If e.g. Kavanaugh had admitted assaulting Ms. Ford and apologized, do you think enough Democrats would have said "Apology accepted" and voted to confirm to make up for the Republicans who would be unwilling to vote to confirm someone who has admitted to sexual assault? As long as Kavanaugh denies it, everyone who votes for him can just publicly say that they believed his denial, whether or not they actually did believe it.
As far as Kavanaugh, obviously none of this applies if he is not-guilty, because few advocate apologizing for things you didn't do. However:
There are a lot of middle-aged adults who did terrible things when they were teenagers. Among those, the ones who own up and apologized are excluded from many positions of power, while those that deny it are included.
So for this particular subset of the population, we punish the best, reward the worst, and incentivize any fence-sitters to lie. Perhaps it's a bit OT, but something is clearly broken here.
That depends on the level of power the said adult has accumulated. We've witnessed people who were persecuted for most minor transgressions, and people who were forgiven for very major things (e.g. credible rape accusations, being an officer in the KKK, being a member of a terrorist organization, being in prison for murder while being a member of a terrorist organization, etc. etc.). That, of course, needs very powerful position and very powerful friends - which none of us likely has.
I also find it interesting how the issue of admitting to making mistakes is being conflated with apologizing. While they are related, there is an important difference: a person who will never apologize is merely immature, while one who never admits to making mistakes might be a dangerous liability to himself and others, and is unfit for positions of responsibility.
I mean, it is absurd expectation. Apology does not even absolve you if minor crime in legal system. Plus, Supreme Court has great only little checked power. I just don't see someone willing to use power that way as suitable, even if he apologized.
Which is why you don't deny it either; you move on, avoiding the Streisand Effect as best as possible by not engaging. It's passive denial vs. active denial.
I'm not saying this is moral or good - I'm only saying that it seems to work for people. It's a question of game theory. We can get better apologies if we start to accept apologies and move on with our lives, but the mob wants blood and these days the public apology only serves as an admission of guilt, absolving the mob of any evil when they pull the person apart limb from limb.
"...absolving the mob of any evil when they pull the person apart limb from limb."
That's a little excessively dramatic, don't you think?
It's 2020, everything's a little excessively dramatic
To that end, an apology that allows s/o to "get out" as in "saw no further consequences" isn't necessarily what's being claimed, because it still needs to come with (some) costs, even if they are mostly symbolic.
And, yes, of course there are people apologising for all sorts of behaviour that's being criticised every day. A Google News search has about five dozen examples from just the last day or two[1]. If apologies are never beneficial, I doubt they would be used that often.
Apologies are also a central factor in the most formalised system of "being cancelled" we have, the criminal justice system.
As to "getting out" of "being cancelled" by "mobs" I wouldn't know since I already have trouble identifying what that's supposed to mean.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=apologized&client=safari&rls...
I have a strong suspicion that you know what I mean, you just don't want to recognize that. If you indeed know nothing about cancel culture, I envy whatever bubble you reside in, and I wish I could organize my life to never encounter it too, however it is not so for me. If you pretend not to know about it because you don't want to engage in discussion about it, well, I certainly can't force you.
> And, yes, of course there are people apologising for all sorts of behaviour that's being criticised every day.
You may find it hard to believe, but I actually know people do such thing as "apologizing". I do it myself once in a while. My question was in specific context of the comment "Agreed. Apologizing may keep the mob size small and insignificant." and related to this context, not to general act of apologizing and whether or not it is practiced in human society. I think you have missed this context and from that follows your trouble to identify what I supposed to mean. I think I made it cleared now, or at least did as much as I could to make it clear.
Also the related phenomenon where people walk through cities being casually and formally anti-semitic, deliberately crashing cars into groups of people, but call the other side "mob", because they complain about that on Twitter.
I think you are confusing your imagination with reality. Nobody - and by that I mean literally, without exaggeration, no single person who lives or ever lived - ever pretended that Harvey Weinstein raping women is the reason they don't want women on their team. Not "everybody", not somebody - literally no single person is pretending or ever pretended that. Moreover, you know that as well as I do, I am certain of that (because you don't know any such person, by virtue of such person not existing). So why are you writing these obviously false words?
> Because apparently "showing up at their colleagues' hotel room doors, naked and at night" is somehow just bound to happen in the course of standard operating procedures.
I do not know who told you that (I suspect you imagined it just as you did the above) but it certainly is not the course of any operating procedures at all. None of them.
> Also the related phenomenon where people walk through cities being casually and formally anti-semitic, deliberately crashing cars into groups of people, but call the other side "mob", because they complain about that on Twitter.
People who walk through cities being anti-semitic and people who complain about cancel culture are distinct sets of people whose intersection is minuscule. And you also know it. Also, cancel culture is not complaining on Twitter about somebody marching somewhere, and you also know it too. Again, you are writing words which both you and everybody reading them knows are false. What for?
It is not like actresses who lost careers because they refused Weinstein could ever get their careers back. And it is not like those who complain about securely harassment cold easily get new jobs - people are afraid to hire them.