess is she had her own negative experiences with someone else in the past and thought she was doing the right thing by speaking out for others here. I recall the post reading as very emotional, like a rant you might send to a private group chat of friends. So definitely not manufactured.
Perhaps you are being too charitable in assuming that the student was calling for Stallman’s head out of past trauma. It could be that the calling for his head was a performative act for her own benefit, boosting her in the eyes of others.
Maybe to the extent that anyone who participates in social justice mobs is being performative, but it definitely did not help her career or result in any material gain. She also had no incentive to take down Stallman specifically, of course she didn't even really know who he was when she made the post. I wouldn't be surprised if she was trying to get a bit of street cred with her in-group, but to me that's just an extremely human, often somewhat subconscious thing. I would be surprised if that was literally the only motivation though - the post comes across as legitimately emotional, not faux outrage.
That doesn't mean she was right to make the post obviously, I just don't think it was any sort of active ploy on her part. I don't even think the anger was fake, from her or most of the initial responders. As it propagated maybe the outrage was more manufactured, but believe me I know people that felt just as heated as she did at the time, only expressed it in private chats. In some cases these were chats with just a handful of friends that had a spectrum of opinions on the issue, so no reason for it to be posturing.
I hate cancel culture, and I understand feeling like some instances are very manufactured. But I feel it is more dangerous when it is organic, because it is very hard to deal with legitimate human emotions. I think usually when the organic mobs misfire it is a "straw breaking the camel's back" type situation: some minor offender becomes the target of pent up rage from a larger issue, and the punishment ends up being way disproportionate for the one, while many others get off scot-free.
>> Perhaps you are being too charitable in assuming that the student was calling for Stallman’s head out of past trauma. It could be that the calling for his head was a performative act for her own benefit, boosting her in the eyes of others.
A lot of people who do the later actually have unresolved trauma issues. It's just harder for people to empathize with them because of their behaviour. The claim in psychology is that narcissistic people are actually using that to protect a deeply fragile ego. But then maybe psychologists just want to say everyone suffers from the same thing. We'd all be peace loving, sharing, commie hippies by default if nobody screwed us up ;-)
There's no detectable difference between manufactured and organic "canceling" because the major component in both cases is a horde of people who are just looking for a hate bandwagon to hop on.
Likewise if you are publishing to Vice or some other moderately popular publication, you're directly motivated to stir up drama both for clickbait and as a form of a personal power trip against those you don't like for whatever reason.
The main issue is that our internet culture is extremely primitive. We're basically animals online, most of us. And it's very easy to spur a stampede and destroy someone, whether intentionally or not.
> from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit
In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.
I think there are also some topics where people are conditioned to respond emotionally. Once responding emotionally of course a fair reading is out the window.
I do think there is a lot of silence due to social expectations, also probably many of the likes/shares with little additional commentary come from such expectations. But IME the people that write the long rants tearing X person apart are either legitimately upset, or have an agenda way beyond trying to fit social expectations.
Of course you can't have mob justice without both the instigators and the larger crowd giving passive support. But I don't think it's accurate to assume it's purely people wanting to fit in. Many of the cases that gain traction have an emotional core.
> the people that write the long rants tearing X person apart are either legitimately upset, or have an agenda way beyond trying to fit social expectations
These would be the activists who are- as you call them- the instigators, and who might be close to the origin of the events. But the second level is the media- and here you have journalists and bloggers, who are already far removed from the original events and are supposed to report them to a wider audience in a neutral way. And yet you see them grossly misreporting the content of text they have read and that anyone can check: despite much less direct emotional involvement here (if there is any it should be acknowledged and balanced), and the fact that a news article takes much more effort and focus than a simple retweet.
So the justification for the spread of obviously false information can only be either an actual wilful dishonesty (and I don't believe it) or it's nothing else than a selective blindness driven by an instinctive desire to align to the immediate peers.
Many good points in the discussion below. However, when one of Stallman’s “crimes” was comparing US laws against that of Sudan (as mentioned in the open letter), I could not help but feel that people are looking for an opportunity to take him down for reasons other than his views on Minsky, adolescent sex, etc.
Sounds like another round of thought-crime and obsessive reactions to stamp it out, a la McCarthyism, etc.
Reminds me of a great ST:TNG episode "The Drumhead" with Jean Simmons as an admiral, who goes on a conspiracy witchhunt. Not until the proceedings go off the rails does anyone have the confidence to resist.
It is a bit of a different category since it is regarding organizations or government, but I believe the angry, obsessive mob angle is the same.
> I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled
Be very careful with that outlook. When I think of cancel culture I always come back to Justine Sacco[0]. She was a nobody with 170 twitter followers before the mob destroyed her life.
Calling it "cancelling" doesn't do it justice (comes from cancelling games or sitcoms). Let's call it what it is, purging. The same tactic employed in communist China and the USSR.
The whole Stallman thing was a shit show, and I think he was thrown off the board for all the wrong reasons. I was still glad so see him go, simply because FSF was a better organization without him.
But yeah, the railroading that he got was wrong.
He should have been removed simply because he has become an obstacle. The FSF does a lot of good things, but occasionally they do dumb things, and it seems (I could be wrong) that the dumb things come down to assuaging Stallman's ego.
I think the libel and defamation laws are too slack in the US. I think Twitter and News Companies who repeat libelous and defamatory tweets about people should be liable.
Society has dealt with how to deal with people spreading rumors and falsehoods about people, and one of the solutions was libel laws. It is not surprising as the. US Supreme Court gutted those laws, and Congress gave safe harbor with section 230 to tech companies, that we have seen a huge spike in these problems.
Hold Twitter, the posters, and any retweeters jointly and severally liable and watch the problem disappear.
> I think Twitter and News Companies who repeat libelous and defamatory tweets about people should be liable.
Actually, given how defamation works in the US, even without Section 230, it's very hard to see how they'd be liable.
In the US, if the defamation is towards a public figure (which it is for every case you'll hear about), then it's not enough that the statement be demonstrably false, but it also has to be made with "actual malice." That means you need to demonstrate that the speaker either knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard as to its veracity.
Since Twitter basically publishes everything its users do, there's no way it can form sufficient mens rea to defame anybody merely by publishing a tweet.
Oh, and loosening up defamation law in the US would run afoul of this pesky thing called the First Amendment.
It's a little weird to hear about people being "cancelled" for things that they did. Usually, to me, "cancel culture" is the phenomenon where people are relentlessly harassed for what they said, or in some (rare) cases, where they were ("so-and-so pictured with so-and-so at such-and-such"). People getting in trouble for doing stuff doesn't strike me as a particularly new or unique cultural phenomenon.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadIt's like the mob wants to find a new villain every week, because of a somewhat past 'crime' on Twitter or a mistake that we disavowed our younger-self online and they still force us to apologise for it.
Even when we begin to apologise, it is never enough and they go to great lengths to cancel anyone who either doesn't agree with them or basically just want to be part of pushing 'this game' too far. No point in apologising or reasoning with them if they aren't go to accept the apology. They'll just continue the witch-hunt and move on to the next villain to be thrown into the lost and banned.
This cancelling-cult has got to stop. It has gotten out of control.
Natalie Wynn talks about this on Contrapoints, worth watching as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
> So I wrote up a statement saying I had slept with women at events and sometimes I was a dick. The statement was heavily (and perhaps hastily) worded in an effort to convey my understanding of the gravity of hurting people and my desire to set a good example. The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist.
You never read actual sources! That runs risk of accidently seeing something that contradicts your preconceptions of the facts. Then you'll be stuck having to rationalize away the cognitive dissonance.
> The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist. The online world expected her to divorce me and when she didn’t many more people who claimed they would support her, shunned her.
