I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the people who have been “cancelled” and then compare it to those that have been violently attacked.
I have lived in the East Europe pre-Perestroyka and back then, it was "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!". And it was true -- there were not that many by 1980s. But there were few not because thought police was not real, but because any appearance of acting against it would be quickly dealt with. So very few people would dare.
> "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!"
You see how it comes across as a little ridiculous when you equate "being cancelled on twitter" to "being a literal political prisoner"? Especially when there are actual political prisoners, in prison, in the US right now?
Losing your livelihood, in a nation famous for it's relative lack of safety net, is in fact a big deal.
Here's the thing, you don't have to pick a side so hard. It's not, either we get this dude fired for citing a study about the 1968 riots or you're in favor of the border patrol arresting citizens without due process. These things are actually highly unrelated, and both can be bad.
I mean I agree with you: broadly I think things like the Yascha Mounk case are bad (I mean there are even better examples on the left: take Matt Bruenig, for instance), but like it's totally insane to say it's the main authoritarian crisis in the US today in the midst of brutal police violence.
Also, I do think that the Mounk or Bruenig case are actually a little different from "cancel culture": they seem much more like political machinations at the places those people worked. Like I think either of those things could have happened just as easily 20 or 30 years ago. When I think "cancel culture" I think more about random people getting twitter mobbed for saying something offensive.
Really I think it's an issue of emphasis. And I think identifying some social pressure to be more "woke" with threat of ridicule on social media as being the first step on the way to totalitarianism, while simultaneously insisting the police brutality is nothing of the sort, reveals quite a lot about people's lack of perspective and warped priorities.
As oisdk points out, I would consider the very real threat of violence different than a celebrity getting their contract cancelled. But that’s an important point to also make. There’s a vast difference between a celebrity being cancelled and an average person. Cultivating popularity is a part of being a celebrity — so isn’t avoiding being cancelled a natural extension of that profession?
As for regular people getting cancelled, there only seems to be a handful - particularly those that might actually have committed a crime (thinking of the Central Park Karen).
Maybe there's only a handful of "regular people" getting cancelled... but that's enough to create a chilling effect, scaring others into compliance with convention.
A good example might be Walter Palmer, the hunter who killed Cecil the lion. He's rich, but wasn't a celebrity. What he did was legal, as far as he could tell. He didn't ask for his guides to break the law for him. Yet he was doxxed, received death threats, and had his house graffitied. People showed up to protest at his business (which is unrelated to hunting) and lowered its rating on Yelp through bad reviews.
(Incidentally, I disagree with the practice of hunting for sport, but think sport hunters should be stopped with new laws, rather than through mob action.)
I don’t know that we can attribute doxing or death threats to “cancel culture”. It’s certainly unjustified outrage. However, it does beg the question what exactly “being cancelled” means.
A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she didn't support BLM in a facebook video: https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/ (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.)
I can post more if you'd like. None of these people are celebrities. None of them committed a crime. Some of them have stupid opinions, some of them made stupid decisions, one of them cracked his knuckles in the wrong way.
But if you don't believe that "regular people" are at risk here, well - I hope your opinions are all non-heretical and that they stay that way for the next 33 years.
Whenever I see lists like this, what's interesting to me is what's omitted. In this particular case I don't see mention of workers getting fired for trying to organize or advocate for unions[1]. I don't see the abuse that gets piled on cops who report the misdeeds of their colleagues[2]. And I don't see the NFL effectively blacklisting Colin Kaepernick for his views on police brutality.
It seems like it's only "cancel culture" when it happens to people we identify with.
In my mind, "cancel culture" refers to the phenomenon where an outraged group (usually on social media) seeks to retaliate against someone over a (possibly inferred) political opinion. Firing union organizers or harassing whistleblowers is bad, but doesn't fit into my mental model of cancel culture.
I'm glad you're expanding the list a little, but I'd also encourage you (and anyone else reading) to reflect on the difference and asymmetry, here.
