Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-my-own-lived-experience-says-otherwise/

by jeremylevy • 6 years ago

76 44 6 years ago

quillette.com

jmeister• 6 years ago

Check out this Twitter thread for >200 examples:

https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...

fack• 6 years ago

I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept.

My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital?

Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...

umvi• 6 years ago

I understand "cancel culture" to simply be a form of mob-enforced group-think. It's "intolerance of intolerance" taken to an extreme. If you say or do something (or said or did something in the past!) that runs afoul of the mob, the mob "cancels" you (tries to get you fired from your job, kicked out of github projects you contribute to, membership revoked from organizations you participate in, your business boycotted/destroyed, etc. - essentially ruin your life as much as possible without causing bodily harm). The end goal of cancel culture is to "send a message" to other people that do similar things and get them to conform to the prevailing group-think of the mob.

Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"

mieses• 6 years ago

It would be convenient if there was a database of cancelled people so those people could go on with their lives and operate outside cancel culture.

For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example).

I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.

notahacker3• 6 years ago

Yep. And whilst the balance of who holds the social capital in which circles and which views they consider beyond the pale changes, it's not a new phenomenon and seldom a one-sided one.

The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.

guitarbill• 6 years ago

Presumably, the author has some kind of scientific studies or evidence to back up his position though (as his claims rely on that)? In which case, he would be using his "social capital" to try and have the debate be more focused on science and research, and less about belief.

chrismcb• 6 years ago

It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.

krapp3• 6 years ago

It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous.

And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.

[0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

natrik• 6 years ago

I saw this posted the other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/128806975173083...

which also provides examples.

DubiousPusher2• 6 years ago

Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has changed is which views will get you ostricised.

And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).

thoughtstheseus• 6 years ago

The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it’s not hard to seek out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.

DubiousPusher2• 6 years ago

The scale, speed, and medium is also different.

I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.

wcerfgba• 6 years ago

Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.”", which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science".

Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.

TheCoelacanth• 6 years ago

Yes, it basically turns the entire rant into one giant strawman argument.

By substituting sex for gender in his opponents' arguments, he is replacing their arguments with weaker ones.

DanBC2• 6 years ago

The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into either gender or sex roles based on these.

fabiofzero• 6 years ago

Mental note: never click a Quilette link again.

ThA0x2• 6 years ago

Why?

DoreenMichele8• 6 years ago

He didn't just express a politically incorrect opinion. He did so in a fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong.

This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate.

It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase cancel culture, whether you believe that's a real thing or not.

Udik3• 6 years ago

asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong.

That seems to be the same thing his opponents are saying about his positions. So do you maintain the same attitude towards them?

DoreenMichele8• 6 years ago

If true, I'm guessing I would. I have a long history of saying "All y'all are wrong and both sides need to quit this crap."

My mother always said "Two wrongs don't make a right."

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

There are people who believe that the earth is flat. They are straight up wrong. There's no allowance for questions or debate, and saying so isn't being obnoxious.

DoreenMichele8• 6 years ago

It's possible to state that this is not the consensus currently and you don't agree with them without being obnoxious.

It's also possible to be utterly obnoxious to people on the justification that current scientific consensus is on your side, pretend you aren't being obnoxious because "you are right" and have enough people agree with you to feel like it's completely okay and justified to be obnoxious.

This latter thing is largely what cancel culture seems to push back against because such behavior is typically reserved for fairly privileged individuals who can get away with it.

Other people can't get away with it, even if truth is on their side, because consensus is not.

GurnBlandston• 6 years ago

Real science is based on the results of experiments, the parameters and results of which are publicized and available to be reproduced.

Questions and debate are good. They don't invalidate the findings of previous experiments. No amount of tweets, articles, or outrage are sufficient to invalidate a scientist's work, and being uncomfortable with the truths* presented does NOT make it ok to "cancel" someone.

Disagree with the findings? See if they're reproducible. Do another experiment. Do some real science. Proceed seeking whatever the truth is rather than evidence for a previously held opinion.

* remembering of course these "truths" are to certain confidences, being open to being proven wrong by future science, and that the whole point is seeking truth.

DoreenMichele8• 6 years ago

The people arguing that gender is a social construct are arguing about a completely different field from human biology per se. Even his remarks about biology per se look ill informed to me. On top of that, he seems to make zero effort to make any distinction between sex and gender.

Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"

Good for you. And irrelevant.

nebulosa• 6 years ago

Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

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