And, depending on what the media actually said:
> I think my low point happened when the story was picked up by some bigger online blogs. Not because they made things worse or that I have any delusions about their journalistic integrity (I was never asked for a comment by any media outlet or blog that shared this story).
Ehm... https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/02/media/house-of-cards-kevin-.... There were eight people working on the "House of Cards" who alleged/confirmed he was predatory. There is of course still a chance that it's one big witch hunt, but this is definitely not a case of 100 Twitter random users making a lot of noise.
But hey, now some guy on hacker news says his friend witnessed it...
Or you can go to Wikipedia to find a list of accusations (sourced with articles written by journalists) and evaluate whether you find the claims credible based on the journalists/newspapers/people/accusations involved.
I think it's perfectly okay to claim that all of these people involved are lying and it's just a big conspiracy, but at least provide some arguments to this specific case instead of vague "oh, but can we actually trust words on the internet???".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I follow a lot of interesting people - as a result my information on Covid was more accurate and months earlier than anything in the main stream press. Sometimes not just 'more accurate', but the main stream press was actively and entirely wrong and a handful of smart people on Twitter were right. [0]
You also can interact with other interesting people, make friends that you can meet in real life (many live in the bay area), learn new things, etc. You can get an accurate sense of where some trends are going.
It can be a great place, but requires a lot of manual curation. Don't engage in culture war, block people often and immediately if they comment in bad faith, curate your feed with friendly people. Don't get drawn into petty emotional arguments. Try to be nice.
[0]: For a recent high quality example: https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1404151502864883713
There is such an asymmetry between how it feels to get piled on and watching someone else piled on.
If I was watching a stranger get their teeth pulled I can almost physically feel the pain. Watching someone harassed online is more like, "the internet sure can be mean" and then I move on.
My hunch here is this illustrates how our social systems aren't designed for a world the size of the internet.
In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.
I think most of us here are anonymous.
It was not inherently about people, it was about what those people managed to bring into virtual existence that was interesting, and it was that you wanted to connect with.
This isn't talking about "forgiving" at all, in fact. i think the only person who can "forgive" someone who has done harm is the person they have done harm to, that's not even in the capacity of anyone else to do, is it?
This is, by the way, very related to "abolish prisons/policing" stuff.
When someone has done grave harm, and the recommended response is to try to keep anyone else from employing, doing business with, or even socializing with them -- what is the goal, what do you expect to accomplish? Preventing them from doing further harm? Repairing the harm done to those who had harm done to them? Making it less likely others will do harm? Just pure vengeance? Which of these are accomplished, how well, by this technique? What kind of community or society is creating, knowing that we will all do harm and all have harm done to us?
> I wouldn't be poor in the first place!
> I wouldn't be sick in the first place!
> I wouldn't be in their shoes in the first place!
What an argument.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
This behavior really has nothing to do with the nature of the crime at hand; it's been used to discriminate against people by race, by gender, by interest, by religion - by just about anything. Giving human beings the ability to arbitrarily punish other humans, without recourse, is obscenely dangerous.
For example, I'm of the (extremely unpopular) opinion that we're too hard on sex criminals. The framework the US has put together doesn't just not help reformation, but in many ways encourages recidivism by limiting employment and housing options. But what's the right choice? Am I right because I'm backed by dozens of studies by social scientists? Or is the local parent mob right to "protect their children" by keeping laws on the books that keep sex offenders in the fringes of community? If a child molester gets off on a technicality, is the victim's father who murders him a hero or a villain?
What about other crimes? In China you can go to jail for 10 days without prosecution for possessing pot. Here in NJ I can smoke a blunt on my front lawn as a police parade goes by and I'm fine. Who is right?
IDK, I'm just rambling at this point. This whole debate is so stupid and circular and hypocritical and fluid on all sides.
Nowadays we know this is dumb and causes tons of unwanted harassment. People changed and made the world a better place, which was great. Then we went back and started prosecuting people for doing what they were told they were supposed to be doing at the time. This is why we have grandfather clauses in the law.
The difference between Sexual Harassment and Flirting is if the other person is into it.
My contention is that this whole spiraled up from discovery of some bad behavior from the past, that seems to have been inflated into an exaggerated character assassination.
My contention with the grandparent comment is that "just don't be x" is not really an option if we are seeking redemption for past sins.
Sometimes actions have long-lasting consequences. Apologies can't magically wash those away.
Try thinking about it with Noah replaced by one of HN’s favorite ‘bad guys’. Facebook periodically puts out statements saying “Oops, sorry, but don’t worry – we totally respect privacy now”. How long would it take for you to believe that Facebook had really changed? How would you feel about a privacy conference accepting sponsorship from Facebook, and justifying this decision by pointing to one of the apologetic statements?
Do you just make things up as you go?
The frightening thing about "cancel culture" isnt that its new or eye-opening. Its has always existed, sandboxed, in places called school playgrounds. The world have adults has this annoying thing called due process. Filing cases, going to court, giving evidence etc etc.
Now that the playground rules are stating to proliferate into adult spaces, companies - surprisingly - have started to use playground platforms to make -what used to be - adult decisions about who to fire, who to buy from, whose services to use...from a 240 character platform. No due process, no due diligence, nothing. Just tweets.
God bless us all.
The fight against cancel culture is a fight against people doing things. It's literally that. "Cancelling" is just a framing device for a myriad of behaviors and reasoning behind those behaviors. If this post gets downvotes, "cancel culture". If OP's post gets a bunch of negative comments, "cancel culture".
TL;dr- There's never been an egalitarian, logic-only meritocracy, in human history, and people getting upset that there isn't one is as reasonable a choice as other people deciding to "cancel" someone.
I don't think anyone had tools like this at their disposal in the 1990s. You could call up someone's employer and lie about an employee saying something bad about immigrants at a birthday party and they'd probably just hang up on you or threaten to call the police for harassment.
The Salem Witch Trials were cancel culture. Jim Crow lynch mobs were cancel culture. The Red Scare was cancel culture. Same idea, new execution.
(Edited for spelling error)
I don't think it's necessary to answer this because "sexual predator" was literally Noah's description of himself and his behavior (in those words) in the apology post that led to Wizards no longer wanting to work with him.
The first step is to delete your Twitter account.
Downvoters: So the New York Times did NOT TRY to de-anonymize SSC? Are you sure? [0]
That is the extent of this issue and it is gone beyond universities and it is now dangerously in the workplace and used against those who want to remain anonymous.
Flaggers: Why is this now flagged? Is it because it is true? [0] Oh dear. So privacy is dead then and it is now a 'crime' for people like SSC (somewhat accepted opinion of HN) to remain anonymous? OK.
Let the cancellations continue then and we'll see what happens if we like it or not.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
Which isn't to say that your advice is poor advice!
They had to come to special terms with their publisher to modify contract because the nature of cancellation is such that at the time, there was basically nothing they could say that would improve their "brand," so the purpose of the contract stipulation had become counterproductive. But as parent notes, this is a real problem some people have, depending on their profession.
One should not pretend that social media is a place to broadcast your unedited inner-most feelings. It's media. Even if you are honest, it doesn't mean you're good enough at expressing yourself that what you intend to come across actually does. If you don't feel you'd be confident expressing yourself millions of people on prime-time television, you shouldn't feel confident expressing yourself to millions of people on twitter.
That's a fair nitpick, actually. What I meant to emphasize is that the truth should have no bearing on your performance, except to the extent that it affects which performance you elect to give. As the saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, nor should they.
These days it seems somewhat more difficult to be anonymous online. I'd be better off having a username of numbers, such as yourself. I have published a few writings online but if I really wanted to throw that into a blog I'd definitely construct a new online persona to do it.
I've tussled accidentally with mentally ill individuals online and experienced harassment that was bordering on dangerous. I would not be quick to put myself in that position again.
