<story><title>Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times</title><url>https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TameAntelope</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was.&lt;p&gt;We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, &amp;quot;...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.&amp;quot;  That&amp;#x27;s gobsmackingly wrong.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt.  I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I&amp;#x27;d ever be able to create.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>The comments on this thread seem to be quite wildly missing White&amp;#x27;s point. Many of the arguments taking place here seem premised on the idea that Ken White has attempted to solve, once and for all, the &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; problem --- or somehow write a dispositive argument that &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t real.&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s not doing any of these things. He&amp;#x27;s responding to a specific NYT staff editorial.&lt;p&gt;White agrees with many of you that disproportionate responses to speech happen, are harmful, and are occurring regularly. He cites several instances, from both sides of the American political spectrum. You don&amp;#x27;t have to come up with an elaborate argument about how White is wrong about how harmful &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; is; White almost certainly agrees with you (at least in a general sense; maybe not in your particulars).&lt;p&gt;His point is that you have to discuss something more particular than &amp;quot;the right to speak your mind without fear of shame or shunning&amp;quot;. You&amp;#x27;ve never had that right. You can&amp;#x27;t have it. To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people&amp;#x27;s speech. If you&amp;#x27;re saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you&amp;#x27;re effectively responding to. At best, you&amp;#x27;re arguing for what White has in the past mockingly referred to as a &amp;quot;replevin of feels&amp;quot;; at worst, what you&amp;#x27;re asking for is totally incoherent.&lt;p&gt;This Substack post would be bigger news if Ken White had, Solomonically, worked out the whole problem of disproportionate responses to speech. He has not, and I think he&amp;#x27;s probably much too smart to try. He&amp;#x27;s just critiquing someone else&amp;#x27;s bad argument. That&amp;#x27;s all you really have to engage with here; you don&amp;#x27;t have to let cortisol trick you into believing this is an amassing of the forces of &amp;quot;cancel culture isn&amp;#x27;t real&amp;quot; that you must mobilize against.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coffeemug</author><text>From TFA:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech.&lt;p&gt;First, the term &amp;quot;free speech&amp;quot; is overloaded-- it means a legal right to speak free of government interference, and it also means a cultural environment of pluralism where opposing views are welcomed and debate is encouraged. Here Ken conflates the two meanings.&lt;p&gt;Second, unlike legal norms, cultural norms are continuous rather than discrete. There are maybe 3-5 definitions of murder (premeditated, involuntary, etc.), but saying mean things is a continuum. You can live in a society like Soviet Union c 1930 where your coworker who wants your position calls for &amp;quot;the people&amp;#x27;s court&amp;quot; because of a joke you made-- a completely informal struggle session that doesn&amp;#x27;t involve the government. Or you can live in a society where you can express anything whatsoever and not get fired. Or at a million points in between.&lt;p&gt;Third, legal norms follow cultural norms. See gay marriage.&lt;p&gt;When people talk about cancel culture they talk about cultural norms shifting toward struggle sessions (the word &amp;quot;culture&amp;quot; is in the term!), and concerns that some day legal norms may follow this cultural shift. In this context the word &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; is used colloquially. Obviously nobody has a legal right to speak without fear of shaming.&lt;p&gt;We want to live in a culture where a joke on the internet doesn&amp;#x27;t lead to a struggle session at work. It isn&amp;#x27;t batshit insane, it isn&amp;#x27;t gobsmackingly wrong, and it isn&amp;#x27;t that difficult to understand.</text></comment>
<story><title>Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times</title><url>https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TameAntelope</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think we should lose sight of just how batshit insane the NYT editorial was.&lt;p&gt;We can continue to talk about Cancel Culture, but the opening assertion of the editorial was that we have a right to, &amp;quot;...speak [our] minds and voice [our] opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.&amp;quot;  That&amp;#x27;s gobsmackingly wrong.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt.  I just... I have a very hard time thinking generously about the author of that sentence.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad people like Ken exist, to put into words something more coherent than what I&amp;#x27;d ever be able to create.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>The comments on this thread seem to be quite wildly missing White&amp;#x27;s point. Many of the arguments taking place here seem premised on the idea that Ken White has attempted to solve, once and for all, the &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; problem --- or somehow write a dispositive argument that &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t real.&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s not doing any of these things. He&amp;#x27;s responding to a specific NYT staff editorial.&lt;p&gt;White agrees with many of you that disproportionate responses to speech happen, are harmful, and are occurring regularly. He cites several instances, from both sides of the American political spectrum. You don&amp;#x27;t have to come up with an elaborate argument about how White is wrong about how harmful &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; is; White almost certainly agrees with you (at least in a general sense; maybe not in your particulars).&lt;p&gt;His point is that you have to discuss something more particular than &amp;quot;the right to speak your mind without fear of shame or shunning&amp;quot;. You&amp;#x27;ve never had that right. You can&amp;#x27;t have it. To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people&amp;#x27;s speech. If you&amp;#x27;re saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you&amp;#x27;re effectively responding to. At best, you&amp;#x27;re arguing for what White has in the past mockingly referred to as a &amp;quot;replevin of feels&amp;quot;; at worst, what you&amp;#x27;re asking for is totally incoherent.&lt;p&gt;This Substack post would be bigger news if Ken White had, Solomonically, worked out the whole problem of disproportionate responses to speech. He has not, and I think he&amp;#x27;s probably much too smart to try. He&amp;#x27;s just critiquing someone else&amp;#x27;s bad argument. That&amp;#x27;s all you really have to engage with here; you don&amp;#x27;t have to let cortisol trick you into believing this is an amassing of the forces of &amp;quot;cancel culture isn&amp;#x27;t real&amp;quot; that you must mobilize against.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akhmatova</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the kind of sentence that, to me at least, grinds my mental gears to a halt.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the cortisone rush that tptacek was referring to.  You need to let it go through you (or past you) until you feel your mental gears loosen up again.  Then step back and look at the bigger picture.&lt;p&gt;What the editorial author meant was not some kind of &lt;i&gt;absolute&lt;/i&gt; freedom from the threat of being shamed or shunned.  But that, once upon a time, and it wasn&amp;#x27;t too long ago, there was a thing known as &amp;quot;civil discourse&amp;quot; in this country.  In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.&lt;p&gt;Note that this don&amp;#x27;t mean &amp;quot;unpopular or difficult&amp;quot; in the anything-goes sense.  Spouting sheer idiocy can (and should) get you shunned and shamed, along with threats of implications of violence, and a whole lot of other things I don&amp;#x27;t need to mention.&lt;p&gt;But taking unpopular &amp;#x2F; difficult (or even simply naïve) stances within the boundaries of plausibility and reason, by themselves, should not merit such a reaction.  And yet increasingly they do.  That is what is meant by a breakdown in the standards of civil discourse.  And it this breakdown of standards -- and the creeping climate of &amp;quot;better hold your tongue&amp;quot; that has taken over this country -- that is the main concern of the editorial piece.   Not absolutist notions of freedom or freedom-from.&lt;p&gt;Nuance.  That&amp;#x27;s the key takeaway here.</text></comment>