"Cancel culture" and the Harper's Letter on Open Debate
If you haven't read the Harper's "Letter on Justice and Open Debate," you really should. If you can't figure out where I stand here, you haven't been paying attention. Nevertheless, I have much to add because there is so much happening. There is the inevitable backlash, denial, hand-wringing, and whathaveyou. Because of course there is.
The signatories of the letter are a diverse lot. The original victim of cancel culture is there, of course. Salman Rushdie. Ideologically, they run the gamut from the far left to the far right, and no matter your political inclinations, there are people who signed the letter whom you detest for one reason or another. The question, of course, is whether or not you grant them the right to speak their minds anyway. That is the philosophical question of free speech. Not the governmental question of free speech, which is the dodge used by proponents of cancel culture. ("The first amendment only protects you from the government." Fine. Then you shut up.) Do you believe in the concept of free speech? Take government out of the equation, and do you grant people with whom you disagree the principled right to speak? Stop hiding behind the wording of the first amendment and address the philosophical principle of free speech. That document was a reflection of the principle, and either you believe in it, or you don't.
Because the list includes demons of every persuasion, there is the backlash. Notice, for example, that JK Rowling signed the letter. This meant that when Matthew Iglesias from Vox signed the letter, there was an actual, serious backlash among his colleagues, most vocally, Emily Todd VanDerWerff.
And of course, the forces of cancel culture have a variety of more generalized responses.
Let's start with a few basics of "cancel culture." This letter is really about cancel culture, and the practitioners and defenders of cancel culture have two lines about it, both of which must be addressed. First, they will say that there is no such thing as "cancel culture." Second, the other side is worse. Let's deal with them.
Cancel culture absolutely is real. Deniers are just plain lying. First, though, let's elaborate on the lie. The lie, in longer form, is as follows. "We don't want to silence anyone. We just want people to respect each other. There's no such thing as cancel culture or political correctness. There's just being respectful and being disrespectful." If you have been paying attention to this stuff, you have probably heard some variation of this. It is, of course, a shameless, Trumpian lie.
Her name was Isabel Fall.
You may have forgotten about Isabel Fall, or perhaps you never knew the name, but I won't forget what happened to her, and it is her prerogative whether or not she forgives, but what happened to her tells you everything you really need to know about cancel culture and what drives its participants.
Some time back, I did a series called "Virtue & virtue-signaling in science fiction and fantasy," which began with some discussion of the JK Rowling affair, and concluded with what happened to Isabel Fall. The links to the whole series are below, but the short version is as follows. Isabel Fall is a trans woman who wrote a short story for Clarkesworld as she was transitioning. The story was called, "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter." She took a trope used by opponents of the transgender rights movement and used it as a science fiction metaphor, claiming it for herself and using it as a literary device to explain how it feels to transition. The left-wing twitter mob, though, never read the story. They just read the title, and they brutalized her. They traumatized her, forced her to come out before she was ready, and forced the retraction of the story that they were too lazy and dishonest to read.
That means, yes, they canceled Isabel Fall. They canceled a trans woman as she was trying to deal with her transition through art because they were too mean-spirited, stupid, angry and self-righteous to read a damned story. A short story at that.
People make fun of Trump for being unable to read?
That's the short version. I did a long-form commentary of this, and other related issues in my "Virtue-signaling" series, links below. Point being, the lefties here want to pretend that they are on the side of goodness and light, and ignore what they did to Isabel Fall, and ignore the fact that they actually canceled her. Yes, they did. Big success for them there. Big success.
So here's the thing about canceling. The people who engage in cancel culture deny that "canceling" happens by pointing to their failures-- the celebrities they try and fail to cancel. They never acknowledge their successes. Like... Isabel Fall. Why don't they want to talk about Isabel Fall? Well, bullying and traumatizing a trans woman for the sake of defending trans people doesn't sound very "progressive," does it? That's because it isn't. It's just being a bunch of hypocritical bullies-- two things I hate most. But there's something else here. They love to point to their failures. They can't "cancel" anyone with a big name because once you have a name, you have a following, and money begets money. Isabel Fall was a nobody, and that was actually part of the point. It was a newly-created name because she was just starting to transition and hadn't fully come out yet. That meant the left-wing mob created some truly insane conspiracy theories, about which I wrote in my earlier series, but more importantly here, it meant she was easy to cancel.