Don't blame knives for killing people, blame people who kill people.
I think the issue here is that Twitter came too quickly into our lives, and people did not have time adapt to the new reality.
Three hundreds years ago people would happily join a mob on a square trying to burn a woman because she is a witch or a traitor or unfaithful. Today people would just tell them they are coo coo and continue with their business.
After a couple of years people will learn to react to Twitter cancelling mob the same.
The term womanizer generally refers to people that have lots of sexual encounters with different women, and has a strong connotation of “I’m very attractive to the opposite sex and am sometimes careless about which sexual advances I accept”
“Sexual predator” on the other hand indicates the use of force or coercion in order to initiate sexual contact, the use of professional or financial pressure to obtain sex, unwanted sexual behavior directed at folks that don’t want it, etc.
The wording in this article kind of seems like he got canceled for being too cool and getting laid too much, which is what he meant to say but accidentally wrote “shitty, creepy sexual predator”(0) in his apology instead. What a typo!
0 https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
You might think this sounds insane, but it's a real thing: https://www.nsvrc.org/i-ask-how-power-impacts-consent
The handouts on here handwave the issue at the end "consider how holding a position of power might influence the situation" but some people advocate that any power imbalance inherently makes consent impossible and they will attack people on Twitter over it.
“I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about.”
I do not get the impression that he apologized for having sex with people while also being guilty of being prominent in his industry. I’m not entirely clear how “any sex with a celebrity is rape” is a salient point here.
I genuinely am just now learning about this “new” shift in definition as my understanding was that the term was applied to people due to their behavior towards others and how they’re experienced by the other involved parties. Expanding it to mean “anybody with money or status” doesn’t seem useful aside from maybe diluting the phrase’s meaning in such a way that it provides cover for actually abusive people.
In conclusion, kudos to the way you bounced back but I really wish there was a bit more introspection into how you see your past behaviour in the light of being cancelled.
This is literally the first I've heard of Bradley, and I have no knowledge of him outside of this HN post. That's a pretty self-damning quote, though.
You had in the past done some terrible things, you agree.
The internet these days tries to utterly destroy people for having in the past done terrible things, with no way out.
This does not in fact make it less likely for people to do terrible things; it does make it less likely for them to admit to them (even to themselves), to apologize to those who have hurt, or to do what those they have hurt need for repair and redress.
So, that's not great, all around, it's true. It's a problem. This response does not actually reduce harm, it just further treats people as disposable.
But if, say, the people you had hurt needed/wanted to hear you say it like that publicly? Then you did the right thing, you didn't do a dumb thing. You owed it to them regardless of consequences, because of the harm you caused. And I respect it. And I think you can feel good about owning up to the terrible things you did, instead of feeling dumb about it, it's the right thing to have done -- which doesn't mean you have to think "the internets" (or your friends :( ) response to you was appropriate.
I'm glad you are figuring out a way out of the hole, and I'm glad you have figured out how to stop treating people like you did in your youth. I respect the way you tell the story without trying to excuse or escape the harm you caused in your youth.
The mob is never satisfied. The mob will never accept an apology. The mob will never stop.
You can never address a mob. They are only chasing you, or you're part of them. The target of the mob is dehumanized and blamed for their own persecution. That's you.
I don't get this comment. The author says explicitly that he was an asshole in the past, that he changed who he was, and that he apologized privately to the people he had hurt. What more do you want?
>I don’t think I can fully describe the heart-wrenching pain of seeing your life & career crumbling around you and feeling utterly powerless to stop it. I thought I was fast approaching my inevitable and permanent end. I don’t cry often, but I cried a lot that night.
The author has harsh words for his previous behavior, but the question I have is about the sentiment at the center of his reflection on the experience: if he had agency in the attacks on him. I certainly believe that he does not think he does.
A lot of this comes down to deeply personal questions about how to address misbehavior and what we expect from other people. I do not know the details of what Noah did or what the people he mistreated want, but in his incomplete account I can certainly think of things that jump out to me.
- He says that no one has accused him of raping them. I personally know people who were raped and never accused their rapists. It was not worth the trouble or they did not have the social capital or they did not want to pursue law enforcement. How much introspection Noah should have depends a lot on the specifics but is it certainly not clearly enough to say that you didn't do something because no one accused you. That's not reflection.
- At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone.
- He says, towards the end "If you’ve been cancelled and want someone to talk with who won’t shame or judge you, shoot me a message." I mean...I suppose I get what he means, but it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior. I am all for a path to restoration, but if I am to believe in reform I would like to see a more complex understanding than I get from this essay. I believe any real path to restoration must include judgement about past misdeeds.
I think about the Dan Harmon apology for the sexual harassment her perpetrated against a coworker[1]. It has its own flaws and, to a degree, I think it overly-centers Harmon, but one thing I think it gets very right is that Harmon made sure to apologize in a way that was accepted by his victims and was detailed about his misbehavior. He is clear-eyed about the way that he took advantage of his power, how selfish and small his motivations were, and how much damage he did to his victims. His apology feels merciless to his past self in a way that I do not see in Noah's account.
Now maybe Noah has fully satisfied his victims and they simply do not want to go public and ofc that changes my understanding of this situation. But I do not get the same unceasingly unsympathetic treatment of Noah's past behavior. He seems like he wants it to go away rather than make it part of his story and, I think, that approach feels less fully-engaged than others that I've seen.
Ultimately accounts like this, where we are all judging behavior of strangers we haven't meet in past events we did not experience, are always questionable. I don't feel certain at all about Noah. I also think it is easy to read this account of his experience and be uncertain about how he has changed. He mentions, at the start, that cancelling "those who are attempting to grow is such a counterproductive and potentially dangerous trend" - but I do not understand from this article how he is attempting to grow. Instead, I see a disagreement about how to deal with his past behavior.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/674/transcript
I think he did in the sense that he could have chosen to respond in different ways. He could have said, for example, something like: "I admit I behaved badly in the past. I have changed who I am so I don't do those things any more, and I have apologized in private to the people I hurt. That's all I'm going to say about it." And then just ignored whatever happened on social media after that.
The question is whether that would have affected, for example, his getting fired and disowned by companies he had worked for. I don't think it would have, because I don't think the companies that fired him were doing it based on any evaluation they did themselves of his behavior; they were doing it based on fear of social media.
> it seems hard to simultaneously put forth that your previous behavior was wrong and should be judged harshly and also that you will not judge others for their previous behavior
I don't think that's what he's saying. The things he was accused of on social media and which caused companies to fire him were not things he had actually done in the past, but accusations about things he had not done in the past. So I don't think he's complaining about being judged on what he actually did. I think he's complaining about being cancelled on the basis of things he had not done, simply because social media never stops at what you actually did, but always goes on to accuse you of things you didn't do, and you have no way of defending yourself. And he's saying he won't judge other people based on things social media says about them because most of the things social media says about anybody aren't true.
(Note that if you disagree about whether, for example, he actually raped someone, naturally you'll disagree about the extent to which the social media cancellation was justified. But the fact is that he says he didn't rape anyone, so what he is saying is not what you are describing. He's not saying that rape isn't bad or that he wouldn't judge someone harshly who had raped someone. He's saying he won't judge someone harshly just because social media accuses them of raping someone.)
If you feel it's only appropriate to judge people on the behavior they admit to, then I think your read is correct. That also, to me, feels like it becomes tautological - it places the locus of power on the accused and the onus of coming forward on the victim.
We want some level of responsibility on the victim. False accusations exist (though research suggests they are extremely rare). I don't have good answers - but someone asked what more someone could want and I answered. There are parts of how he talks about the experience that make me uneasy. I can understand that unease making others uncomfortable.