(Rhetorical questions--no answer needed) What's the bottom-line difference in getting fired for roughly free-speech reasons by an employer of their own accord, or of their own accord but because a single person wrote them to bring your behavior to their attention, or instead because of a Twitter mob or a petition or a letter-writing campaign or a flood of bad news coverage or a boycott started by some group? How do we adjudicate which path is worse?
Part of what I find frustrating about this debate (as someone who takes this risk seriously, and has for a while) is selectiveness of the cases/scope/concerns that get brought up by a certain segment of outlets eager to catalog certain cases to build a narrative about who is censorious and who is censored.
There's a long history of people mobbing decision-makers (at schools, or libraries, businesses, media standards boards, advertisers, etc.) to lobby for action against things they don't like. The Dixie Chicks got caught in this fire. When One Million Moms threatened JCPenney over their deal with Ellen DeGeneres--what obvious outcome were they demanding? (They keep a brag-list of things they've gotten canceled at https://onemillionmoms.com/successes/, and a list of ~20 current campaigns. You can find even more at their parent org, AFA).
There are numerous teachers over the years who claim they were fired for being an atheist, teaching evolution, and a sad graveyard of articles about teachers sacked for exactly how they taught sex ed (of particular irony in this case, those fired for not teaching top-down abstinence-only dogma), or what books they're teaching.
(I realize this list is itself biased; I'm advocating expanding the umbrella, and suspicion of slanted lists, not trying to whatabout.)
But companies firing organizing workers isn't an example of cancel culture. Why would you be surprised that someone answered the question asked, and not a different question?
You're suggesting the person would have to remain jobless for a long time for it to be a cancellation? We're talking people deliberately going for other people's jobs in a country where access to health care is often tied to employment.
Have we started killing cancelled people? Who has been “cancelled” anyways? What punishments have they endured? A lost job at a very public position?
As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered. Look at Al Franken - polls show he’s electable in his state (by the group that ostracized him no less).
More importantly, if cancel culture had any teeth, this President would have been cancelled.
That's actually a great summary of the beef with cancel culture -- it only punches down.
They can't touch Trump, or Ben Shapiro, or any of the other people that they really hate. Those people's actual jobs are to say things progressives hate.
Who can the cancelers get? Moderate liberals, working in liberal enclaves, who said the wrong thing. Get'em! That'll make me feel better.
And what are the consequences of you getting cancelled? Really? You lose your job? People are fired everyday for silly things or no reason at all. But would you really want to continue working for a company/culture so incapable of enduring free thought? Perhaps companies need to suffer the consequences of losing talent to realize how intellectually bankrupt this process is.
Incredible how clueless some people can be to true mob evilness.
Being cancelled can mean that you will never get another job in your field. It depends on the circumstances. A cancelled professor on tenure track will probably never get another tenure track position.
So, to rephrase your words, "What so bad about not being able to feed yourself and your family...is that really so bad?"
Do you really think that the effect of "losing talent" will be accounted for when cancelling people? MAO "cancelled" (murdered) the intellectual class in his cultural revolution. Rational though isn't going to be emphasized in the midst of an irrational political movement.
By the way you write and think, you're probably a Millennial with a very weak grasp of history. Yet, you feel qualified to tell people that LIVED through communism that they should't fear what they are seeing.
I mean I think there's an argument to be made that discourse has become more rigid (although I do think it's overblown), but like I don't understand how you can write this:
> Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes.
And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest and the army being brought in to police civilians. Like your alarm bells are dead silent for all of that, but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying "latinx" or whatever and suddenly you're all "ah yes, just like in the Soviet Union"?!
It's difficult, when we are in thorough disagreement of the facts.
> And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest
Is the police crackdown on protest or rioting? I can buy an argument that Trump hates the protests and is secretly hoping that sending the police will also disperse protesters, but on its face, do we disagree that there's rioting in Portland, and that it's the police's job to stop it?
> and the army being brought in to police civilians.
Huh?
