Annotated 31-11
The larger plot here means I’m on Shanna’s side, of course (Right that wrong! Right that wrong!), and I don’t mind when she deploys a little guilt bomb in panel 5. But I definitely get where Joel’s coming from. He wants to help because he just likes to help people he meets. But you meet a lot of people at cons who are a little off-center, and that was true even before the current age of rampant disinformation. You gotta be careful not to get recruited into anything too crazy, especially when people can tag you in selfies. “With @JoelWatson, who supports our quest to free the millions of people being abducted into tubes and converted into nutrients every day! #StopTheMeal”
And that’s true even for those of us who don’t have a family. The references to Joel’s are significant now and will be more important later.
The last panel is an interesting clash of perspectives. For the purpose of this story, as in the real-life HiJinks Ensue podcast, Joel took on some of the roles and responsibilities of a journalist. But a dyed-in-the-wool journalist would never refer to an interview subject as one of their “fans.” Shanna no doubt has a few opinions about the blurring of lines between journalist and internet microcelebrity and what that means for the field she passionately practices. But that isn’t exactly Joel’s fault either. Sometimes you just have to work with the world you’ve got.
“Ah yes, privacy… I remember that…”
It should be said though, that getting “tagged” in a selfie with a “looney” would be a lot less of an issue if people took time to be rational about everything rather than dive into “cancel culture” and push for people to lose their (often unrelated) jobs etc. based on an opinion they MIGHT have. When you’ve got socialized McCarthyism driving blacklists and harassment it doesn’t often give time for people to explain or even distance themselves from whatever the wrongthink of the day is.
Plus “#StopTheMeal” might start trending sooner than you think with Bill Gates pushing “synthesized beef” (thanks Popular Mechanics!)… I must say I liked him better when he stuck to stealing… er… designing Operating Systems than his current apparent desire to dictate the peoples health and dietary regimes. Which, incidentally wraps back around to the first point…
“Ah yes, privacy… I remember that…”
Oh my. You went all-out at the nutbar buffet, didn’t you?
It can’t be helped that people with the combination of an irrepressible personality and problematic attitudes will find a way to complain about a lack of privacy in a public space, within the confines of a public space.
Irony has no sense of propriety.
Not the argument I was making though was it? There were two points made. First, was that people “self-censor” or expressly try to limit other people’s views in relation to themselves in order to avoid “guilt by association” with whatever is deemed “politically incorrect” at the time, because that “guilt by association” is the sort of thing that leads to, for a recent example, death threats being sent to Trump’s Impeachment lawyers (and others), which, regardless of what you feel about Trump, is uncalled for. Or firing an actress from a show that has nothing to do with modern politics. Etc. Disagreeing with people is fine… or at least it is supposed to be.
The second is that Bill Gates is a jerk that, having his way, would require everyone to take his experimental vaccines, eat synthetic meat (according to an article in Popular Mechanics, a magazine), and the tracked and traced constantly by the government… thus ignoring both “informed consent” when it comes to medicine and invading everyone’s privacy.
Try not to conflate the two.
Both points are ignorant paranoid crazy-talk, so how on earth would you ever be able to tell if they’ve been conflated?
Yeah, that was…. oof. Hopefully they’re going for parody, but Poe’s law means that’s a terrible idea these days.
You do realize that ad-hominem is not a valid argument from a logical perspective, yes? Have you ever considered adressing the content instead of attacking the person?
You need to read up on your logic…
An ad hominem is judging your argument by your character or something pertaining to it.
Judging your mental capacity by the quality of your output is the OPPOSITE of a fallacy : it’s an essential heuristic.
It is indeed necessary to disregard insane arguments, and by that measure, the makers of such arguments.
Again I have to ask, why is it always people who have no understanding of logic that are the first to invoke its name?
Oh, right, it’s because they have no understanding of it.
Do you?
The concept of “cancel culture”, at least as popularized by the usual talking heads, conflates the problem of corporate/executive decision-making with ideas about the so-called “court of popular opinion” – two very distinct, often opposite, and hardly novel social forces, which have little in the way of shared or even roughly adjacent interests, outside of marketing/image considerations (and, ever more rarely, class-action lawsuits).
Which is not to say that these forces can *never* act in common cause – but “influencers”, private detectives, corporate espionage, and thugs of various stripes have been around for a lot longer than the internet, which is why journalism is a tradition and not some newfangled response to them.
The internet did not invent these trades, or provide them agendas on a silver platter, it simply makes their work more complicated – and makes the distinction between a professional and an armchair practitioner a little more blurry. (If you’re looking to read anything between the lines here, it should be that fewer people are getting paid to do those jobs, so a good proportion are less likely to do them well.)
