In Anne Laurie’s morning thread, during a discussion about The New York Times’ astoundingly dumb “cancel culture” editorial, Kay called our attention to the quintessential cancel culture story:
(Reuters) A conservative federal appeals court judge on Thursday in an unusual email urged judges to think twice about hiring as clerks any Yale Law School students who protested a recent event hosted by the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society.
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman sent the message to federal judges nationwide in response to an event at Yale last week featuring a conservative lawyer who at the U.S. Supreme Court defended a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay wedding.
“All federal judges – and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech – should carefully consider whether any such student so identified should be disqualified for potential clerkships,” Silberman wrote, according to two recipients of the email.
It’s hilarious in a way — if you’re not one of the 120 students targeted by Judge Silberman for professional sabotage, that is. According to the Yale Law School spokesperson quoted by Reuters, the students chanted “this protest is free speech” while the panel’s moderator read the university’s free speech policy, and then “the students exited the event, and [the panel discussion] went forward.”
So to recap, the anti-gay wedding cake baker’s lawyer wasn’t “canceled” at all — she just had to sit through a brief interruption in opening remarks and then held forth as planned. Then the old fart whom Reagan appointed to the federal bench in the 1980s before the Yale students were even born emailed ALL federal judges in an attempt to preemptively “cancel” the students’ clerkships.
Irony, having survived more murder attempts than Grigori Rasputin, then threw itself into the icy Neva River to end it all. I mean, what is even the point anymore?
Kay said:
That they didn’t see any problems with their cancel culture theory – that it was always and inevitably going to result in actual cancelling, means to me that they are morons.
Yes. Yes, they are morons, and of course it was always and inevitably going to lead to actual canceling. We should probably pay more attention to the complicity of the cancel culture panic purveyors. Their incessant whining created an environment in which free speech in states like Florida and Texas is being abridged for real — in the name of freedom.
None of this is to suggest that there aren’t self-righteous hotheads who obnoxiously shout others down or that people online and off never overreact and cause pile-ons that hurt people who don’t deserve it. It happens. The immature and/or malicious behavior behind such incidents is nothing new, but social media amplifies it. Maybe that’s why organizations that take social media more seriously than they should foment this dumb panic — it’s about what they perceive as their own victimization.
But the bottom line, IMO, is that the kernel of truth underlying the endless obsession with cancel culture isn’t even among the top 1,000 of this country’s very real and pressing concerns. And the reality is that the copious attention paid to cancel culture by prominent media figures actively aids the censorious and anti-democratic forces that should be our #1 national concern.
Open thread.
Kay
So much if it is itself speech policing. Here, the Learned Middle Aged Leftist will instruct the unwashed rabble in the acceptable terms of the debate.
It’s control. Only certain people have status to direct our “debates”. The official Lefists, liberals and conservatives will determine what’s allowed.
p.a.
How many of these “cancel culture” frauds puke out “2nd Amendment rights” rhetoric, which is just permanent cancellation by 9(ish) grams?
Soprano2
I think it’s they’re just butthurt that people who they consider to be “the peasants” can now easily critique anything they say. They aren’t the gatekeepers of the discourse anymore, and it burns them up when they think about it. I cannot believe anyone who cares about free speech wrote the phrase “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned”. Shame and shunning have been societal ways of indicating what’s acceptable since we’ve had society! I guess according to the people who wrote this editorial the most reprehensible white supremacist with the most odious anti-Semitic take on things should be able to voice his/her opinion “without fear of being shamed or shunned” by anyone. It’s an odious viewpoint. What the hell is wrong with these people? Did being criticized by black and brown and female and non-Christian writers make them lose their fucking minds
And of course I’m sure they don’t consider it “cancellation” when a powerful federal judge threatens the livelihoods of law students at Yale by suggesting that them exercising their freedom of speech means they shouldn’t be hired for certain jobs at all. Irony is truly dead.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Silberman! there’s a flashback. Weren’t he and Royce Lamberth the favored judges of Larry Klayman et al during the Great Clenis Hunt? I know his wife a sort of proto-Ginni Thomas, she features prominently in David Brock’s Blinded by the Right (for other geezers who remember to much of the 90s)
Baud
Am not.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: I gave up on Corey Robin and others of his ilk – white lefty male academics who tended to haunt the Jacobin and Crooked Timber sites, for example – after they showed their entire white misogynistic asses during the run-up to the 2016 election. The way they dunked on Hillary Clinton and mainstream Democrats demonstrated to me how completely insulated they had to be from the briars of this workaday world faced by women and POC, for example.
The fact that he’s bleating out something like this just cements that impression further for me.
Betty
@Kay: I was genuinely surprised at the number of professionals who argued that people shouting down speech they oppose just isn’t free speech. I don’t see how it differs from heckling, just more and perhaps louder hecklers.
Calouste
The only problem that certain people have with cancel culture is when it works in a direction they don’t like, i.e. when people of (usually unearned) power and status are affected.
If it works the other way, well, women/non-whites/LGBTQ+/non-“christians”/the lower classes should just know their place, shouldn’t they?
Kay
@Soprano2:
But it’s not even THAT consistent. The same people who go on and fucking on about “cancel culture” from the Left adopted the anti-vacc protestors in Canada as a pure and righteous expression of grievance.
NONE of it hangs together. They are picking and choosing who gets to do what. It has no consistent or rational meaning at all. That’s why everyone from Andrew Cuomo to Putin has picked it up and uses it as a cudgel. Because it means whatever they say it means. It’s all purpose. Lose your job as an elected offocial because you’re a predatory scumbag? Cancel culture! Invade a country? Cancel culture!
Baud
@Kay:
It’s why this blog can’t rise into the top 10,000.
Baud
@Betty:
I mean, heckling ≠ shaming and shunning.
Also why doxxing isn’t about free speech.