> but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying "latinx" or whatever
This is disingenuous strawmanning. There's plenty instances of people losing their jobs for saying the wrong thing, and even a few extreme cases of people ending their lives after intense internet vitriol(although it would be equally disingenuous of me to focus on those cases and claim that cancel culture "kills people"). I don't know why parent jumps on celebrities as go-to examples - a stronger example would be academia, where political censure has been normalized for decades.
I think that’s the point. “Cancel cultural” has always been around in some form or another when you challenge the cultural norms of some society or institution. The outrage over it now seems silly, particularly when it’s predominantly liberal people suffering from it. However, unlike other oppressed minorities of the past, the consequences are much less severe.
Unfortunately I actually LOLd when I got to that point in the essay. It was not a surprise.
If being an SV founder or VC requires nonconformism, it's a very mainstream kind of nonconformism which has been part of the culture since the 1940s. (By some accounts, even earlier.)
IMO you cannot seriously claim to be a nonconformist if you unquestioningly accept and promote the framing of a game and a set of rules which have been in place for decades now.
Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.
> Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.
I'm of the opinion that the non-conformists these days are the people that think capitalism shouldn't exist at all and choose to minimize their role in it as far as they can without starving and going homeless.
Ok radical. I served 9 years in the military and no one I worked with was evil. Service members honestly believed they were doing good in the world and many felt some of the wars they were forced to participate in were unjust. Life is way more nuanced.
There’s not really a European identity like American’s have. You can live in Texas or Idaho, but consider yourself American. I’ve never met a Spaniard, German, or Englishmen consider themselves European first, and their nationality second.
First, the pageantry in most sports is not paid primarily by the military. It’s true that military will lend a color guard (those are the service members holding the flag), and will often sponsor sports, but that tends to be only at televised games. The tradition of honoring the flag and local service members is common throughout the country down to grade school events.
The overt acts of patriotism and congratulatory acknowledgements of soldiers has certainly been ratcheted up over the last 40 years, but I think you can contribute that to guilt over how services members were treated during and shortly after the Vietnam War. I would liken it to “asking forgiveness”, which in some respects is shallow given that those that are most patriotic are likely to vote for politicians that will send the military into more needless wars.
My point is, the nature of our patriotism is complex and nuanced. You can be disgusted by it, but understand that there is a history behind it.
People need to stop seeing the military as the problem and rather the electorate that votes for politicians that lead us into wars. The military without a war is just a big gun club.
Your attitude (and people with similar) are the problem. If we isolated for four weeks, wore masks, and focused on contact tracing early on, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. But suddenly, we have a whole crop of arm chair doctors and statisticians who disregard basic instructions by medical experts and attempt to minimize (or dismiss outright) the threat of this disease.
Worse yet, we now have a sizable portion of our population that honestly believes that the economic damage is worse than losing 1% (or more) of our population. Given the unpredictability of how people cope with this virus, you are telling me I should risk my family because we are too stupid and/or lazy to do basic things like wear masks and observe a quarantine?
IMHO this article is nonsense. Even the Gallagher example contradicts the premise. The SEALs that reported him basically risked their careers in doing so.
The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct (e.g. “handle internally”) because they don’t want the embarrassment. More importantly, failures by subordinates are often seen as leadership problems (you can make an argument that in many cases this is true) which mean officers and SNCOs are likely to sweep them under the rug if they can.
I saw many, many cases of this in the USMC. DUIs turned into “wet and reckless” because it involved a SNCO (an NCO or lower would have lost rank). NCOs (rightfully) pressing charges against subordinates for misconduct, only to be pressured by company/battalion leadership to accept “alternative punishment” (which often amounted to nothing). A let’s not even talk about all the case where there was sexual or physical abuse that went unreported despite everyone knowing it was happening.
The only time the military is motivated to act on misconduct is when it can’t hide it.
The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct
The key word seems to be structurally. The US have this much copied feature of decentralization. Every town elects his sheriff, judges, a lot of the administration is local, then statal. Federal bodies are a far away, mistruted entities. Police is local.