The line I would draw is one of looking for reflection on personal behavior. As I said in my post, I'm not comfortable accepting his description of the events as the end of it and I do not see any understanding of why that might be in his answer. I don't think he needs to have intended to commit sexual assault to have done it and I don't think someone needs to accuse him (privately or publicly) for him to reflect on the possibility.
I said elsewhere that I would work with him, but I would certainly understand if people didn't feel comfortable about it. I guess I've seen many people leave companies or not get hired for far more mundane interpersonal mismatches. It is really hard for me to take seriously that cultural fit matters at work, but that people must accept a former abusers' representations they have changed.
I also just want to say:
>[the companies fired him] based on fear of social media.
I have no idea if this is true and neither do you. I have seen external embarrassments handled in different ways and I am skeptical it was this simple. Of course, I could be wrong, but there are plenty of prominent figures who had accusations made against them and they either kept their jobs or found new positions.
I'm fine with forming and acting on your own opinions, if they are based on reliable information.
What I'm not fine with is cancelling someone without even bothering to find out reliable information, which is what appears to have happened in this case.
What research are you referring to?
[1]https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape
I have no idea if this is true and neither do you.
Fair enough. We don't have access to internal company deliberations.
I agree with this, but here we're not talking about just disliking someone. We're talking about cancellation--someone's livelihood is taken away (he was fired, from multiple jobs). Just disliking someone does not justify doing that. We don't have a right to have other people like us, but we do have a right to make a living, and we should have legal recourse if false accusations impact our livelihood.
I think each employer would need to make their own decision. There is nothing in his account that would make me uncomfortable working with him. But, I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections. I favor those, but they aren't really related to 'cancelling' people.
He does if he can prove damages. In practice that is extremely hard to do, even if we leave out all the additional difficulties associated with accusations made by anonymous people on the Internet.
Also, the only legal remedy is compensatory damages and punitive damages from a successful lawsuit. But who is he going to sue? Twitter? They'll just say they aren't responsible for false accusations made using their platform, and AFAIK that position has already been upheld in court. And beyond that, we come up against those difficulties I just referred to: how do you find people in the real world corresponding to various Twitter identities and get them into court? And what do you do if they turn out to be judgment proof?
I agree. But the decision should be based on reliable information. What's more, I would say it should be based on reliable information that is related to the person's job performance.
> I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections.
To the extent that "cancel culture" has an impact on people's employment, the two are related. Of course a company isn't going to come right out and say "we fired this person because we were afraid of being shamed on social media". That doesn't mean there isn't causation involved. Would Bradley have been fired if there hadn't been a social media firestorm? If someone had just privately informed Wizards of the Coast (or any other company he was doing artwork for) about what Bradley had done in the past? That's the key question, and I'm not sure it's addressable by more robust employment protections, since there's no way to prove causation even if it's there.
Here's an example of that learning: he obviously has turned from some sort of jerk into someone whose wife didn't want to leave him after all of this happened.
Seems like a big change to me.
Put simply, there's a lot to cover here. There's a lot of history, context, perspective, etc. and covering it all would take, well, probably a book. I couldn't get it all in this article, but maybe I should have included a little more on the lessons I learned before and why I had already changed. Next time.
What happened is quickly glossed over in vague terms with a half hearted apology and treated as a mere unimportant sideshow to the real problem: I faced consequences. Ignoring the pushback or saying 'well I could have provided more detail about what I learned as a person' isn't actually explaining what you did wrong. There is a big gap between 'acting like an asshole' (to use your language) and 'being a sexual predator' (to use another headline). Those details matter - because they frame the rest of the description of what happened. It's the head nod to 'I'm sorry if anyone was offended' so we can get to the real topic...
The real topic is claiming victimhood when the consequences of one's behavior come out. No challenge of facts, of what others are saying, simply an acclimation that you are put upon based on your evaluation of the consequences. By bypassing all of that, you are starting from the idea that you (and your wife) are really the victim here and building that narrative very intentionally. These types of articles are basically an argument by assertion that accountability is not important.
Cancel culture is not real - the term 'cancel culture' is an attempt to recuperate[0] the language of equal rights and justice to protect people from the consequences of their actions. You're sitting here writing a blog post about this. It's on the front page of HN, you posted about it on your twitter. Please...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Should society try to help everyone learn to be better, or should society righteously punish those who trangress the invisible boundaries of decency?
His narrative is certainly believable, although I am in no position to judge your accusations against him.
I fear to even answer you, as I am sure others are, because perhaps you are someone to start a crusade against me for no reason more than you have the ability to do so.
All adults need to take some responsibility for his his actions: he is steeped in a society that tacitly accepts womanising in its media (think “Two and a Half Men”), a society that has accepted sleezing as a valid sport (jock culture). Neither you nor I accepts such hideous behaviour, but clearly we are not yet winning against the wider society of the world, and what should we do with those that get sucked into red pill culture?
I am not apologising for his behaviours, nor am I defending myself by proxy. I do fear for where “cancel culture” is trending towards silencing any discourse. (Disclaimer: I am a white guy who isn’t in the US. I try to always do my best, although I am as fallible as any other person).
Edit: perhaps this comment would have been safer made using a throwaway account?
No, I believe we are all our own unreliable narrator
> Can a man change their spots?
Absolutely
> Is it acceptable to attack someone in the court of Twitter, victimise them, hurt them, and hurt their friends and family?
begging the question. I am merely commenting on the credibility of accepting an argument about victimization from someone who demands that we bifurcate that from how they have victimized others. There is one reality and yet we all have our own. You aren't entitled to demand your reality be adopted as the only one.
I'm a white guy too, I've never felt the need to opt out of discourse out of fear of being canceled. Cancel culture is designed to silence discourse...but not in the way you think. The term was created out of whole cloth and is designed to silence critique. It is a label applied to exempt behavior from critique. Discourse requires critique, cancel culture is designed to be a singular label to ensure ideas from certain people (i.e., you and me) are not subject to critique. You can note that this entire thread has treated any critique of the author as largely akin to a violent attack on them. What kind of discourse is that?
'Cancel culture' is a bad faith argument, not something you need to fear. It is a narrative created specifically to make you feel the way you describe in your edit when there is no evidence to support that. You don't need a throwaway...just like I'm totally identifiable from my account history while continuing to say dumb things, I manage that by (mostly) being respectful of people. Cancel culture is right wing propaganda.
So far anything I have seen that directly or indirectly argues against cancelling invites a vortex of political bullshit to descend upon the writer, and you are already tainted so you are seen as a legitimate target for more abuse.
I can easily see how I could be falsely accused, and how difficult I would find to recover from that, so I can empathise with your decision to open the wound again.
That's the mob mentality speaking. Just because a bunch of assholes on the internet took something they said out of context, and refused to acknowledge that people other than themselves are not objects and are capable of changing over time, that doesn't mean the person they targeted needs to "learn" anything except that people on the internet are assholes.
If you put out a statement saying that one of your past statements was inaccurate, then that's hardly likely to increase confidence in the accuracy of your current statement.
Ultimately, people criticised him for doing things that he himself admitted to doing. As those things were pretty awful, I don't see that he really has anything to complain about.
An immigrant _tenured_ professor in Canada got suspended for saying that Canada is not racist on her blog. Was she being a dick? Does she deserve the “consequences”?
At what point do we stop saying “oh these are isolated incidents and not a trend”?
Supporting the idea that you (individual, organization, country, whatever) are not racist makes it convenient to ignore efforts to combat racism ("why should we combat racism when there isn't any") which should be universally supported.
So yeah she was being a dick. As a representative of Mount Allison, they decided her behaviour was problematic, which they are in the right to do. Just because you're a powerful person with a fancy title doesn't make you immune from consequences of shitty behaviour.
