This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now.
This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as anti-virtuous.
People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc. have seen this before, but the current generation of westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how this plays out. And just like back then, people now are going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'.
Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.
Lovely story! That said, lord of the flies had at least 20-30 boys involved, whereas this group was six boys who were already friends. More is different.
(Not arguing reality would go the way of lord of the flies, merely that the example above is not definitive. But boy would I like to see the movie they made!)
Keep in mind that the book that is from, Humankind, while a hope filled book (I enjoyed it thoroughly), makes the point that when we get together, the bonds between people can lead them to do horrendous things to others. Our power to cooperate is our superpower and our kryptonite.
My family in China are amazed that we in the US don't recognize the parallels between the marxist revolutionaries and violent Red Guards in China and today's US. The One Party that controls more and more of the institutions, the "news" reporters whose mission is obviously to sell the revolutionary narrative so the few stories that support the narrative are huge and meaningful while the much larger number of parallel examples that contradict the narrative are hidden by various means, all the entertainers gradually speaking with the same voice and same approved opinions as the "news", silencing of debate at the academies and ongoing purge of anyone suspected of harboring counter-revolutionary ideas there and in many other institutions and employers, young people taught that smart, independent thinkers such as themselves will become heroes by denouncing their parents and anyone they suspect of clinging to old ideas....
People who hear almost nothing that doesn't support the revolutionary narrative and are bombarded with stories about how those who "bravely" denounce dissenters are "heroes", and especially young people with little worldly success to be proud of, go on a rampage to feel the thrill of glory and power over others. The Red Guards are born. They burn whatever, destroy whatever, attack whomever, for whatever excuse they can come up, confident they'll be lauded as heroes by the "news" if they can somehow claim they are fighting enemies of the revolution, and if they can make it dramatic enough to compete with all the other aspiring heroes for attention. Because for most Red Guards, it's all about the thrill of feeling powerful and important.
My Chinese relatives frankly feel a bit of schadenfreude about it. "So, you were supposedly the ones with all the freedom to think and say whatever you wanted, criticize whoever you wanted, and freely argue for your own opinions. We were the ones who were forced to keep our mouths shut and not say what we really thought because we were still stuck with a conform-and-submit culture that wasn't yet enlightened."
In addition to Lord of the Flies, we had to watch a movie in my high school (long ago) about student movements getting out of hand, I think it was called The Wave.
As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance in the US.
On the other hand, it's clear, especially to young people, that traditional liberalism has failed at actually addressing inequality, racism, and other systemic problems that the US faces. A big part of what people refer to as "cancel culture" is frustration over the ineffectiveness of traditional liberalism, especially when the far right seems to play by a different set of rules.
I'm definitely concerned about far left zealotry, but I don't think that's what I'd happening in the US.
I understand why you would not think it is a problem. Unfortunately the only evidence for something like this is anecdotes, so unless you personally experience cancellation or are a member of a community where someone is cancelled, you won't notice. The lack of concern about the cancellation narrative makes sense in this respect.
Beyond "random people being fired", there are a number of notable examples in the programming community, like James Damore, Stallman, and Donglegate. After CoCs were added to open source projects, there are a handful of accounts of people being removed for their views expressed outside of the open source community.
In the wider world, things like the Harper's Magazine letter criticizing cancel culture (signed by many notable individuals, including Noam Chomsky), Obama's criticism of the "circular firing squad", leading philosophy researchers decrying sanctions for expressing ideas [1], the Joe Rogan discussion between Twitter Exec and Tim Pool on online censorship, the Evergreen College fiasco, and the rioting of Berkeley students into a Ben Shapiro lecture, paint the picture of a worrying trend: some subset of people on the left respond to argument not with argument, but with censorship, boycotts, and sometimes violence.
Apologies for the amp link. I would recommend looking at Twitter replies to the Harper's Mag letter about her being a signer, and then other discussions on it.
Turns out that we aren't electing a counsel composed of the liberals most active on twitter.
Lets look at the situation clearly.
I don't think JK Rowling is a bigot and yet and the internet hate machine is sure going full steam but her detractors are a smaller group than her fans and the woman is worth almost a billion dollars. She could burn dollar bills for warmth in her house for warmth for the rest of her life if she wanted. A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues.
"A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."
Not true at all.
It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.
She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.
The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.
'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.
I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.
Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.
'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement.
This is inexcusable.
The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.
It's a fairly existential problem right now.
A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.
JK Rowling's views on trans people are also nearly the perfect demonstration that pg's "aggressive conformism" analysis is spot on. See, not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people. They were being used to succesfully lobby for laws that did things like effectively deny trans women access to rape counselling and domestic violence services, and justify pretty awful campaigns of online harassment against any openly trans woman - not by JK Rowling, who seemed quite happy to just quietly hold her opinions, but by others. The reason you didn't hear much about this is because when these views actually had power, the loud, aggressive, well-connected warriors for social justice kind of supported them.
