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Javier E

Harper's Scarlet Letter. Matthew Yglesias, free speech, and… | by Berny Belve... - 0 views

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cancel culture analysis censorship

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many of us didn’t see, and still don’t see, how Yglesias’s signing of the letter is supposed to increase the likelihood that VanDerWerff suffers harm. This is VanDerWerff’s most significant complaint against Yglesias
  • because it comes in the form of a worry over personal safety, rather than as an intellectual challenge to the letter’s contents, this has the effect of preempting critical engagement with VanDerWerff’s response, since disagreement with her no longer seems morally appropriate.
  • this is my second point — disagreement with her no longer seems logically appropriate, since what’s been offered is not so much a counterpoint to the Harper’s letter but something less cognitive, less vulnerable to the forms and checks of reason and argument
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • This is the element that those of us who agree with the Harper’s letter find most frustrating. We think the debate over where the discourse’s parameters should be (which is what the Harper’s letter is fundamentally about), and, more specifically, the debate over sex and gender identity that J. K. Rowling and her critics have been engaging in, are and should continue to be intellectually in bounds.
  • It’s no surprise that, when a move like that is made, the only thing the internet can produce in response is a torrential downpour of replyrage.
  • The move has the effect of disarming a would-be critic’s capacity to engage in counterargument.
  • We now have a case in which affirming the importance of intellectual openness is met with severe professional discomfort. A journalist has accused her colleague of inflicting harm, complicating her job, selfishly disvaluing her person, violating their shared employer’s aims, and more.
  • I don’t think it’s credible to suggest Yglesias’s signing of the letter complicates his employer’s ability to “build a more diverse and more thoughtful workplace.” If anything, the opposite is true — for Vox not to have a single staffer sign the letter harms its ability to do so. Diversity and thoughtfulness require … diversity and thoughtfulness, not uniformity and groupthink.
  • he reality is that the clinching move here is not an argument
  • Rather, it’s an assertion without supporting evidence that the letter’s contents are so damaging that, by signing it, you increase the likelihood that trans colleagues incur harm.
  • There is no support offered for this claim. There is no attempt to connect the letter’s contents, or the act of agreeing with the letter’s contents, to the incidence of harms experienced by trans people now. No attempt to chart out how the letter might lead to harms in the future.
  • the connection between signing a letter about discourse values and a colleague subsequently being more vulnerable to harm does need the dots connected. That can’t merely be asserted and the matter closed.
  • But the suggestion that taking the contrary position literally endangers those on the opposing side has a clinching effect — the debate can’t continue. It is shut down because of safety concerns.
  • (7) VanDerWerff claimed the letter contains “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions.”
  • It’s about the letter itself. It’s a claim about the letter’s subtext.
  • It follows that, on some occasions, our “cancel culture totally exists!/cancel culture is totally nonexistent!” back-and-forths are really just disguised ways of saying “I think this view should continue to be debated!/I think this view should not be up for discussion!”
  • I understand it but I disagree with it. Because Rowling was not the only person who signed it — there were over 150 others, including some trans people, and including many who disagree with Rowling’s stance on trans issues.
  • In any event, I disagree with the characterization that the letter, either explicitly or implicitly, is “anti-trans.” Some people obviously think some of the signatories are “anti-trans,” but that doesn’t tell us much except that those signatories’ critics find their views deeply morally troubling.
  • Here is a brief account of what I take cancel culture to be
  • I take cancel culture to be person-variable, or community-variable, in the sense that what counts as an act of cancellation differs from person to person, or community to community, based on certain underlying beliefs. What beliefs are those?
  • I think we see a targeting as a cancellation when the person who is in the crosshairs is there for views we think should continue to be seen as discourse legitimate
  • Blake Neff, a longtime senior writer for Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, was fired when his relentlessly racist and sexist online comments under a pseudonym came to light. Is this a cancellation? This one isn’t hard at all. It’s manifestly not.None of us think his views on black people or women are discourse legitimate.
  • But David Shor, who was fired for tweeting research findings that were taken to suggest the post-Floyd riots could harm Democratic electoral interests, does count as an act of cancellation. The protests’ effects on the political prospects of Biden unseating Trump is absolutely a live question. It follows that someone who gets fired, as a data analyst, for tweeting about it constitutes a prima facie case of cancellation.
  • This is also what explains why a standard skeptical response to asserting the existence of “cancel culture” is to counteranalyze it as “people merely being held accountable.”
  • How does this connect with the letter? I understand how, in seeing Rowling’s name next to the letter, a critic of Rowling’s stance on sex and gender could believe Rowling’s involvement shapes, in a very real way, the semantic content of the letter beyond what its linguistic elements strictly and independently suggest.
  • A harder thing to pin down is when exactly reputational damage, rather than employment status, counts as “cancel culture.”
  • is tough when the name itself, “cancel,” is a success term. If someone has not actually been canceled, then how can their targeting be called a cancellation? It makes intuitive sense to require a cancellation to involve a genuine canceling.
  • I want to move away from this understanding of it because, often times, the outcomes are predicated on arbitrary factors like whether the target is independently wealthy, or how amenable their boss is to outspokenness, or how fearful their university is of lawsuits, or any number of other luck-based factors that take us away from the supposedly inappropriate actions.
  • Rowling is impervious to cancellation, but that doesn’t mean the manner in which her critics have engaged her is meaningfully different than the way others who have had their livelihoods impacted have been engaged. Gillian Philip, a bestselling children’s author, was sacked from a group-publishing collective for tweeting #IStandWithJKRowling.
  • It’s a style of challenge that assumes the wrongness of the views and moves directly to affixing a culturally odious label, seeking a deplatforming or shrinking of the offender’s channels, or outright firing. It’s not the sort of challenge where evidence of the offending view’s wrongness is brought forward and an invitation to respond is either explicitly or implicitly offered.
  • Again, there are many occasions where I’d move straight to no-platforming. I would never publish Richard Spencer. I said, above, that Neff’s firing was absolutely the right call.
Javier E

