25:00 Why attend an art history class then when you are so sensitive of images being depicted (decent argument)? 27:00 cancel culture at college campuses (evolution being taught creationist becoming mad example) 29:25 Tension between intellectual discomfort and harm (notion of safe spaces as being a problem). 31:00 Illiberal left as sketching good vs evil and claiming moral superoprity. Here, leftist claim to be inclusive, but in fact, they are exclusive .

Trump Media Quietly Enters Deal With a Republican Donor Who Could Benefit From a Second Trump Administration by [[Justin Elliott]], [[Robert Faturechi]] and [[Alex Mierjeski]]

Some of the first part of the Trump Two-Step sounds like the idea of "Schrödinger's douchebag".

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodinger%27s%20douchebag

[[Mark Lawrence Schrad]] in Why the World of Typewriter Collectors Splits Down the Middle When These Machines Come Up for Sale<br /> at 2024-03-16 12:00 PM <br /> (accessed:: 2024-03-19 10:23:08)

https://github.com/travisbrown/cancel-culture

Cancel culture, tool for fighting abuse on Twitter, which can also be used to archive one's Tweets.

Example: An archive of a user's Tweets: https://gist.github.com/rondy/e6fc62e6968f39428df5eb1746f0d308

for - investigate - Rene Girard - mimetic desire - I don't quite understand how this leads to cancel culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/24/1208190881/charlie-chaplin-vs-america-explores-the-accusations-that-sent-a-star-into-exile

Listened to on 2023-11-11

Huffduffer data: podcast:name="fresh air", podcast:producer=npr, podcast:interviewer="terry gross", podcast:interviewee="scott eyman", book:author="scott eyman", book:title="Charlie Chaplin vs. America", book:year=2023, movie:writer="charlie chaplin", movie:director="The Great Dictator", movie:genre=satire, movie:genre=comedy,

An important question here: her identity may not have been completely authentic, but is this a reason not to heed and consider her work on its own merit?

How do any of us really know our identities?

Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings

article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

Is algorithmic content moderation creating a new sort of cancel culture online?

There are lessons in Frederic L. Paxson's 1938 address to the American Historical Association for todays social media culture and the growing realm of cancel culture when he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning... not to write in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls538847946/

Waterson, J. (2022, January 11). BBC does not subscribe to ‘cancel culture’, says director of editorial policy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/11/bbc-does-not-subscribe-to-cancel-culture-says-director-of-editorial-policy

https://theankler.com/p/michael-wolff-on-random-houses-cancelation

Are there other examples of this job function in the broader American culture? What do these job descriptions and titles look like?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

Anne Applebaum looks at the ideas of public humiliation and cancel culture as a potential slippery slope toward authoritarianism. She provides numerous examples of people experiencing forms of cancel culture without any arguments for or against them, but instead explores the cultural space around it and what its consequences might possibly be.

Many of her examples focus on spaces related to academia rather than broader life, a space which needs further exploration as the scope and shape for those may differ dramatically.

She also brings up the broad phenomenon of "university justice" (my descriptor) and generally secret tribunals and justice administered by them rather than traditional governmental means.

This brings up some excellent avenues for thought about who we are as a country and a liberal democracy.

Highly recommend.

There's something intriguing here with this cultural analogy of people to either elephants or zebras.

The other side of this is also that of the accusers, who on the whole have not been believed or gaslit for centuries. How can we simultaneously be elephants for them as well?

I have no context with this particular case, but if innocent of the charges, the viciousness of such a public charge without confrontation or proof is tantamount to an emotional rape without the physical violence.

There's something interesting to be learned in this experience.

See: How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life by Stephen Elliott on 2018-09-25. For additional context see this opinion piece follow up a few months later: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/stephen-elliott-moira-donegan-media-men.html

(My opinion of this essay is already biased by the fact that it's published in Quillette...)

Kudos to Applebaum for not naming the party involved here, but instead giving the infamy to the "offending" parties who may have sought fame and attention for themselves.

Certainly this modern inquisition is a more gentle one than the original Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

Is this a supporting data point on the continuum of decreasing violence for Steven Pinker's decline of violence thesis?

Is the totality of what we may be giving up worth it for the greater overall comfort for society?

Are people being targeted simply for being socially divergent in small ways? Could this be similar to how the LGBTQ are marginalized for being themselves but from a different perspective? This requires some studying and thinking. Not everyone should be penalized for being their true selves.

How much of this can be written down to differing personal contexts and lack of respect for people's humanity? Are the neurodivergent being punished in these spaces?

Applebaum provides a list of potential conflict areas of cancel culture outside of power dynamics.

Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

Is there a prototype for the people at the center of these cancel culture stories?

Modern mob justice is not too dissimilar to the historical experience of the Salem witch trials.

How might one rewrite Arthur Miller's The Crucible within the framework of modern cancel culture? What does that look like? We need more art to reflect these changes in society to tell our story and get people thinking.

