The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

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Mark^Bastard
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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

Post by Mark^Bastard »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
09 Jul 2020, 7:45pm
I confess my viewpoint of public speech has altered considerably in the last few years, from a boilerplate libertarian attitude to something … much less so. While recognizing the dangers of gatekeeping and marginalizing voices, I lean more to a communitarian attitude where some speech does deserve public censure right out of the gate. Too much of the libertarian position has come to mean speech meant to offend and without consequences, which has pushed me to consider whether we, as a society, are mature enough to be entrusted with genuine free speech. Related to that, I'm bothered by the decline in the sacred. By this, I don't mean in the religious sense, but rather a shared decency. Gleefully using slurs and seeking to diminish people based on their race or gender. Some things we should understand are not appropriate, not because of law but because of shared custom. A victim, I suppose, of our fragmented culture where everything is open as a target.
Firstly it's very refreshing to see someone self-aware that their attitude has changed. I'm one of the few people that hasn't changed with the world, I still believe in left-libertarian values as much as ever, and it's been frustrating seeing so many other people change and then pretend they haven't.

A couple of other points:
- It's often better to let people say what they think and get it out in the open, even if it's uncomfortable. They will receive feedback and they'll take it on board and likely be less extreme.
- The extremist views of the last decade or so are in part due to censorship. It allows these people to believe that they are truth bearers that are being censored. It keeps them going.
- Well intentioned policy with bad outcomes is disastrous and people need to think critically when this happens and change accordingly.
- Cancel culture absolutely does exist. It isn't the same thing as censorship but it can lead to censorship. For example, if someone says something and a lot of people disagree with it and call them out on it, that is free speech both ways. If the mob 'cancel' a regular blue collar worker and their employer fires them and they can't get work any more because their name is mud and a simple google search will show how bad they are, that is censorship. To say this doesn't exist is a big cope, there are numerous examples, including where people have been 'wrongly convicted' due to fraudsters that make videos on youtube claiming racism (etc).
- Overall, the point of left-libertarian values is to take away the power from both government and corporations. It's sort of paradoxical then that cancel culture is often neither of those, but a more democratic style of backlash. But people are also not showing the kind of restraint they should, looking at both sides, being fair with people, understanding that redemption exists and people can grow etc. Without that it's horrible. Particularly bad in this post-modern culture we have now.

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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

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A few comments about the above.

I'd need to see examples of what is being called censorship here because I think there's a misapplication of the term. Censorship is done by the state, legally punishing citizens who violate laws regulating speech. A "mob" or Google search can't censor anyone. That's not picking nits, I don't think, because censorship is about being going up against the power of the state, not interacting with fellow citizens.

What I think you're claiming as censorship is what should be understood as consequence. Speech, if it has value, has consequences. We want to influence others with our speech, opponents wants to counter the influence of our speech, government censors want to ensure our speech does not have consequences it doesn't like (like promoting a revolution), etc. If speech simply evaporated the moment it appears, no one would care. It wouldn't be worth censoring, it wouldn't be worth responding to, it wouldn't be worth the burning of calories to produce. So, speech must be consequential if it's worth a damn. That's central to all this.

But because life (or history, if your prefer) is fluid, what produces good consequences and bad consequences is always changing. Always. Life is only static in nostalgia. In some social groups, using racial slurs, say, produces bad consequences. in others, good consequences (even if it's just to affirm solidarity with the group). How we dress for certain contexts produce different consequences. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt with "Fuck You" on it will likely produce a different response from others than a three-piece suit, whether it's at a concert or a job interview. Those are consequences of speech. Different time frames reflecting different social norms will produce different consequences, too. A hundred years ago, or twenty years ago, saying certain words or how one dressed in public would generate bad consequences, now they generate good consequences or only mildly bad ones.

The point is that it's fluid … and it's always been fluid. Those who think the changing norms and values are some huge violation of an objective good standard are complaining that those good and bad consequences that used to favour them are less likely to do so. They claim they're being canceled. No, they're experiencing the bad consequences of being out of the norm. It happens. That's politics. Some groups and values rise, others fall. It may suck for those who wish it was like the old days when they could, say, openly mock people of colour, queer people, or women, but it's better than speech having no consequences, having no value. If you only want your speech to have good consequences, that's being entitled and immature. That's a toddler's or a billionaire's perspective.

It sounds nice to suggest super duper open conversation and all, and in the abstract I agree, but if there are no consequences from that openness—if it's all just air—we'd quickly feel it's a pretty hollow exercise. We can argue about the quality of the consequences, good and bad, and whether they're justified, but just calling for openness ends up devaluing what it is we want.

