Let us know if you can actually formulate that into some kind of coherent point, it's a total mess right now.

Seems like the "cancel culture" panic is the media version of "Make America Great Again". Much like how Trump voters seem to think America was last "great" when black people didn't have civil rights, the anti-cancel-culture crusaders want to go back to a golden era of when which stories got told and which didn't were all just decided by a group of 75 white men.

So just because JK Rowling is wealthy (completely self made woman FWIW, which would be a cause for celebration by the liberal left in a sane world) and will ultimately be fine that means she isn't allowed to have an opinion about cancel culture? Is that your argument? So by this logic, because you are white and privileged it is bad faith for you to argue against white privilege, systemic racism, etc. So, you admit you are arguing in bad faith, correct?

Anyways, the point in regards to Rowling is not that she is going to suffer any serious material hardship due to the criticism against her. The point seems to be she is one of the good gals, has good faith concern about the tensions between feminism and tran activism (I dont know the exact nuts and bolt, but it seems this is the 30,000 foot view of the issue), and shouldn't be maligned in the way she is for her good faith concerns.

And arguing she is rich, so any concern or experience she has about cancel culture is bad faith is completely absurd IMO.

I don't see any argument against the right to organize boycotts. It seems the letter is just a plea for everyone involved in the process to re-examine their objectives and tactics and consider where this is all going.

I jus found it a little ironic you seem to be making a Neoliberal argument, when you never struck me as a big laissez faire free market proponent.

Well, I said systemic wealth inequality, not wealth inequality. You took out the systemic because it is inconvenient to you.

Anyways, the issue is that there is a belief that if the Overton window vis a vis speech and censorship moves too far in a particular direction, it will destabilize our social/political systems and everyone will suffer for it. You seem to be working under an assumption that the current activism is a normal part of a functioning democracy, working in the correct direction and will have positive results. A lot of us don't share your optimism.

Generally you seem to be working under an assumption that all far left beliefs and actions are made in good faith, will have the intended results and be a positive. I personally dont believe many of the actions of the left are being made in good faith, and their actions will be disastrous.

Unlike me, it seems the signatories of the letter (at least in aggregate) are accepting the actions are being undertaken in good faith; they are just concerned the downstream consequences will work against the cause. Most of them have not been cancelled and probably never will. That doesn't mean they can't have an opinion things are going the wrong way, and it doesn't mean they can't be right.

Every time you use the word "so", what follows is something you completely made up. And then you build further logical conclusions on top of those false premises.

You managed to do it 3 times here, in 4 sentences, to arrive at a conclusion of "well well, looks like Wookie admits he's arguing in bad faith". And this is just your first paragraph! LOLOL

Well, Wookie seems to be arguing the line should be drawn where the line is drawn. That is a neoliberal argument.

Anyways, in regards to the intentions of the authors, it seems their argument goes way beyond "stop overreacting" into concern for the consequences for overreaction.

Maybe you think they are arguing about downstream consequences in bad faith and they really just want people to stop picking on them. But regardless, you aren't representing their argument correctly by minimizing the contents of the last paragraph IMO.

No, that is called sarcasm.

The point is Wookie's argument is that we should examine every person that signed the letter, and if they don't meet his standard of being oppressed by cancel culture then they have to be acting in bad faith. And Wookie certainly doesn't apply those standards to arguments he is more sympathetic too.

So at worst I am calling him a hypocrite. I don't think he is self aware enough to ever admit he is arguing in bad faith, even when he probably is.

FWIW I can appreciate the irony of the media suddenly showing concern when the monster they have been feeding for the last 20 years turns on them.

But at the same time, I had these concerns a long time before they did, so I am not going to hand waive away the concerns themselves.

Okay, sure, let's talk about the last paragraph.

As a piece of writing out of context, this is fine, it makes sense, I get why a bunch of people would sign a letter saying this.

The problem is with applying the contents of this paragraph to the real world, and how people deploy attacks of "cancel culture" in situations that obviously have nothing to do with this paragraph.

