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Cancel culture IRL

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SuburbanTurkey said:
To be fair, I don't take Distracted's original comment as particularly relevant or intellectually serious, so I felt free to shine him on. I don't see how mobs of local people showing up at a killer cop's house is at all similar to internet mobs trying to get people fired.
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They are an offshoot of an Internet mob trying to get someone fired. The "IRL" part of "IRL".
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
To be fair, I don't take Distracted's original comment as particularly relevant or intellectually serious, so I felt free to shine him on. I don't see how mobs of local people showing up at a killer cop's house is at all similar to internet mobs trying to get people fired.
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Then I shall interpret it as snark.


ETA: The only additional comment here is that the "internet mob" behavior very often comes with death threats and some seriously vile harassment to go along with it. It's not like the internet warriors are saying "Gee Mr. Employer, we find this behavior of your employee to be unacceptable in polite society and would appreciate if you would discuss the ramifications of such behavior with them" and leave it at that. It seems like you frequently gloss over the emotional toll and the threats when these topics come up, as if those don't matter and don't have lasting effects. Just because it happens online doesn't make it less traumatic and harmful than real life bullying, threats, and harassment can be. Often it can be worse because far, far more people join in, and they say much worse and more vicious things than most humans would say in person.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
She was explicitly calling for violence against other non-violent students. This is generally frowned upon in academia.
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I would object to the term "explicitly". I think it was implicit, and no violence was actually committed.


The point is that she said something stupid, and it was caught on camera. Let me assure you that I think it was very, very, stupid. Really bad. I can't remember exactly what I said about it at the time, but I was seriously anti-Melissa Click.

But should she lose her job for it? Did it affect her ability to teach about "Twilight"? (As I recall, she was an authority on the "Twilight" series. Why you would want one of those on your campus I'm not sure, but that's neither here nor there.) I think, instead, that what really happened is it went viral and a lot of right wingers, especially Republican legislators, applied pressure to Mizzou to get rid of her.

Because it happened on campus and involved interaction with students, you can stretch it and say that maybe it was related to her job, so perhaps it was justified. Sometimes, "cancel culture" gets things right. So, perhaps that is one more thing that you would never do, so you don't have to worry. You wouldn't have a public racist meltdown. You wouldn't call for "muscle" against.....anyone I suppose, but especially not a student journalist. You wouldn't insult the national anthem......or would you? You wouldn't encourage anyone to shoot a police officer.......er.....well......you would, but there are special circumstances and.........I think treading lightly might be a good idea.
 
Distracted1 said:
They are an offshoot of an Internet mob trying to get someone fired. The "IRL" part of "IRL".
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What I meant by the IRL bit was that the initial precipitating event wasn't a FB post or a tweet or an online article, etc.

ETA: The actual cancellation demanded (see e.g. post #58) is nearly always in terms of real world consequences.
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
A small number of people do, for sure. Sometimes it even works - mostly when the person actually has done something egregious. Is this really a significant problem?
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Yes, there are certainly individual incidents of people losing their jobs or facing a public backlash are flat-out wrong.
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It's not just about the person whose life has been turned upside-down but the fear that it could happen to anyone. It has a chilling effect. Now, is this perhaps an irrational fear? Maybe. Lawsuits are not that common, but every large business and govt. institution hires somebody to say, "Do X, Y, Z or else we can get sued." The same entities would be remiss if they did not have policies governing social media. These things occupy peoples' headspace.

And it's not just how you behave from now on. Someone can dig into your past. They find racist Tweets your daughter posted eight years ago when she was 14 and you can lose your job.

And a small proportion of that wouldn't actually be mitigated by the US having better protection for workers, which is what the main issue often seems ultimately to boil down to.
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Agreed, but even where there are laws in place (such as California), it's still a gray/immature area.
 
d4m10n said:
What I meant by the IRL bit was that the initial precipitating event wasn't a FB post or a tweet or an online article, etc.

ETA: The actual cancellation demanded (see e.g. post #58) is nearly always in terms of real world consequences.
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And what consequences could be more real world than a mob outside ones' home (or girlfriends home) making real threats and actually attempting to terrorize? A mob destroying a persons' life is at least as inevitable consequence of cancel culture as a gunman showing up at a pedophiles pizza parlor to put an end to the horrors going on in the (nonexistent) basement is of "fake news".

One might speak of slippery-slopes as fallacies, or point out that IRL things like this get out of hand as a natural consequent. Here is a real world example of that very thing happening.
 
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A recent, real world example of cancel culture.

Belligerent woman in Tennessee counter-protesting BLM, screaming that "White lives matter more!" (as those accompanying her tried to stop her)

She was outed on social media and was fired from her job at an eye clinic.

I mean, come on! Why should an eye doctor care if their receptionist is a raging racist who thinks that white people matter more than black people? This is way out of control, am I right?
 
pgwenthold said:
This is way out of control, am I right?
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Not in this particular case, IMO.

Not every cancellation is warranted, nor is every cancellation unwarranted. If you're trying to bin them all together under the heading of necessary or excessive, you're missing the trees for the forest.

Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk
 
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Meadmaker said:
I think so.

Everyone does something egregious at some time or another. People have bad days.

