Whats the difference between having sex and being a sexual predator?
Do you just make things up as you go?
The frightening thing about "cancel culture" isnt that its new or eye-opening. Its has always existed, sandboxed, in places called school playgrounds. The world have adults has this annoying thing called due process. Filing cases, going to court, giving evidence etc etc.
Now that the playground rules are stating to proliferate into adult spaces, companies - surprisingly - have started to use playground platforms to make -what used to be - adult decisions about who to fire, who to buy from, whose services to use...from a 240 character platform. No due process, no due diligence, nothing. Just tweets.
> Whats the difference between having sex and being a sexual predator?
I don't think it's necessary to answer this because "sexual predator" was literally Noah's description of himself and his behavior (in those words) in the apology post that led to Wizards no longer wanting to work with him.
I mean, "angry mobs" have always existed as you said yourself. They didn't seep into "adult spaces", they've always been there. We don't need to blame Twitter, the Internet as a whole, anonymous communication platforms or anything else for human nature.
The fight against cancel culture is a fight against people doing things. It's literally that. "Cancelling" is just a framing device for a myriad of behaviors and reasoning behind those behaviors. If this post gets downvotes, "cancel culture". If OP's post gets a bunch of negative comments, "cancel culture".
TL;dr- There's never been an egalitarian, logic-only meritocracy, in human history, and people getting upset that there isn't one is as reasonable a choice as other people deciding to "cancel" someone.
I recently had a mentally ill family member try to work up a mob to get another family member fired from their job over some perceived slight. This person was able to get attention from media figures on Facebook who were interested in writing a story. They attempted to make noise on Twitter using the employer's account.
I don't think anyone had tools like this at their disposal in the 1990s. You could call up someone's employer and lie about an employee saying something bad about immigrants at a birthday party and they'd probably just hang up on you or threaten to call the police for harassment.
I was commenting on the causal relationship. The fact that vigilante social pressure is easier today is technically true, but not really addressing my point about the fact that people wanted (and did) do this. Your example is a guess. I promise you, in 1990 if I wanted to ruin someone's life, I could have (go check out the movie Fear).
The Salem Witch Trials were cancel culture. Jim Crow lynch mobs were cancel culture. The Red Scare was cancel culture. Same idea, new execution.
That's an odd strawman. I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.
>> I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.
> I wouldn't be poor in the first place!
> I wouldn't be sick in the first place!
> I wouldn't be in their shoes in the first place!
I hear this said a lot today by people I grew up with. No dude, I was there. I remember how much you loved to tell racist jokes. Not one example, dozens.
The point is: In a society in which we have violent factions opposing one another on an single basic idea, what sins are truly and permanently unforgivable by a society? We would all seem to agreed that a legal framework is more valuable than vigilante justice, but people on all sides admit the courts don't work all the time. What is the right choice? And can offenders reform?
For example, I'm of the (extremely unpopular) opinion that we're too hard on sex criminals. The framework the US has put together doesn't just not help reformation, but in many ways encourages recidivism by limiting employment and housing options. But what's the right choice? Am I right because I'm backed by dozens of studies by social scientists? Or is the local parent mob right to "protect their children" by keeping laws on the books that keep sex offenders in the fringes of community? If a child molester gets off on a technicality, is the victim's father who murders him a hero or a villain?
What about other crimes? In China you can go to jail for 10 days without prosecution for possessing pot. Here in NJ I can smoke a blunt on my front lawn as a police parade goes by and I'm fine. Who is right?
IDK, I'm just rambling at this point. This whole debate is so stupid and circular and hypocritical and fluid on all sides.
No. Because we all behave incorrectly and cause harm -- most of us at some points in our life, serious, grave, harm even -- we should not cast out anyone who has from society and say "well, if you don't want to be cast out from society don't behave incorrectly." Because we all would be. (Someone that runs a red light can run over a pedestrian, and sometimes do, it's not thing separate from causing grave harm...)
This isn't talking about "forgiving" at all, in fact. i think the only person who can "forgive" someone who has done harm is the person they have done harm to, that's not even in the capacity of anyone else to do, is it?
This is, by the way, very related to "abolish prisons/policing" stuff.
When someone has done grave harm, and the recommended response is to try to keep anyone else from employing, doing business with, or even socializing with them -- what is the goal, what do you expect to accomplish? Preventing them from doing further harm? Repairing the harm done to those who had harm done to them? Making it less likely others will do harm? Just pure vengeance? Which of these are accomplished, how well, by this technique? What kind of community or society is creating, knowing that we will all do harm and all have harm done to us?
Some people had the norms change out from under them. In the past the societal norm was that Women were supposed to be shy and demure and pretend to be uninterested in sex. The men were supposed to take charge and "conquer".
Nowadays we know this is dumb and causes tons of unwanted harassment. People changed and made the world a better place, which was great. Then we went back and started prosecuting people for doing what they were told they were supposed to be doing at the time. This is why we have grandfather clauses in the law.
The difference between Sexual Harassment and Flirting is if the other person is into it.
I have never been a sexual predator and will commit to never being one in the future. This is something I would wager the vast, vast majority of the public can commit to too. This is not something weird or out of the ordinary.
This is really the chief danger here - it's the ability to retroactively label anything as predatory. You don't actually have to be guilty; in fact, what's perhaps the most dangerous aspect is that you don't have to have even been a party to the matter, innocent or not. Someone who just plain doesn't like you can levy an accusation, and even if you've literally never interacted with them in your life, you're guilty. I've seen it happen firsthand.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
This behavior really has nothing to do with the nature of the crime at hand; it's been used to discriminate against people by race, by gender, by interest, by religion - by just about anything. Giving human beings the ability to arbitrarily punish other humans, without recourse, is obscenely dangerous.
Should everyone who has ever behaved inappropriately in that area lose their employment when their behavior comes to light? Does it matter if they've since stopped behaving like that? Where do you draw the line? Should they be excluded from productive society altogether if one instance of misbehavior can be found, at any time in the past? Is that best?
Surely that's up to their employers to decide. I don't think anyone should feel obliged to employ Noah Bradley just because you happen to think that his apology is sincere.
Your point well taken, but my issue is not so much that these companies decided to terminate his employment. I think that was cowardly and in essence caving to an imaginary mob, but let's leave that aside.
My contention is that this whole spiraled up from discovery of some bad behavior from the past, that seems to have been inflated into an exaggerated character assassination.
My contention with the grandparent comment is that "just don't be x" is not really an option if we are seeking redemption for past sins.
I think the point in this case is pretty simple. A company can't employ this guy and also credibly claim to be concerned about creating a safe environment for women at conferences and other events. There's nothing 'exaggerated' about that.
Sometimes actions have long-lasting consequences. Apologies can't magically wash those away.
There is an assumption being used by these companies, and Twitter generally, that I disagree with: "Once someone has behaved in a certain way, they can never be trusted not to behave in that way again".
I think people are judging on a case by case basis. But in general, if you do something very bad, it is very difficult to persuade people that you've genuinely changed. How could it be otherwise?
Try thinking about it with Noah replaced by one of HN’s favorite ‘bad guys’. Facebook periodically puts out statements saying “Oops, sorry, but don’t worry – we totally respect privacy now”. How long would it take for you to believe that Facebook had really changed? How would you feel about a privacy conference accepting sponsorship from Facebook, and justifying this decision by pointing to one of the apologetic statements?