Should people be judged by statements made in their youth or decades prior? Shouldn't they be given some credit for changing over time and becoming better?

How can we as a society provide credit to people's changed contexts over time?

This can be related to Heraclitus' river.

Is cancel culture a right/left political issue? Some have indicated that it is though Anne Applebaum shows that the victims don't show such bias.

This is worth exploring in more depth to untangle the justice needed from the political debate cesspool and political polarization which seems to be occurring in America.

This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

This is a searing image for what this article is about:

Could be entitled "A different kind of social justice."

While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

How can restorative justice work in a broader sense when public apologies aren't more carefully considered by the public-at-large? If the accuser accepts an apology, shouldn't that be enough? Society-at-large can still be leery of the person and watch their behavior, but do we need to continue ostracizing them?

An interesting example to look at is that of Monica Lewinsky who in producing a version of her story 20+ years later is finally able to get her own story and framing out. Surely there will be political adherents who will fault her, but has she finally gotten some sort of justice and reprieve from a society that utterly shunned her for far too long for an indiscretion which happens nearly every day in our society? Compare her with Hester Prynne.

Are we moving into a realm in which everyone is a public figure on a national if not international stage? How do we as a society handle these cases? What are the third and higher order effects besides the potential for authoritarianism which Applebaum mentions?

In an era of cancel culture there are now websites that offer sample templates of apologies and even universities are offering advice to constituents about how to apologize better.

When might we see a book in the self-help section with a title like "How to apologize?" At what point have we perhaps gone too far on this scale?

Putting people beyond the pale creates isolation, public shaming, loss of income, loss of profession, and sometimes loss of personal identity and psychological worth. The most insidious problem of all is the indeterminate length of the "sentence".

For wealthy people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Kevin Spacey, they're heavily insulated by the fact that at least they've got amassed wealth which mitigates some of these issues. In these cases the decades of extracting wealth through privilege gives them an unfair advantage.

There are now apparently enough cases of this happening, it would be interesting to watch the long term psychological effects of this group to see if these situations statistically effects their longevity or if there are multi-generational knock on effects as have been seen in Holocaust survivors or those freed from slavery.

There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

Definitely unfortunate for Laura Kipnis (to me on the surface), but are these growing cases helping to deconstruct some of the unfair power structures which we've institutionalized over time? Dismantling them is certainly worthwhile, but the question is are the correct institutions and people paying the price and doing the work? In Kipnis's case, she probably isn't the right person to be paying the price, but rather the institution itself.

Another example of this is that of Donald McNeil in the paragraph above (in the related article).

Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

A solid definition of cancel culture.

Given the prevalence of people towards making mistakes and practicing extreme hypocrisy, we really ought to move toward restorative justice. Especially in the smaller non-capital cases.

Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.

A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.

What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.

Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.

How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)

Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html

Tangentially related idea which this sparked:

Within my beyond the pale thesis, banishing people in smaller social groups is easier, but doesn't necessarily scale well.

In larger towns, cities, and even states, it may work in some of the smallest and most egregious cases like major crime or murder when carried out by the state, but what about the smaller social infractions?

Cancel culture is attempting to apply this larger social pressure to bigger public figures in ways that it traditionally has been more difficult to do. It's even more difficult in a highly networked world where globalism has taken hold.

How do we cater to the centric masses while potentially allowing some flexibility to the cultures considered at the edges? Ethics aren't universal, so there will be friction at a huge number of overlaps.

Examples:

• Paula Dean (racism), loses shows, deals, etc. but still has reach in certain sections of the country and online

This is another solid example of the hypocrisy of large portions of the Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do. How far can these laws drift from our overarching principles before there is a schism?

How does this fit into the [[beyond the pale]] idea going from small communities to a much larger internet-connected society?

How could one design a mathematical balancing system to help separate individuals embedded within a variety of societies or publics to enforce a balance of levels of privacy.

• There's the interpersonal level between the individuals
• There's the person's individual privacy and the public's reaction/response to the thing captured, for which the public may shun or not
• There's the takers rights (possibly a journalist or news outlet) to inform the broader public which may shame or not
• There's the publics' potential right to know, the outcome may effect them or dramatically change society as a whole
• others facets?
• how many facets?
• how to balance all these to create an optimum outcome for all parties?
• How might the right to forget look like and be enforced?
• How do economic incentives play out (paparazzi, journalism, social media, etc.?)

This is worth discussion. Specifically the ownership part and it may be surprising to uncover how little control there has been and how that is changing in 2021 as ISPs and hosting companies refuse or welcome radical platforms and groups, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/15/968116346/after-weeks-of-being-off-line-parler-finds-a-new-web-host

The hegemony of the minority. A danger of public schooling that we never saw coming. This hegemony came about by sacrificing the potential of black america. The school system the greatest source of systemic racism..

Reading this now and looking back on the idea of cancel culture, I'm curious where in the spectrum of use the word cancelable sits?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&content=cancel%2Ccancelable%2C%22cancel+culture%22&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccancel%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccancelable%3B%2Cc0