Now, it wasn't quite mandatory to hold these views back when I started following things about a decade, decade-and-a-half ago (though I remember Shit Reddit Says, the group trying to force Reddit to police its content based on their ideological demands, got quite close). What was mandatory was covering for them, shutting up about the laws they passed and the harm they did and pressuring everyone else to do so with allegations of misogyny. The arguments used to do this were quite reminiscent of present-day claims that "cancel culture" doesn't matter and people only object to it because they're bigots, now I think about it - supposedly the people pushing this didn't hold any power, and therefore the only reason for trans women to spend effort objecting to them rather than fighting non-feminist men, who by definition were the ones with real power, was because they had a misogynistic hatred of women. It was only when those views actually lost their power and relevance that the loud, aggressive, well-connected online activists switched from covering for them to demanding that everyone support beating up elderly lesbians for merely existing in public whilst holding transphobic views. (I am unfortunately not exaggerating, this actually happened - and yes, it was definitely the same people. pg's remark about "an exclamation point after a variable" is an extreme understatement.) This shift was quite recent too - maybe around 2016 or so?
There were of course actually non-conformist people with moral views that didn't just follow the crowd and various levels of aggressiveness who balked at this at the time. They just ended up being effectively irrelevant - too far from the status quo for its supporters, but so throughly and aggressively labeled as evil supporters of it by its organised, orthodox self-proclaimed challengers that few people seeking to challenge it would listen to the non-conformists.
"not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people"
I understand what you are saying, but there's a pretty big concern right there in the conflation of 'intellectual position' vs. 'ammunition supporting specific movements'.
That some systems take another persons nuanced views, possibly out of context, and use them to promote their agenda, should not in any way stop people from being able to have public discourse about them.
The fact of the matter is, JK's views are not anti-trans, even if they could be used by others as such.
However much we can decry other parties for using her words in a manner in which we do not agree, the same thing applies in the other direction: we don't get to shut her down because she doesn't 'toe the line' on the current, 'new' orthodoxy.
JK's views are reasonable.
It doesn't matter that 'some other organisation using those words to do this or that'. It's relavent, but not to the extent of censoring her.
Now - if we're talking about crude, casual bigotry from 'powerful voices' and the public effects of that, i.e. a 'Famous Person' tweeting 'bad things' - then yes, this is just populism.
But anyone willing to make a serious point within the boundaries of civility needs to be able to make it, full stop.
People can debate with JK, they can even ask her to not make her statements public 'because bad people will use it as ammunition' - but there's no way her words cross the thresholds of uncivil, and she should be able to make them without fear of being banned.
I don't view trans women as 'the same as female women' either, to me, they are very objectively 'something else', 'not exactly like women', but I also have zero problems with them 'being women for the most part' and identifying as such if they want.
In my view, denying the glaringly obvious difference between 'trans women' and 'female women' is to deny reality, in the name of some cause.
Now, I have zero problem with people wanting to identify as women, if a trans woman wants me to call her 'she' - or whatever - it's fine by me. I hold zero concern or anything against them.
I will also tell you that in other cultures - particularly in Brasil wherein trans is far more common - that this is a popular view. The only trans women with whom I've ever had a conversation about the issue literally told me, unsolicited, that 'she is not like other women'. I kind of 'gasped' at the statement, but this woman was simply stating her mind and what to her was obvious. The statement was not ideological oriented, formed by 'mob opinion', and not a complex, intellectual thing. Just her view. Is this tans woman a bigot?
It's perfectly fine if people want to disagree with Rowling's view. I'm basically certain that Rowling doesn't mind a single bit if many would disagree with her.
The issue, is that she's not allowed to have her opinion because of the ostensibly ideologically held view that 'people who identify as women are women and that's it'.
And so this is one of the points made: "Agree with me on you're a bigot".
I meant for clarity that people are allowed to think JK rowling is a bigot and she is allowed to roll in pile of money while denying it and attacking her detractors.
It's not a linguistic question, it's a social question.
"Is a man who identifies as a woman, a woman, or a man?" - that's a pretty core question.
To be fair, it's pretty important to trans women that they identify and be referred to as 'women'. That's pretty core to the identity, so it's more than a word.
So, in that sense, I can understand how her arguments could be disconcerting to some.
But - when we talk about what is 'objectively a woman' or the policies we apply in sports, that kind of stuff, then it's an issue that transcends just self identification.
In terms of 'self identity' - well - 'who cares' really, I agree, but what about the legal requirement for others to use specific words, or sports, special facilities, access to gendered facilities and clubs etc. - then it becomes a real problem.
I think most people would admit he is a buffoon. I also think most people would not stand by if he did something obviously, materially, directly and apolitically harmful to people. I can't write people off if they continue to vote red until then. I also don't find republican rhetoric to be much different than democrat rhetoric. Both-sides-ism acknowledged, I think prominent Democrat and Republican and messaging both rely almost entirely on emotional argument. I think this is novel behavior for Republicans, since their old behavior was to meekly, logically and unsuccessfully argue their point. The change to unapologetic emotional argument is shocking to the left wing, but it prevails. A scream of "kids in cages" is no more convincing than a growl of "some of them are good people." A "womp womp" is as convicing as a "how absolutely dare you sir." You are right on the result: it pushes common people into irrelevant, trivial debates, preventing meaningful discussion.
This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as anti-virtuous.
People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc. have seen this before, but the current generation of westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how this plays out. And just like back then, people now are going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'.
Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.