I disagree. Saying you agree with free speech, such as the Harper's Letter which is about as milquetoast and generic as it gets, is viciously attacked on the left for being racist, anti-trans, the authors are scum, anyone who signs it should be fired, and on and on.

As a testament to the existence of cancel culture and the stifling of any opinion against the party line in the progressive media, I can't think of a more obvious example.

I remember when people used to proudly say, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". This is not the norm for progressive thinking in 2020.

First, I think you're lumping "the left" together and assuming "the left" believes whatever the most extreme "left" tweets say.

Second, Bari Weiss can write whatever she wants. Totally her right. She's got a website there in the link! She can continue to reach a global audience. Does the NYTimes need to promote her? No, that's not a right I'm willing to die for.

Third, why on earth is Bari Weiss' opinion more sacrosanct than mine? If she says something I consider offensive, I might say I think it's offensive. If she says something dumb, I might say I think it's dumb. If she says something astute, I might say I think it's astute. She has a HUGE megaphone, so of course lots of people will respond to her. That's not "cancel culture." That's a side effect of having a huge megaphone. With great power comes great responsibility, etc.

Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence. Oftentimes people in marginalized group react in a way that feels extra venomous to those of us not in those groups because they can feel their lives are constantly hindered and harmed by the sorts of thoughts that other people can just toss out and then walk away from. If this happens, I might suggest listening to the free speech from those people and trying to understand rather than writing screeds against "cancel culture" or whining about how you, as a very well-publicized and probably quite wealthy writer having your rights squashed. And that's why the Harper's Letter was annoying.

> Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence.

I hear this all the time, but it seems so disingenuous. There are so many national examples that no reasonable person could consider to be any of the above:

* A hispanic man was fired for accidentally making the "ok" symbol

* A data scientist was canned for citing a prominent black academic's research about the efficacy of nonviolent protest

* A journalist was forced to issue an apology for interviewing a black man who was happy about BLM but wished there was more attention on issues of violence in his community

Frothing racists indeed.

In light of cases like this, I don't know how anyone can think that cancel culture is just "punching up" or "criticizing people" or "going for people who want to use hate speech".

Those are three anecdotes, and at least two of them are not as stark as described. The data scientist's timing was bad and his prior relationship with several stakeholders was already on the rocks. There are rumors that the worker who had no idea what the connotations of the ok symbol are has been re-hired. This is hardly anything compared to the armies of celebrities who signed the Harper's letter and are mostly complaining that they can no longer express their opinions without being criticized.

The difficulty here is that several things are happening at once. There is a problem with groupthink at some institutions, but there are also people who are trying to suppress legitimate criticism.

They are indeed anecdotes, as are the Harper’s letter signatories and many, many others. Anyway, the issue for the Nth time is not about “criticism” but “harassment”. It’s not a good faith argument to conflate these things when it has been stated over and over that this is about people targeting individuals’ employment status. This isn’t “criticism”.

The fact that it hasn’t stifled prominent, powerful people such as the Harper’s signatories is not evidence that cancel culture doesn’t exist or that it is a weak force; it means that less powerful people are effectively suppressed. You don’t hear about what you don’t hear about. Survivorship bias.

> Also, yeah, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. People get things wrong sometimes. It sucks and we should use our freedom of speech to help correct those errors, not argue that freedom of speech should be shut down.

There's a difference in my opinion between harassment and free speech. Notably, if you're trying to punish, threaten, or coerce someone, you fall outside of the bounds of "criticism". This may not be the legal definition, but I can't see any other definition that would be consistent with free speech ideals.

Further, because it's perhaps too difficult to legally litigate this kind of harassment, we could also approach the problem by making it more difficult for employers to terminate employees, thereby neutering the mobs (they can "speak" all they want but they can't persecute).

> If she says something I consider offensive, I might say I think it's offensive. If she says something dumb, I might say I think it's dumb.

Respectfully, I think you're missing the point. She works at a journalistic outlet that claims to be neutral and factual. When her peers demean her openly within the company for "writing about the Jews" (because she supports Israel), that shows that NYT is no longer operating like a legitimate news house. After all, their employees feel a freedom and psychological safety in openly harassing peers for their ideas and political views. The comments here are not asking to insulate Bari Weiss's ideas from intellectual critique or from public criticism. They are against biases in journalism, the censorship of ideas, and ideological bullying/discrimination in the workplace.

> Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence.

The problem is that words like "transphobic" have a wide range of meanings, and are purposely vague to dismiss anyone who doesn't pass an arbitrary purity test. There are very few people who wish violence (physical harm) against trans people. But there are lots of people, who very reasonably, think trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports and that trans women are not women. The attempts to censor or deplatform THOSE discussions are exactly the type of hate speech mission creep that characterizes "cancel culture".

But I don't think anybody did get fired? Who of the signees of the Harpers letter is actually being hurt? Even if they _were_ fired, why is that bad? Most of the people who signed that letter are professional writers in some form or another, and their job is to write stuff that people want to read. If people don't want to read it anymore because they write dumb stuff or sign their name to stupid letters, how is that anymore an issue of free speech than if I got fired for writing buggy code or insistently arguing that we should be coding everything in Perl 4?

You can say all kinds of dumb shit and sign your name to stupid letters and other people get to call for you to be fired, and maybe you will be! Even after that, you can continue saying dumb shit and signing your name to stupid letters, and I can go write buggy Perl 4 code, and nobody can stop us! Your dumb letters might not get published in national magazines and I probably won't get paid much for my code but in neither case is this a violation of our free speech rights.

