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Popehat did, I think, an excellent job of it, even though he doesn't believe this is synonymous with cancel culture:

> some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency



I largely agree. But this is an awful lot of faff to ultimately agree with their concept but complain about their scope.

We can all agree there is a problem. Why wait for your political opposition to give you the correct parameters before you start solving it?


Because "solving it" can look radically different depending on the definition or group trying to do the "solving." Platforms enforcing their terms of service to ban, say, holocaust deniers, is not what I consider "cancel culture," but a lot of people on the right would disagree.

Similarly, I think that David Shor was unfairly maligned and fired over hugely disingenuous misreadings of his work, but how do you solve that in any meaningful way? I don't think we should make "twitter user" a protected class, but I fail to see how else you can realistically prevent businesses from responding (read: caving in) to bad PR.


I feel like he just kicked the can down the road and introduced additional ambiguities by invoking the concepts of norms and decency. Both of which are very contextual and highly variable.


Some are disproportionately harsh. Some are disproportionately lenient. Some are just right. Popehat has discovered that human perception is subjective and imperfect. Wait until he discovers this applies to literally everything.




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