Baud
@Kay:
Isn’t it tied together by contrarianism against mainstream liberalism?
Miss Bianca
@Baud:
BINGO!
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
What would happen if they just let young people come to their own definition of “liberalism”, norms, culture, etc? What if the official standard bearers just allowed them to muddle through that and work it out?
Why don’t they have any faith in them? They really believe that if they don’t grip tightly to control the students will just inexorably slip into brutal suppression? At this point there’s more Protestor Etiquette Police than there are protestors. I barely hear from the students. They’re drowned out by the middle aged liberalism police force.
Calouste
Core tenet, maybe even the only tenet, of conservatism. Rules are for other people.
mrmoshpotato
@Calouste:
Whiny ass fascist crybabies, all of them.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay:
Wouldn’t that mean that a bunch of NYT trash like David Fucking Brooks would have to shut the fuck up forever?
Brachiator
Is this New Math?
Miss Bianca
@Calouste:
@mrmoshpotato: My simplistic hot take on people who whine and moan about “cancel culture”?: They’re just fine with it as long as they’re the only ones who get to do the cancelling.
Martin
Not to both sides this, and Silbermans email was simply wrong, but the ongoing reports about the Yale protest don’t terribly favor the students. Understand that ‘free speech’ doesn’t include a hecklers veto, which is a violation of speech. And with the subsequent reporting it’s looking more like the protest was closer to a hecklers veto than what earlier reports claimed. I would also note that protests that planned to be respectful often wind up not being when crowds start to become cognizant of their dominance. Herd mentality affects law students as well.
The students were fine to respectfully protest, wear shirts, hold signs, walk out, and so on. But the later reports are that they students were sufficiently loud to disrupt several other lectures going on in the building, as well as a visiting professor talk (usually as part of a job interview). That’s going too far. At my institution those kinds of actions almost always took place between the Israeli/Palestinian student groups (I’ll note the university was very consistent about inviting speakers defending Israel security practices and not good about inviting speakers talking of human rights impacts on Palestinians).
The consequences of these interactions were some kind of light community service and the institution not recognizing the offending organization for a term or a year, after which it could reform. This is after all an educational institution where students are supposed to be allowed to make mistakes so they can learn from them. Yale should be doing that, and Silberman shouldn’t get all pissy that someone is disrespecting the Federalist Society, which at this stage of the game deserves none.
I would say that the veto on job prospects is abhorrent, but law schools have long required documentation of incidents of academic dishonesty as undergrads as part of the application process and use it as a veto on attending law school, so Silberman’s veto is actually pretty consistent with the professions general approach here, which I also find abhorrent.
See also: Chapman law professor sues students to identify which uploaded an exam to a 3rd party test hosting site. I appreciate the creativity and willingness to escalate, but given the rampant problem with cheating and the complete failure of the ‘beatings will continue until morale improves’ nature of the response, perhaps our educational leaders could acknowledge that the problem lies with them, and not with the students. This behavior is just shitty, and I would seriously warn faculty to not establish lawsuits as an appropriate way to adjudicate classroom problems, because they will lose that war so badly that it will probably break more than a few universities.
Betty Cracker
After I wrote this, I saw a Fox News tweet with a clip featuring the anti-gay bigot baker’s lawyer whining on Fox & Friends about being canceled! She disputed the Yale Law School spokesperson’s account of what happened and claimed she was intimidated and threatened. On the Fox News site, there was video someone took at the event that DID NOT include threats and intimidation — mostly it was a bunch of students standing around with signs as the Yale moderator read the free speech policy. There was some rowdy verbal pushback, especially when the moderator said the protestors should “grow up” or they’d be asked to leave. But it was hardly a rampaging mob. The cake bigot’s lawyer lamented that only one video had emerged from the event. I guess we’re supposed to just trust her.
anon
silberman was the judge who wrote this dissent
oatler
Mike Lindell tells me his business is suffering from Cancel Culture. He tells me this all day long with his Mypillow ads on MeTV through a Sinclair station in AZ.
oatler
Mike Lindell tells me his business is suffering from Cancel Culture. He tells me this all day long with his Mypillow ads on MeTV through a Sinclair station in AZ.
Lobo
There must be in-groups whom can cancel but cannot be canceled, alongside out-groups whom are canceled, but cannot cancel.
Feel free to build on this. ;)
Kay
@Baud:
This is the banal nonsense that passes for amazing insight in cancel culture land. Did the students consider manner of dress?
He won’t even give them that. I think my 6th grade teacher raised this amazing insight. I got it.
They have to work harder then this. It’s junk. Come up with a coherent theory. They just pulled this one out of their ass and have spent a year saying it without any thinking added.
Why can the Canadian truckers block a street but BLM can not block a street? What’s going on here?
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Well she sure showed them. The email went out not to hire any of them because…free speech must be protected.
Some speech. From certain speakers. Anti-vacc speech? Cherished. Anti police murdering speech? Must be tightly regulated. They can wear suits and sit at lunch counters.
artem1s
college kids are always being threatened by small penis faculty when they protest the small penis faculty member’s class or whatever. it’s a rite of passage to get some small penis faculty member mad at you to the point they go off the rails and start threatening things they have no power to follow thru on. IMO it should be part of your requirements in order to get a Grad or higher degree. Hell, I was reprimanded by both my undergrad and graduate department chairs simply for not having a penis when I was doing something all penis bearing students get away with daily. while chewing me out they also added reprimands for actions and thoughts that also existed only in their own tiny little minds – very surreal experiences. I hope those Yale kids use that letter as a reference when they want to get a clerkship for an honest to god judge, not some Federalist Society upwardly failing Kavanaugh boofer fratpack hack.