Do you not find it ironic that an immigrant non-white professor is being criticized by mostly white Canadians for her views and different experiences? Actually yeah maybe Canada is racist after all.
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in Canada. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the topic[0], some of which is covered during the common Canadian education. Other examples are commonplace knowledge. In particular, Aboriginal peoples have generally been treated quite poorly throughout Canada's history. This is further evidenced by the recent headlines, if you don't live under a rock.
I do have experiences in other countries to compare with, but I am not interested in comparisons, and I really don't know what that matters. I don't know any of that has to do with my statements.
> Nowhere is perfect, but allow me to say that Canada (and even the US for that matter) are vastly less racist compared to many places.
Sure, Canada (and the USA) might be "less racist" compared to other places but that doesn't really mean anything. I think very highly of Canada compared to my experiences in the rest of the world, and I'd like to add I did not feel this way until after experiencing other parts of the world. The more I experienced elsewhere, the more I appreciate how good Canadians have it.
But that doesn't mean it's a bastion of equality and its people without prejudices. We can always do better.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Canada
Let me offer an analogy. You might think that some aspects of the Canadian government are corrupt, while I on the other hand would grant that there might be some issues but would emphatically agree that “Canada is NOT a corrupt country”. Would you still say something like: “Supporting the idea that you (individual, organization, country, whatever) are not corrupt makes it convenient to ignore efforts to combat corruption ("why should we combat corruption when there isn't any") which should be universally supported.”? Would you still agree that it’s right to cancel someone over saying that “Canada is NOT corrupt”?
Because I see very little difference between the two situations.
Regarding the example you provided wherein the professor was fired from her job:
- You're entitled to your own opinion, you're welcome to publish it, etc.
- Your opinion can be bad and others may dislike you for it. That's fair. You are not free from repercussions.
- A tenured professor is a representative of their university, an employee. They are a face of the school, they teach classes, etc. As far as I'm concerned, no employer should be subjected to bad PR solely because of your shitty opinion. If they want you gone, tough, that's what you signed up for.
- It sounds like the university took this seriously and launched an investigation. Seems like the right thing to me. No one should be subjected to an environment where they do not feel safe or comfortable, let alone paying university students. How should an Aboriginal student feel?
Next, the fact that you see very little difference between opinions on racism and corruption in this example is pretty concerning. For one, race is a protected class, but like birth gender, sexual orientation, etc. affects everyone. It's an intrinsic part of the individual, the identity. A more apt comparison might be "Canada is NOT sexist" which I don't think would receive a response surprising to anyone.
I don't think any individual stance on corruption, at least in North America, could be considered remotely controversial. Except, maybe, to people who have been personally impacted by corruption, which I imagine is a small cohort, but the same would apply for practically any topic.
Looping back around, I dislike the notion that "it's right to cancel" anyone. We're not executing people without trial. People aren't (usually) going to jail or dying. In your first example, it seems the professor chose this hill to die on, instead of apologizing or attempting to show some empathy. Their choice.
The mistake you and others here frequently make is that people are not logicians in isolated environments. People are emotional, have vastly different experiences and varying degrees of education, and a variety of communication skills. Life, or Twitter, isn't a structured debate, even if you'd like it to be. If you piss a lot of people off, you're going to have a bad time. The very connected world in which we live changes things. If you have a controversial opinion that might piss people off, maybe don't share it somewhere easily discovered by said people. Or better still, maybe consider why they might be pissed off and reflect on your choices.
In practice this would look like strong protections for academic freedom and the administration would take the side of free expression instead of pandering to the offended. I find it troubling that you’re ok with the “bad opinion” being silenced to make people comfortable instead of debated on its own merits.
I guess you’re assuming that the Aboriginal student in your example would have the opinion that Canada is in fact racist? I don’t know if this is a widespread opinion but if it is they would be entitled to expressing their viewpoint and hopefully the professor would learn something new about the country. How is shutting them up instead more productive? This doesn’t decrease the amount of racism at all.
It’s precisely because people are often emotional and are often not capable of a rational debate that we should dedicate extra effort to protecting academic freedom. If we don’t then in the long term we all lose if we have to walk on eggshells and can’t freely debate the full range of opinions.
Let me ask you this: if we’re not allowed to question if or to what extent systemic racism exists, how do we ever know when we fully conquered it? Does it just become an article of faith? At that point, what does this have to do with scientific inquiry and universities at all?
Edit: regarding your example, no I don’t think that Canada is sexist either. Canada consistently ranks in top 5 or 10 countries for women’s rights and labor equality (roughly equal to the Nordic countries). Why do you think it’s controversial to say that Canada is not sexist?
That being said, I do think that there are circumstances in which being "canceled" might not be warranted. I have not heard of the case you are referencing specifically until just now. I read the article and found the prof on RateMyProfessor and overall they do not seem like a shitty person, however I would still like to read the "confidential" report the school conducted even though that is probably not possible as that might change my opinion. Also I am not Canadian and most of the Canadians I know/have experiences with do not outright strike me as racist. Of course current trends I have seen in both the US and Canada have lead me to rethink that people/areas are not inherently free of racial prejudice and if Canada has a somewhat similar history to the US, there is most certainly a bit of racism.
I digress, I think canceling can be a problem for situations like the one you referenced and I do not want to undersell how shitty it can be for someone who is on the wrong end of it. In some cases in may be warranted if the proper mechanism for fairness or recourse are not working. I guess it just kind of depends.
Instead you must harden. Deny everything. Gaslight. You will know you have won when the mob grows tired and cynical from their inability to destroy you.
When the dust has settled, all that will matter is that no one came forward with hard evidence, only he-said-she-said bullshit.
You can downvote me all you want, it does not change the truth.
Perhaps they were playing too much Wolfenstein VR and they see Nazis in everything.
As you can see with the OP and the comments in this thread, it seems there is little to no redemption anyway. So apology is not an option. Especially on your own Twitter account.
Human beings are still barely-evolved monkeys, with a keen sense for, and penchant to exploit, perceived weakness.
Apologies to third parties never make things better. Rather, they signal weakness to the mob, which emboldens them to pile on harder.
Absolutely, you should apologize to the specific people you've hurt, as I gather the original poster did. NEVER apologize to random unaffiliated people looking for outrage fuel. It always ends badly.
100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.
We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.
“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.
I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.
This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.”””
Seems even more appropriate - quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men...
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
Yes, journalists are overrepresented there and yes, their journalism often degenerates into "we are covering what happened on Twitter".
But the worst offenders in terms of toxicity aren't journos. They are ... well, tormented human beings who love to dish out some misery to everyone around. Usually under a superficial veneer of a respectable goal.
So long and thanks for all the tweets, but I am not coming back. After leaving Facebook in July 2019, I felt almost liberated; I expect the same to happen now.
https://cpj.org/2020/12/in-2020-u-s-journalists-faced-unprec...
Besides, there were plenty of clergy who were otherwise fairly decent people.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
But anyway, re: your comment on the worst offenders, a related quote that came across my twitter this weekend-
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats" - Aldous Huxley
Elon Musk does this as well, just without any pretense of subtlety.
Teenagers spend 1000x the amount of time on Twitter - their "voice" is amplified.
There's another clade of credentialed or 'pedigreed' professionals, such as activist or non-profit people, 'community management' people, professors, journalists, etc. who seem to have some function in legitimizing and mainstreaming the drama of the day, possibly creating rationalizations for why it's good along the way.
I'm sure Twitter, internally, is already aware of these dynamics. But it would probably help the sociology of it out a lot if that information was more well known.
This doesn't have to be anything magical. Do you believe there is no cultural difference? Or do you believe culture doesn't matter to a democracy system?
Correct. But I cannot see how it supports this part that you started with:
> What? This is a totally nonsensical response.
https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2021/06/19/pol...
Except it was very much attached to his work since this was happening at industry events...
