Cancel culture

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Stephanie
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Stephanie » Sat Jul 11, 2020 7:22 am

plodder wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 5:48 am
Tessa K wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:10 am
plodder wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:03 am
Lovely stuff. I mentioned upthread about the structures of different types of social media and the way that these will drive certain sorts of discourse and what you've said here chimes with that. Communication is being democratised, which is great, but also funneled, which is more problematic.

Addressing the funnels is why I think existing social media should be scrapped, broken up and made open-source. This will allow for multiple competing cross-compatible platforms which will help solve the "funneling" problem.
What do you mean by funnelled in this context?
Different online platforms reward (and don’t reward) different social behaviours. This funnels everyone doing it down particular routes. For example, I think twitter hate mobs are an inadvertent result of design decisions at twitter hq.
Yes. I was actually just looking at some articles to reply to another post about dunking. This one has some interesting insights about twitter behaviour

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18245536/e ... incentives
There’s also Twitter’s brevity: Tweets are limited to 280 characters, which can limit space for a more nuanced discussion. And Twitter’s algorithms also promote tweets with lots of “Likes” or retweets. As we’ve learned from Twitter dunks, those aren’t always a signal that something is healthy.
My objection to a "like" button here was partly for that reason.
In a separate study still under review about how news stories are passed around the internet like a giant game of telephone, Melumad and her colleagues found that as stories get further from their initial source, people know fewer and fewer details about what actually happened. So they offer up their opinions instead.

“In the face of fewer details, people seem to be writing summaries that are increasingly opinionated, and they’re increasingly negatively opinionated,” she said of her findings. “They have this sort of desire to fill in this void with something, and they’re filling it in with something that they do know, which is their opinions about the information that’s presented to them.”

In other words, Twitter’s brevity lends itself to emotional tweets, while its virality breeds legions of opinionated, less-informed tweets.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Woodchopper » Sat Jul 11, 2020 7:36 am

I agree. Compared to Facebook there's also two other things - its far easier to be anonymous on Twitter and Facebook is build around closed networks (yes some are open but it seems that people's default is to share things among friends and members only groups).

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by lpm » Sat Jul 11, 2020 8:52 am

plodder wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 6:07 am
lpm one specific point: what happened to Katie Hopkins (and Milo, and Tommy) was that their career trajectories went massively downhill, from a huge media platform to bankruptcy in the case of Hopkins.

I really think we need to see social media in a similar way to “msm” with specific reference to the degree of influence the proprietors have.
Yes. I think these examples are interesting:

- Were the roles they played really cancelled? Are they merely swapped out for a fresh face?
- How much was pressure from progressives? Hopkins bankrupted herself with a reckless libel, Tommy is a violent alleged drug addict, Milo made paedophilia remarks
- The establishment made the decision to axe Hopkins and Milo, the power still lies with them even if pressure comes from below
- Are trolls like evolving killer robots, where Version 1.0 gets killed by human freedom fighters, 2.0 knows to avoid that killing method, 3.0 is even better, until Captain Picard says "They're adapting to our weapons" and the Borg take over the ship. Hopkins 2.0 knows to avoid the words that killed Hopkins 1.0
- Are there any examples of internecine cancellations among our opponents? Do one clique of racists ever attack and cancel a racist from another clique?

But mostly it's the huge asymmetry that's startling:

- For Hopkins it took months of "cockroaches" and "final solution", and huge resources devoted to her cancellation, until she was finally given the boot.
- For leftie transgressors something trivial can be enough - for example tweeting a link to an academic article, a cancellation mob coming for you and getting fired days later

I think it's highly likely right-wing extremists trigger pile-ons, knowing the PFJ and JPF will fight each other to death once you get them started. The Russian troll farms certainly know how to stir up division and amplify conflicts - I wouldn't be surprised if there's also right-wing funding for trolls as part of fuelling culture wars. Trump wants these modern controversies to be front and centre of the election because he believes his side has the vote winning position for ordinary voters, so why not orchestrate some feminist vs feminist chemical attacks or Democrat vs BLM civil war?
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Tessa K » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:07 am

lpm wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 8:52 am

I think it's highly likely right-wing extremists trigger pile-ons, knowing the PFJ and JPF will fight each other to death once you get them started. The Russian troll farms certainly know how to stir up division and amplify conflicts - I wouldn't be surprised if there's also right-wing funding for trolls as part of fuelling culture wars. Trump wants these modern controversies to be front and centre of the election because he believes his side has the vote winning position for ordinary voters, so why not orchestrate some feminist vs feminist chemical attacks or Democrat vs BLM civil war?
I'm watching Mrs America at the moment, a fictional account of the pro and anti ERA groups in 1970s America (equal rights amendment). https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/ and a review of the series here https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... f-feminism

The anti-ERA group present a united front with a single message whereas the pro-ERA is made up of various different feminist groups who have differing views and priorities. One of the anti-ERA tactics is to exploit and increase these divisions, caricaturing and demonising the feminists while concealing their own differences to present an easily saleable message to a target audience (often through deliberate lies and exaggerations).