Baud
@Kay:
People get shamed for how they dress all the time. In many cases it’s abhorrent because the underlying value judgment is abhorrent, not because casting shame is some deep offense to the freedom of speech. Corey’s worldview seems to reflect the moral relativism that the right is always portrays the left as believing in, even though very few of us actually do.
Martin
I will add that universities have a different cultural standard for ‘free speech’ that departs quite significantly from the constitutional meaning. In none of these cases is there a violation of anyone’s constitutional rights. Shouting people down is in no way ‘the state making a law barring’. And one reason why I find Silberman’s actions here abhorrent is that it the university expectations of speech and tries to enforce it outside of academia, and that’s a road the GOP does not want to go down.
Inside academia, people have a right to speak their mind. They don’t need to be heard, but they need to be able to be heard. This is why the hecklers veto violates the standard inside academia, but wouldn’t outside. It has more to do with academic freedom to voice unpopular ideas than it does to the constitutional free speech right, even at a public university. Most universities take that standard pretty seriously, and I think you can pretty fairly judge how shitty a university is by how fairly they police that. I’m pretty proud of my institution on that front as it happens. But enforcement of that is not easy – to the extent that we required heavy police presence and security checks (metal detectors, etc.) around some pretty innocuous events. Thankfully Richard Spencer or Milo never tried to come speak, because the bill on that one would have easily hit 6 figures.
Silberman is showing his hand here. He wants the academic standard to extend beyond academia, but not universally. This is not the first time a speaker has been shouted down in a law school, and he was silent then. So he doesn’t actually care about any notion of free speech as any of us would describe it, he only cares that the Federalist Society have both a unique ability to speak, and a unique ability to force students to hear them. And he can fuck right off on that.
ian
@Kay:
Well, there goes the fashion magazines.
mrmoshpotato
@Miss Bianca: Yup. They’re whiny shitheads if they’re “cancelled*.”
*And what a stupid term that is.
Brachiator
@Martin:
I guess things have changed. In my student days, protests did not have to be strictly “respectful.”
Sure Lurkalot
Michael Hobbes’ take on this latest pearl clutching.
Always excellent on the subject of moral panic, imho.
Citizen Alan
@Calouste: No one on the right has EVER been cancelled as hard as Colin Kaepernick and the Dixie Chicks.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: Inside the room things were fine. Outside the room, the students pushed close to if not went over the line. And one of the sources for this is a progressive lawyer who was speaking at the same time elsewhere in the building. I have not heard any credible reports of threats, only of disruption. Mind you ‘I will not listen to your performative bullshit’ constitutes a threat to most republicans these days.
Bottom line, this was an incident of students expressing themselves that may have gone a bit too far. This happens every day at universities in one form or another. Good institutions turn them into learning opportunities.
OTOH, fewer Yalies in federal courts wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. One of the downsides to going to a top public law school is your ability to get a job in the judiciary is practically zero because of the massive bias towards a handful of ivies. And given the direction this court is going, that bias is going to destroy this country.
Captain C
@Kay: By this standard, we shouldn’t criticize someone wearing a swastika shirt, or a “Kill all [Black folks]” shirt.
Of course, Robin would probably cry and stomp and try to ban a shirt saying, say, “Corey Robin Sucks!” or “Corey Robin is Mickey Kaus’ Goat Wingman!” After all, that’s not free speech, that’s cancelling Corey, which is bad. Even if he’s crying and stomping from a widely-seen platform.
For people like him or the FTFNYT idiots, criticizing them is cancel culture. Them doing it to others, especially while punching down, is just Reasonable Free Speech and Good Journalism.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@mrmoshpotato: I rather like “deplatformed” myself. It allows me to make the pune, or play on words, on how Lord Haw-Haw was deplatformed in 1946 and how his modern intellectual heirs should be similarly deplatformed.
Soprano2
@Miss Bianca: Boy, this is absolutely right!
Soprano2
@Martin: I had an economics professor who wouldn’t let us keep tests. He passed them out so we could see what we got right and wrong and ask questions, but then we had to hand them all back. He said he didn’t want them to end up in a fraternity’s files. It would be harder to police today with cell phone cameras.
Geminid
@oatler: “My heart is crying! Crying!
Lonely teardrops. My Pillow never dry of, lo-o-onely tear drops.”
Martin
@Brachiator: Depends on what is being protested. A policy, a government action, etc. then yeah, go for it. But a speaker, that’s different. That’s hitting the academic freedom line. That gets protected (as it should) because a forum is created for expression. That forum can be a classroom, an invited guest either by the institution or by a student group, or even a private citizen, which is why you find the nutjobs with the ‘masturbation is a sin’ signs.
The government, or Chick Fil A or whatever else is being protested is not given a forum to speak. But as soon as they are given a forum, then the line gets drawn. And you can protest that speaker disrespectfully so long as you don’t take away the rights of other people to hear what that speaker has to say. You can go the other side of campus and raise whatever ruckus you want. But if a speaker has been invited to speak in a room, that room needs to be allowed to proceed in a reasonable way. Your protest can be seen or even heard from that room so long as it’s not so disruptive as to make it impossible for that speech to be given and received in the room.
From what I’ve read this morning, the protestors crossed that line *after* they left the room, when the group got large. And once the event is over, you can go for it and be loud and disrespectful, so long as you aren’t intimidating (blocking their freedom of movement, etc.)
Elizabelle
@Baud: I am still laughing about your quip about the NY Times standing outside Bari Weiss’s window with a boombox.
Well done, sir.
You guys are going to make me skim that ridiculous op ed, aren’t you?
Kay
@Sure Lurkalot:
Clarence Thomas and Alito are two of the most powerful people in the country. That they center their speeches around how they are being “cancelled” is ludicrous. It’s whiny bullshit from people who don’t like being criticized, so like Andrew Cuomo and Putin, they have grabbed this all purpose shield are using it. Alito attacks his critics personally. He singled one out for the crime of criticizing his legal reasoning.
