The art world is especially exposed to this because it's full of leftists, so you're really asking for a roll back of identity politics as a whole. Good luck with that. If you figure it out let us know.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and try to push back. But yeah I feel the hopelessness when I get in a jaded mood too. My friend has a hypothesis that since the 3rd wave has taken hold, we'll only see a swing back once the tactics start negatively affecting the progenitors of the rhetoric, which it eventually will because the rhetoric is not internally consistent.
What gives me a sliver of hope is that people are talking about the negative impacts and how irrational the situation is now with a seriousness and subtle urgency that never used to exist. 10 years ago when I had these conversations it was all hypothetical "that will never happen cmon don't be such a bigot you kinda sound like you're victim blaming" type of responses. How quickly it's become "shit that happened uh oh.. um..".
Have you read his original published written apology [1]? I can't think of a company that would want to keep someone who in their own words was a "Shitty, Creepy, Sexual Predator" at recent work & industry events.
[1] https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
Wizards didn't fire him for being a rapist[1]. It's great he isn't a rapist! But why should his company ignore that he publicly apologized for doing sexually inappropriate things at work events?
[1] https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/statement... "Noah Bradley, engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with members of the Magic and artist community."
The only reason Wizard cared was because there was an associated twitter shitfest. Why didn't they simply ask Noah to stop making sexual advances at “work events” if it was really a pervasive problem outside of the twitterverse affecting employees at the company? It’s not illegal to hit on someone. Inappropriate is such a fuzzy definition it can literally mean “he gave me the up down”.
Wizard's had a business relationship with him and were liable for his behavior. They didn't owe him anything. Your company isn't your friend, if you want a friend buy a dog.
It's not alleged, he published a written apology.
> I doubt what Noah does at parties (I have found no references to the problematic behavior happening at specifically work events)
These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events. Yes companies do not want their employees to be sexually inappropriate with other employees, vendors and community members at their conference's and workshops.
The point is it's not legally problematic. He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term. There's nuance here.
> These weren't random private parties, these were work & industry events
Do you have a citation on that last part? I can't find any info indicating they were work sponsored events with vendors and the like.
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
> He apologized because some people said he was being inappropriate. We have no evidence that there was actually sexual harassment by any legal definition of the term.
His apology is Screenshoted in the above link.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about".
You really think this doesn't meet definition of sexual harassment? It seems pretty clear he admits to "unwelcome sexual advances" and creating "a hostile or offensive work environment" https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what you or I think about Noah's behavior. We would probably come to the same conclusion, you and I, if we were sitting on a jury together presented with facts. Neither of us want sexual assault to go unpunished. The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice. If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations. A twitter shitfest is not the appropriate mechanism.
The initial tweet cited in that article specifically mentions "Massive Black afterparty" a arts studio, and "workshops" and "conventions".
>If you are at a happy hour the Friday night on the first day of a conference, is that a work event?
If it's in your field and sponsored by your company or vendors? yes. If its a a random event you are anonymously crashing? probably not.
>The point of my initial comment is that I don't think society benefits from extrajudicial groups and I do not consider firing someone, even if the mob was right, appropriate justice.
Ignore the mob spreading false rape allegations, it's a red herring. He apologized/admitted to being sexually inappropriate at work events, that is grounds to terminate for cause.
> If Noah is guilty of sexual harassment, that's a serious crime and he should be treated as a criminal. As a society we have mechanisms in place to handle these situations.
Sexual harassment is a civil violation not a criminal violation. Police do not investigate sexual harassment and people do not go to jail for sexual harassment... You are right we have mechanisms such as his employer terminating his employment or suing for damages.
Yes, but not sure why that matters. The guy has a 6-pack does that change anything for you? https://twitter.com/noahbradley/status/1245397083529543680/p...
This mode of operation is not realistic if you acknowledge humans get attracted to each other. If we approach society by making trying to hook up with someone a social crime, what does society look like?
You are creating a straw-man not reflective of this scenario.
By his own written published apology he acted inappropriately. Real problems existed thats why he apologized. That no one sued him for tort is irrelevant.
It's a very similar situation: Noah liked to be forward with people. It wasn't a problem. Later, somebody decided Noah was too forward. Noah apologized. What's missing (unless you know more than I do) is the determination that Noah committed real sexual harassment. A "sorry I was inappropriate" is not the same as "this man harassed women in problematic ways".
If Noah had actually committed sexual harassment there would be legal ramifications because sexual harassment is a real problem that society cares about. For me the distinction between social justice and legal justice matters. If a mob is free to extol its own judgement on people, then we do not have justice. We have mob rule.
What's interesting is that if Noah had been convicted of sexual harassment and served his punishment, then it would be illegal in e.g. California for any company to weigh that information into future hiring decisions. So Noah is actually more damned for simply apologizing and trying to do the "right thing" than he would have been if he denied the allegations.
"I was terrible to women. I preyed on them, I ceaselessly hit on them, I pressured them into sex. Yes I was one of those creepy sexual predators you hear about"[1]
He clearly admits to harassing women in problematic ways, for which his employer fired him[2]. It's pretty bizarre that you think it's not "real sexual harassment" because he wasn't sued. Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? They are an incredible pain the ass for both sides. I know I personally wouldn't want to waste 2+ years of my life on one for something like this.
[1]https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
[2]https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/statement...
That's the point. It shouldn't be easy to call someone creepy and get them fired. If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route. Invoking mob justice is a rash shortcut. I don't care if the mob "got it right" or not. It's not how we do justice. If I go shoot people who appear to be the type that have committed a crime, it doesn't matter if I happen to usually "get it right" and only hurt criminals. I'm still a vigilante operating in an extrajudicial capacity and engaging in activity that endangers people.
