This just isn’t true, and I’m not sure why the discussion around cancel culture is framed like it is true.
It’s exceedingly hard to be cancelled if you’re acting genuinely, kindly, and with empathy for the topic you’re discussing. You can say literally anything you want if you can figure out how to be nice when you say it, but you do have to put real effort into that endeavor.
Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit.
Guile and wit get you just as far in today's 21st century "cancel culture" as they did in a 1800's gentleman's club, a 1400's king's court, or a BCE Roman senate. What you say is much less important to most people than how you say it.
Which is honestly why I have little sympathy for the "cancelled", in many cases.
Occasionally, I do feel a pang of empathy for people like Gina Carano, for example, who genuinely don't seem to know how to say what they want to, and may not have intentionally wanted to harm others, but through ego end up refusing to reword their expression or to account for how their words might hurt others.
It's a small pang, and not a long lasting one.
I can see how the confusion might happen, but even for the least articulate among us there are clean off-ramps that get ignored.
If you believe you're entering a conversation with positive intent, a genuine point of view, and empathy for others, you are more or less immune to being cancelled.
Any sufficiently selective style guide is indistinguishable from a censor.
It's bizarrely hilarious how "Progressives" mirror religious fundamentalists, down to the particular language used to dispel accusations of censorship and closed-mindedness. "You can say whatever you like, just in ways we like (which will sometimes include you shutting up entirely)" looks painfully familiar for any closeted atheist.
Completely disagree. Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language.
> "You can say whatever you like, just in ways we like (which will sometimes include you shutting up entirely)"
The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.
You completely missed the point, the "selective" part is doing most of the work. By having a vague and ill-defined rulebook that nobody but an ideologically homogeneous group of people can invoke and enforce, this group acts as a censor that selectively switches on and off certain expressions it deems "not polite".
You also uncritically assume that polite language is universal, capable of expressing any possible issue. If I told you "you can write any program you want, just don't use C/C++/Rust" I have effectively banned you from writing a huge variety of programs, from OSes to Interpreters. Similarly, some things are inherently non-polite to say, because they express non-polite truths, and those truths will always exist because the universe is under no obligation to be polite. You can never discuss (say) Putin's human rights abuses in polite language, nor can you ever discuss how sexual predators use a trendy identity to escape retribution in a polite way using nice words.
>The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.
Not at all, see above for my reasoning for why this is a natural implication of your words. You are free to dispute the major 2 points it rests on.
Let’s stop being abstract; what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?
Are you implying that it's possible to write an efficient OS in a language other than the likes of C/C++/Rust? Do mention an example.
>what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?
- A lot of Transgender people are teenagers with mental health adopting the identity for attention and validation, with gross bodily harm as a result
And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?" OSes are not necessarily "well" written software by their nature. There are lots of good examples of "good code" that aren't written as part of OS code. Why would that, of all things, be your metric? Seems utterly nonsensical, the more I think about it the less sense it makes.
Do you want a list of examples of other academics who were harassed and fired for saying this same idea to be convinced it's actually quite a cancellable idea, or is one academic not being fired (and not for lack of trying) enough for you to be convinced that "kindness" is an effective cancel shield?
>You can't swing a dead cat in conservative circles without hearing, verbatim
It's kinda a natural position when you can't swing a cat (dead or alive) in a trans community without both you and the cat changing gender. I, for instance, am not traditionally conservative (atheist and vegetarian, which are not traditionally conservative positions where I live. Also a moderate trans supporter.) and I still arrived at such an idea purely by observation.
>And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?"
My analogy was meant to convey the fact "Banning certain kinds of languages effectively bans certain kinds of expressions", no more and no less. You can't write an OS in a programming language that doesn't expose low-level memory primitives, and you can't talk about sexual predators grooming teens in a natural language that doesn't expose quite a lot of non-polite primitives.
You saying that you could write quality software without them being OSes is like saying that you could say truths in China without them being truths about Tiananmen square, yes off course you can, but if you do want to talk about Tiananmen square, you're out of luck. Nobody ever said censorship suppresses the full 360-degree field of conversation, just a very particular cone that upsets the censors.
The bar you are setting for people to speak without a mob ending them is so high it's not even funny.
Sure, but that isn't the premise of what I wanted to express. You've had a bad day, or are a genuine jerk, and wrote something that you really shouldn't have. Passage of time, personal growth, change of opinions, conduct that demonstrably disagrees with the post and an apology does not prevent that from possibly ruining your future.
Who of us wasn't an easily influenced jerk as a teenager? Well, right, some weren't. But many more outgrew that. Some took more time than others. Some remained jerks, at least for now. But I prefer to hope they will change for the better. And would prefer if we recognized the change in those who succeeded.
Sorry but I don't even undstand what that would mean. I can understand not being a jerk or insulting someone when voicing an opinion but to me this sounds like you want people to only voice opinions in a docile way that acknowledges all the other positions as just as valid. You can be genuine, kind and nuanced and have a firm position I think. Not being a jerk is just half of the equation, the other half is if people are even receptive to discussion.
This a hypocritical Isolated Demand For Rigor[1], or in this case for Niceness. Many people doing the cancelling don't have to be and don't bother with civility or politeness, they are entirely ok with the worst slurs if it came from mouths they support. The kindness they demand is a thin wrapper over ideological conformity, and the demands are demonstrably done in bad faith to silence the discussion not to shape it.
It also, rather naively and hilariously, imagines potential cancellers as ideal rational censors who will read all of your words before arriving at a fair judgment. This is in stark contrast with what actually happens, where cancellers read a headline and then reach a red 100 Celsius before reading a single additional word. The off-the-top-of-my-head example is a whole ironic saga of twitter cancelling a trans scifi author[2] because a pro-trans story just so happened to have an "offensive" title (that turned out to be literally true in the world of the story.)
>Getting canceled isn’t a landmine, it’s a tar pit
Both are public dangers that civilised societies hunt and eradicate.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_At...
More "cancellers" should be shamed and shunned for failing in this way. Isabel Fall should not have been ridiculed for her work, Ken White would agree with you on that.
I actually think that there is a solution that not many people have mentioned.
What we can do is actually fund enforcement of the actual really bad stuff that people do during these hate/harrassement type situations.
And by that I mean, when people make death threats against someone, or harassment or target them in a similar way, then you have a government run doxxing squad that finds out who sent the death threats, and they arrest them, send them to jail, and put a felony on their record, even if it is a 1 time/first offense.
Right now, if you send a bunch of deaths threats to people, you'll probably get away with it. But if the government actually enforced the law, and sent you to prison, the first time you did that to anybody, well I think the worst of the "cancel culture" type harassment would end really quick.
There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined the relationship with the people that heard it and the people they talked to. In the worst case it went into a filler column of the local newspaper. He had a limited number of people to apologise to. And in the worst case could move to another town and start fresh.
If you write an outrageous blog post today, you're hosed. Even if you're not famous, or in any other way a "public figure". But just because your outrageous writing (or second-hand - someone else writing about a thing you said) is in public record today, you will find that some people in the far future will get offended by it. You get hired in 20 years as a VP of a large company in another country? Well, someone will dig up that post and before you know it you're out of a job. Saying sorry and that you're wiser now, than when you were a teenager, is likely not going to help. Bonus points if what you wrote is within the mainstream today, but the cultural norms move in the following decades.
I think that's a problem. But it cannot be solved by laws. Right to be forgotten won't work well enough (just a hunch, but international enforcement of soft issues like this doesn't have a reassuring track record). Nor by telling people they have to listen to jerks. That's what the OP deconstructs as obviously absurd. What we need is to build into our culture and understanding that people do change and can reach redemption.