No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas ... - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a

Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • Two things jump out here:
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
lmunch

Opinion: Look at everything the GOP wants to cancel - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

cancel Culture Politics US Trump policy gop

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This week we saw GOP elected officials and Fox News in full conniption mode falsely claiming that Democrats wanted to cancel Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. The reality, though, is that it's the GOP that is the party of cancel culture.
  • But facts don't matter when it comes to Republicans trying to distract from their lack of policies to help Americans in need or score political points.
  • Over on GOP TV, aka Fox News, there was a lot of time spent discussing Mr. Potato Head being "canceled." While channels such as CNN and MSNBC carried live Tuesday's testimony by FBI Director Christopher Wray about the details of the January 6 insurrection incited by Trump, Fox News did not.
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  • Just last Sunday, Trump announced to cheers of the right-wing audience at CPAC his plan to "get rid of" (aka "cancel") the 17 GOP members of Congress who voted to hold him accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on our Capitol.
  • Then there are the Republicans across the country trying to cancel access to the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, a battleground state Biden won, GOP lawmakers have announced proposals to "cancel" no-excuse mail-in ballots. The reason is obvious as Pennsylvania Democrats used mail-in ballots at three times the rate of Republicans in 2020.
  • In Arizona, a state Biden won by around 10,500 votes, GOP officials have alarmingly introduced a bill that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to "cancel" everyone's vote and award the state's electoral votes to the person of their choosing. Wow, talk about cancel culture!
Javier E

Opinion | Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...colin-kaepernick-nfl.html