Calouste
@Soprano2: So basically he was too lazy to come up with different questions every year.
Sure Lurkalot
@Calouste:
Following rules are for other people. Making rules that we and our ilk have no obligation to follow are our exclusive territory.
kindness
Did any Federal judges who got the e-mail reply back telling him to shut the frack up?
Asking for a friend.
Kay
They all cite cancel culture, all insist they are being silenced, but they also say this with no recognition that they’re cancelling people who live in that city. What could “cancel culture” possibly mean if everyone can (and does) use it, for everything?
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: General William Westmoreland, former Army commander in Vietnam, was invited by some group to speak at Yale in 1972. He did get shouted down.
Baud
@Kay: I think the problem here is that the Yalies didn’t use motorized vehicles. Not legitimate.
Kay
Andrew Cuomo believes he was “bullied”.
Martin
@Soprano2: That still happens, even though it shouldn’t. This is why I said that adjudicating these things in court wouldn’t end well for faculty. See, an exam is copyrightable (and by default is the instructors IP) right up to the point that you the student start writing on it, which is the intent of the exam. So yes, you have a claim against a student that uploads a blank exam, but not one that has been marked up because now the students contribution becomes their IP. It’s one of those things that in theory you can copyright a test, but in practice you cannot. (Things start to shift when we talk about electronic tests). The argument from the instructor that the marked up test is their property would get laughs because the test only exists to collect the students IP. That’s literally the point of a test – to collect other people’s IP. And so by definition, the completed test is the property of the student, not the instructor.
This never actually comes up in practice, but it does in policy setting and enforcement. I’d have had that Econ professor in my office and it wouldn’t have gone well for them. See, the schools general catalogue – where it documents degree requirements and courses and all that is a legal contract. And students sue the institution over violations of that *all the time*, and faculty feel universally entitled to ignore that contract. They do it constantly because students are to be constrained, but faculty are not (even though the students are the ones that are paying). The other main contract that comes into play is the syllabus. That’s the instructors written contract with the students, and too often isn’t set up as such. Varies a lot between institutions – some are very good and you’ll get these 12 page syllabi that look like iTunes terms of service, and some are garbage and violate the students rights or just get ignored by the instructor. In between you have a set of rights that faculty and students have that are documented elsewhere, which a syllabus policy of ‘all exam materials are kept by the instructor’ would fall afoul of, at least at every institution I’m familiar with.
You get some others that are constantly violated. There’s a federal law that says that students must be told about all course-related expenses prior to their enrollment in the class. This is to protect students from inexpensive courses that contain an expensive course material packet that either the institution or in some cases the instructor directly profits off of. This one gets violated all the time, because instructors cannot be bothered to actually plan out their course ahead of time. That one can result in the institution losing access to federal financial aid if there’s a pattern of violation. It goes on and on.
I was not a risk management official at my institution, but I sure spent a lot of time talking to them.
artem1s
@kindness:
He certainly deserves the Cleveland Brown’s response…
some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.
Baud
@artem1s:
Heh. USPS. How it was done before Twitter.
evodevo
@Calouste: Yep..time-honored tradition in old academia, if I remember…you keep the same questions, but just alter their order in the next semester’s exam (or if it’s multiple guess, you alter the order of the answer choices).
Geminid
@Kay: That trucker made quite a brag. I wonder if he’ll try to back it up.
Baud
@Kay: There’s no shortage of people who would want to literally stone Andrew Cuomo.
Kay
@Baud:
I’m kind of shocked fancy lawyers (to be) took that much risk. All the ones I read are always “settle down- this thing burning down is not actually on fire”.
Martin
@Kay: Cancel culture is what you get when institutions break down and fail to hold people accountable. Accountability will happen one way or another.
So yeah, let’s get rid of cancel culture, throw Andrew Cuomo in jail for violating the rights of several women, and throw Chris Cuomo in jail for being an accessory after the fact. I’m cool with that. Let’s similarly throw the Yale Federalist Society speakers in jail for attempting to default the federal government and interfering in the proceeding of a federal government activity. Now the need to shout them down goes away. See how easy this is? I could go on…
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca:
I’ve said this, too. It’s not simplistic, but it is simple.
I will note that I have heard of individual instances of people getting fired, where I probably wouldn’t have done that. But that’s why I don’t lead anything. Furthermore, I am loath to help out anyone on the right wing here, because they are the ones who created this as a problem. They’re the ones who removed worker protections and made states “right to work”. They were fine with that, even though people like me said HAY WAIT MEBBE THAT’S A BAD IDEA UR GONNA REGRET THAT. They made corporations into people, but now they’re pissed that Josh Hawley’s book got dropped by its original publisher. They are living in the world THEY MADE and I am petty and shitty enough to let them enjoy it.
Martin
@Kay: Starting to think it wasn’t about the nonexistent federal vaccine mandate after all.
Baud
@Kay:
Honestly, I don’t know who they are. It may not be that much of a risk depending on their background. I’m not a big protest person, so I don’t have a “feel” for what people can get away with.
Martin
@Kay: I know there’s endless skepticism that young people give a shit, but young people give a shit. They are the Ukrainians to the Boomer/GenX Russian invasion. You break the world badly enough and eventually a generation digs in and fights back.
Villago Delenda Est
The scum of the Federalist Society hates the Enlightenment with the intensity of 10,000 burning Suns.
Brachiator
@Martin:
What was the policy of this school?
In the end, was the speaker allowed to speak?
Martin
@Suzanne: They’re getting fired because nobody is throwing them in jail. That’s the problem. Throw them in jail, and the getting fired part solves itself.
trollhattan
Mariupol’s mayor reports Russian troops have reached the city center. Look at what they’ve done to their “prize.”