It made sense for a huge country developed at the rhythm of railroad. Law and order must exist near the place where the crime is. I'm not so sure that it's still the case with current connected world. Maybe the US still needs a level more decentralization than most other countries. But if you look at other countries where police is less corrupt and citizens trust them, it's usually an entity dependent on central government, not the city council.
Making the investigative entity as far as possible from the investigated is much better for imparciality. Also involving judges, not in the same branch. Local police here has limited competences. Any serious crime goes to national corps. Police needs to go to national academy and get certified for the whole country.
In my country I would trust police much more than the military.
That’s a fascinating idea, but in practice I think we Americans have completely messed it up. Some U.S. states like Georgia centralize investigative responsibilities (often when municipalities are too small to budget these services). This strategy hasn’t lead to great results. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is notorious for falsely indicting and imprisoning minorities. I suspect the same is probably true in other states.
We do still have the FBI and federal Dept of Justice that is supposed to provide some semblance of oversight. However, as we have seen over the last 4 years, they are equally susceptible to political influence as local law enforcement agencies.
There is an interesting fact that's seldom overlooked over here. We have comunidades autónomas, that might be similar to states, only smaller. They're relatively new, less than 50 y.o. and accumulates a disproportionate number of corruption cases. Why is that?
Central government was developed around the statute of the public officer. In the 1800s there was an unending flow of public officers in and out (the "cesantías") caused by political parties putting their people in public jobs and firing the others' people when every elections turnover. At a certain moment a system of merit access was imposed to provide stability. If you were under the line that divides technical from political, you're safe from firing. Still it's possible that you want to cooperate for promotions but, at a certain level, you just don't care.
Comunidades were developed from scratch, with a hight proportion of "external" workers (that don't have the protections of the public officer statute), with "merit points" distorting the exams (being the merit having been working for years without exams because you're friends with someone) and with very little judicial oversight.
TL;DR: to avoid local corruption, make the police come from as far above as possible. To avoid central corruption, make technical lead not political and involve judges not elected by politicians. Everything elected by politicians gets corrupted.
It's trained from early in bootcamp that misconduct must be reported and dealt with.
The Gallagher debacle did not go like you're claiming. Some of the SEALs who reported him went on to choice assignments that I know of personally, and I believe at least one of them has made Chief since (for the non-Navy that's the biggest promotion an enlisted Sailor can get). There's always some measure of risk I suppose, but NSW handled that case by the book. The lawyers fucked it up, and then his lawyer managed to get the case into the public eye and by extension a CINC with no military experience or understanding who interfered in the case over and over.
The military isn't perfect in this area by any means, but in my experience if they're going to err, they're going to err on the side of a full investigation and throwing the military member under the bus whether deserved or not.
I’m sorry but that’s not how the Gallagher case went down. To specifically reinforce the point:
“ It is an unspoken rule among their teams that SEALs should not report other SEALs for misconduct. An internal investigation could close off choice assignments or end careers for the accusers as well as the accused. And anyone who reported concerns outside the tight-knit SEAL community risked being branded a traitor.”
“ The platoon members told investigators that they tried repeatedly to report what they saw, but that the chain of command above them was friendly toward Chief Gallagher and took no action. Finally, in April 2018, they went outside the SEALs to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Chief Gallagher was arrested a few months later.”
NYT hasn't met a story they can't spice up with some made up details.
Gallagher was tried in a Navy court, not federal court. When they claim they "tried repeatedly to report what they saw", they may have talked to somebody, but they sure didn't report it to any of the people in their chain of command they could have. Probably they talked to their buddies and wondered why nobody did anything. NCIS handed the case to a Navy Admiral who signed the charge sheet, not a federal court.
There are a ton of things in that story that simply aren't so.
20+ year career on active duty, multiple deployments with NSW, and lots of experience with NCIS (clowns with badges) as well.
Yes, NSW is generally tight lipped about things. The claim that the SEALs involved in this were punished for it didn't happen.