cancel culture ostracism power culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks.
  • What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South?
  • any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it
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  • Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless
  • in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized
  • It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, one where dissenting from groupthink does not invite exile and people’s occasional lapses are not held up as evidence of who they are
  • if we are to construct such a world, we would do well to leave the slight acts of cancellation effected in the quad and cafe, and proceed to more illustrious offices.
  • The N.F.L. is revered in this country as a paragon of patriotism and chivalry, a sacred trust controlled by some of the wealthiest men and women in America. For the past three years, this sacred trust has executed, with brutal efficiency, the cancellation of Colin Kaepernick.
  • the N.F.L. has a different power at its fingertips: the power of monopoly
  • Mr. Kaepernick’s cancellation bars him from making a living at a skill he has been honing since childhood.
  • the wrongdoing of elite institutions was once hidden from public view, in the era of Donald Trump it is all there to be seen.
  • A sobering process that began with the broadcast beatings of civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, then accelerated with the recorded police brutality against Rodney King, has achieved its zenith with the social media sharing of the executions of Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald and Daniel Shaver.
  • The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color
  • Nothing is sacred anymore, and, more important, nothing is legitimate — least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd.
  • Mr. Kaepernick is not fighting for a job. He is fighting against cancellation. And his struggle is not merely his own — it is the struggle of Major Taylor, Jack Johnson, Craig Hodges and Muhammad Ali
  • This isn’t a fight for employment at any cost. It is a fight for a world where we are not shot, or shunned, because the masters of capital, or their agents, do not like our comportment, our attire or what we have to say.
aleija

Opinion | A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ncel-culture-social-media.html

Culture opinion economics

shared by aleija on 26 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • To debate whether these punishments were fair is to commit a category error. These weren’t verdicts weighed and delivered on behalf of society. These were the actions of self-interested organizations that had decided their employees were now liabilities.
  • Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation.
  • The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities
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  • What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience.
  • This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture.
  • Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired.
  • This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all.
  • This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few.
  • Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others.
  • Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person.
  • There have always been things we cannot say in polite society, and those things are changing, in overdue ways. The balance of demographic power is shifting, and groups that had little voice in the language and ordering of the national agenda are gaining that voice and using it.
  • Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society in which more people can speak and have some say over how they’re spoken of.
Javier E

Opinion | Conservatives have a 'cancel culture' of their own - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-have-cancel-culture-their-own

conservative cancel culture censorship gop

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • For as long as I can remember, conservatives have been denouncing the intolerance of the left. I was decrying “political correctness” as a student columnist at the University of California at Berkeley 30 years ago. Now the catchphrase is “cancel culture.”
  • The right has little standing to complain about the left’s cancel culture, because it has its own cancel culture that is just as pervasive and might be even more powerful.
  • the conservative movement can be just as intolerant of dissent.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I learned this the hard way when I was the op-ed editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1997 to 2002. As I recount in my book “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right,” I was nearly fired for trying to run an op-ed critical of supply-side economics by Paul Krugman, a future Nobel laureate in economics. The editorial-page philosophy was that it would run one liberal column a week; if readers wanted more, they could turn to the New York Times.
  • In more recent years, I have been dismayed to see conservative organizations purging Never Trumpers. There are practically no Trump critics left at Fox News
  • omething similar happened at National Review. The conservative magazine ran a cover article in January 2016 “Against Trump,” but it has since become noisily pro-Trump. When it does gingerly criticize Trump, it typically asserts that his opponents are way worse.
  • These are hardly isolated examples. Sol Stern, a former fellow at the Manhattan Institute and longtime contributor to its influential magazine, City Journal, has just published an essay in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas recounting how these New York-based entities were Trumpified.
  • All organizations have the right to tell their audiences what they want to hear. But when it comes to a diversity of opinions, the right doesn’t practice what it preaches. It (rightly) demands conservative representation in universities, corporations and mainstream media organizations, but it shuns liberal views in its own sphere of control — which now extends to the entire federal government.
anonymous

Olympic Organizers Say They're Ready For COVID-19 Risks, But Japan's Doctors Are Wary :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...yo-olympics-should-be-canceled

