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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Contrapoints released her newest video yesterday. As someone who has found a number of her past videos to be well done and interesting (they're generally better the further back you go), this one was disappointing. Some random thoughts:

Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives; now it seems like she's totally bought into some of the worst argumentation styles of the woke left. Most annoying to me is the frequency with which Natalie begs the question by referring to "trans rights" as if they're some unobjectionable, neutral thing that only "bigots" could oppose. Interestingly, the only time she actually concretely discusses a supposed "trans right" (males competing in women's sports), she agrees that there is a debate to be had here. Of course, no mention of kids transitioning, males in women's prisons, etc. Just "trans rights" in the abstract. The one thing Contrapoints is clear about is that not acknowledging that "trans women are women" is at the least "transphobic" (if not a violation of "trans rights" in some hard to define way), which is interesting. What does it mean to be "transphobic"? Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"? Because I would like to say that I'm not "transphobic" on the basis that I don't think trans people should be denied rights that we accord to others, or that they should be forcibly prevented from dressing like women, or even (if over 18) allowed to surgically alter themselves to match their desired gender identity (perhaps with some reasonable safeguards).

I think she makes some good arguments about the fact that there are always limits to debate. She talks about how LGBTQ activists essentially "cancelled" an old anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, with the implication that most people nowadays would agree with that cancellation. Of course, I would simply say that there are meaningful differences between gay activism and trans activism (e.g., gay people were fighting against laws that criminalized consensual behavior between adults; trans people often are fighting to allow children to mutilate themselves). Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here. If, say, someone was going around and gathering a following by literally advocating for the murder of Jews, I think a lot of us would agree that public shaming (at the least) would be appropriate. That means that one must always have some object-level discussion about what people are being cancelled for before one can reasonably argue that any given cancellation is unacceptable. It's hardly a groundbreaking observation, but it's true nonetheless that there must be a line somewhere that would make "cancel culture" type tactics acceptable; we're all just debating where that line is.

Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.

Anyways, I would be curious on others thoughts here (assuming anyone is willing to watch a nearly two hour video by someone most would consider an ideological opponent.

it's true nonetheless that there must be a line somewhere that would make "cancel culture" type tactics acceptable; we're all just debating where that line is.

I'll bite the bullet and say I don't think there's any line where cancel culture type tactics are acceptable.

If person A wants to speak and person B wants to listen, then it's not acceptable for unrelated third party C to prevent this from occurring.

The only exception would be if person A or person B was breaching some duty they owed to person C. For example, if person A signed a non-disclosure agreement with person C.

So, you think if you were in Weimar Germany around 1930, it wouldn't have been acceptable to "cancel" Hitler (lol) if you thought that was a tactic likely to prevent his coming to power? To me there is no question it would be legitimate to disrupt Nazi rallies, throw pies in Hitler's face (a tactic Contrapoints discusses LGBTQ activists using against anti-gay activists), etc., if you legitimately thought it would prevent Nazism and the Holocaust. The problem for me with current activists is simply that they've set the bar for using these tactics way too low.

First off, there were lots of attempts to "cancel" Hitler and the Nazis and those attempts didn't work. Criminal laws against hate speech were brought to bear, and if anything those attempts at shutting down the Nazis made them stronger and gave them better rhetorical tools. "What don't they want you to know?" was their argument.

Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters.

But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.

I largely agree that cancellation is tactically counterproductive. But one could also say that the Woke left uses cancellation all the time and seems to have amassed a large amount of cultural power, which might indicate that in certain circumstances it is effective.

But even if I thought it would work, I'm against censorship on principle.

So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?

So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?

It depends on what you mean by cancelling, but if you mean violating his right to speak freely, then yes I would be opposed. The whole point of rights is that everyone has them, including bad people. The whole point of free speech is that it protects the right to say vile and reprehensible things.

Okay. Disrupt him. Throw pies at him. And then, shockingly, him and his ilk form brownshirts and distrupt the distrupters. The Nazis don't become reformed moderates when punched. Instead it's Hitler and his buddies beating and dog whipping people all the way to victory.

That's not an argument against disrupting Hitler, that's an argument for doing it harder.