And it meant that you didn't know about her in the first place, and you never heard about the cancelation. This is an important social scientific principle. If someone is big enough for you to know, that person can't be canceled. So, the participants in cancel culture will proudly point to their failure for a multitude of reasons, but strategically, it allows them a Trumpian denial that cancel culture even exists.
In contrast, you never see their successes because taking someone down requires that person to be small time in the first place. Like Isabel Fall. You don't know the person before the mob descends on that person, and you don't find out about it after the fact. Unless you happen to be in the narrow, little subculture or community involved. I know about Isabel Fall because I'm a sci-fi obsessive. Otherwise, I wouldn't know! That's the point. How many successes do you not know because the practitioners of cancel culture picked on someone small enough to take down?
Like Isabel Fall?
This is a social science observation in addition to a moral one. Remember Isabel Fall, and remember her any time one of these self-righteous rage machines denies that cancel culture exists. Then ask yourself how many other times they have succeeded in taking down someone else too small for you to know? That's how bullies work. And how many of them, like Isabel Fall, weren't just innocent, but were actually on the other side?
They bullied and traumatized a trans woman going through a transition.
Cancel culture doesn't merely exist-- it is the antithesis of what its practitioners claim to seek.
Remember Isabel Fall.
Next, practitioners of cancel culture defend themselves by saying that the other side is worse. They're fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. That's worse, and that means you shouldn't criticize them.
Let's deal with the completeness of the hypocrisy here, in addition to the lack of moral validity to the argument. If Person A commits a moral wrong, that has nothing to do with the moral wrongness of anything Person B does. That's... not hard. They are unrelated. If I point out that Person A does wrong, and you respond by saying, "but Person B did this other thing," that's a non-sequitur. There is no moral logic to that. It is pure distraction. It doesn't matter who Person A is, who person B is, nor what moral wrongs we insert into these statements. This is not a valid way to construct a moral argument.
The irony is that the left not only understands this, but applies this principle when arguing. They even have a shorthand. They refer to the fallacy as, "what-about-ism." Conservatives actually use "what-about-ism" as a distraction all the time. The worst of it is the "black-on-black crime" line. Point out some racial inequity, like police brutality, and you get something like, "what about black-on-black crime" from wide swaths of the conservative movement. This isn't just a "what-about-ism" fallacy, it's a racist "what-about-ism" fallacy. The prevalence of "what-about-ism" in conservative argumentation has necessitated a short-hand response, hence the term, "what-about-ism."
But you know what? If I point to incidents like Isabel Fall, and the practitioners of cancel culture respond with, "yeah, but racism and transphobia, and everything else!"... you know what they're doing? That's right. That's... what-about-ism. They don't want to let conservatives get away with it, and I'm not letting them get away with it. A fallacy is a fallacy is a fallacy. The reflexive property of moral logic.
Remember Isabel Fall. Do not excuse what happened to her, ask yourself how many similar incidents you don't know because bullies love to pick on those who are smaller, and never let anyone pull the "what-about" thing to draw attention away from cancel culture.
No. And "no" means no.
And yet, we have gotten to such an ugly place in political dialog that the mere act of signing a letter in favor of open debate is now perversely characterized as opposing free speech and attacking minorities. As I said, when Matthew Iglesias at Vox signed that letter, Emily Todd VanDerWerff took that as an attack on herself, as a trans woman. Problems ensued, and were it not for the fact that Iglesias is a close, personal friend of Ezra Klein-- they actually co-founded Vox together-- Iglesias could potentially have gotten into some real trouble, given that Vox, for its intellectualism, is regularly guilty of denying that political correctness or cancel culture exist. It is very much on the identity politics/political correctness side of left-wing politics. Iglesias took a real risk signing that letter, and it shouldn't have been a risk. Vox itself is keeping this off their main page, but if you want a write-up, you can click here. Yeah, it's Fox. Get over yourself. I have to read widely, and so can you.
As long as I am getting into this, though, I'm going to take a moment to recognize VanDerWerff for getting it right on Isabel Fall. When so many were too lazy to read her story, and just piled on, VanDerWerff read the story, appreciated it for what it was, and took Fall's side. I don't always agree with VanDerWerff, but this was a big one, and she got it right on a big one for me, so I do need to recognize that. You're on the side of angels there, Emily. Now, just take a moment to recognize the fact that you needed to be. What does it say that Isabel needed you? Yeah, you came to her defense, but what does it say that you had to?