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Athletes have begun to arrive in Tokyo in preparation for the Summer Olympics, set to begin on July 23, despite warnings from many Japanese doctors that the games should be canceled.Japanese officials and members of the International Olympic Committee continue to insist the games will go on safely.
  • The Olympic Games were postponed last year because of the pandemic. This year, thousands of physicians cite a surge in infections in Japan in warning that there is no capacity to handle possible outbreaks. Last week, Japan's government extended a state of emergency covering major cities through at least June 20.
  • The IOC says 80% of athletes in the Olympic Village will be vaccinated — though vaccinations will not be required — and outside the village, less than 3% of the population will be. A recent poll by a Japanese newspaper found that 83% of respondents favor canceling or postponing the games.
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  • Why not move the Summer Games to 2022?
  • The organizers have announced that the games will take place without any international spectators, and they're considering banning all spectators. A big part of the Olympics is people from around the world coming together to watch them in person. Tell me about why you think it's still worth hosting the games.
  • So if you ask most athletes, would you rather have live spectators when you're competing or not? Most would say yes. [If asked] well, if we can't have any spectators, should we cancel the games? They'd say, oh, my God, no, no, no. Heavens, don't even think about that. What's really important is the competition. And we can certainly live without spectators if that's the price of doing it in a pandemic context
  • It's important to athletes. I understand that. It also is about, I would imagine, keeping sponsors and TV networks happy. There's a lot of money in the Olympics, and that's going to lead to some charges that money is at the center of pushing this thing forward as opposed to wisdom about the outbreak of a very dangerous virus.
Javier E

Cancel Culture and the Problem of Woke Capitalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614086

cancel culture woke capitalism symbolic response crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture,” is not through a social lens, but an economic one.
  • Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.
  • But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.
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  • Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.
  • It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets
  • We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease.
  • Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.”
  • In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.
  • the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications
  • “Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.”
  • Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.
  • we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established.
  • But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back
  • Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.
  • If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is
  • When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.
  • Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.
Javier E

World's garment workers face ruin as fashion brands refuse to pay $16bn | Garment worke... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...hion-brands-refuse-to-pay-16bn

garment fashion pandemic

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Two US-based groups, the Center for Global Workers’ Rights (CGWR) and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), used previously unpublished import databases to calculate that garment factories and suppliers from across the world lost at least $16.2bn in revenue between April and June this year as brands cancelled orders or refused to pay for clothing orders they had placed before the coronavirus outbreak.
  • This has left suppliers in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar with little choice but to slim down their operations or close altogether, leaving millions of workers facing reduced hours and unemployment, according to the report.
  • “In the Covid-19 crisis, this skewed payment system allowed western brands to shore up their financial position by essentially robbing their developing country suppliers,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The report argues that the pandemic exposed the huge power imbalance at the heart of the fashion industry, which demands that suppliers in some of the poorest countries in the world bear all the upfront production costs while buyers pay nothing until weeks or months after factories ship the goods.
  • Despite leaving suppliers and workers facing ruin, some retailers have paid out millions in dividends to shareholders. In March, Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, paid out $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling large orders from factories in Bangladesh, Korea and elsewhere
  • In an open letter published in April, the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia appealed to buyers to honour their contracts to protect the 750,000 workers who rely on the Cambodian garment industry.
  • “All parties in the global apparel supply chain are feeling the extreme burden caused by Covid-19,” the letter said. “However, manufacturers [factories] operate on razor-thin margins and have much less ability to shoulder such a burden as compared to our customers [buyers]. The consequential burden faced by our workers who still need to put food on the table is enormous and extreme.”
  • In Bangladesh, more than a million garment workers have been fired or furloughed as a result of cancelled orders and buyers’ refusal to pay, according to the CGWR. Despite a government package of more than $500m to factories to help mitigate job losses, Bangladeshi workers have reported not being paid for two months or more.
  • “While their economic position at the top of supply chains gives them the power to renege on what they owe suppliers during a crisis, they have a moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable … and that begins with protecting the wellbeing of the workers at the bottom of supply chains.”
  • Topshop owner Arcadia Group, Walmart, Urban Outfitters and Mothercare are listed among those which have made no commitment to pay in full for orders completed and in production.
  • n contrast, said WRC’s Nova, a substantial number of big brands and retailers are now fulfilling their financial obligations to suppliers. H&M and Zara made a commitment to pay after Anner first revealed the scale of the cancellations in a CGWR/WRC report published at the end of March. Gap is among others that have since followed suit.
criscimagnael

