The magazine article of the day—on Twitter, anyway—is Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic about "mob justice" in America. It's a worthy enough subject, but unfortunately the piece itself just isn't very good.
The proximate issue is "cancel culture," and the fact that one false move in lefty America—something you say, something dug up from your distant past, sometimes simply holding unpopular opinions—can get you fired and/or banned from polite company forever. Partly this is due to kangaroo court "investigations" and partly due to fear of Twitter mobs and all they represent.
And sure, fine enough. This is hardly the first treatment this subject has gotten, but a fresh look is always welcome. The problem is that Applebaum's look is tooth-crunchingly stale. It's basically what I think of as a Google piece: round up all the cancel culture stories of the past year or two and then devote a few thousand words to summarizing them. All the greatest hits are here: Amy Chua, Donald McNeil, Ian Buruma, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas Christakis, Howard Bauchner, and the usual cast of anonymous victims who didn't want to be quoted publicly.
And that's it. The problem here should be obvious: This represents only about a dozen cases over two years—plus the alleged thousands of others who are now afraid to speak their minds because of the toxic PC atmosphere that young people have brought to contemporary discourse.
If this were the first piece ever written on the subject, that would be fine. But it's more like the hundredth. To make it worthwhile we need to learn something new. And in this case the something new is obvious: Aside from the usual roll call, just how widespread is cancel culture? Does it pop up here and there on occasion, or are there hundreds of lower-profile cases that have genuinely created a climate of fear all across the country?
You won't learn this from Applebaum. You won't learn this from anyone. But it's the nut of the whole thing. I'm sympathetic to the argument that lefty PC has become harmful and faintly ridiculous in recent years, but I'd still like to see a broader look that's a little more convincing on that score. I understand that I'm asking for something pretty difficult to measure, but someone ought to be giving it a try. Otherwise it's just the same dozen or so cases swirling around forever with no real broader conclusion aside from the personal views of the people writing about it.
I wonder what's worse, being a fire data analyst or being a teacher put in jail for teaching about Jackie Robinson?
I'm new here, so maybe your question makes sense. What is a "fire data analyst" and why are you comparing one to the empty set?
To get to Kevin's point of quantization (something I notice an utter lack of interest of in the comments) the one comparison point I'd make is with the Red Scare.
Is Kevin willing to concede that the Red Scare was "real" insofar as it represented some number (how many?) of real people with Leftist sympathies either hounded from their jobs, or compelled to stay quiet (and thus allow the image to persist that the opinions of the Red Scaremongers were close to universal)?
If that point is conceded, then what is the evidence for that beyond the similar evidence for Cancel Culture? We have the same few prominent cases, lots of anecdotes, and almost no numbers beyond that. But if Kevin is willing to accept one, it seems reasonable to accept the other (or alternatively, I guess, to deny both).
In terms of quantification, I'd look at things like the "stance" of say all US history dissertations (masters and doctorate) over the past five years. My guess is that you'll find 90% of them code as woke, 9% code as "trying hard to avoid the issue" and 1% code as anti-woke. Of course this is not an easy project today, automated linguistic analysis is not there yet. But it should be feasible in ten years (at which point people start arguing about what defines "coding as woke"...)
Now, if you believe that woke is just the abstract light of pure truth, you see no problem in this. (Just as you would see no problem if you were Muslim and saw a similar analysis in the "Islamic stance" of history theses produced in Saudi Arabia); if you don't see woke in this way, you will see a problem.
Of course that's not exactly the same thing as cancel culture, but it is quantifiable.
Cancel culture is a lot tougher because almost by definition it requires counting things that *didn't* happen.
You could (in theory, perhaps) count the number of people fired on stated "cancel culture" ground.
You couldn't count the number of people really fired on "cancel culture" grounds. but given some other excuse.
And most importantly, you couldn't count the number of cases where people suppressed an opinion they felt would be treated as problematic and thereby contributed to creating an environment of apparent unanimity. Because of course that is the primary goal, to *suppress the existence of common knowledge* The firings are simply a tool to that end, but they are not the end and not even an interesting proxy for the end; the end is the creation of an environment where, regardless of what people feel as individuals, they have no sense for how strongly and commonly those opinions are held by others in society.
My guess is that you'll find 90% of them code as woke, 9% code as "trying hard to avoid the issue" and 1% code as anti-woke.
Those are some fine imaginary numbers there.
Tell us your estimate or stand revealed as possessing mere snark.
"...you couldn't count the number of cases where people suppressed an opinion they felt would be treated as problematic and thereby contributed to creating an environment of apparent unanimity..."
Why do I need to count it when it's so obviously all-pervasive?
“Cancel culture” mostly exists because it is the way to hold people responsible for being hacks, racists, bigots, clowns, and otherwise shîtty people as they have been for literally hundreds of years without ever paying the tiniest price for king so.
Is it a perfect situation? No.
Are the worst people getting held responsible for their bad behavior more frequently? They sure are.
So chalk that up as a slight win, and maybe start to consider how to not allow such a parade of charlatans and jackässes to become prominent and important public figures in the first place.
“Being” not “king”
It'll start being a win when you get yours.
Here is a list of 258 examples.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1282404647160942598.html?refreshed=1594769677
What is the threshold of anecdotes before one concludes that cancel culture exists?
258? Out of appx 330 million ppl in the US?
Lol it’s gotta be A LOT higher than that. On the magnitude of 100,000 to still be well under 10% of the total population.
Perhaps 6 times a year Daily Kos runs an item about some American soldiers getting intimidated by their commanders over the issue of Christianity. The most recent incident was described in a post titled "MRFF Victory! Christian Cross Sculpture at Fort Dix Personally Removed by Commander".
I am of the opinion that even a dozen of these a year are intimidating to all soldiers on all bases. I don't see much difference between the ability of military commander to make life miserable for a soldier (of the wrong faith) as compared to a workplace culture where one can be ostracized and fired due to having the wrong cultural opinion.
So, yes, the 258 here, the other incidents listed in other comments, and the many, many situations where people bit their tongue and just went along, because they didn't want to be a target.
How would one ever get the data? Polling? I don't know anybody who trusts pollsters.
lol you’re absurd
You wouldn't be celebrating it if it were only 100,000 people.
100,000 is 10% of 1 million, btw. You obviously don't have any grasp of even the rudiments of math, either.
As Kevin said, the article is a mash up of old anecdotes with a lot of hand waving. Example: Alexi McCammond makes homophobic and racist slurs and Teen Vogue should just call "bygones".
More annoyingly is Applebaum's conflation between the power of social media and the power of the state. All the constitutional rights that she references are acknowledged and enforced by the state, but there is no requirement that private institutions observe them—unless expressly stated in law.
So, while it is disgusting to see people hurt by the spinelessness of institutional apparatchiks, a hurt then compounded by the fecklessness of their colleagues, it is not the same as the actions of the Soviet, Nazi, or any other authoritarian regime. None of the people affected faced imprisonment, let alone execution.
I had no idea who McCammond is, but she got fired for tweeting this https://nextshark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/MCCAMMOND_TWEETS.jpg in 2011? LOL!
I'll throw in 4 episodes of "30 Rock" being deleted, and apparently today, CC removed episode 2 of The Office ("Diversity Training").
Of course, this is relatively minor stuff, though it was painful to read Tina Fey's self-flagellation explaining why they recalled the 30 Rock episodes.
That's not minor at all!
That episode with Jane Krakowski in blackface at the end is the greatest Christmas episode of any sitcom ever!