Sometimes fines on the employer can be imposed, but I don’t think they are common.So, such things help. Mindfulness is beneficial in many areas of my life.
We have the quick presumption of guilt. I think Rosenbaum needs to get a life. What you’re trying to do is to elevate advance your position without having to defend it.“One way to understand the ease with which the victims of the Windrush scandal could lose their jobs, their homes, their liberty or be deported to far-away countries, is that in the public imaginary that is partly constituted by speech, many people did not see them as proper members with equal standing to others.”Were we to do away with everything that had a downside we would have very little good. In the intervening years I don’t think anybody has a clear solution for what would prevent that from happening again, but I also think that would be a great place to start for anybody thinking about free expression online.You mention “rape culture” and that might be a good analogy, and it just points towards how long a process we’re talking about. Sad.I find this also true to some extent for the Harper’s letter. If some idiot like Scruton wants to publish (with tobacco company money) an opinion piece in a major newspaper saying smoking is good, he is engaging in (subsidized) speech. The trick then would seem to be to have as nuanced a view as possible and do the least harm possible – though that is a lot easier said than done.From my perspective this thread seems to illustrate that this topic is pretty mired in confusion – there is a lot of different perspectives regarding what cancel culture is, how it works, what constitutes cancelling behaviour, when it may or may not be justified, etc. (Perhaps you still mean to refer to him. Why would there be a question of standing for who may speak? The problem involves some level of increased ostracism on decreased burden of proof, plus increased network ability to broadcast and amplify the ostracism, plus a bunch of not actually knowing the people involved so not having a shared sense of what counts as beyond the pale, plus an increased ability to actually attack people’s livelihood.There are a bunch of right wing cases that have parts of it. The head of Google is just now trying to explain why “Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews” somehow disappeared from the Google search engine. What the RLB case does is confirm two of the elements in Emily Yoffe’s Whether justified or not, a significant minority of Americans, across multiple lines, are fearful that their political opinions could endanger their jobs; this suggests the problem might be more than just people getting “bent-out-of-shape that they can’t be raging bigots”.Fear that your political opinions might put you in danger of losing your job is not the same problem as actual danger that your political opinions might lose you your job in exactly the same way that fear of crime is not the same problem as crime. To answer that you’d need to dig through a thousand hours of idiotic drama, and I was never willing.But of course the biggest issue, as I saw it, was that building a community around sniffing other people’s panties and screeching about the smell was inevitably awful.
The only good news is that this firing is so ridiculous that it has generated some serious pushback. So the patient is immuno-compromised and additional interventions are called for.As to Peter’s argument that cancel culture disfigures the left, I would add that the only cases where the radical left has seized power took place in the brutal aftermath of right-wing pandemics: e.g. SJ is canceled now? Trump clearly “canceled” Kaepernick, with the NFL’s help.
But when you start removing speech that someone claims is harmful, every demand for someone to be silenced will come wrapped in a claim of harm. It’s also highly problematic, in the Ridd case, that employer codes of conduct have been held to over-ride enterprise bargains.To rephrase the point. Focus on the contingent academics fired from their jobs for speaking their minds. I do. Refusing to allow employees bathroom breaks is very bad, and no doubt there’s an argument to be made in favor of more subtle conceptions of domination and freedom, but in an apparently descriptive work like Anderson’s I would expect to see more evidence than this.I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in ten years we see “private government” taken as a prescriptive notion.“I don’t see any reason why your friend should not express her poor opinion of some of her co-signers in public; after all, a lack of purity (and even hypocrisy) on their parts doesn’t make the letter any less valid.”I do. Ironically, while being quick to take offence themselves they demand that those less powerful than they are should toughen up and not be such “snowflakes”.