Your reductio ad hitlerum is especially bad considering the history of why the Sturmabteilung were formed in the first place.

If you're saying that disruptions of Nazi rallies led to the creation of the Sturmabteilung and thus indirectly led to the rise of Hitler, okay. It doesn't really affect my point, because I specifically qualified the use of "cancellation" on the legitimate belief that it would prevent his rise. If you think that cancellation is counterproductive (I largely tend to agree), that's a tactical disagreement, not a moral one.

It doesn't really affect my point, because I specifically qualified the use of "cancellation" on the legitimate belief that it would prevent his rise.

I think part of the issue here is that a legitimate belief isn't necessarily a correct belief, and someone who genuinely wants to do good in this world has the responsibility to make sure that his beliefs are not just legitimate but also correct. That's an endless endeavor, of course. But in this particular case, one could argue that someone who has a legitimate belief that this sort of "cancellation" would prevent the rise of Hitler in the 1930s is someone who hasn't take on the proper responsibility of figuring out if his legitimate belief is also a correct belief.

This is rather far away from the initial discussion about "cancel culture" and its possible usefulness in general, though.

Hitler was the instrument the army of the Weimar Republic was using to cancel the German Workers Party. Kinda backfired on them.

I'd suggest that if it's okay to shoot someone dead, it's also okay to cancel them.

It's okay to shoot Hitler dead. But nobody's going to seriously argue that it's okay to shoot J. K. Rowling dead.

JK Rowling, maybe not. There’s definitely people who at least say they think it would be justified to shoot Matt Walsh or other prominent anti-gender-ideology activists dead, whether or not they believe it(I would point to the lack of any attempts on their lives as evidence they don’t), and these are regular and frequent targets of cancel culture.

But nobody's going to seriously argue that it's okay to shoot J. K. Rowling dead.

By "nobody", you mean "nobody here, out loud", right? Because I'm pretty sure I can find a whole lot of people in the general trans orbit who will in fact argue that it's okay to shoot J.K. Rowling dead. Certainly there were people making that argument for the Tennessee shooter regarding random Christian adults and kids, possibly including the shooter herself.

Certainly there were people making that argument for the Tennessee shooter regarding random Christian adults and kids

Were there? The closest is that one tweet from the "Trans Resistance Network" (the "network" being a Twitter account and a Wordpress website) that said that the shooting is a tragedy but it's also a tragedy that trans people are mistreated. It did not say that the shooting was justified.

There were definately additional twitter randos opining that the Christians had it coming and that Hale was a freedom fighter. I'm not claiming that they represent anyone other than themselves, but they do exist. I think there would be more people willing to make the argument for Rowling, since in her case no violence has actually happened, so the edginess draws less social oprobrium.

I'd agree with this as a heuristic for where it is absolutely OK to cancel someone. But certainly there's a middle ground? It can't only be either "I can only use reasoned debate to stop this person" or "I can shoot or cancel someone". Surely there's a place at which it would be acceptable to cancel but not murder someone?

Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.

The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms. Speaking from a platform isn't a private transaction between person A & B, it involves the approval of whoever owns the platform. Consumers and employees play a role, as they can boycott or stop working for platform owners who use the platform to promote things they think are harmful. That's not physically preventing person A from Person B, it's just creating an incentive structure for the platform owner to deny person A from using their private platform to talk to Person B.

When you speak through a private platform (e.g. youtube), you incur various contractual duties to that platform. If your speech violates those contractual duties, then it's permissible for the platform to prevent you from speaking. Similarly, I would say boycotting or quitting one's job is permissible and doesn't count as cancel culture because no one is being prevented from speaking by these actions.

But a situation such as the one that recently occurred and Stanford, where the Federalist Society invited Judge Duncan to speak, followed all proper rules and policies to obtain a room for him to speak in, but he was then shouted down and prevented from speaking, is an example of "deplatforming" that is improper.

Ok, so are you supporting the various threats sent to people for streaming a video game?

Seriously, look at some of the tactics used to boycott a video game (with no transphobic content). Do you support everything that happened there? Who (aside from rightoids, whom I don't listen to) is saying anything about some pretty nasty tactics (rape/death threats are never ok).