The population is (was) within 100k of my city, and I’m having difficulty envisioning essentially every structure here being damaged or destroyed. That’s what has occurred In Mariupol.
Benw
@Baud: Cuomo dragged his fucking heels forever implementing legal weed in NY, so he’s why some people literally can’t get stoned.
Also, right now Perdue is halfway to cancelling Yale right out of the tourney. Will this cancel madness never cease!?
piratedan
well…. when it comes to cancel culture and free speech, I guess there must be a national shortage of shine boxes and street corners, so these people have no choice but to publish Op-eds in nationally distributed publications…..
Kay
@Martin:
Justice Thomas. His wife at was the January 6th rally and she eagerly cheered on the insane crowds who disrupted school board meetings for 6 months, not to mention the activists who went to the homes of election officials and threatened them.
Who could possibly take this seriously? What are they talking about? Certain speech and certain speakers can do…whatever, up to and including actions that are covered under state criminal codes, like making threats at a school. Others? They can’t even behave badly at a speech at an elite university.
It’s a joke. If young people look at this ridiculous hypocrisy and think it’s bullshit- they’re right. It is.
Cameron
@Kay: Because proper liberals show good breeding, unlike the unwashed conservative rabble and ignorant lefties. No true lady or gentleman would interrupt a speaker or offer some meretricious comment on the fashion choices of another. It just wouldn’t do.
Amazing. These yoyos have convinced themselves that by virtue of adopting some incredibly constipated (and mostly imaginary) views of human thought and action, they are embodying some sort of superior class in society. Christ, I’m glad I’m dumb and broke.
Baud
@Kay:
Wasn’t he the one who didn’t want us to “engage” in debate about expanding the court?
Soprano2
@Kay: I bet he’s never seen the “People of WalMart” web site. I bet he’d approve of the shaming that happens on there.
JanieM
@Martin:
Except that we’re not talking about fewer Yalies, we’re talking about fewer non-conservative Yalies. (Speaking as a Yalie, not via the law school but with close ties to law school Yalies.)
Kay
@Martin:
My father loves them and he’s an actual contrarian. He thinks all the rest of us are horrible.
Kay
@Baud:
Right. Same speech. Too “cavalier”. Threatens the institutional legitimacy. I’m like a 13 year old with eye rolling with these people.
Just SOME measure of consistency and accountability. At least make it work for a whole speech.
Jim Appleton
@Martin: Having been a naive, impressionable undergrad, I strongly disagree.
A trivial example: in 1980 I attended a lecture given by James Watt at Pacific University. He trotted out his trademark phrase, “the solution to pollution is dilution,” in a context where it almost began to make sense.
A tiny group of young, very animated folks immediately raised a ruckus which shut down the proceedings for a good five minutes, after which Watt was clearly on the backfoot and highly defensive in a way which provoked me to consider a lot.
Had that tiny, otherwise well behaved group limited themselves to a remote venue, I likely still would not agree with Watt’s dilution argument, but the bulk of his BS may have slid by just enough that he’d strike me as wrong in this case, but not utterly, irredeemably controversial.
ETA if the Student Union invites Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot to jam about “what’s good,” would you insist that survivors of their genocide merely respect the invitation and retire?
Soprano2
@Calouste: Nah, I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s that he wanted to be able to mix and match questions without having to worry about his tests being shared around campus. I don’t blame him for that, why should they get to file his tests away so students can cheat? Are you honestly defending the students who want to cheat? I earned my grades the old-fashioned way, by studying, so I resent cheaters something fierce.
Martin
@Brachiator: Yales policy is that speakers have a right to speak and be heard. Mind you, this is a community conduct policy, not a law. It’s adjudicated not on the academic side, but on the student conduct side, which means that consequence are generally mild (sometimes too mild when universities believe that things like sexual assault belong in the student conduct arena rather than the legal one). The students certainly violated the student conduct policy after the left the classroom based on the broader set of reports I’ve read today (I’m dismissing the one by the speakers themselves as clearly an overreaction). I’d expect to see a disciplinary action of basically a time-out, some community service, and some activity that reminds the students of the rights of others to be heard.
My understanding is that the speaker was allowed to continue but the event was in a greatly diminished state due to the degree of disruption, and unrelated speakers elsewhere in the building *were* disrupted. So that alone puts them over the line. If the students had left the building, they probably would have been fine. Additionally, leaving the building would have defused the herd mindset that was pretty clearly building there (of which everyone is susceptible).
So yeah, a light punishment, a learning opportunity, but not something that would spill out of the university or impact the students ability to complete their studies. This doesn’t speak to their exactly policy, but there’s relatively little variation among top universities. I know we reviewed Yales recently as we surveyed all AAU policies and they were one of them. Had they deviated from ours in any significant way, I’d remember that. I guess it could have changed substantially in the last 18 months, but I doubt it. I was working on student climate as my last project at work, and we explored how student conduct policies intersected with that.
Soprano2
@Martin: So my question is, how do you keep people from cheating? I mean really, how? Changing all the questions on every test every time wouldn’t work, because there aren’t an infinite amount of questions about core concepts.
UncleEbeneezer
The fact that Vladimir fucking Putin used “cancel” as a verb as a potential threat to Russia (the much bigger country doing the actual invading) shows just how ridiculous the concept is and has always been.
trollhattan
@UncleEbeneezer:
“Psst, Komrade, Vlad is ‘Woke.’ Now to be passing it on.”
Geminid
@Martin: Gen-Xer Xeni Jardin:
“Me at 20: Fuck the System!”
“Me at 50: For the love of God, preserve the System.”
Suzanne
@Martin:
Eh, but what most of them are really concerned about isn’t anything that would land anybody in jail. It’s situations like that dude Damore at Google writing a letter about why he thinks it’s okay that women at Google make less money than the men. Damore got canned, because none of his women colleagues wanted to work with him anymore. They are terrified of this kind of incident, because these are mostly white dudes who have years of history of making statements that were always offensive to someone but didn’t merit social sanction before.