Novak Djokovic and Global Pandemic Morality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-djokovic-australian-open.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • What began as a power struggle between a defiantly unvaccinated tennis star and a prime minister seeking a distraction from his own pre-election missteps has turned into something far weightier: a public stand for pandemic rules and the collective good.
  • Australians didn’t much like how their government had summarily canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa at the airport. After all their lockdown obedience and vaccine drives, they were also unhappy about the celebrity athlete’s effort to glide into the country while skirting a Covid vaccination mandate.
  • Mr. Djokovic admitted that he had not isolated himself last month while he apparently suspected, and later confirmed, a Covid infection.
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  • With that, Australia’s leaders decided they had seen enough. On Friday, the country’s immigration minister canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa for a second time, putting his bid to win a record 21st Grand Slam title in grave doubt.
  • In the final tally, a country far from the epicenters of Covid suffering, where sport is a revered forum for right and wrong, has become an enforcer of the collectivist values that the entire world has been struggling to maintain during the pandemic.
  • Mr. Djokovic sought to play by his own rules. First, he admitted submitting an entry form at the airport that falsely said he had not traveled internationally in the 14 days before he arrived in Melbourne. He had in fact been flying during that time between his native Serbia and Spain. (The misstatement was a “human error,” he said, made by his agent.)
  • And then there was everything he did during the time he believed he might have been exposed to Covid and eventually, in his telling, tested positive — the Covid diagnosis that enabled his vaccine exemption in the first place.
  • Five days in December, more or less, sank his chances of winning an unmatched 10th Australian Open, as the world saw what his many critics have described as his selfish and reckless disregard for the health of others.
  • The next day, before he had received the result, he said, he took a rapid antigen test that came back negative. He then attended a junior tennis ceremony in Belgrade, where photographs show him posing without a mask near children.
  • Later that day, Dec. 17, Mr. Djokovic said he learned about his positive P.C.R. test result. But he did not then go into 14 days of isolation, as the Serbian government requires.
  • The following day, Dec. 18, he did a media interview and a photo shoot at his tennis center in Belgrade. He later said he knew he was Covid-positive
  • his behavior after receiving a positive test seems to be what set the world on edge over his moral compass.
  • Refusing to get vaccinated was one thing. But withholding the fact that he was infectious?
  • Many Australians saw in Mr. Djokovic’s actions both dishonesty and a disregard for others. Some questioned whether he had really tested positive in the first place, given the convenient timing for his vaccination exemption.
  • The community spirit that has defined the country’s virus response — with people grinding through lockdowns and longing for family as borders slammed shut, only to then rush out for vaccines — is in an uncertain place at the moment.
  • Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to exploit that urge when he pounced on Mr. Djokovic’s first visa cancellation, tweeting barely an hour after it happened on Jan. 6 that “rules are rules.”
  • He made the point again on Friday evening after the second visa cancellation was announced, four days after a judge had restored it on procedural grounds.
  • Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,”
  • With tens of thousands of new Covid cases every day in Australia, and sky-high vaccination rates among the vulnerable, one athlete does not pose much of a threat.
  • But the “Djokovic affair” is no longer — and maybe never was — just about science.
  • Dr. Collignon said that three years into the pandemic, it raised the question of moral judgment. “When do we stop punishing people for making bad decisions?” he asked.
  • In Australia, the answer is “not yet.”
  • the decent man is the one who doesn’t infect anyone, as Albert Camus wrote in his 1947 novel “The Plague,” and if the prime minister hadn’t jumped on the cause, someone else probably would have.
  • Sport is life to many Australians. Participation rates are high, and even watching others compete has been described, for generations, as an activity that builds character.
  • A “character test” sits at the center of a provision that gives the immigration minister the right to deny or cancel a visa for a wide range of reasons, though in this case, he relied on another section that lets the minister reject a visa if it’s “in the public interest.”
  • More than two dozen refugees are still in the same hotel where Mr. Djokovic stayed while waiting for the hearing on his first visa cancellation. Some, like Mehdi Ali, a musician who fled Iran when he was 15, have been held by Australia for many years.
  • But for Mr. Djokovic, Australia’s tough stance on border security seems to have delivered a result that many people can support, even if it means a less interesting Australian Open.
  • At Melbourne Park on Friday, where Mr. Djokovic had been scheduled to practice after being named the No. 1 seed, fans seemed resigned to the loss of a player who was fun to watch and hard to admire.
  • No disrespect for him or his tennis ability and that, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t quite sit with the Australian public.”
anonymous