Lots of people are offended every day and they don't coalesce into slanderous mobs who demand the offender's termination. Further, these largely ignored offenses are generally much more overt than "accidentally making an 'ok' sign", "interviewing a black man who wishes there was more focus on violence in his community", "citing a prominent black researcher", "opening an Asian restaurant", "wearing a Chinese-inspired prom dress", "whatever the Covington Catholic students did to piss of the national media and their legions", etc. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the offended are largely progressives and not the minority groups on whose behalf they claim to take offense. This seems like a pretty novel phenomenon, isolated to one more-or-less distinct group (notable exceptions include Kaepernick or Dixie Chicks circa 2005, but these are anomalies and also "punching up" and not downward or laterally).

Kaepernick and Dixie Chicks are obvious examples of "cancel culture" coming from the right, and many people on the left are more than happy to practice this in the other direction, in spite of recognizing how wrong it was in those cases.

"coalesce into slanderous mobs"

Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days. And I'd frankly argue that the fact that bad information is so easy spread has been used to very harmful effect not by progressives but by people like Donald Trump who require these sorts of misinformation campaigns to stay afloat politically.

Maybe you disagree with that last point.

Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.

That said, the other part of this is that it's very easy for a large group of people to be informed of and react against something which they perceive to be harmful. Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled." It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is. But high profile writers with huge megaphones need to be aware that people have the ability to read, share, and react to what they write. And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.

> But that doesn't mean it's wrong

People aren't just expressing their opinion. Instead a whole bunch of people are engaging in actual illegal harassment, when these mobs start up.

No, I am not talking about criticism. I am talking about the actual harassment that often comes out of these mobs. Harassment such as death threats to you, your friends and your family, and the like, all because someone said something dumb on twitter or whatever.

When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment: doxxing, pressuring one's employer to terminate an employee, and defamation. Specifically, we're talking about harassment campaigns--in other words, large movements that engage in any of these behaviors for the purpose of punishing wrongthink. While these mobs have a few people who make death threats, there aren't usually large enough numbers of these threats to constitute a campaign, and even if there were, I like to think that even cancellation advocates would consider this out-of-bounds of acceptable behavior. The debate mostly revolves around the question of whether these harassment campaigns constitute criticism ("the opponents of cancellation just don't want to be criticized" and all that). Of course, harassment is never criticism, and it's always morally repugnant; however, sometimes harassment is legal either in theory (e.g., afaik there is no legal prohibition against doxing) and other times it's legal in practice (e.g., 'defamation' is illegal in theory but the burden of proof is absurdly high).

From the perspective of free speech ideals, "speech" is the expression of an idea; it may be "persuasion" but not "coercion" or "intimidation". Cancellation is both coercive and intimidating by design and by definition, so it falls outside of the boundaries of 'speech'; however, not everything that violates free speech ideals is illegal to the great glee of free speech opponents.

> When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment:

Sure, but I think it is unfortunately that this is the only thing that people talk about.

The reality is that there is a whole bunch of stuff that is really really bad, such as death threats and the like, that will happen whenever there is a hate mob/harassment campaign that was started against someone.

When people try to defend these kinds of online mobs, they tend to focus more on the grey stuff, and they try to ignore the really bad stuff that happens. It is much easier to defend someone just "criticizing" another, instead of the much worse stuff that I've seen happen.

I don't think that someone should be able to distance themselves from the truly horrific stuff that can come out of these kinds of movements. It is much worse than people just be criticize, or whatever. And people need to recognize that those kinds of things happen.

IE, the stuff that happens can often be even worse than the, admittedly still very bad things that you brought up that I agree shouldn't happen either.

And by bringing up the even worse stuff, it gives less room for contrarians to make arguments and claims like "Well, actually, criticism isn't harassment", or "well actually, maybe the person deserved to be the target".

I agree with this to a certain extent, but any side of a large debate is going to have a handful of people who make death threats. I wouldn’t want anyone to think, for example, that criticism of antifa is invalidated or lessened because one or two critics issued threats. If there is evidence that the volume of threats is higher among cancellers than other movements, then that would be good cause for additional criticism IMO.

But everyone should condemn violence and harassment from their own ideological cohort.

> Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days.

"Getting things wrong" is a symptom of social media and misinformation; cancellation and mobbing, however, are almost unique to progressive mobs. There are conservative mobs. E.g., the campaigns against Sarah Jeong, Kaepernick, and the Dixie Chicks [circa 2005]), but these are far fewer and they punch up (and in the case of Jeong, she really should have been terminated based on NYT's own policies and track record irrespective of a mob).

Misinformation is a problem, and Donald Trump wields it to great effect, and I'll happily talk about that in a pertinent thread.

> Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.

I certainly think that social media companies should be held to account for the consequences of their curation policies or else they should not curate at all. I don't think they should be allowed to claim to be "dumb pipes" when it suits them even though they're transparently not "dumb pipes".

> Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled."

You're quite right--anyone who argues that cancellation and criticism are equivalent would indeed be mistaken. Cancellation refers to concerted campaigns to harm someone, usually by having them terminated or defaming them. This is harassment, not criticism, even if it's not prosecuted.

> It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is.

Social media certainly plays a role, but if it were the primary driver, we would expect these mobs to be evenly distributed across the ideological matrix.

> And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.

"Scrutinized" is one thing. The problem is that overwhelmingly there is no evidence to support claims of 'racism' whatsoever, and yet the penalties are harsh. There's simply no evidence at all that could acquit you in the court of Twitter. Kafka couldn't write fiction like this.