To wit, if people “took the time to be rational about everything”, ever in history, then you might not ever have heard the terms “rabble-rouser”, “pundit”, “scandal”, or “character assassination”, or seen their use recorded before the dawn of telecommunications – which your own autobiographical references indicate you certainly should recall.
This is not to say no one has ever been fired or lost face over a misapprehension of circumstances, or over lies and rumors circulating, but it is hardly “the problem of our time” that you’re making it out to be, and there are plenty of legitimate cases of bad actors being punished for actions that are perfectly well-documented and understood, which claims of “cancel culture” alone are at best insufficient to brush under the rug.
So what I’m getting at is, legitimate grievances against “cancel culture” are both 1) far outnumbered by the number of legitimate grievances the label has been falsely used to try and dismiss, and 2) rarely given the publicity they deserve, because the majority of the legitimate victims of it are without substantial public platforms – like minorities and the people society tends to marginalize.
Thanks, thoughtful and… dare I say, rational.
I try – occasionally.
People frequently bring up John Stuart Mills’ argument against censorship, as a reason to forcibly tolerate all views no matter how harmful.
JSM had his moments, no doubt about it, his argument about why we cannot look at what women choose to study in a sexist society as evidence for a “natural tendencies” – similar to how a coerced choice is not evidence of a desired choice.
But his argument against censorship was sorely lacking.
Poor devil lived in a time where, by royal decree, valid ideas were shot down for political reasons.
He could scarcely have imagined a time like today, where meritless ideas are buoyed by politics.
If he had, it would only have taken a passing understanding of signal-to-noise ratios to see why good ideas do not win out in an atmosphere of complete freedom of speech.
Today we know for a fact that if bad ideas are not pushed aside, the literally infinite number of them, compared to the very limited number of less-wrong-than-present-thought ideas will ensure a backwards slide into ignorance.
A precipice we find ourselves at the edge of, still.
So, if anything, we should demand MORE cancel culture, not less.
People should be very afraid of saying the wrong things, at least until such a time as we’ve rooted out the Mercers and Limbaughs and ended their ability to boost hateful nonsense.
I see. “It’s happened before so stop complaining!”
Is honestly what your reply comes off as. I thought the point was to keep voicing our opinions until things improve, not to shrug our shoulders and move on with life… If there’s a difference today however… it’s how open it all is, and how centralized control of information is relative to the past (before modern technology). And how much people like you defend it.
Sure, stuff like this happened in the ’20s and ’30s especially, for recent history… but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
I I were to wager a guess, you were supposed to read it as “You’re wrong, actually, and you’re also shouting wolf about a non-existing problem – if anything we should root out the fascist nutbars FASTER, not slower”.
To everyone else reading this, I would like to point out the paradox of tolerance, whereby trying to speak sense to the intolerant is actually morally impermissible.
Just throw the boot at them and be done with them.
“if people took time to be rational about everything”, you’d have a lot of important problems solved instantly. Add to that people always being empathetic and we’re basically in heaven.
Like, I understand what you mean, but: Nobody is rational about anything, most of the time. That includes both you and myself. Believing oneself to be rational about everything (or even a majority of things) is a really good starting point for going to very very irrational places. Nope. Hopes, fears, emotions and personal preferences determine our decisions way more than anything else, and provide an extremely good motivation to cover up the logical fallacies we use to justify those decisions to ourselves.
All of which is not to say that people never overreacted in public spheres. It’s however usually only a small number of (loud) people, and I think there’s a reason why some of them are so on edge that they blow up so quickly. If you have a wound that can’t heal because someone or other keeps prodding it, you too might become prone to overreacting the next time somebody goes near it. And to anyone who didn’t know about your wound, it would look very very stupid.
Emotions are important. I’m not saying I’ve “always been rational” or anything like that. But rationally approaching a subject, particularly subjects regarding censorship, firing people, etc. where you explicitly have the time to sit down and talk/think things through before acting (compared to someone attacking your physically etc.)? It’s something that should be aimed for, not merely ignored in favor of emotional kneejerk reactions.
If people are wounded, it’s understandable that they react… but it’s not an excuse to go about wounding others in response. However, a vocal minority can easily cause grievous wounds if no one else speaks out against irrational responses. Indeed, a vocal minority can cause great harm to everyone including themselves if others are unwilling or unable to speak…
“Yeah… yeah. I remember that guy. How could I not? He actually bought a T-shirt. If only more of them did that *shoots an accusing glare at the audience*”