Roseanne says she 'begged' ABC, 'like 40 motherf-----s,' to let her 'make amends' befor... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ends-before-show-was-axed.html

US politics twitter

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Following days of heavy backlash for a string of controversial tweets, Roseanne Barr on Thursday said she “begged” ABC to give her a chance to “apologize & make amends.”“I begged Ben Sherwood at ABC 2 let me apologize & make amends,” the embattled TV star tweeted about the ABC president. “I begged them not to cancel the show. I told them I was willing to do anything & asked 4 help in making things right. I'd worked doing publicity4 them 4free for weeks, traveling, thru bronchitis. I begged4 ppls jobs.”
  • Earlier this week, Barr tweeted that Jarrett, who is African-American and born in Iran, is like the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” She also sent a politically charged tweet linking Chelsea Clinton to Soros.
  • Amid the ongoing fallback for her comments, Barr returned to Twitter and retweeted an unproved claim posted by a right-wing activist, which accused ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey of consulting the former first lady before canceling the reboot.
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  • Barr also said she "intended to bring ppl together" and said it was "a joyous experience" to get "to work on the Roseanne show again."
brookegoodman

Airbnb is expanding its coronavirus response | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis culture us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN) — As coronavirus spreads across the globe, thousands of travelers are canceling their reservations and choosing to stay home.
  • When a traveler books with Airbnb, their reservation comes with one of six cancellation policies, ranging from flexible to super strict. These are set by the host.
  • Now, travelers with bookings in the United States made on or before March 13, with a check-in date of April 1 or earlier, are eligible for penalty-free cancellations.
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  • The Schengen Area is a group of 26 European countries that extend visa-free travel to their citizens. Ireland and the United Kingdom are not in the Schengen Area, and Airbnb has not announced whether they will be covered by the new policy.
  • A previous statement announced that reservations in mainland China booked on or before January 28, with a check in date of April 1 or before, would qualify for penalty-free bookings under the extenuating circumstances policy.
  • If you're coming from South Korea, you may also cancel some bookings penalty free. Reservations are eligible if they were booked on or before February 25, with a check-in date of March 23 or before.
  • Even if you're not coming from or going to an area that automatically qualifies for a refund, though, it might be possible to get your money back.
  • Penalty-free refunds will be extended to any hosts or guests who must cancel reservations to comply with disease control restrictions, or to perform coronavirus-related medical or disease-control duties.
Javier E

Nobel-winning novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns that 'cancel culture is stifling new wr... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...ture-stifling-new-writers.html

cancel culture self-censoring creativity fear writers

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sir Kazuo, 66, said they were avoiding writing from viewpoints outside their own immediate experiences for fear of being cancelled by an 'anonymous lynch mob' online.
  • Novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro has warned that a 'climate of fear' is forcing young writers to self-censor
  • The Nobel Prize winner whose novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day were adapted for the big screen, said he was concerned for less established writers.
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  • They would feel that 'their careers are more fragile, their reputations are more fragile and they don't want to take risks'.
  • 'I very much fear for the younger generation of writers. Novelists should feel free to write from whichever viewpoint they wish or represent all kinds of views. Right from an early age I've written from the point of view of people very different from myself. My first novel was written from the point of view of a woman.'
  • Sir Kazuo, whose new novel Klara and the Sun is published today, said he does not fear being cancelled.
  • Last year more than 100 high-profile cultural figures including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem signed an open letter which claimed the spread of 'censoriousness' was leading to 'a vogue for public shaming and ostracism'.
  • Booker Prize-winning author Sir Salman Rushdie, 73, also voiced his fears for literature and rejected the idea that writers can only write about their own experiences.
  • Prue Leith, 81, revealed last year she had 'abandoned' her novel after falling out with the publisher 'because they kept wanting to tell me what was politically correct'.
anonymous

