"some position of power or responsibility" has an explicit bias that only those in power can be cancelled. Those who are oppressed have no power, and so cannot be cancelled, yes?
Or do you mean any position except the absolute lowest has some power? If so, then it seems that "power" isn't really useful description.
For that matter, who tends to have power - left-leaning or right-leaning people? Men or women? Blacks or white? Doesn't this cause a sample bias?
Furthermore, some of the claims of cancel culture are because of cases where the action they took is due to "predictive power..." To pick one of your examples, the "Joint statement on the GNU Project" argued that Stallman was not appropriate as the head of the FSF because "the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to".
And yes, Stallman's alienating behavior was well known, but protected by his position of power. So why do you think this is "cancel culture" rather than a disagreement over what is acceptable levels of alienating behavior?
Or, to go to the Stephen Pinker example I started off with, the argument was that Pinker should only not have special standing in the LSA because of his "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them" conflict with the goals of the LSA.
In any case, that didn't happen, so by your definition it wasn't a cancelling. And arguing that this proposal shouldn't have been made in the first place because it's intrinsically "cancel culture" sounds very much like wanting to suppress free speech and dialog - so long as it concerns criticizing people with power.
Lastly, your definition at "cancel culture" means that J. K. Rowling is certainly not being cancelled. She has no "position of power or responsibility". What she has is a lot of fame and money, and the free market says there's no reason people need to keep buying her works.
> Right wing cancellations are not a current problem.
Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel for the pledge does not affect his ability to play football. How do you explain the wide-spread antagonism toward him, including by our ex-president, as other than part of right-wing cancellation?
Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at a CPAC meeting until it was found out that he thinks that consensual pedophilia (with 13.y.o.s) can be beneficial. CPAC withdraw his speaking spot. How is this not right-wing cancellation?
When you apply your definition, as stated, you'll see that it applies all over the place. When a politician or CEO decides to step down after a secret affair is made public, well, how does that have predictive power on being fit to perform? Do you think people would be fine if it were a public mistress instead, where the wife knows about it? Because it doesn't seem that way. (And this is "right" only in the sense that the right has the strong public stance against extramarital sex .. unless you're Trump, in which case sex with porn stars is hunky dory.)
> Cherry picked from what?
Most of those I've heard before, which is why I didn't need to do research about (eg) Stallman or donglegate.
I figure if it's really common there should be thousands of such stories, rather than the handful of ones repeated over and over.
> even among some of the most prominent left wing leaders, cancel culture is a problem
1) Obama is not a left-wing leader, he's a centrist, and an ex-leader. 2) Chomsky at best is only a thought leader these days - you have to go to places like Democracy Now to hear him. 3) powerful people fear popular criticism, film at 11. 4) Cancel culture is so ill-defined that everyone can be against it without having agreement on what it means.
> Why is that relevant?
Some people pick and choose what they want from MLK, like his "I Have A Dream" speech, where they oppose any sort of racial justice by saying that would depend on the color one's skin, which goes counter to MLK's dream. They then ignore almost everything else MLK argued for, including racial justice.
If you're picking Chomsky because you agree with him on this one case, but not in any other case, then why not just say the reason why you agree with Chomsky, rather than argue by authority?
> 4 .... the only way to remain a philosopher is to never make a morally wrong argument.
Pardon!? I said that you should face repercussions for making a factually wrong argument. The earth is not flat. If your serious philosophical argument depends on the earth being flat, you should be ridiculed. We know without a scientific doubt that more than two genders exist and we know of cultures which recognize or recognized two genders. Therefore, a philosophical argument based on the invalid statement that there are only two genders is factually incorrect and should be judged accordingly.
> 5. On the twitter link
Yes, but where's the "cancel culture"? Your definition says "removed from some position of power or responsibility despite the action they took having no predictive power in deciding whether they are fit to perform in their position of power or responsibility."
Who has been removed from power?
My quick reading of the paper was that it's wrong, for exactly the same reasons you think the professor's email is right - "Black" is not a biological race, it's a social construct. The data used to determine "black" in that study is a US cultural definition. Under US tradition, 1/4 African and 3/4 European is black, even though genetically it's 3/4 white. So it's bad analysis, and much more likely a proxy for wealth and social status.
And if that criticism is valid, isn't that directly relevant to the quality of the research?
> 6. professor's email
Shrug My reading from the link you gave was that his response was structured similar to how people argue that we can't provide reparations for slavery and Jim Crow because it's too complicated to figure out who was "really" affected and who wasn't. But frankly, I don't care enough to look into the story - college students have so little power anyway, and so far we haven't seen if the professor has lost his position.
> 7. How [Stallman's] political musings predict
It wasn't about Stallman's political musings. See above. And below.
> 10. On donglegate
Who lost their positions of power or responsibility? Of the three people, one man and the woman lost their jobs. So 'position of power or responsibility' includes having any sort of job, right?
The man who was fired says the woman "every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Adria_Richards_... reports that he quickly found re-employment while the woman did not. Her employer was DDoS attacked by people who did not think the complaint was appropriate and wanted to see her fired.
So if donglegate is part of cancel culture, why didn't you recognize this as a right-wing cancellation issue.
Oh, other examples of right-wing cancel culture: Gamergate and Sad/Rapid Puppies.
> 11. left wing actions resulting in negative consequences
Yet you'll notice the outrage machine, most often backed by the right, doesn't bring up these examples.
Personally, I would rather characterize them as "negative consequences from speaking out" than "cancel culture" since my description seems to make more sense.
> 12. I don't think [Stallman's] accuser suffers any negative effects for being ignored
What accuser are you talking about?
I thought you were talking about his email at MIT in a message thread urging "MIT students to speak out against the university’s relationship with Epstein and the culture it had of covering that up." (Quoting https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient... ). Minsky was tangentially involved, and Stallman in that thread ineptly defended Minksy with very bad timing. As Minsky was no longer there to protect his position at MIT - Stallman needed that protection because of his long-time alienating behavior - Stallman was pressured to resign. This was part of the process that lead to Stallman stepping down from the FSF.
But you seem to specifically be talking about his position with the FSF, and I don't know those details, or what specific accuser you refer to.
> 13. On American history being full of examples of the right winger cancelling people.
You only summarized half my statement. The other half of the quote was anti-both-siderism: "one that occasionally gets crossed by the so-called left wing, it is almost invariably true that the real cancel culture is perpetrated by those who have embraced the term."
You clearly don't agree with me that the large majority of 'cancel culture', in any meaningful definition of the term, much more often applies to the actions of the right.
> why are we doing it?
Why are you recycling paper cups instead of taking real action on environmental protection? Because it's easy for management to say/do.
How about, why did you wait so long to make the change? Drupal changed its terms over a decade ago, Django some 6 years ago.
But hey, I'm a Mercurial user so I never had that problem in the first place. :P
> Have black programmers actually ever been surveyed to see whether they want the term removed?
I am not aware of such. Do you think it would make a difference to anyone?
I collected a series of real-world anecdotes last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739 .