Take Kevin Williamson getting hired to then fired from The Atlantic; he was a hero of the anti-wokesters for a brief moment. Nobody wished his ideas out of existence; his ideas are still everywhere. Nobody silenced him; he went right back to his old job at the National Review, where he still has a national platform to spew his dumbassery to anyone who wants to listen (without worry of any liberal writers having their opinions show up next to his). There's no lack of debate around his ideas; plenty of people wrote about his abortion takes, and continue to debate the other sides of ideas Williamson writes about today. His firing wasn't exactly about a "good-faith disagreement", it was about the Atlantic realizing that their readers were gonna start not wanting what they were selling.

The simple fact is, Kevin Williamson isn't entitled to a writing job at The Atlantic. Nobody's entitled to a job anywhere (if you disagree, maybe you'll be on board with AOC's federal jobs guarantee, with an added carve-out that all media outlets must hire an ideologically balanced staff). I'm not obligated to read a dumb, hypocritical Bari Weiss or Bret Stephens column for every Nathan J. Robinson article I read. If I pay to read The Atlantic, I'm entitled to tell them my opinion that I don't know what the **** they're doing by hiring a dumbass like Williamson. If I feel sufficiently strongly, I'm even entitled to cancel my subscription. None of this has "silenced" Williamson since he is, again, still publishing piping hot conservative takes over at the National Review (like "Netflix Must Cancel Obama", because of course there is nothing to conservative ideology anymore beyond trolling).

So what does the last paragraph have to do with him? Nothing. This was a shining example of "cancel culture" at work to the right, but that paragraph you point to has nothing to do with it.

That's because the letter is not about "cancel culture". It's about an extremely small subset of what the right refers to as "cancel culture". As best as I can tell, people holding up this letter saying "see, lefties?" (see also: "they trying to cancel Matt Yglesias now") are making a category error, because this letter simply isn't talking about the same phenomenon they are. The funny part is that there's probably legitimate areas of concern the letter is talking about, like firings in academia, which are far more problematic than a for-profit magazine deciding who writes for them - but conservatives, in their zeal to spike the football and say "told you so" over their totally unrelated pet peeves, will ironically end up preventing those real issues from actually being talked about, because they're more obsessed with Aunt Jemima and Paw Patrol.

And obviously there is also something at least a little self-serving about the last paragraph's carve-out for "writers" ("As writers, ..."). A bunch of writers sign a letter demanding stronger job security, wow, more news at 11.

Clearly people should be able to write bad takes and have the space to apologize and move on without facing "dire professional consequences", but like, how many of the signatories to this letter do you think would expect the right to write a piece like "On the many virtues of Adolf Hitler" and keep their jobs?

Again, it's not controversial to say that there's a line somewhere between "bad take" and "fired, because Hitler". This whole thing is obviously a fight about where the line is. There's nothing radical here.

As we have already established "The Right" is not the intended audience for the article, and in the first paragraph the authors acknowledge the right has their own version of cancel culture, which is also wrong.

You seem to be making some argument that if some random right wing troll on twitter (who is probably 50/50 chance of being a Russian or Chinese bot) can cynically support an argument, that argument must be invalid.

You seem to acknowledge the existence of a 3rd tribe ("CNN watching centrist", or whatever perjorative descriptor you choose), so given that maybe we should accept the article is written as an overture from that tribe (although it is seems a categorical error to put Matt Yglesias and Chomsky and I am sure many more of the signatories in this tribe) to the wokester tribe, and the right is not a part of it, and "whataboutism" isn't really relevant here.

Well, it seems you think this isn't a big deal because you perceive the line being close to where it should be. If the line was in the same place as Germany circa 1935 I don't think you would be so stoic about things.

Anyways, I take it that having a press relatively free from coercion (from government or the mob) is not a norm that you feel is particularly important to a functioning democratic state?

FWIW, I absolutely think that having a free press is important. My issue is extreme displeasure and concern with how the press have decided to exercise their relative freedom in my adult lifetime.

And yet most of this thread is people on the right trying to rightsplain the letter to lefties. This was your opening take here:

You took the letter's contents and put it through a typical right-wing "cancel culture" framing to write this. If you want us to not talk about the right, seems like you and itshot are just getting in the way tbh. I say this not to silence you, but because you're honestly getting in your own way if your desired result here is introspection by the left.