That’s the crux of the issue. Straight white dudes got to live for a long time in a milieu in which they didn’t really have to consider the full humanity of others. Now they do, and it’s threatening. The ones complaining about cancel culture neglect to realize that some of us always have had to watch what we say lest we offend the wrong person.
Once again, all politics is relative social status.
jeffreyw
Baud
@jeffreyw:
The problem with shunning is that you have to have to have a relationship with them in the first place.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay: The malignant tumor that is Broderism has a very wide range.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
How are you feeling?
ronno2018
https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1501276244314316802?s=20&t=UN4bGGX8eUCuNIo_NN-lQA
Kelly
@Soprano2: I had a class where the Prof saw that some frat guys had brought in a ringer for the midterm and simply sat where they could copy his work. About 120 students sitting for the exam. Instead of busting them then he waited until the final. Placed all the exams at seats before anyone came in. There were four versions of the exam. If an exam showed up with the right answer to the wrong version, flunk and report.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
?
Villago Delenda Est
@anon: Silberman is vile fascist shit. He has no rights.
Cacti
Political hackery is the primary quality Federalist Society judges seek in their clerks.
UncleEbeneezer
Since this is an Open Thread, college basketball fans check out this skit (14 mins) from Bomani Jones’ new show Game Theory on HBO about Duke University and Coach K. I think there is a lot of truth to it. That program got a whole lot of extra love from fans and the media due to its’ positioning as a white savior team in an increasingly black NCAA. I know people who openly admitted this using dog-whistle terms at the time.
Kay
I’ve been following voting rights for at least 20 years. Every single restrictive voting law does this. Always.
There’s a response to this that goes “but black turnout is up!” So black people, and only black people, vote collectively, as a group. What?
I would just ask if that would be the response if it were white people. Of course not. Their right to vote would be individual. How fucking racist is it to analyze this with black people as some kind of collective bloc where you can just exchange one for another?
“Well, we supressed HER vote but it doesn’t matter because MORE of “her” came out!” No one would ever, ever analyze white voting like that.
A US Supreme Court Justice did this. It’s now the basis of US election law. Insanely racist.
Martin
@JanieM: Yeah, well that’s why I don’t support it. But you’re catching onto why law students from publics aren’t considered. The privates are much better able to regulate their fealty to conservatism.
Cacti
@UncleEbeneezer:
Duke men’s b-ball is synonymous with the obnoxious “scrappy” white player.
Ken
I was never completely clear on what metric we were using. For example I think easily crack the top 100, maybe even top 10, pet rescue blogs.
Also, how many blogs are actually still out there? I get the impression many of them moved to Twitter or Facebook. And that they then abandoned those, for the latest shiny new thing.
Kay
@Ken:
It’s true. We’re still only top 10,000 with virtually no competition :)
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
Irony is truly dead.
Ironic isn’t it that irony can’t even get a ticket to the 1am showing of the movie about irony.
Or that conservatism is at the point that conservatives seem to want to not allow life, because it might be about actual living.
Another Scott
Why is there a red ghost standing off Xi’s right shoulder??
AlJazeera
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Take off of the Imperial Royal Guard from Return of the Jedi?
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: Duke has always recruited really good white players, especially post players like Laettner. And Chud-shevsky is labeled a “cerebral” coach and Black coaches as brainier or more get ignored.
I can’t stand those assholes. The coach thinks his team is entitled to every call, and that he is such a big shot he can be as pissy with the refs as he wants.
My friend Stephanie and I were texting about the Tournament, and she said she didn’t have any favorites. I told her I didn’t have any either. Except for whatever team was playing Duke. She sent back two thumbs up emojis.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Cancel culture is a lot easier for many to say than “I was fucking WRONG.” Cancel culture rolls right off the tongue. And sounds smarter – if you are an idiot and have to blame everyone else for your decision to actually like being an idiot.
Betty Cracker
Dan Froomkin says the NYT editorial board should retract their awful editorial and resign. He’s right. It’s a shockingly bad piece of embarrassing hackery that should by rights trigger a house-cleaning even if it were written by a college student and published as a guest essay. That it was published under the editorial board byline is an embarrassing indicator of institutional rot.
RaflW
“the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned” is one of the stupidest, most facile and ridiculous things imaginable.
Also, too, Maureen Dowd would not have a job if they actually believed this tripe. 50% of the reason she exists is to shame and shun the Clintons.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Isn’t the NYT’s defense that they don’t read those? See Tom Cotton.
Cacti
I remember when that MFer got picked for the 1992 “Dream Team” over Shaquille O’Neal.
Now when you look back at the team photos, it’s like “Here is the Dream Team…and also Christian Laettner.” LOL
Ruckus
@oatler:
So, cancel culture IS good for something…..
Calouste
@Betty Cracker: That didn’t happen after the NYT gave space to Tom Cotton for his fascist screed, and it won’t happen now.
Martin
@Soprano2: There’s a few factors at work here.
To start, at the university level we’ve made achievement dependent on time invested, rather than the reverse. Grading students in a manner that ‘this student only learned 70% of the material, oh well, good enough’ is a serious enough problem of its own. You want to invert that – 100% achievement is the only goal, and the time invested varies by student. Self-paced courses are nothing new, but all the tools are geared toward fixed time pedagogy.
This leads to the production of high-stakes testing with minimal or no low-stakes. Ideally you want a lot of continuous assessment with any high stakes testing being more comprehensive in nature. This breaks the economics of cheating – you have to cheat so frequently that it becomes unsustainable. High stakes cuts both ways – it makes it economical to cheat.