The art world is especially exposed to this because it's full of leftists, so you're really asking for a roll back of identity politics as a whole. Good luck with that. If you figure it out let us know.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and try to push back. But yeah I feel the hopelessness when I get in a jaded mood too. My friend has a hypothesis that since the 3rd wave has taken hold, we'll only see a swing back once the tactics start negatively affecting the progenitors of the rhetoric, which it eventually will because the rhetoric is not internally consistent.
What gives me a sliver of hope is that people are talking about the negative impacts and how irrational the situation is now with a seriousness and subtle urgency that never used to exist. 10 years ago when I had these conversations it was all hypothetical "that will never happen cmon don't be such a bigot you kinda sound like you're victim blaming" type of responses. How quickly it's become "shit that happened uh oh.. um..".
Have you read his original published written apology [1]? I can't think of a company that would want to keep someone who in their own words was a "Shitty, Creepy, Sexual Predator" at recent work & industry events.
[1] https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
Wizards didn't fire him for being a rapist[1]. It's great he isn't a rapist! But why should his company ignore that he publicly apologized for doing sexually inappropriate things at work events?
[1] https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/statement... "Noah Bradley, engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with members of the Magic and artist community."
The only reason Wizard cared was because there was an associated twitter shitfest. Why didn't they simply ask Noah to stop making sexual advances at “work events” if it was really a pervasive problem outside of the twitterverse affecting employees at the company? It’s not illegal to hit on someone. Inappropriate is such a fuzzy definition it can literally mean “he gave me the up down”.
Wizard's had a business relationship with him and were liable for his behavior. They didn't owe him anything. Your company isn't your friend, if you want a friend buy a dog.
It's not alleged, he published a written apology.
> I doubt what Noah does at parties (I have found no references to the problematic behavior happening at specifically work events)
These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events. Yes companies do not want their employees to be sexually inappropriate with other employees, vendors and community members at their conference's and workshops.
The point is it's not legally problematic. He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term. There's nuance here.
> These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events
Do you have a citation on that last part? I can't find any info indicating they were work sponsored events with vendors and the like.
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
> He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term.
His apology is Screenshoted in the above link.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about".
You really think this doesn't meet definition of sexual harassment? It seems pretty clear he admits to "unwelcome sexual advances" and creating "a hostile or offensive work environment" https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what you or I think about Noah's behavior. We would probably come to the same conclusion, you and I, if we were sitting on a jury together presented with facts. Neither of us want sexual assault to go unpunished. The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice. If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations. A twitter shitfest is not the appropriate mechanism.
The initial tweet cited in that article specifically mentions "Massive Black afterparty" a arts studio, and "workshops" and "conventions".
>If you are at a happy hour the Friday night on the first day of a conference, is that a work event?
If it's in your field and sponsored by your company or vendors? yes. If its a a random event you are anonymously crashing? probably not.
>The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice.
Ignore the mob spreading false rape allegations, it's a red herring. He apologized/admitted to being sexually inappropriate at work events, that is grounds to terminate for cause.
> If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations.
Sexual harassment is a civil violation not a criminal violation. Police do not investigate sexual harassment and people do not go to jail for sexual harassment... You are right we have mechanisms such as his employer terminating his employment or suing for damages.
Yes, but not sure why that matters. The guy has a 6-pack does that change anything for you? https://twitter.com/noahbradley/status/1245397083529543680/p...
This mode of operation is not realistic if you acknowledge humans get attracted to each other. If we approach society by making trying to hook up with someone a social crime, what does society look like?
You are creating a straw-man not reflective of this scenario.
By his own written published apology he acted inappropriately. Real problems existed thats why he apologized. That no one sued him for tort is irrelevant.
It's a very similar situation: Noah liked to be forward with people. It wasn't a problem. Later, somebody decided Noah was too forward. Noah apologized. What's missing (unless you know more than I do) is the determination that Noah committed real sexual harassment. A "sorry I was inappropriate" is not the same as "this man harassed women in problematic ways".
If Noah had actually committed sexual harassment there would be legal ramifications because sexual harassment is a real problem that society cares about. For me the distinction between social justice and legal justice matters. If a mob is free to extol its own judgement on people, then we do not have justice. We have mob rule.
What's interesting is that if Noah had been convicted of sexual harassment and served his punishment, then it would be illegal in e.g. California for any company to weigh that information into future hiring decisions. So Noah is actually more damned for simply apologizing and trying to do the "right thing" than he would have been if he denied the allegations.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about"[1]
He clearly admits to harassing women in problematic ways, for which his employer fired him[2]. It's pretty bizarre that you think it's not "real sexual harassment" because he wasn't sued. Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? They are an incredible pain the ass for both sides. I know I personally wouldn't want to waste 2+ years of my life on one for something like this.
[1]https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
[2]https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/statement...
That's the point. It shouldn't be easy to call someone creepy and get them fired. If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route. Invoking mob justice is a rash shortcut. I don't care if the mob "got it right" or not. It's not how we do justice. If I go shoot people who appear to be the type that have committed a crime, it doesn't matter if I happen to usually "get it right" and only hurt criminals. I'm still a vigilante operating in an extrajudicial capacity and engaging in activity that endangers people.
I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly. He might legitimately be a creep. But I also know what it's like to be in a situation where suddenly a bunch of people have formed a very negative opinion about you and are interested in publicly demonstrating as much. The threat of losing friends, the respect of peers, etc., is very real and the desire to simply admit perceived guilt and try to damage control is strong and causes rash behavior. With respect to this thread, I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Have you ever met a narcissist? Without external input, given enough time, they will bend the interpretation of any scenario into one where they are not truly guilty. I have no idea if Noah fits that bill, but when I think of people who do, no friendly discussion is going to convince them of their errors despite how they act in the moment. You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
Thats not what happened. He wasn't fired because someone said something on the internet, he published a written apology calling himself a "sexual predator" etc.
> If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route
People shouldn't be able to report negative behavior, they have to sue for damages? That would be an extreme view.
> I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly
In regards to the rape allegations from "pressuring someone to have sex" but that is still sexual harassment in a work environment.
>I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
By his own admission in the parent article he was an asshole and regrets his past behavior he just doesn't want people to think he said that he raped anyone, which is fair.
> Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Sexual assault is not something he is accused of but the stats are something like 31% [1] of them being reported to the police.
>You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
sexual harassment is not a criminal offense
[1] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
I think if Twitter had an easy way to show displeasure, it would be more common, and thus harder for internet mobs to form around them.
I used to think that no one had time to internet mob strangers so maybe I’m wrong that there’s not enough attention to mob every “meh” and dislike.
Cancelling is ultimately an extremely valuable service for social media. Increases engagement like crazy, and ultimately can serve as leverage politically. "Yo, we could start boosting x cancelling narrative wink wink."
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
There are disproportionately loud participants on Twitter that push a toxic narrative.
If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc.
This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.
Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.
It should be obvious how twitter the company could provide a good estimate, with their server logs.
It should also be obvious how the twitter userbase has no idea, because that's exactly the problem.
So do you understand the separation now?
If not, then which part is the problem?
And you're getting downvotes because all of this was already explained, and it looks like you initially misunderstood and failed to process the reply you got and then go reread the initial post.
Twitter doesn’t have a dislike but they have signals like amount of time spent, skipped over, etc. I wish they would add a frown option.
If I tell a joke to a dinner table and get 6 frowns and 1 laughing person that means the joke isn’t very good. In the Twitter ecosystem, that’s a great joke.
Nowadays small groups of coordinated people can cause a lot of chaos in internet.
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-h...
In this case, he admitted to being a sexual predator.