But since the actual introspection the letter requests here is so much more narrow then you want to see, I kinda doubt that's enough for you.

You're absolutely right - the line isn't in a particularly bad place right now. There are places on either side where it could be bad.

But like, what's your solution? "Abolish the line" is dumb and I don't think anyone's arguing for that anyway.

Ok, fine. You think it isn't a problem that a lot of MSM journalists feel they can't do their job properly right now due to censorship, and you aren't overly concerned this is leading us to a bad place no one wants to be. You and the 150 people who signed that letter will have to agree to disagree on that.

thankfully we have the tabloids to give us the real story without all that heinous CENSORSHIP that is going around.

i guess it is a cautionary tale..

first they came for the racists, the bigots, and those that push falsehoods as alternative facts and i did nothing..

Hahahahahahaha perfect, thanks man

It's "wave." You know, that thing you do with your hands.

I wonder what legitimate criticism of progressivism, progressives would accept. I can only think of one: Progressives are not progressive enough.

The Psychology of Progressive Hostility

----

from the same piece:

I guess I presumed too much knowledge of Rowling's situation on your part. No, I didn't single her out just because she's rich. I singled her out because she hasn't historically been much of one for being a free speech absolutist, but now, in the face of all the criticism she's brought down upon herself due to her hateful takes on trans women, she's all of a sudden a warrior against "cancel culture," as if she's a victim thereof. She isn't. She hasn't been canceled in any way, and all she has actually faced is a barrage of criticism from people who disagree with her. Even if you agree with her takes on trans women, do you think she deserves special protection from the criticism that has been directed at her? That would make you a proponent of cancellations, ones merely in the form of cancellations for critics you don't like, but prominence for billionaires who you agree with.
Just what do you think the following refers to?

The "calls for retribution" are exactly what I said: calls for boycotts, and the damage control of the institutional leaders are their responses to those criticisms and calls for boycotts. Boycotts are the only real retribution the critics on social media have, outside of outright calls for violence that are already illegal and don't need further tempering. If it is merely a request to boycott less, well, OK, but it's pretty silly to tell people that they shouldn't be offended by unspecified speech. Indeed, the argument being made seems to be that regardless of what speech or arguments were put forth, people should not wage these sorts of boycotts, as they are a threat:

You continue to deliberately misconstrue an analogy, "the marketplace of ideas," with literal free market capitalism. I have no intention of fighting against your straw man that supporting the rights of people to disagree with the prominent by means of boycotts or social media criticism necessarily is supporting unfettered capitalism. They're different things.
Another in your tortured false equivalences. If you're not going to make a better case, I'm not going to give it a better rebuttal.

If a publication produces material that some people find objectionable, what is the correct course of action? What alternative actions that have not been explored should be employed instead of, say, calls for a boycott on social media?

A complete fabrication.

I can't really stop people from having stupid or misguided or bad faith opinions.

Quillette ITT.

Since you like bonafides:

1. I love IHIV editing more quotes into his post as he reads the article, he clearly only started reading it at the same time he posted the link here lolol
2. There's a pretty obvious lack of self-awareness in this dude from the very start:

Yeah, and, uh, how does your political identity factor into this? The guy writing about "SJWs" in Quillette thinks it doesn't, and this is just the natural way of things: conservatives can listen, progressives can't.

What's likely happening here, that he seems oblivious to, is that people get more defensive when attacked by someone outside their own tribe than inside it. "So shocking that my political enemies get more defensive when I attack them than my own friends", wondered no one ever before this guy.

Anyone who thinks conservatives are better listeners is welcome to go start posting friendly liberal arguments on ChiefsPlanet and see how far you get.

We have to start with what your idea of a better listener is, because I'm almost positive, most progressives, at least on this forum, would identify that as agreeableness. Your idea of posting on CheifsPlanet demonstrate this. The idea is not necessarily to convince others, it's to comprehend the other side. What exactly does going to CheifsPlanet and arguing liberal ideas with a bunch of 'con's prove?

The part at the beginning I discussed was *specifically* about disagreeing with people, and how they react to being disagreed with.

Most people are reasonable when someone is disagreeing with them, especially on intellectual topics.