And there are an infinite number of questions. Creating a problem/question bank and randomizing that for every student is trivial. You don’t really even need to build that bank yourself – there are tons of them out in the world, if you’re willing to stop treating your course as some unique product of your exceptional intelligence and judgement, and instead as an implementation of a broader consensus of what students need to learn. It requires some technical ability to pull off, and some coordination, but nothing too difficult with institutional support.
But this requires a rethinking of what higher education is supposed to do. Is it supposed to gatekeep certain people from professions and fields? Is it supposed to focus on the student or the faculty achievement?
I’ve built and implemented these systems, and they were always viewed as threat, despite the raves from students, and the measurable benefits because it diminishes the differentiated expertise of the faculty. Mind you, I don’t advocate this across the board – most graduate level courses are supposed to focus on the differentiated expertise of the faculty, but undergraduate courses do not, and foundational graduate courses do not. 1L curriculum is very standardized, but law school reputations are not, and we can’t have prospective law students thinking that they get just as good an education at some state school as at some ivy, even though its exactly the same education. Instead we introduce massive inefficiencies into the system in order to preserve this perception of inequality so that we can implement an actual system of inequality. The federal judiciary should not discriminate who sits on the bench, but we can outsource that task to a handful of law schools and faculty and get away with it.
Ken
@Baud: The “We aren’t responsible for what appears on our platform” defense? Weren’t there some court cases holding otherwise — or do those only apply to electronic media that isn’t also provided in a dead-tree version?
Martin
@RaflW: Yeah, I agree. Academia protects your right to say dumb shit, but has no problem shaming you for saying dumb shit and refusing to invite you back to say more dumb shit.
Baud
@Ken: NYT isn’t completely immune from liability for the editorials they choose to publish. They don’t have the same protection as Facebook and Twitter get for what people post.
delk
Cancel culture the bane of philatelists.
raven
@Martin: Did you retire?
trollhattan
@delk: {Golf Clap}
raven
Go Hokies, Go Illini, Go Davidson (my last team in the Calcutta)!
Ruckus
@Kay:
Alito attacks his critics personally. He singled one out for the crime of criticizing his legal reasoning.
Society has stated that he must be great, they made him one of the 9 top people not just of his profession, but in the entire country. Wanna bet that’s pretty much how he thinks? He’s the smartest man. In a room of one. This pretty much defines conservatives and conservatism. Their entire world view is that the world revolves around the stick up their butt and everyone else is wrong. About anything. Most of which they usually know only jack and shit. It’s an ethos, not a reality.
topclimber
If these folks are canceled, how can they actually talk to us?
I will pray for insight from the FSM and the Jackal Commonwealth.
Captain C
@Geminid:
I remember hearing a rumor that Laettner’s go-to pickup line at Duke was “Hi, I’m Christian Laettner. Wanna go upstars?”
According to this rumor, Cherokee Parks’ pickup line was also, “Hi, I’m Christian Laettner. Wanna go upstairs?”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Martin:
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m more inclined to the method that Meyer Lansky used to make sure there weren’t more Bund meetings.
Make ‘em scared.
Barbara
I do lose patience with policing speech, mostly when it becomes a substitute for doing anything real to address real problems for real people. But if someone calls you a racist anti-queer misogynistic asshole and your only reaction is, “Don’t insult your betters,” then you are going to be shamed and shunned because you haven’t actually countered their case.
No one likes getting criticized and it is fairly clear that journalists have lost their minds at the idea that it’s so easy for non-journalists to loudly and effectively push back. Controlling the narrative is powerful, especially when you trick yourself into believing that only you are unbiased.
Another Scott
@Martin: +1
The GQPers argue in bad faith about everything. Even if kids are behaving badly, that doesn’t mean that old white geezers with all the power get to cry about being a victim and use their butthurt to trample on everyone’s rights.
Relatedly, it looks like the word has gone out (based on snippets of McCarthy’s comments I heard on C-Span today) that Zelenskyy’s calls for patriotism mean that everyone should crank up their flag waving here in the USofA and if they don’t, well, something’s wrong with them (with unstated consequences to be expected later). The patriotism has to be GQP-Approved, of course…
Grr…,
Scott.
Old School
@Cacti:
1992? Boy, can you hold a grudge.
Served
One thing that stands out to me with this dull op-ed is that there isn’t a single new idea in it? If the Editorial Board has felt this way, why have they been outsourcing their personal opinions to college sophomores and other human targets? Pretty cowardly for an elite institution
Jinchi
‘Cancel Culture’ doesn’t apply to roughly 330 million of us, who were never invited to the party in the first place.
It’s entirely navel gazing by people who think they have a right to be heard and never to be challenged for the stupid things they say.
Soprano2
I listened to Bill Maher’s podcast from last week this afternoon. He claims he’s brave and has on different viewpoints, but he never has anyone on who disagrees with him about “wokeness”. He had a woman on named Batya Unger-Sargon who I had never heard of, who wrote a book about how the press is “woke” now. Her thesis is that because reporters now have college degrees they are all “woke liberals”, and don’t ever write about the working class or know anything about them, and this is terrible. There was more to it, but it’s basically romanticizing the time when all the reporters were (white) working class stiffs. I kept wishing there was someone on the panel who could interject the idea that perhaps they’re writing more about race because the reporting staff is more diverse now. (One of her complaints was that the press makes everything revolve around race rather than class, which is the real inequality problem). As far as I’ve heard Maher hasn’t yet said one word about all these restrictive speech laws being passed or proposed in the states. I still think he’s basically pissed for the same reason the NY Times editorial writers are; he thinks his “lessers” shouldn’t be able to criticize him so publicly. Frank Bruni was on the panel, and he barely defended the Times, which I think tells you something.
PJ
@Martin: I don’t know about you, but I never invaded shit.