It's fascinating (and a bit depressing) to watch how the sides line up, the tactics they use and how the men choose which sides to take - and exploit for their own ends. It's a pre-Internet time so the methods are newsletters, landline phone calls to a mailing list, live TV interviews, posters and handbills and so on but the methods of persuasion and divide-and-conquer haven't changed much.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bewildered » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:30 am

lpm wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 8:52 am


- Are there any examples of internecine cancellations among our opponents? Do one clique of racists ever attack and cancel a racist from another clique?
Yes of course there is. Far right groups are filled with this. Racists who want to hate only blacks and/or muslims vs traditional racists who insist Jewish people are behind everything. The fact that lots of far right group members would kill milo if they ever met him.

There is a also a whole strange subculture of far right forums with different forums hating each other.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Woodchopper » Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:35 am

An example of what lpm was writing about.

It appears that TripAdvisor has had to suspend new reviews of Twentymans pizza resturaunt in Leigh, because after the owner was referred to in this article as having voted Tory, supported government policy and criticized Corbyn, a large number of people tried to give the place 1 star reviews.

If they'd been successful they could have damaged a small business in very difficult times, all because someone expressed a mainstream political opinion.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Stephanie » Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:23 am

Bewildered wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:30 am
lpm wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 8:52 am


- Are there any examples of internecine cancellations among our opponents? Do one clique of racists ever attack and cancel a racist from another clique?
Yes of course there is. Far right groups are filled with this. Racists who want to hate only blacks and/or muslims vs traditional racists who insist Jewish people are behind everything. The fact that lots of far right group members would kill milo if they ever met him.

There is a also a whole strange subculture of far right forums with different forums hating each other.
Yes. Plus the women. Some of them are happy to have prominent far right women spreading the message. Others refer to them as thots and spend time trolling them - saw this in particular with Laura Loomer. She's Jewish and therefore hated by certain far right groups.

Qanon is another example - lots of younger folk on the right think it's b.llsh.t for boomers, and mock the f.ck out of them for it.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by secret squirrel » Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:31 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:35 am
An example of what lpm was writing about.

It appears that TripAdvisor has had to suspend new reviews of Twentymans pizza resturaunt in Leigh, because after the owner was referred to in this article as having voted Tory, supported government policy and criticized Corbyn, a large number of people tried to give the place 1 star reviews.

If they'd been successful they could have damaged a small business in very difficult times, all because someone expressed a mainstream political opinion.
I think as a starting point, any call for 'cancellation' that involves lying about the situation, or defacto lying like leaving an unwarranted 1 star review, is wrong.

As an aside, this strategy of review bombing, as it's known, seems to be pretty widely used across the political spectrum.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by lpm » Sat Jul 11, 2020 12:43 pm

Trouble is, a lot of it isn't direct lying.

It's more usually someone says X, enemies reinterpret and claim they said Y, everyone agrees Y is really bad.

For example tweeting "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections", which gets reinterpreted to mean "current BLM protests are going to help Trump and so should be stopped", leading to the tweeter getting fired for being anti BLM.

This is not a hypothetical example, it happened.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Stephanie » Sat Jul 11, 2020 3:09 pm

lpm wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 12:43 pm
Trouble is, a lot of it isn't direct lying.

It's more usually someone says X, enemies reinterpret and claim they said Y, everyone agrees Y is really bad.

For example tweeting "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections", which gets reinterpreted to mean "current BLM protests are going to help Trump and so should be stopped", leading to the tweeter getting fired for being anti BLM.

