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Cancel culture IRL

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d4m10n said:
If you could tell that was true when the tweet first landed, you're a far better prognosticator than I'll ever be. I'm constantly surprised at what goes viral and how it plays out.
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A good rule of thumb appears to be to ask whether or not it's a reasonable complaint. If it's not, then the mob are unlikely to descend.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
A good rule of thumb appears to be to ask whether or not it's a reasonable complaint. If it's not, then the mob are unlikely to descend.
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Adria Richards wouldn't likely agree.

HansMustermann said:
Except if you're talking about Richards, it turns out that the backlash was against HER for trying to shame those guys, not against them.
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I am well aware of this; it does not justify her firing.

HansMustermann said:
So if anything, it shows that it's not as easy to start some public outcry against someone if they hadn't actually done anything offensive...
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Except that the offensive dongler was sacked as well.
 
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d4m10n said:
Adria Richards wouldn't likely agree.

I am well aware of this; it does not justify her firing.

Except that the offensive dongler was sacked as well.
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I'm curious, how many Donglegates before you have an irredeemable culture?

By my eye, the public has gotten a lot more saavy over the years since this happened. It's been a bit of heuristic process, and there's no shortage of regrettable overreactions, but I'm curious how to conclude that the whole idea of public accountability for bad actors is a lost cause.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I'm curious, how many Donglegates before you have an irredeemable culture?
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One donglegate is enough to show that we've yet to adjust, as a culture, to novel levels of social connectivity.

SuburbanTurkey said:
...I'm curious how to conclude that the whole idea of public accountability for bad actors is a lost cause.
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I've yet to see anyone claim this.
 
d4m10n said:
I am well aware of this; it does not justify her firing.
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And I should care... why?

1. The alternative would be that someone is somehow FORCED to not talk about her, or is forced to keep her employed no matter how much that association hurts their business. That strikes me as an entitlement delusion.

We're essentially moving away even from the domain of having rights like, say, the others won't raise their hand against you, to the domain of expecting others to be somehow forced to give you whatever you want. Be it a wage, or ad money, or a medium for your message, or whatever. Which is just stupid.

2. She got hit by exactly what she was trying to cause to other people. And even after the backlash started happening, she never actually showed any remorse, didn't even stop, didn't try to calm everyone down, but rather tried even harder to dump on that guy. Phrases like "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" or "hoist by one's own petard" come to mind.

And again, it strikes me as an entitlement delusion if she expected to have some privilege there. Because that's the name for when you get something that the other guy doesn't get. If you expect that the internet only serves as a soapbox for you, but never for those who don't like you -- which seems like exactly what I'm supposed to want for her -- that's expecting a privilege.

d4m10n said:
Except that the offensive dongler was sacked as well.
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And he actually found a job the next day, because it turns out, that kind of thing doesn't actually stick if you haven't actually been an awful person. It turns out that those that do stay unemployed or "deplatformed" or whatever, are those who actually do have a legitimate complaint against them.
 
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d4m10n said:
One donglegate is enough to show that we've yet to adjust, as a culture, to novel levels of social connectivity.

I've yet to see anyone claim this.
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Seems that a public racist can't lose their job without pages of hand wringing about "cancel culture" and people citing the same handful of historical grievances.
 
Well, it seems to go mostly from the other direction in this thread, namely 'here's an example of an accusation that nobody took seriously and had no consequences for the two people involved, therefore when someone actually does get deplatformed, it's over something just as trivial and unjustified.' Same general idea, though.
 
d4m10n said:
If you could tell that was true when the tweet first landed, you're a far better prognosticator than I'll ever be. I'm constantly surprised at what goes viral and how it plays out.
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Really? I thought you posted it here expressly to call her out for overplaying her hand and encourage backlash.

That's why I started a MySpace campaign to have you de-platformed. It's going OK, but my viewership has sunk a lot now that folks aren't trolling MySpace for Luby's coupons as much as they were before the pandemic.

Don't expect a lot of octogenarians to approve of you on twitter. Some may even send over passive aggressive messages like "bless your heart." I have a polite following.
 
d4m10n said:
Adria Richards wouldn't likely agree.
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Indeed. She seems to have little remorse for her actions, other than for how they negatively affected her because, she claims, she was literally scared for her life (from, as you term it, "a bawdy dongle joke"). In fact, she blames the man she got fired for getting her fired because, even if he didn't engage with anybody else on the subject, he had tweeted that he'd lost his job and therefore given the mob something to rally around.