Baud
@Soprano2:
She’s right about the second part, but it’s not because reporters are liberal, much less woke liberals.
randy khan
“I understand that your position is that your side gets to say whatever it want whenever it wants and to bear no consequences at all for what it says, including being criticized for what is said. When does the other side get to do that? And can you tell Tucker Carlson to knock it off?”
I mean, it’s an absurd proposition on its face. The reason we have the First Amendment is that the Framers believed that speech has power, that it affects what we do, and that, as a consequence government shouldn’t get in the way of it. If you told them that there was a group of people saying they should be allowed to speak without even suffering from any criticism, let alone the possibility of being called out as wrong or evil, they would find it incomprehensible.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
That about the nicest thing that can be said about the entire FTFNYT.
Rotten from the core to the fish wrap.
Baud
Maybe instead of culture, people should cancel the NYT.
debbie
As my good friend Hillel the Elder used to say, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” Why is that so hard?
Baud
@debbie:
What if it’s your neighbor who’s hateful to you?
Kelly
Epic move by U of Indiana cheerleaders
https://twitter.com/laurenpeikoff/status/1504626118044704768
Barbara
@Jinchi: It’s like the first time you told your parents to STFU and they couldn’t do anything about it anymore. All the defenses of authority and position and prerogative come rushing to the fore.
debbie
I will shun that neighbor.
raven
@Kelly: What was really funny was when they brought out the chair and the St Mary big looked at it and said “fuck that, I’m not standing on that chair”!
Splitting Image
@Soprano2:
Googling Batya Unger-Sargon produces this entry from Google books:
Cancelled indeed. If she were any more cancelled, she’d be on Fox.
Another Scott
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
indycat32
@Kelly: Indiana University, please. That was the highlight of the game for my Hoosiers.
Kay
@Soprano2:
That’s kind of an age thing too, though. Younger white working class are pretty “woke” themselves.
I just think that to a certain extent cultural “norms” changed and they aren’t handling it well. I say this as an old!
They have a kind of romantic, old fashioned idea about white working class people which in its own way is just as reductive and stereotyped as any other. There are gay white working class people. There are white working class people who are not only not Christian, they’re not religious at all. There are white working class people with signifigant others or relatives who are not white.
Kay
@Soprano2:
What if white working class young people were not tuned in to a “class struggle” and instead were just like most people who kind of float along on pop culture and accept the changing norms of that?
If social issues weren’t such a big part of that would young white working class people necessarily plug into a class struggle? Or is that just what middle aged Leftists think would happen? What if instead they just followed sports or music or movies?
Ken
@Baud: That is a point which scholars have debated for centuries. However in recent years, American Evangelicals have decided that “neighbor” as used by Hillel — and for that matter by Jesus in the parable of the good Samaritan — means “other American Evangelicals”. This slightly clarifies the issue, since we now have one answer which is absolutely and indisputably wrong.
Ken
@Kelly: Does the university budget not stretch to a second basketball?
Another Scott
ICYMI, NASA.gov – SLS is at the launchpad, final “wet dress rehersal” tests before for first launch.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt
All that anyone who whines about “cancel culture” means is “people who I feel I should be able to abuse might hold me accountable for my behavior in some probably-trivial way”.
Much like snarling about “wokeness”, the only useful conversational purpose of such an utterance is to mark the speaker as a fascist.
The correct reply to such whining is, “well I’m glad you’re in favor of free speech, because otherwise you’d be offended when I tell you you’re a fascist asshole with garbage opinions”.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
So much finger-wagging! Their egos and entitlement are too big to fail!
Pathetic.
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: once you get past protection from the elements, sanitation, and maybe athletic/activity function, all clothing is a costume. And I say this as a former uniform-wearing (in school) person and current lawyer who loved reading my dad’s Dress for Success when I was a kid, and who has plenty of suits in my closet.
trollhattan
@Kelly:
That’s so great!
Watched the end of that game (the kid’s Gaels move on) but missed that great bit of innovation.
Bobby Knight would have thrown a chair.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
THANK YOU!
I didn’t even know we still had an actual space program. The pictures are grand. I like that the launch director is a woman, named Charlie. She has extensive experience at the job, quite the resume.
For all the last days, with Ukraine and Covid and conservatives, “woke” and cancel culture, it has been somewhat difficult to see that humanity can rise above bullshit and stupidity.
karensky
@Soprano2: Perfect!!
Baud
@Kayla Rudbek:
That’s why I’m opposed to clothes.
Ruckus
@Kay:
They just pulled this one out of their ass.
It must be the easiest thing they know how to do, they do it constantly. So constantly that it might be the only thing. Maybe they pull it out their ass to make more breathing room in there……
Ruckus
@Baud:
And we just thought you were trying to show off.
And no one was impressed…….
Soprano2
@Kay: What I heard had a real “longing for the ’50’s” vibe to it. You know, when all the reporters were working class white guys. ??? I listened to “Overtime” later, where they talked about the Florida “don’t say gay” bill. They all thought it was “reasonable” to say teachers in grade school shouldn’t talk about gay sex (why do they insist talking about gay people is always only about their sex lives?), and it was only right that parents know if their child identifies as other than cis-straight. Gay man Frank Bruni didn’t say anything about how the most common reason teens are homeless is because their parents kicked them out because they found out the teen was gay or gender non-conforming, so maybe a kid is right to not want their parents to know. It was just coming from a place of ignorance about how the world actually is.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Speaking of sciencey space things, Webb is inching closer to perfection.
“Working better than hoped.”
artem1s
@Baud:
@jeffreyw:
The problem with shunning is that you have to have to WANT TO have a relationship with them in the first place.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Suzanne:
Exactly.
O. Felix Culpa
Late to the show, as usual, but Gabrielle Union (actress in Disney’s remake of “Cheaper by the Dozen”) isn’t wrong:
‘
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I believe that it might just be working fine.
“Roughly” 2000 light years away.
Just a tad farther than the liquor store.