This is not a hypothetical example, it happened.
The thread I posted earlier talked a bit about that:
Bad faith is the condition of the modern internet, and shitposting is the lingua franca of the online world. And not just online: A troll is president. Trolling won. Perhaps we can agree that these platforms aren't suited to the earnest exchange of big ideas.
Of course that's frustrating, especially to those who wish to debate things like abortion. But there's a history here: platforms got flooded by devil's advocates who wasted the time of people with real investments--cruelly, for sport. That tends to weed out good faith engagement.
...
Does that lead to paranoid readings and meta-debates that seem totally batshit to onlookers who aren't internet-poisoned? Yup! "All Lives Matter" sounds perfectly reasonable--as a text--unless you know the history of that discourse. (And you'll sound pretty weird explaining it.)
...
It's *also* possible that people who've learned to read *through* stuff (to whatever bummer of a subtext we're used to finding there) sometimes overdo it. Some of us might reflexively ignore the actual text--fast-forwarding to the sh.tty point we "know" is coming even if it isn't
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:18 pm

I think if people are making arguments that rest on particular anecdotes it would be really helpful if they can link to them. Most of us probably don't follow every twitter spat, or follow different ones (as there are plenty to choose from and the algorithm sorts by interest).

For example, googling "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections" just brings up a Guardian article from its US editor Ed Pilkington making that argument, and he doesn't appear to have been fired.

It's not that I don't trust other people's representation of these events - I fully accept that there will be examples of cancel culture directed at the wrong targets. But it would be nice to see reliable sources so we can see if any commonalities link those cases, etc.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:21 pm

Stephanie wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:23 am
Qanon is another example - lots of younger folk on the right think it's b.llsh.t for boomers, and mock the f.ck out of them for it.
hahaha I mean I think anybody who's vaguely internet-literate is aware that it's a 4chan hoax
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by plodder » Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:03 pm

Sorry guys, this is a slippery debate but the root cause is with the platforms. They are essentially monopolistic and must be broken up. There really needs to be a campaign about this.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Stephanie » Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:48 pm

plodder wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:03 pm
Sorry guys, this is a slippery debate but the root cause is with the platforms. They are essentially monopolistic and must be broken up. There really needs to be a campaign about this.
I did start a thread sort of about this a while back

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1078&p=25878
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by snoozeofreason » Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:52 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:18 pm
I think if people are making arguments that rest on particular anecdotes it would be really helpful if they can link to them. Most of us probably don't follow every twitter spat, or follow different ones (as there are plenty to choose from and the algorithm sorts by interest).

For example, googling "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections" just brings up a Guardian article from its US editor Ed Pilkington making that argument, and he doesn't appear to have been fired.

It's not that I don't trust other people's representation of these events - I fully accept that there will be examples of cancel culture directed at the wrong targets. But it would be nice to see reliable sources so we can see if any commonalities link those cases, etc.
Hello caller. You are through to LPM's out-of-hours linking service. I think that the case that she is referring to is that of David Shor, a data analyst the consulting firm Civis Analytics, the details of which are set out here.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:02 pm

plodder wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:03 pm
Sorry guys, this is a slippery debate but the root cause is with the platforms. They are essentially monopolistic and must be broken up. There really needs to be a campaign about this.
I think you're right to emphasise the platforms, and I think we need to think about the role of the algorithms that promote certain posts. Most of them are tailored to increase interactions, especially with sponsored content.

An interesting case is Reddit, which allows the user to select which algorithm they want to use. A big breaking story on r/news might get thousands of replies. Their default sorting algorithm is called "Best", which is reddit's algorithm to maximise my engagements, analogous to those used on other websites. I normally find a range of well-informed responses that largely agree with me. But I can also sort by "Top", which is the posts that have the most 'upvotes' from all users. Often, I suddenly find myself reading posts by poorly-informed c.nts. Or I can sort by "Controversial", and see which posts got the most disagreement between upvotes and downvotes. Or I can just sort by "New" and read the latest updates.

I think what it's showing is that I mostly engage positively with stuff I like and very rarely use the downvote button, the way to maximise my interactions is to show me stuff I like. If I were often downvoting and responding to posts I disagree with I'd get more of the controversial/baity stuff in my feed.

It ought to be possible for platforms to distinguish between positive and negative interactions (though if it decreased their ability to target adverts they'd probably have to be forced to through legislation) so that baity stuff gets less attention. Then they'd have the Facebook problem of groupthink, rather than the Twitter problem of constant pissing matches. You could minimise groupthink by randomising comments highly upvoted by different subnetworks to each other. It might also help to give users choices between different algorithms.

I think what I'm saying is that 'breaking up' big networks might not be effective, as networks like this are greedy - links to a node form relative to the exponentiated number of links it already has; in other words, the bigger ones get bigger still and size inequalities grow. People would be constantly shifting over to bigger networks because they have bigger value (networks are essentially inherently monopolistic). By all means tax the sh.t out of them, though.

An alternative approach would be to use algorithms that de-incentivise trolling and mob behaviour. The problem is that they're all black boxes and nobody has much clue what they're doing, including the people who work on them, but it is still possible to change the incentive structure you program in.