Opinion | Should Biden Cancel Student Debt? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-cancel-student-debt.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Should Biden Cancel Student Debt?Economics offers only part of the answer. The rest depends on whether you think higher education is an investment or a public good.
  • Whenever I think about student loan debt, one of the first things I think about — besides my own — is a 2018 essay by my colleague M.H. Miller. As one of the 45 million Americans who collectively owe $1.71 trillion for student loans, Mr. Miller wrote about what it is like to have debt — more than $100,000 worth in his case — become the organizing principle of your life, to be incapacitated by it, suspended, at age 30, “in a state of perpetual childishness.”
  • The economic injustice argument tends to invite a lot of debate about how best to tailor cancellation to those who are suffering most from the crisis, which isn’t always the same thing as who has the largest student loan balance. That’s because student debt, in dollar terms, is concentrated among people who make more money and tend to be much better able to make their monthly payments than borrowers who owe relatively small amounts.Here’s a chart from Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project that shows the spread:Editors’ PicksWhere Is Hollywood When Broadway Needs It?75 Artists, 7 Questions, One
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • From this vantage, proponents argue that the student debt crisis incurs social costs even in the case of better-off borrowers, like lawyers who have to go into corporate law instead of becoming public defenders because they have $200,000 in law school loans to pay off. And then there are borrowers for whom “affording” payments means being saddled with the depressing obligation to delay or forgo major life milestones like having children, owning a home and saving for retirement.
  • Virtually everyone in this debate agrees that cancellation would only treat the symptoms of the student debt crisis, not cure its causes. Some say it could make the problem even worse by, in effect, bailing out schools whose value has outstripped their cost, causing tuitions to rise even higher and incentivizing people to take out loans they can’t afford with the expectation they will be forgiven.
carolinehayter

Japan Extends 3rd State Of Emergency Weeks Before Olympics : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eeks-before-the-olympics-begin

pandemic Culture politics

shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Japan's government extended a state of emergency covering major cities until at least until June 20 — roughly a month before the start of the Tokyo Olympics, which polls show an overwhelming number of Japanese do not want to proceed as scheduled.
  • It's Japan's third state of emergency of the pandemic and the second extension since the current emergency began on April 25. The emergency shortens some businesses' hours, and caps attendance at large events
  • The spread in Japan of variant strains of the virus has slowed the decline in case numbers. Some hospitals remain overstretched by COVID-19 patients, and some people have died at home without being able to access medical care.
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  • Japan's vaccine rollout remains the slowest among developed economies with just 6% of residents having received at least one dose.
  • An article this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, meanwhile, questioned organizers' fundamental argument that the games can be held safely. "We believe the IOC's determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence," the authors wrote.
  • International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told a conference on Thursday that athletes should "come with full confidence to Tokyo and get ready," lauding the Japanese capital as "the best-prepared Olympic city ever."
  • The IOC has asked Olympic athletes to sign waivers absolving the organizers of legal liability for COVID-19-related risks. Bach acknowledged this was an issue of concern for some athletes, but the IOC calls it "standard practice."
  • Japan requires that imported vaccines undergo domestic clinical testing, slowing down the approval process.
  • Japan's second-largest newspaper by circulation, The Asahi Shimbun, became the first major Japanese media outlet to publish an editorial calling for the games to be canceled. The 142-year-old publication, one of Asia's oldest newspapers, is also an Olympic sponsor.
  • Sponsors are especially jittery about the prospect of the games' cancellation, which could cost Japan an estimated $17 billion.
  • another state of emergency in response to a fresh wave of infections after the Olympics could cost the country several times that amount.
lmunch

Opinion | The Internet's 'Dark Patterns' Need to Be Regulated - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rnet-ecommerce-regulation.html