Maybe it says that Iglesias had a real, legitimate reason to sign that letter.
And I think that this is a good place to wrap up my observations here. Emily Todd VanDerWerff's blindness on Isabel Fall. I wrote earlier in this post that it is easy to get away with the claim that there's no such thing as cancel culture when you don't know about cases like Isabel Fall, but... VanDerWerff clearly does know about Fall. Even more, she got it right on Isabel Fall. At some level, then, she knows that cancel culture goes too far. How, then, can such a person not recognize the need to step back from the brink of the twitter wars?
My concluding thoughts here are pretty simple. This is a minor, insignificant little blog in which I shout my annoyance into the void because what else am I going to do while drinking my Saturday and Sunday morning coffee? Writin's fun. This blog isn't going to change minds, not just because nobody reads it, but because snark doesn't change minds. It's just fun to write, and perhaps fun to read if you already agree, or enjoy hate-reading.
But... cancel culture doesn't merely not change minds. [Pauses for awkward grammar...] It actually can cause backlash. Political correctness polls pretty badly, and it doesn't even really unify Democrats very effectively. When you make people feel like they can't say anything... they don't like that. Isabel Fall couldn't write a short story about transitioning without her own side brutalizing her.
Donald Trump tells more lies than any human being who ever lived, but there really is a faction that will look for reasons to attack you for speaking, even when your speech is innocent. See: Fall, Isabel. So, when Trump tells people that this is happening, his motives are as impure as everything else about him, but he's not wrong. A clock with hands that jump around randomly in response to quantum mechanical principles will eventually be right, despite its best efforts to be wrong at all times. So it is when Trump decries political correctness. And while plenty of racist and otherwise bigoted people flock to the avatar of white grievance under false pretenses, cancel culture strengthens his hand.
Don't give Donald Trump any more cards to play. Stop helping him.
Oh, and this blog and everything in it are protected by academic freedom. In tenure veritas.
"Virtue & virtue-signaling in science fiction & fantasy" series links
Part I
Part II: Definitions and the good stuff
Part III: The rise of Seth Dickinson
Part IV: The fall of Seth Dickinson
Part V: Isabel Fall, attack helicopters, and why we can't have nice things
Part VI: Coda on N.K. Jemisin
There were a few "preview" and other dithering posts between, but these are the main posts with my primary observations.
The signatories of the letter are a diverse lot. The original victim of cancel culture is there, of course. Salman Rushdie. Ideologically, they run the gamut from the far left to the far right, and no matter your political inclinations, there are people who signed the letter whom you detest for one reason or another. The question, of course, is whether or not you grant them the right to speak their minds anyway. That is the philosophical question of free speech. Not the governmental question of free speech, which is the dodge used by proponents of cancel culture. ("The first amendment only protects you from the government." Fine. Then you shut up.) Do you believe in the concept of free speech? Take government out of the equation, and do you grant people with whom you disagree the principled right to speak? Stop hiding behind the wording of the first amendment and address the philosophical principle of free speech. That document was a reflection of the principle, and either you believe in it, or you don't.
Because the list includes demons of every persuasion, there is the backlash. Notice, for example, that JK Rowling signed the letter. This meant that when Matthew Iglesias from Vox signed the letter, there was an actual, serious backlash among his colleagues, most vocally, Emily Todd VanDerWerff.
And of course, the forces of cancel culture have a variety of more generalized responses.
Let's start with a few basics of "cancel culture." This letter is really about cancel culture, and the practitioners and defenders of cancel culture have two lines about it, both of which must be addressed. First, they will say that there is no such thing as "cancel culture." Second, the other side is worse. Let's deal with them.
Cancel culture absolutely is real. Deniers are just plain lying. First, though, let's elaborate on the lie. The lie, in longer form, is as follows. "We don't want to silence anyone. We just want people to respect each other. There's no such thing as cancel culture or political correctness. There's just being respectful and being disrespectful." If you have been paying attention to this stuff, you have probably heard some variation of this. It is, of course, a shameless, Trumpian lie.
Her name was Isabel Fall.
You may have forgotten about Isabel Fall, or perhaps you never knew the name, but I won't forget what happened to her, and it is her prerogative whether or not she forgives, but what happened to her tells you everything you really need to know about cancel culture and what drives its participants.