By way of analogy with traditional media, I think what Twitter currently does is like small local newspapers that publish provocative stories and letters in order to get people really seething on the letters page, in order to boost readership and thus advertising money. More successful, national or global papers used to (in the age of widespread, paid-for circulation) aim to provide high quality content, thus maintaining customers and therefore advertisers. AI is an incredibly cheap way of mass-sorting content compared to human editors, and so far the big companies haven't found good ways of using their main human resource - users - to sort content by quality rather than controversy.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:16 pm

snoozeofreason wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:52 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:18 pm
I think if people are making arguments that rest on particular anecdotes it would be really helpful if they can link to them. Most of us probably don't follow every twitter spat, or follow different ones (as there are plenty to choose from and the algorithm sorts by interest).

For example, googling "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections" just brings up a Guardian article from its US editor Ed Pilkington making that argument, and he doesn't appear to have been fired.

It's not that I don't trust other people's representation of these events - I fully accept that there will be examples of cancel culture directed at the wrong targets. But it would be nice to see reliable sources so we can see if any commonalities link those cases, etc.
Hello caller. You are through to LPM's out-of-hours linking service. I think that the case that she is referring to is that of David Shor, a data analyst the consulting firm Civis Analytics, the details of which are set out here.
Thank you snooze! Several troubling cases in that article.

There's clearly a lot of instances like this: cancel culture isn't accurately hitting appropriate targets. Perhaps it's that the wrong targets are easier to hit (we could perhaps call this the "punching down" hypothesis). Perhaps the right targets are being hit quite reliably, but along with a lot of others (the "collateral damage" hypothesis). Perhaps it's a hugely stochastic process largely driven by the vagaries of machine-learning algorithms ("Do androids cancel electric sheep?"), such that 'cancelled' people are effectively a random sample of users. Perhaps 'cancelling' is never appropriate ("Anything Goes"), though I'm not sure where the line is between cancellation and being fired for misconduct.

I think I think that the first three are probably all important contributors, and I'm not sure if anybody is actually arguing for number four.
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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Jul 12, 2020 3:13 am

warumich wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 9:51 am
My uni, god knows what possessed them, had invited Katie Hopkins to give a talk. She was then at the height of her infamy, with a column in the Mail and what not, and fresh off from some controversy about not letting her children play with anyone called Keisha or something. Anyway, our student union wasn't particularly pleased, but instead of lobbying to have it cancelled, en masse applied for tickets for the event and then on the day turned their back and then walked out as soon as Hopkins opened her mouth. It was glorious, I was so proud of our kids. And of course, Hopkins used her newspaper column to complain about how she was being cancelled, and her right to free speech and yadda yadda.
This shows you completely misunderstand the purpose of free speech. You seem to think it is for the benefit of Katie Hopkins. It is not. She is irrelevant. It is for the benefit of the students and others. When she comes to talk, the students should listen carefully to what she says. Her views are typically very wrong, but held by a substantial number of people. It is important to know exactly what the views are and why they are wrong. Those students will be exposed to similar views, often disguised in some form. It is to their advantage if they have already heard and analysed them, so that they can spot the errors both in those particular views and in others. It is to the advantage of others if the students are familiar with the views so that when they meet other people who have heard a second or third hand variant of the views, the student can explain to these other people what the views really are and why they are wrong.

If you had asked those students just after they walked out, how many would have been able to explain Katie Hopkins views and what was wrong with them, and how many would have been in the same position a Brexiteers on the EU - saying they know something is wrong but can't explain what or why?

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Jul 12, 2020 3:30 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 7:40 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:51 am
Obviously the making of the demand is exercising freedom of speech, and no supporter of freedom of speech can condemn it without hypocrisy, but the employer taking action, unless that action consists solely of speech, is not exercising freedom of speech, so a supporter of freedom of speech can consistently claim that an employer disciplining or firing an employee solely because of something they said - even if it resulted in numerous complaints - is infringing freedom of speech.
Indeed. But this is where the interplay between capitalism and free speech comes in. Employers are concerned about their reputation, their ability to make money, whether from customers, other businesses, sponsors, etc. Sometimes overly so.
An employer who fires someone because of something they said is infringing their freedom of speech. If they feel that they are forced into doing so because of the reaction of society, then that society of infringing freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech isn't freedom from the consequences of speech. Being fired because an employer deemed something you said to be gross misconduct or whatever isn't infringing on free speech - people are still free to say things if they want to - but it might provide some consequences for doing so.
Without being free of the consequences you are not free at all. If the king executes everyone who says he is bald, then people are not free to say it in any meaningful sense. If a woman believes that her husband will find her and kill her if she leaves him, then she is not free to leave.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bewildered » Sun Jul 12, 2020 3:42 am

snoozeofreason wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:52 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:18 pm
I think if people are making arguments that rest on particular anecdotes it would be really helpful if they can link to them. Most of us probably don't follow every twitter spat, or follow different ones (as there are plenty to choose from and the algorithm sorts by interest).