Dark Patterns Internet Regulation Policy Politics

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Consider Amazon. The company perfected the one-click checkout. But canceling a $119 Prime subscription is a labyrinthine process that requires multiple screens and clicks.
  • These are examples of “dark patterns,” the techniques that companies use online to get consumers to sign up for things, keep subscriptions they might otherwise cancel or turn over more personal data. They come in countless variations: giant blinking sign-up buttons, hidden unsubscribe links, red X’s that actually open new pages, countdown timers and pre-checked options for marketing spam. Think of them as the digital equivalent of trying to cancel a gym membership.
  • Last year, the F.T.C. fined the parent company of the children’s educational program ABCmouse $10 million over what it said were tactics to keep customers paying as much as $60 annually for the service by obscuring language about automatic renewals and forcing users through six or more screens to cancel.
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  • Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, for instance, used a website with pre-checked boxes that committed donors to give far more money than they had intended, a recent Times investigation found. That cost some consumers thousands of dollars that the campaign later repaid.
  • “While there’s nothing inherently wrong with companies making money, there is something wrong with those companies intentionally manipulating users to extract their data,” said Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat, at the F.T.C. event. She said she planned to introduce dark pattern legislation later this year.
  • More than one in 10 e-commerce sites rely on dark patterns, according to another study, which also found that many online customer testimonials (“I wouldn’t buy any other brand!”) and tickers counting recent purchases (“7,235 customers bought this service in the past week”) were phony, randomly generated by software programs.
  • “The internet shouldn’t be the Wild West anymore — there’s just too much traffic,” said a Loyola Law School professor, Lauren Willis, at the F.T.C. event. “We need stop signs and street signs to enable consumers to shop easily, accurately.”
anonymous

Airbnb Canceling All D.C. Area Reservations For Inauguration Week : Insurrection At The... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-d-c-during-inauguration-week

shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Airbnb says it is canceling reservations made in the Washington, D.C., metro area during inauguration week, citing various officials' requests that people not travel to the area during this time
  • The service will also block new bookings in the area during that period. Airbnb says it will refund guests whose reservations were canceled and reimburse hosts for the money they would have earned from the canceled reservations.
  • Additionally, we are aware of reports emerging yesterday afternoon regarding armed militias and known hate groups that are attempting to travel and disrupt the Inauguration."
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  • The company said it has taken steps to "ensure hate group members are not part of the Airbnb community" — banning "numerous individuals" from using its platform if Airbnb has learned they "are either associated with known hate groups or otherwise involved in the criminal activity at the Capitol Building."
  • Neighborhood message boards in D.C. lit up in recent days with reports of shouting matches between pro-Trump Airbnb guests and D.C. neighbors, and of hosts hearing guests talking afterward about taking part in the riot.
  • Some neighbors urged D.C. Airbnb hosts to be careful who they rent to, while others cautioned hosts not to run afoul of nondiscrimination policies.
  • "Members of hate groups are never welcome on Airbnb," the company said,
Javier E

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order | Billy Bra... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...free-speech-young-people

cancel culture liberty accountability free speech culture politics

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  • Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.
  • Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.
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  • The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion
  • An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.
  • the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.
  • Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.
  • The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.
  • The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.
  • Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability
  • Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.
  • a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard
anonymous

Student Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the Left - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-student-loans.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale
  • ut Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.
  • The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion
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  • “There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,
  • People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,”
  • more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all
  • almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.
  • Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger.
  • Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans
  • Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,”
  • Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school.
  • The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts
  • The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.
  • The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,”
  • “There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.
Javier E

Why the Latest Campus Cancellation Is Different - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620352

campus cancel culture affirmative action Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Back in August, Abbot and a colleague criticized affirmative action and other ways to give candidates for admission or employment a leg up on the basis of their ethnic or racial identity in Newsweek. In their place, Abbot advocated what he calls a Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) framework in which applicants would be “treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” This, Abbot emphasized, would also entail “an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants.”
  • Is Abbot a climate-change denier? Or has he committed some terrible crime? No, he simply expressed his views about the way universities should admit students and hire faculty in the pages of a national magazine.
  • Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. In recognition of his research on climate change, MIT invited him to deliver the John Carlson Lecture, which takes place every year at a large venue in the Boston area and is meant to “communicate exciting new results in climate science to the general public.”
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  • Then the campaign to cancel Abbot’s lecture began. On Twitter, some students and professors called on the university to retract its invitation. And, sure enough, MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website evaporates the moment some loud voices on social media call for a speaker’s head.
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