Saying, 'they are genociding us' to any criticism is not helpful to the cause... It just makes self-righteous people feel better about themselves. :marseyshrug:

I don't think that has much to do with what I wrote. Death threats aren't the same thing as boycotts and I don't support them.

Yes, self righteous people saying edgy things to signal ingroup loyalty is a lot of internet content.

The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms.

People wanted to stream a game on their twitch channel (some channel were very small). Those people got a lot of nastiness threats put their way.

If you're going to talk about the boycott, this nastiness is part of it... And where pretty much at the point where bringing it up gets you called a bigot. Shouting down and arguing against empathy (like the contrapoints video does) is not helpful.

That's not really the "cancel culture debate". Often the "cancel culture" is enforced by outrage mobs creating a hostile environment precluding debate where the mob isn't supposed to be the owner of a given space, or by the mob "leaning" on the owners of the space/platform or trying to sabotage infrastructure or payment providers.

Leaning on the owner is usually a second degree boycott though. We can't directly boycott x because we aren't its consumer base, but we are the consumer base for company y that works with x and we can threaten to boycott y if they don't boycott x. It's still a sort of social shunning rather than a direct censorship.

None of the cancel culture ever took form of a boycott, and when they do try it, it tends to fail miserably - see the latest harry potter game affair. If these were actual boycotts, whether first or second hand, I'd have no issue with progressive activism.

TBH i'm mostly fine with boycotts. Where I draw the line is physical violence and literally intimidation and interference with business like sending bogus DMCA strikes or trying to get some one fired by badgering their boss.

I think there's another place where blocking the communication between A and B, where both A and B want that communication to happen, where a third party C still has a legitimate interest in preventing that communication from happening. Consider the case where person A (Alice) has access to detailed instructions on how to construct nuclear weapons, and person B (Bob) wants to buy those instructions off her. Alice wants this communication to happen, because she estimates that the chance that Bob will actually build and use nuclear weapons in a way that harms her is fairly low, and Bob wants this communication to happen because he wants to gain the ability to construct nuclear weapons.

I claim that it is legitimately in the interests of person C (the rest of us humans on Earth) to prevent that communication from happening, even if Alice had never signed a nondisclosure agreement.

I think there is in fact a line. Though that line is pretty fucking far from "misgendering someone".

If Alice is breaching a duty, for example if she works for the US government and is obligated to keep nuclear secrets confidential, then it's proper for the US government to intervene and stop her from speaking. If Alice obtained the nuclear secrets without incurring or breaching a duty, for example if she found them laying on the street, then there's no proper basis to stop her from speaking, even if her speech is likely to cause harm.

I claim that it is legitimately in the interests of person C (the rest of us humans on Earth) to prevent that communication from happening, even if Alice had never signed a nondisclosure agreement.

There are lots of things that may be in Person C's legitimate interest but are nevertheless are impermissible because they infringe the rights of others. Person C may want a new Rolex watch and it therefore may be in Person C's interest to steal a Rolex from the jewelry store, but that doesn't make it permissible to do so because stealing a Rolex involves violating the rights of others.

The current policy in the US is that certain information, specifically the design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons, is born secret. Philosophically this is a really ugly and unprincipled hack, and it's probably unconstitutional. As you say, there is no proper basis to stop her from speaking, and it totally violates her rights. Moreover, once the exception is carved out, I expect that politicians will twist the intent and make it illegal to talk about other, non-dangerous-but-enraging-or-embarrassing stuff for the purposes of "national security".

I hate it. And yet, on the balance, I'd rather live in a world where the policy exists than one where it doesn't, because I expect the world that has that policy to contain nice things like "cities" for several more decades than the one where that information is a free-for-all.

I guess I come out on this the way Sam Harris comes out on torture. He argues torture should be illegal, but nevertheless there are situations where it should be done anyway, such as if a terrorist has hidden a nuclear bomb in a city and torture is the only way to discover its whereabouts. In truly extreme situations, morally repugnant acts may be necessary.

I think censorship is repugnant even when it's used to prevent the disclosure of nuclear secrets, but perhaps it's a necessary evil in extremis.

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