Remember that this is how the Mao cultural revolution began, silence is violence. If you're not virtue signaling hard enough the spiral collapses in on you and you yourself will be destroyed. It wasn't just some top-down systemic action that did so much damage, it took everyone working together to cause so much death and destruction. We saw this happen in Stalins regime too, everyone has to prove their loyalty to the party/ideal or risk being canceled. Eventually no one left standing is pure enough.
From Bidens commencement ceremony by Amanda Goreman, first paragraph: “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.”
Quiet isn't always peace. Let that sink in. America's cultural revolution has already begun. Cancel culture is going to burn this country to the ground, those who don't speak truth to it let the mob win. But those who stand against this will be also be burned at the stake just like those who stood against the cultural revolutions in China and Russia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
sane people dont have Twitter accounts
enjoy polling insane people
The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth.
It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.
But boy, cancel culture and this whole social justice warrior crap makes me so glad that I moved away from the U.S. many years ago to saner parts of the world.
Obviously that is going to get me downvoted to oblivion here on HN. But hey.
The next part I don't understand is the weak culture of profuse and repeated apologizing and contrition for a "microaggression." This is something Bill Maher harps about from time-to-time.
Finally, the culture of competitive, and sometimes crybully, victimhood is tedious and nauseating. Why does everyone have to outdo themselves to be the biggest victim? Are you "The Man" to be collectively punished and assaulted if you don't have enough victomology points?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
It seems like the answer to this is yes? or at least enough to have serious life consequences for those that find themselves on the wrong side of it.
Losing your job, losing your spouse, losing your reputation, it's basically a form of ex-communication that can have serious consequences.
Mob justice is not a great thing independent of specific instances, there's a reason we moved as a society to courts - they're not perfect, but they're better.
Cancelling also conflates two things often, but the mob response is similar.
There are people 'cancelled' because they discuss ideas that others disagree with. I think this is the most objectionable. Then there are people cancelled for (often, but not always sexual) behavior - this is more nuanced in the sense that the action may be (but is not always) wrong, but the mob justice is wrong too. There is also a wide spectrum of behavior here that ranges from mild to actual crime, and in the public 'mob justice' sphere (rather than a court) often nuance is lost and the truth is lost too.
We have a criminal system, courts, and the presumption of innocence for a reason.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cancel-culture/id13800...
First mistake. You can’t give in to this stuff. It does not make it better. It makes it worse.
In short, don't have the crowd be the first thing that tells you you're someone you don't want to be.
It’s much easier not trying for anything like that. You can live a comfortable life without ever trying to make waves. Leave politics to the psychopaths.
No clue whether or not that claim is true, just pointing out the source
Personally, I enjoy ignoring his types in online debates. Bait them, and ignore them - priceless.
My only misdeed in this thread was having missed the part in the OP about that '48 laws' thing.
What I'm seeing in this whole mess is an admitted 'sexual predator' (his own words!) trying to portray himself as the victim, and I'm disappointed that so many people here are buying it.
>Bait them, and ignore them - priceless.
This is a nearly exact definition of trolling.
Why would he feel powerless? He was (apparently) a name in the MTG art world and the Noah Bradley of the apology considered his previous self to have been on a 'self-centered hot-shot ego-trip'.
What a fucking psycho. Imagine hating someone so much as to spend multiple years connecting dots to ruin their life. It's as if A Beautiful Mind was about some neckbeard living in his basement.
(Has that never happened to you? Never found out that somebody you knew or worked with did something terrible and went 'huh, yeah that checks out'?)
> The 48 Laws of Power mess I feel like an idiot about this one.
> I’ve read the 48 Laws of Power and I found it an interesting book. I naively saw it only as a way to understand & categorize the crazy power plays historical figures have made. I made some desktop wallpapers to remind myself of those various laws because I have a poor memory and wanted to remind myself of them while I was reading a bunch of history books. I didn’t make this clear and people dug this up later while I was being cancelled. They inferred that these were laws I based my life around and viewed everything I had done (including my apology) through this lens.
> I kick myself for this one a lot. I should have realized that it didn’t look like I was sharing a useful resource but instead a handbook on how to be a sociopath. To clarify: I don’t think this is a good book to base your life around. I think it can be used abusively and I see that now and I was too wrapped up in the “more knowledge can’t be a bad thing” to see how likely it would be that people would use it badly.
There's nothing even wrong with reading any book. Just because you read "mein kaumpf" doesn't mean you agree with Hitler, it might just mean you're curious how the most evil man in history became that way.
(I've read that 48 laws book btw. It's "amoral" -- none of the advice is suggested be either good or bad, but simply effective)
She did not explain what she saw as problematic. Maybe that a couple in a relationship situation was shown or that an attractive woman was in the foreground, or that the man openly expressed his attraction towards the other woman. I apologized profusley and tried to explain that I'm not an insensitive or sexist person, which she seemed to imply with her remark though.
I have been thinking about this incident for several days now, as I really can't make up my mind if I did something wrong or not by including the meme. If anyone want to add his/her opinion I'd be grateful therefore. The lecture was directed at B.Sc. students at a university in Europe BTW.
Personally I can say it feels quite bad being called out like that, especially as someone who has never (consciously) done anything discriminatory against women or minorities. And as someone who's quite sensitive I can say that it definitely has a chilling effect on me.
[1] https://twitter.com/annaegalite/status/1166446645204213760
my question to those who read this comment is: given all that has happened regarding canceling disgusting people (i.e weinstein) and potentially more controversial ones that maybe didn't deserve it (e.g aziz ansari) is it a net negative or a positive for society?
Maybe sorry that you mistakenly upset her. But be careful about apologizing for something when you didn't do anything wrong.
Also, keep in mind that context is important. That meme may come off very differently coming from a popular, well-established female professor who is passing along a student creation after class than dropped into a formal lecture, especially if they don’t know you well yet.
but on the other hand - holy **, you better get thick skin quick enough, because life's gonna be way harsher than this.
If you've been strongly sensitized to feelings of actual or potential distress due to unwanted sexual attraction, or the sexualization of the (in this case) female body, or whatever the problem might have been, it's probably seen as wrong or at least problematic. The sensitization might have happened due to personal experiences, or due to hearing a lot about such experiences from other people, or, well... *looks around on the Internet*.
If you haven't been strongly sensitized that way, there probably isn't anything particularly wrong with that. Most people would probably have some kind of a middle ground perspective where e.g. physical attraction, and its expression (and humour about it) is part of normal human experience. The same people might see it as lewd or inappropriate in other contexts, or if expressed in other ways, or when it's too much. It might sometimes feel uncomfortable, and the extent to which people tolerate (and want to tolerate) that varies, as does the line where people begin to deem it "not right".
Which part of the spectrum is right or wrong is not an objective question. Right now lots of people (at least in social media) seem to be rather preoccupied with the former, perhaps because legitimate problems have often been overlooked. Some people who are in the former end of the spectrum are being rather aggressive. The anger is often understandable, although that doesn't mean they're objectively right or that you're wrong if you don't follow the same line.
With that said, people who were already sensitive about not causing ill feelings were probably not the actual problem in the first place.
This is just my random view, of course.
In a situation like that it's fair to ask what in particular was a problem. If they can't give a reasonable response you should ignore them.
Still, I'm a woman and I see absolutely nothing wrong with using that meme in that context. The teacher who shared that meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong. The student who created the meme, who is also a woman, also saw nothing wrong.
It's an amusing and memorable way to teach a concept, which is great.
I wonder if the "women's representative" on the hiring committee just felt like she had to find something to say to justify her presence there.
Did you give a source citation on that meme? It's not guaranteed, but I do wonder if you would have been left alone if it had been readily apparent that this meme was created and shared by women scholars.
As others have said, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
Feel free to point the hiring commission to The New York Times (<https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1133724550871560192>).