Some time back, I did a series called "Virtue & virtue-signaling in science fiction and fantasy," which began with some discussion of the JK Rowling affair, and concluded with what happened to Isabel Fall. The links to the whole series are below, but the short version is as follows. Isabel Fall is a trans woman who wrote a short story for Clarkesworld as she was transitioning. The story was called, "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter." She took a trope used by opponents of the transgender rights movement and used it as a science fiction metaphor, claiming it for herself and using it as a literary device to explain how it feels to transition. The left-wing twitter mob, though, never read the story. They just read the title, and they brutalized her. They traumatized her, forced her to come out before she was ready, and forced the retraction of the story that they were too lazy and dishonest to read.
That means, yes, they canceled Isabel Fall. They canceled a trans woman as she was trying to deal with her transition through art because they were too mean-spirited, stupid, angry and self-righteous to read a damned story. A short story at that.
People make fun of Trump for being unable to read?
That's the short version. I did a long-form commentary of this, and other related issues in my "Virtue-signaling" series, links below. Point being, the lefties here want to pretend that they are on the side of goodness and light, and ignore what they did to Isabel Fall, and ignore the fact that they actually canceled her. Yes, they did. Big success for them there. Big success.
So here's the thing about canceling. The people who engage in cancel culture deny that "canceling" happens by pointing to their failures-- the celebrities they try and fail to cancel. They never acknowledge their successes. Like... Isabel Fall. Why don't they want to talk about Isabel Fall? Well, bullying and traumatizing a trans woman for the sake of defending trans people doesn't sound very "progressive," does it? That's because it isn't. It's just being a bunch of hypocritical bullies-- two things I hate most. But there's something else here. They love to point to their failures. They can't "cancel" anyone with a big name because once you have a name, you have a following, and money begets money. Isabel Fall was a nobody, and that was actually part of the point. It was a newly-created name because she was just starting to transition and hadn't fully come out yet. That meant the left-wing mob created some truly insane conspiracy theories, about which I wrote in my earlier series, but more importantly here, it meant she was easy to cancel.
And it meant that you didn't know about her in the first place, and you never heard about the cancelation. This is an important social scientific principle. If someone is big enough for you to know, that person can't be canceled. So, the participants in cancel culture will proudly point to their failure for a multitude of reasons, but strategically, it allows them a Trumpian denial that cancel culture even exists.
In contrast, you never see their successes because taking someone down requires that person to be small time in the first place. Like Isabel Fall. You don't know the person before the mob descends on that person, and you don't find out about it after the fact. Unless you happen to be in the narrow, little subculture or community involved. I know about Isabel Fall because I'm a sci-fi obsessive. Otherwise, I wouldn't know! That's the point. How many successes do you not know because the practitioners of cancel culture picked on someone small enough to take down?
Like Isabel Fall?
This is a social science observation in addition to a moral one. Remember Isabel Fall, and remember her any time one of these self-righteous rage machines denies that cancel culture exists. Then ask yourself how many other times they have succeeded in taking down someone else too small for you to know? That's how bullies work. And how many of them, like Isabel Fall, weren't just innocent, but were actually on the other side?
They bullied and traumatized a trans woman going through a transition.
Cancel culture doesn't merely exist-- it is the antithesis of what its practitioners claim to seek.
Remember Isabel Fall.
Next, practitioners of cancel culture defend themselves by saying that the other side is worse. They're fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. That's worse, and that means you shouldn't criticize them.
Let's deal with the completeness of the hypocrisy here, in addition to the lack of moral validity to the argument. If Person A commits a moral wrong, that has nothing to do with the moral wrongness of anything Person B does. That's... not hard. They are unrelated. If I point out that Person A does wrong, and you respond by saying, "but Person B did this other thing," that's a non-sequitur. There is no moral logic to that. It is pure distraction. It doesn't matter who Person A is, who person B is, nor what moral wrongs we insert into these statements. This is not a valid way to construct a moral argument.
The irony is that the left not only understands this, but applies this principle when arguing. They even have a shorthand. They refer to the fallacy as, "what-about-ism." Conservatives actually use "what-about-ism" as a distraction all the time. The worst of it is the "black-on-black crime" line. Point out some racial inequity, like police brutality, and you get something like, "what about black-on-black crime" from wide swaths of the conservative movement. This isn't just a "what-about-ism" fallacy, it's a racist "what-about-ism" fallacy. The prevalence of "what-about-ism" in conservative argumentation has necessitated a short-hand response, hence the term, "what-about-ism."