I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly. He might legitimately be a creep. But I also know what it's like to be in a situation where suddenly a bunch of people have formed a very negative opinion about you and are interested in publicly demonstrating as much. The threat of losing friends, the respect of peers, etc., is very real and the desire to simply admit perceived guilt and try to damage control is strong and causes rash behavior. With respect to this thread, I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Have you ever met a narcissist? Without external input, given enough time, they will bend the interpretation of any scenario into one where they are not truly guilty. I have no idea if Noah fits that bill, but when I think of people who do, no friendly discussion is going to convince them of their errors despite how they act in the moment. You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
Thats not what happened. He wasn't fired because someone said something on the internet, he published a written apology calling himself a "sexual predator" etc.
> If it really is such a problem then you should be willing to take the legal route
People shouldn't be able to report negative behavior, they have to sue for damages? That would be an extreme view.
> I take Noah's original statement with context. He says in the article we're discussing here that he doesn't believe he worded the apology correctly
In regards to the rape allegations from "pressuring someone to have sex" but that is still sexual harassment in a work environment.
>I'm trying to process Noah's reflection on the events, not the "in the moment" stuff from last year. It sounds like Noah is at a point on his personal journey where he understands people's reactions but doesn't believe events played out in a just manner, all things considered.
By his own admission in the parent article he was an asshole and regrets his past behavior he just doesn't want people to think he said that he raped anyone, which is fair.
> Taking things one level up, if Noah is guilty of sexual assault, it should be abundantly clear to him in the form of a conviction. I don't think it's a great situation to be in where it's not clear what actually happened and the door is left open for Noah (and/or others) to interpret events however he (they) wants. We potentially have an unpunished/unregistered sexual predator hanging out. Not good.
Sexual assault is not something he is accused of but the stats are something like 31% [1] of them being reported to the police.
>You need the law to step in and lay down the gavel.
sexual harassment is not a criminal offense
[1] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
Except it was very much attached to his work since this was happening at industry events...
https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2021/06/19/pol...
This doesn't have to be anything magical. Do you believe there is no cultural difference? Or do you believe culture doesn't matter to a democracy system?
Correct. But I cannot see how it supports this part that you started with:
> What? This is a totally nonsensical response.
I think if Twitter had an easy way to show displeasure, it would be more common, and thus harder for internet mobs to form around them.
I used to think that no one had time to internet mob strangers so maybe I’m wrong that there’s not enough attention to mob every “meh” and dislike.
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
Yes, journalists are overrepresented there and yes, their journalism often degenerates into "we are covering what happened on Twitter".
But the worst offenders in terms of toxicity aren't journos. They are ... well, tormented human beings who love to dish out some misery to everyone around. Usually under a superficial veneer of a respectable goal.
So long and thanks for all the tweets, but I am not coming back. After leaving Facebook in July 2019, I felt almost liberated; I expect the same to happen now.
But anyway, re: your comment on the worst offenders, a related quote that came across my twitter this weekend-
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats" - Aldous Huxley
https://cpj.org/2020/12/in-2020-u-s-journalists-faced-unprec...
Besides, there were plenty of clergy who were otherwise fairly decent people.
Elon Musk does this as well, just without any pretense of subtlety.
Teenagers spend 1000x the amount of time on Twitter - their "voice" is amplified.
There's another clade of credentialed or 'pedigreed' professionals, such as activist or non-profit people, 'community management' people, professors, journalists, etc. who seem to have some function in legitimizing and mainstreaming the drama of the day, possibly creating rationalizations for why it's good along the way.
I'm sure Twitter, internally, is already aware of these dynamics. But it would probably help the sociology of it out a lot if that information was more well known.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
There are disproportionately loud participants on Twitter that push a toxic narrative.
If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc.
This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.”””
Seems even more appropriate - quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men...
The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth.
It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.
sane people dont have Twitter accounts
enjoy polling insane people
Nowadays small groups of coordinated people can cause a lot of chaos in internet.
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-h...
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
In this case, he admitted to being a sexual predator.
Remember that this is how the Mao cultural revolution began, silence is violence. If you're not virtue signaling hard enough the spiral collapses in on you and you yourself will be destroyed. It wasn't just some top-down systemic action that did so much damage, it took everyone working together to cause so much death and destruction. We saw this happen in Stalins regime too, everyone has to prove their loyalty to the party/ideal or risk being canceled. Eventually no one left standing is pure enough.
From Bidens commencement ceremony by Amanda Goreman, first paragraph: “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.”
Quiet isn't always peace. Let that sink in. America's cultural revolution has already begun. Cancel culture is going to burn this country to the ground, those who don't speak truth to it let the mob win. But those who stand against this will be also be burned at the stake just like those who stood against the cultural revolutions in China and Russia.
There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.
It should be obvious how twitter the company could provide a good estimate, with their server logs.
It should also be obvious how the twitter userbase has no idea, because that's exactly the problem.
So do you understand the separation now?
If not, then which part is the problem?
And you're getting downvotes because all of this was already explained, and it looks like you initially misunderstood and failed to process the reply you got and then go reread the initial post.
Twitter doesn’t have a dislike but they have signals like amount of time spent, skipped over, etc. I wish they would add a frown option.
If I tell a joke to a dinner table and get 6 frowns and 1 laughing person that means the joke isn’t very good. In the Twitter ecosystem, that’s a great joke.
But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.
100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.
We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.
“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.
I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.
This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.