I don't think hitting on woman or convincing them to have sex is sexual predation. 'pressuring woman for sex' can mean many things. People under attack by a mob do many stupid things, including thinking that 'admitting and apologizing' will somehow stop that abuse.
You accused him of being a sexual predator. What does that mean to you? how do you know what happened meets any definition of that word to you? Don't take these pressured confessions of wrongdoing as credible - they're people desperate to save their life. They may say anything to do so.
[0] https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
Except he did not. He got burned for a blog post apology -- where he called himself a sexual predactor. No apology, no burning.
Maybe if he wasn't so self-loathing in it the consequences wouldn't have been as extreme. When the mob comes for you its best to just ignore it rather than give in to their demands. He called himself a sexual predator, what kind of impression does that give?
A sidenote, this happened at the same time as the Smash bros community was experiencing a "metoo"-ish moment, and it dragged a lot of nerdy hobbies into the mix. Many innocent people were cancelled last June, and not all of them managed to get out from the hole like Noah sadly.
So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans.
There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse controversies simply by ignoring them! There is no reward for being self-aware or apologetic. But there are rewards for unyielding self-righteousness.
It may be the case that cancellations are too circumstance-specific to say what works and what doesn't.
Public apologies should never be done. If you want to apologize, do it in private to the alleged victim - do not do it in public.
That sounds like a lawsuit in the making, even if he wasn't a formal employee.
That's not the purpose of an apology. An apology is something you do to help the victims move forward, not something you do to minimize consequences.
In either case, a good apology should show some sincere character development on your part.
Public apologies are just emotional porn for the Twitter masses. They serve no purpose, and are a desperate attempt to satiate the insatiable.
The proper behavior is not much different than dealing with an angry bear. Showing weakness doesn’t work, ever.
Sad but true.
I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.
It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.
I've had great discussions with friends and family that disagree with me on free speech.
On Twitter people don't seem to treat each other as people, but as representatives of a given ideology.
I expect people on Twitter to fall into that hole, and I don't engage with Twitter for that reason. I have more respect for HN users. For example, the sibling to this reply refers to me, saying "These people are a lost cause. They cannot be convinced of the value of free speech." I'd like to keep sentiments like that at bay here, and I have hope for that (see the fact that the comment I'm referring to is dead).
Sorry if that term offends I didn't realize it did.
Here we don't have "Free Speech." As such, we have freedom of expression in our bill of rights. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." So to use the term "Free Speech" in New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to advocate for an American version of free speech. Many are actively against that.
That said, I'm sure many simply want to place new boundaries on speech and feel the result still maintains free speech. To them, I can see how it would be offensive to be accused of being against free speech.
Also, thank you for your willingness to get to the bottom of this. You have opened my eyes to how my comment could have been read. HN is a much better environment.
e.g in cases like Derek's Chauvin (police officer / G. Floyd)
Let me ask you - did you feel like the hate thrown at you on Twitter was completely organic? Was there anything that made you question the motives of the involved Twits?
I ask because the whole smear job vs Stallman felt quite manufactured to me; from the initial Vice article horrifically misquoting him, to the weirdly rabid hate towards anyone defending him on forums like this and Reddit.
What you are mentioning regarding the case of Stallman’s cancelling is the same pattern I have seen applied against every other voice that has a dissenting opinion of the current culture that dominates social media.
No. Spacey, Weinstein, and Epstein, to name a few, felt the opposite of manufactured. Repressed? Those stories took years, or decades to break, even with high profile advocates.
Now, you might say that they didn't have a "dissenting opinion of the social media culture" - but their actions would show otherwise.
Also, they weren’t cancelled, they got charged with one or multiple felonies, which is different, and there are plenty of apologists for their behavior.
For example, this was a real tweet that got taken down.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E32Pup-WEAIhQvz?format=jpg&name=...
That doesn't mean she was right to make the post obviously, I just don't think it was any sort of active ploy on her part. I don't even think the anger was fake, from her or most of the initial responders. As it propagated maybe the outrage was more manufactured, but believe me I know people that felt just as heated as she did at the time, only expressed it in private chats. In some cases these were chats with just a handful of friends that had a spectrum of opinions on the issue, so no reason for it to be posturing.
I hate cancel culture, and I understand feeling like some instances are very manufactured. But I feel it is more dangerous when it is organic, because it is very hard to deal with legitimate human emotions. I think usually when the organic mobs misfire it is a "straw breaking the camel's back" type situation: some minor offender becomes the target of pent up rage from a larger issue, and the punishment ends up being way disproportionate for the one, while many others get off scot-free.
A lot of people who do the later actually have unresolved trauma issues. It's just harder for people to empathize with them because of their behaviour. The claim in psychology is that narcissistic people are actually using that to protect a deeply fragile ego. But then maybe psychologists just want to say everyone suffers from the same thing. We'd all be peace loving, sharing, commie hippies by default if nobody screwed us up ;-)
Likewise if you are publishing to Vice or some other moderately popular publication, you're directly motivated to stir up drama both for clickbait and as a form of a personal power trip against those you don't like for whatever reason.
The main issue is that our internet culture is extremely primitive. We're basically animals online, most of us. And it's very easy to spur a stampede and destroy someone, whether intentionally or not.
In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.
I do think there is a lot of silence due to social expectations, also probably many of the likes/shares with little additional commentary come from such expectations. But IME the people that write the long rants tearing X person apart are either legitimately upset, or have an agenda way beyond trying to fit social expectations.
Of course you can't have mob justice without both the instigators and the larger crowd giving passive support. But I don't think it's accurate to assume it's purely people wanting to fit in. Many of the cases that gain traction have an emotional core.
These would be the activists who are- as you call them- the instigators, and who might be close to the origin of the events. But the second level is the media- and here you have journalists and bloggers, who are already far removed from the original events and are supposed to report them to a wider audience in a neutral way. And yet you see them grossly misreporting the content of text they have read and that anyone can check: despite much less direct emotional involvement here (if there is any it should be acknowledged and balanced), and the fact that a news article takes much more effort and focus than a simple retweet.
So the justification for the spread of obviously false information can only be either an actual wilful dishonesty (and I don't believe it) or it's nothing else than a selective blindness driven by an instinctive desire to align to the immediate peers.
Reminds me of a great ST:TNG episode "The Drumhead" with Jean Simmons as an admiral, who goes on a conspiracy witchhunt. Not until the proceedings go off the rails does anyone have the confidence to resist.
It is a bit of a different category since it is regarding organizations or government, but I believe the angry, obsessive mob angle is the same.
Be very careful with that outlook. When I think of cancel culture I always come back to Justine Sacco[0]. She was a nobody with 170 twitter followers before the mob destroyed her life.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...
But yeah, the railroading that he got was wrong.
He should have been removed simply because he has become an obstacle. The FSF does a lot of good things, but occasionally they do dumb things, and it seems (I could be wrong) that the dumb things come down to assuaging Stallman's ego.
Society has dealt with how to deal with people spreading rumors and falsehoods about people, and one of the solutions was libel laws. It is not surprising as the. US Supreme Court gutted those laws, and Congress gave safe harbor with section 230 to tech companies, that we have seen a huge spike in these problems.
Hold Twitter, the posters, and any retweeters jointly and severally liable and watch the problem disappear.
Actually, given how defamation works in the US, even without Section 230, it's very hard to see how they'd be liable.
In the US, if the defamation is towards a public figure (which it is for every case you'll hear about), then it's not enough that the statement be demonstrably false, but it also has to be made with "actual malice." That means you need to demonstrate that the speaker either knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard as to its veracity.
Since Twitter basically publishes everything its users do, there's no way it can form sufficient mens rea to defame anybody merely by publishing a tweet.
Oh, and loosening up defamation law in the US would run afoul of this pesky thing called the First Amendment.