For example, googling "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections" just brings up a Guardian article from its US editor Ed Pilkington making that argument, and he doesn't appear to have been fired.

It's not that I don't trust other people's representation of these events - I fully accept that there will be examples of cancel culture directed at the wrong targets. But it would be nice to see reliable sources so we can see if any commonalities link those cases, etc.
Hello caller. You are through to LPM's out-of-hours linking service. I think that the case that she is referring to is that of David Shor, a data analyst the consulting firm Civis Analytics, the details of which are set out here.
I need to create an account to view that. This article also talks about it https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06 ... ennet.html and I at least can view it.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by secret squirrel » Sun Jul 12, 2020 5:23 am

Sometimes calls for 'cancellation' can be disingenuous, but people arguing against 'cancel culture' are often disingenuous with their descriptions of events too. This isn't to say that 'cancellation' attacks don't often go to far or are unjustly targeted, but there is an orchestrated movement to to use the specter of 'cancelism' to advance a particular political agenda.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by Bewildered » Sun Jul 12, 2020 7:22 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Jul 12, 2020 5:23 am
Sometimes calls for 'cancellation' can be disingenuous, but people arguing against 'cancel culture' are often disingenuous with their descriptions of events too. This isn't to say that 'cancellation' attacks don't often go to far or are unjustly targeted, but there is an orchestrated movement to to use the specter of 'cancelism' to advance a particular political agenda.
Yes, but just to continue to iterate on this list of things that happen, sometimes people who are worried about legitimate problems, and trying to fix them, are mistaken for being disingenuous and/or right wingers doing that. Also some people may legitimately believe and defend some cases that are actually wrong, due to a simple error of judgement on that particular case.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by plodder » Sun Jul 12, 2020 7:27 am

I think what you mean is that the orchestrated campaigns are good at disguising themselves.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by secret squirrel » Sun Jul 12, 2020 7:59 am

Bewildered wrote:
Sun Jul 12, 2020 7:22 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Jul 12, 2020 5:23 am
Sometimes calls for 'cancellation' can be disingenuous, but people arguing against 'cancel culture' are often disingenuous with their descriptions of events too. This isn't to say that 'cancellation' attacks don't often go to far or are unjustly targeted, but there is an orchestrated movement to to use the specter of 'cancelism' to advance a particular political agenda.
Yes, but just to continue to iterate on this list of things that happen, sometimes people who are worried about legitimate problems, and trying to fix them, are mistaken for being disingenuous and/or right wingers doing that. Also some people may legitimately believe and defend some cases that are actually wrong, due to a simple error of judgement on that particular case.
Yes of course. But the narrative in the more mainstream parts of the media seems to me to be largely that 'crazy SJW leftists are ruining everything!', which I believe is false, and also happens to serve the interests of groups I generally disagree with. Before we can deal with the nuance, we have to first acknowledge the context.

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Re: Cancel culture

Post by lpm » Sun Jul 12, 2020 8:04 am

snoozeofreason wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:52 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:18 pm
I think if people are making arguments that rest on particular anecdotes it would be really helpful if they can link to them. Most of us probably don't follow every twitter spat, or follow different ones (as there are plenty to choose from and the algorithm sorts by interest).

For example, googling "violent civil rights protests in 1968 appear to have helped the Republicans in the Nov 1968 elections" just brings up a Guardian article from its US editor Ed Pilkington making that argument, and he doesn't appear to have been fired.

It's not that I don't trust other people's representation of these events - I fully accept that there will be examples of cancel culture directed at the wrong targets. But it would be nice to see reliable sources so we can see if any commonalities link those cases, etc.
Hello caller. You are through to LPM's out-of-hours linking service. I think that the case that she is referring to is that of David Shor, a data analyst the consulting firm Civis Analytics, the details of which are set out here.
Thanks Links Minion, but I think it's better not to provide links. Partly because self-education is better than being spoonfed education - 60 minutes reading per 6 minutes posting would be a good ratio.

But mainly because if everyone of us just follows the same trail of spoonfed links, we'll all just end up at the same place. Group think is enhanced by a group reading exactly the same material. Why not just tell people there are loads of interesting things in the forest and we should all just wander off on separate paths?
⭐ Awarded gold star 4 November 2021

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