And she was fired for doing what you're claiming to be against - trying to stir up an internet hate-mob against people. And the role she was fired from was of "developer evangelist". Her job was literally to create goodwill. And her actions, while on the clock, did the opposite. She also claims that she knew full well what she was doing when she tweeted.

I'm not sure she's the example I'd choose of a) someone whose firing cannot be connected to her performance in her capacity as an employee, or b) the bastion of what is or is not an overreaction.

I absolutely don't endorse everything that happened to her in this case. But there are probably better examples you could find than someone who tried to whip up a hate mob and instead found herself the victim of one.
 
d4m10n said:
One donglegate is enough to show that we've yet to adjust, as a culture, to novel levels of social connectivity.

I've yet to see anyone claim this.
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Pretty sure there are multiple people here insisting that public racists, like Amy Cooper, ought not be fired or otherwise publicly shunned for their actions. Do you consider these examples of cancel culture scorn worthy?
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Much of this seems tangential, or not even vaguely related, to what I said.

You positioned "comics working out material in a club" as being in opposition to "undisguised racism", which is clearly ignoring the fact that "comics working out material in a club" can be indulging in "undisguised racism".
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I don't know how to characterize this other than "stubbornly stupid."

My original comment: "This goes for undsiguised racism. It does not apply to the UCLA professor put on leave because he read Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (which includes a racial slur). Or to comics working out material in a club."

Someone could equally say that I never accounted for the "real possibility" that a professor might just secretly get off on saying a racial slur in class under the cover plausible deniability. I wonder if you've ever been to a comedy club. It's more a matter of trying to discern a blurry line and calibrate an act. Comedians usually strive to generate laughter, not to be racist. It's more a matter of jokes being informed by a racist/subtly racist worldview, but all of that's neither here nor there.

Right. So, again, the situation doesn't give you an extra bit of leeway, because how what's going on should be assessed depends so much on what it is that's actually going on. There are far too many variables and unknowns to fit into a sweeping, blanket, one-size-fits-all rule, as you are trying to do.
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It's odd you would say there's a one-size-fits-all-rule at work when I'm explicitly inclined to allow for lenience in extemporaneous situations. Everything about this topic is fuzzy and inchoate, so it's little surprise you would attempt to mischaracterize my approach. Par for the course with you. The blanket is entirely your own. It's not about rules as much as a sensibility. With enough muddling we can aspire to develop heuristics.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Pretty sure there are multiple people here insisting that public racists, like Amy Cooper, ought not be fired or otherwise publicly shunned for their actions.
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How did you make the leap from "Individual X ought not lose their job" to "Public accountability for bad actors is a lost cause," though?

SuburbanTurkey said:
Seems that a public racist can't lose their job without pages of hand wringing about "cancel culture" and people citing the same handful of historical grievances.
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Seems to me that some shamings and/or sackings are obvious overreactions, while others are appropriate reactions to (workplace) incapacity or (personal) immorality. Plenty of cases lie in a gray area as well, IMO. Can we discuss this topic without hand-wringing? I'd like to think so.
 
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Dr. Keith said:
Did you think her participation in that cultural phenomenon would reflect positively upon her in these parts?
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I would hope that we all relate to the positive impulse to encourage universal mask use, and that most of us see this particular approach to pro-mask PR as suboptimal. That said, I'd be quite surprised if anyone here took the trouble to try to deplatform Muscato from, say, Patreon (or what-have-you) and at least moderately surprised if anyone took a shaming approach to the issues raised by the OP.
 
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d4m10n said:
I would hope that we all relate to the positive impulse to encourage universal mask use, and that most of us see this particular approach to pro-mask PR as suboptimal. That said, I'd be quite surprised if anyone here took the trouble to try to deplatform Muscato from, say, Patreon (or what-have-you) and at least moderately surprised if anyone took a shaming approach to the issues raised by the OP.
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That's a long way to say you did not intend her financial harm, but you did intend to show her suboptimal approach to dealing with a masking issue to a broader audience that you trust to follow your intent.

I mean, I guess we could take that as a compliment. So, thanks?

I just think it is a fine line to rest upon. Cancel culture thrives on sharing. You shared. Whether she or KA face any consequences, you can feel comfortable that you helped in some very small way by brining it to the attention of at least a dozen people who otherwise wouldn't have known. I'm not so sure your intent gives you a perch above the fray.
 
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