But you know what? If I point to incidents like Isabel Fall, and the practitioners of cancel culture respond with, "yeah, but racism and transphobia, and everything else!"... you know what they're doing? That's right. That's... what-about-ism. They don't want to let conservatives get away with it, and I'm not letting them get away with it. A fallacy is a fallacy is a fallacy. The reflexive property of moral logic.
Remember Isabel Fall. Do not excuse what happened to her, ask yourself how many similar incidents you don't know because bullies love to pick on those who are smaller, and never let anyone pull the "what-about" thing to draw attention away from cancel culture.
No. And "no" means no.
And yet, we have gotten to such an ugly place in political dialog that the mere act of signing a letter in favor of open debate is now perversely characterized as opposing free speech and attacking minorities. As I said, when Matthew Iglesias at Vox signed that letter, Emily Todd VanDerWerff took that as an attack on herself, as a trans woman. Problems ensued, and were it not for the fact that Iglesias is a close, personal friend of Ezra Klein-- they actually co-founded Vox together-- Iglesias could potentially have gotten into some real trouble, given that Vox, for its intellectualism, is regularly guilty of denying that political correctness or cancel culture exist. It is very much on the identity politics/political correctness side of left-wing politics. Iglesias took a real risk signing that letter, and it shouldn't have been a risk. Vox itself is keeping this off their main page, but if you want a write-up, you can click here. Yeah, it's Fox. Get over yourself. I have to read widely, and so can you.
As long as I am getting into this, though, I'm going to take a moment to recognize VanDerWerff for getting it right on Isabel Fall. When so many were too lazy to read her story, and just piled on, VanDerWerff read the story, appreciated it for what it was, and took Fall's side. I don't always agree with VanDerWerff, but this was a big one, and she got it right on a big one for me, so I do need to recognize that. You're on the side of angels there, Emily. Now, just take a moment to recognize the fact that you needed to be. What does it say that Isabel needed you? Yeah, you came to her defense, but what does it say that you had to?
Maybe it says that Iglesias had a real, legitimate reason to sign that letter.
And I think that this is a good place to wrap up my observations here. Emily Todd VanDerWerff's blindness on Isabel Fall. I wrote earlier in this post that it is easy to get away with the claim that there's no such thing as cancel culture when you don't know about cases like Isabel Fall, but... VanDerWerff clearly does know about Fall. Even more, she got it right on Isabel Fall. At some level, then, she knows that cancel culture goes too far. How, then, can such a person not recognize the need to step back from the brink of the twitter wars?
My concluding thoughts here are pretty simple. This is a minor, insignificant little blog in which I shout my annoyance into the void because what else am I going to do while drinking my Saturday and Sunday morning coffee? Writin's fun. This blog isn't going to change minds, not just because nobody reads it, but because snark doesn't change minds. It's just fun to write, and perhaps fun to read if you already agree, or enjoy hate-reading.
But... cancel culture doesn't merely not change minds. [Pauses for awkward grammar...] It actually can cause backlash. Political correctness polls pretty badly, and it doesn't even really unify Democrats very effectively. When you make people feel like they can't say anything... they don't like that. Isabel Fall couldn't write a short story about transitioning without her own side brutalizing her.
Donald Trump tells more lies than any human being who ever lived, but there really is a faction that will look for reasons to attack you for speaking, even when your speech is innocent. See: Fall, Isabel. So, when Trump tells people that this is happening, his motives are as impure as everything else about him, but he's not wrong. A clock with hands that jump around randomly in response to quantum mechanical principles will eventually be right, despite its best efforts to be wrong at all times. So it is when Trump decries political correctness. And while plenty of racist and otherwise bigoted people flock to the avatar of white grievance under false pretenses, cancel culture strengthens his hand.
Don't give Donald Trump any more cards to play. Stop helping him.
Oh, and this blog and everything in it are protected by academic freedom. In tenure veritas.
"Virtue & virtue-signaling in science fiction & fantasy" series links
Part I
Part II: Definitions and the good stuff
Part III: The rise of Seth Dickinson
Part IV: The fall of Seth Dickinson
Part V: Isabel Fall, attack helicopters, and why we can't have nice things
Part VI: Coda on N.K. Jemisin
There were a few "preview" and other dithering posts between, but these are the main posts with my primary observations.
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