It's a case of "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." People don't imagine that they, themselves, ever do anything which, if caught on video, would result in them being "cancelled". The fact is that darned near everyone does things like that at some point or another. Hwoever, your friends or colleagues brush it off because they know you and they know "That's just the way Bob is." or sometimes, "Wow. That's not like Bob. Something must really be bugging him. I wonder what's wrong."
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I've never, for example, gone on a racist tirade. In public, or in private. And I've had plenty of bad days on very little sleep in a very stressful job.

I'd honestly be happy of recordings of my behaviour on any of those days to be released on the internet, and I'm confident that the response to any attempt to start a hate-mob would be "erm, no, that's fine".

Come to that, through my job I've met plenty of other people having bad days on very little sleep in stressful situations - and they can often be intoxicated on alcohol or worse. Again, I've not seen any behaviour that would see them "cancelled".

I think that most people understand what behaviour is and isn't acceptable in society. And it's entirely reasonable for society to make it known when behaviour isn't acceptable. That's pretty much the definition of a society having standards of behaviour which are or are not acceptable.
 
Cain said:
It's not just about the person whose life has been turned upside-down but the fear that it could happen to anyone. It has a chilling effect.
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How significant is this effect? Is people being less willing to go on racist tirades actually a bad thing?

They find racist Tweets your daughter posted eight years ago when she was 14 and you can lose your job.
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This seems like an oddly specific example, but the closest I can find through searching is a CEO who fired his own daughter after racist tweets surfaced.

Besides, yet again, this appears to actually be a call for better workers' protections under US law.

Agreed, but even where there are laws in place (such as California), it's still a gray/immature area.
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Perhaps. I would definitely be open to the argument that there should be better workers' protections in a number of countries.
 
pgwenthold said:
A recent, real world example of cancel culture.

Belligerent woman in Tennessee counter-protesting BLM, screaming that "White lives matter more!" (as those accompanying her tried to stop her)

She was outed on social media and was fired from her job at an eye clinic.

I mean, come on! Why should an eye doctor care if their receptionist is a raging racist who thinks that white people matter more than black people? This is way out of control, am I right?
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Sometimes the victims of a lynching actually did the thing they were lynched for.
 
Meadmaker said:
I would object to the term "explicitly". I think it was implicit, and no violence was actually committed.


The point is that she said something stupid, and it was caught on camera. Let me assure you that I think it was very, very, stupid. Really bad. I can't remember exactly what I said about it at the time, but I was seriously anti-Melissa Click.

But should she lose her job for it? Did it affect her ability to teach about "Twilight"? (As I recall, she was an authority on the "Twilight" series. Why you would want one of those on your campus I'm not sure, but that's neither here nor there.) I think, instead, that what really happened is it went viral and a lot of right wingers, especially Republican legislators, applied pressure to Mizzou to get rid of her.

Because it happened on campus and involved interaction with students, you can stretch it and say that maybe it was related to her job, so perhaps it was justified. Sometimes, "cancel culture" gets things right. So, perhaps that is one more thing that you would never do, so you don't have to worry. You wouldn't have a public racist meltdown. You wouldn't call for "muscle" against.....anyone I suppose, but especially not a student journalist. You wouldn't insult the national anthem......or would you? You wouldn't encourage anyone to shoot a police officer.......er.....well......you would, but there are special circumstances and.........I think treading lightly might be a good idea.
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Seems like thin gravy to me. All these hypotheticals about the excesses of cancel culture. Meanwhile, the real world, it's a parade of racists getting fired when they express their racism in very public ways. The slippery slope seems to have plenty of traction.

The rate at which these anti-BLM racists keep outing themselves as racists, there will be plenty of cancellations to be done without sliding down the slippery slope any further.
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
This seems like an oddly specific example, but the closest I can find through searching is a CEO who fired his own daughter after racist tweets surfaced.
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Yes, that's the one. Did you miss the parts where the entire company was losing business as a result of her tweets, even after she had been fired, and regardless of the fact that they had occurred several years prior?

The CEO and his company are being cancelled... for something that someone else did years before.
 
I do not tweet or look at twitter but from what I read in the news about it I think if it went offline for a while, the world would be a better place.

#socialmediavacation
 
Darat said:
Since you think criminal behaviour is somehow related to "cancel culture" - what parts of "cancel culture" do you want to see criminalised?
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This doesn't follow. I'm having a bit of trouble putting my thoughts into words here, so bear with me. It's kind of like looking at a case of a fundamentalist killing an abortion doctor, then saying "Since you think criminal behavior is somehow related to "religious fundamentalism" - which parts of "religious fundamentalism" do you want to see criminalized"? It's missing a lot of steps in between.

I think part of the point that is being missed here is that "cancel culture", no matter what you call it, encourages and opens the door to criminal behavior: threats, violence, vandalism, coercion. Those actions are already criminal, and should be dealt with appropriately. Part of the problem though is that a lot of those actions (threats and coercion) happen on line in an anonymous fashion. Even some of the RL actions have a veneer of anonymity to them - the people shooting at the cop and his family don't have a personal connection to him, they're just some rando from the internet most likely. Which makes it incredibly difficult for the police to pursue.

It's not that "cancel culture" needs to be criminalized at all. It's that it needs to be acknowledged as a behavior that increases the probability of anonymous criminal behavior, that has real world consequences for the targets including emotional trauma as well as loss of livelihood and potential violence, and that it should be discouraged.
 
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