Cancel culture is the complaint of those whose values, which once produced good consequences when expressed, now produce bad ones, even if it's just being mocked on twitter (the bad consequence in this case is a realization that one's status is shakier than you think it should be). That's politics and that's history, and denying each isn't going to get you very far.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

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A fine piece from Ken "Popehat" White:
Regarding Efforts By You, In Inferior Person, To Cancel Me, A Genius
As you know, I recently said something incendiary and provocative, and you reacted, as did many people like you.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

You see, I said what I said knowing that this would be your reaction. I did it to prove a point. The point is that I am a genius and you and the rest of society is sadly inferior. The good news is that you may have a limited capacity to improve, with the help of people like me. There are not many of us, but there are a few, we brave few.

When I said the incendiary and provocative thing, intending that you would react, I was not actually being incendiary or provocative. I was being thoughtful, and deep. If you had followed my clever wordplay, or my superior use of rhetoric, you would have seen that I was not incendiary at all. I was insightful. However, I will not clarify exactly how you misunderstood what I said, or how what I said was somehow exaggerated or rendered misleading for effect. That's not what geniuses do for inferior people. In fact, many of the incendiary parts of what I said are actually literally true, and I did not go far enough. Wait. Do I mean that? Or am I being deliberately incendiary again to illustrate a deep social truth? Not telling.

When you think I am getting facts "wrong," you are missing how I am illuminating what truth means. When you say I am "ignoring context," you are missing how I am illustrating the unknowability of context. When you say I am contradicting myself, you fail to recognize I am in a Platonic dialogue with myself, and both sides of myself are winning.

I set out boldly to illustrate many things: how society in general and people like you are thoughtless sheep, how you fail to appreciate the geniuses among you, how you resist wisdom, how you persecute and oppress the most enlightened in your society, how you shun and mock and divorce and occasionally pepper-spray them, how you call them things like bigot, emotionally spavined, narcissistic, sociopathic, kinda creepy. Your reaction, reviling me, is simultaneously exactly what I intended and anticipated and a deep, sigh-provoking disappointment to me. It is a sign of genius to be able to accommodate both of these feelings at once.

Your reaction shows what is wrong with society. Specifically: when I, a genius, speak, you, a mediocre person, should listen, and appreciate. That's what freedom of speech means. When you react by criticizing and shunning me, you demonstrate your contempt for freedom of expression. Freedom of speech means I talk and you listen respectfully and make occasional soft noises of affirmation, whether it is on one of my YouTube videos or when I initiate foreplay by explaining why women are overrepresented in engineering. When you don't, you are part of the mindless mob, heirs to the tradition of people who condemned Socrates and crucified Jesus and were really quite rude to that thoughtful young man Nick Fuentes.

When you react to me with criticism, or by deciding not to associate with me, you are driving a stake through the heart of free speech culture. Free speech culture means that I can say whatever I want about other people but they shouldn't say anything that would make me feel badly about what I said, if I had the emotional capacity to feel badly about what I said, which I do not. You must abandon your instinct to criticize or shun me as if that instinct were a troubled stepchild.

I know this is very difficult for you to follow. But you should continue to try. Please pay to subscribe to my various things, to help stand up against the mindless hordes silencing me. If you don't, you hate speech and Western Civilization. Thank you for trying to follow me.
https://post.news/@/popehat/2MQJ4k9HJnheREhy6iguOZmsbhT
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
02 Mar 2023, 9:33am
A fine piece from Ken "Popehat" White:
Ahh, the inevitable message of every substacker in existence.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

Pex Lives!

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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Just gonna throw this here without comment. If people want to bounce off it, there you go. This is from Claire Dederer's Monsters, discussing Richard Wagner, antisemitism, and a documentary that Stephen Fry narrated:
When Stephen Fry describes the letter he’d like to write to Wagner—“Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the nineteenth century and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing”—he’s actually describing the dynamic that we call cancel culture. The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a historical figure that he might not say to someone alive.



What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?

This is a hint that our self-concept of being at the apex of enlightenment is maybe a little off. Because if we were really so enlightened, wouldn’t we celebrate that this pointing out has occurred? I don’t mean to pretend an innocence that I don’t really have. Of course I know that the pointing out of wrongdoing can become, has become, virulent. Of course I know that because of the way we process accusations, there now exists a culture of fear, a sense of imminent exposure. Personally, I regret things I’ve said, things I’ve written, things I’ve done. They’re out there and I know I was wrong. I have a sense of fear that I might be shamed for my mistakes. Is this shame-in-waiting the price we pay for the reckoning of #MeToo? Is it some kind of Greek myth–like trade-off where we don’t get one without the other? If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful.

This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.

The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

Post by Dr. Medulla »

This could go in the Stand-Ups thread, but more appropriate here, I think: https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/ricky- ... 235851313/

Not that I've made a serious accounting of it, but it seems like the comedians who have crashed and burned raging against wokeness and cancel culture and all that are Xers. Maybe it's a generational tic or maybe they just happened to be having their career midlife crisis at the wrong time (wrong, that is, in terms of their respectability). A comedian in their 50s these days will give me premature shudders.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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