Long time listener, first time caller (commenter)... thanks for writing this! I am a digital subscriber to the NYT and I had not seen or heard about the piece (clearly I am insufficiently active on social media). I agree with you on the failed juxtaposition of "cancel culture" and active legislative attempts to invalidate and criminalize speech, but I'm in more violent agreement with the revelation (which should not be revelatory to the NYT editorial board) that free speech is not now (nor has it ever been) free of social consequences. Ever since I found my voice I have always been an outspoken person and I have taken a ton of grief for it over the years. In other words, I've never operated under the notion that the constitution should protect me from the fallout of my words.
Also, my grandma never told me that bull$h!t about not saying something nice, either. They were two peas in a pod those two...
Mar 22, 2022·edited Mar 22, 2022Liked by Sebastian Stockman
Perhaps you have this precisely backward.
The GOP legislative efforts to limit the speech activity of public servants is the result of a lawful political process. (Public employees do not have 1a rights at work, see Garcetti.) The remedy to legislative overreach could not be clearer: elect different representatives who will pass better laws. The policies might be wrong, but we have a set of rules so we can change them.
The corporate infringement upon political expression is much more pernicious because there is not a political remedy. If Amazon, or Haliburton, or Yale decide that certain political expressions are disqualifying for anyone who wishes to work for them, they are not violating anyone's 1a rights, but they are infringing upon the political sphere in ways that are difficult to undo. We can't easily undo them because we can't vote out the board at Amazon, or Haliburton, or Yale Law.
And sure, companies have always tried to use their power over employees to serve their political interest. The difference is that, during the GWB administration, when companies were pressuring employees to donate to, and support political candidates favorable to those industries, we on the left objected to threatening employees' livelihoods to compel political cooperation against their own interests.
If you think that you are simultaneously expressing the muffled voice of the unheard and getting Ivy League universities and Fortune 100 companies to enforce your opinions through threats to the livelihoods of the wage slaves that work for them, perhaps it is time to reassess.
The labor rights movement is full of efforts to extend free speech protections to insulate employees from employers. That the new left sees this corporate power as a new tool for social engineering and not a threat to our political sphere is a truly sad development.
I'm not really a poster of comments but this hit my inbox as I'm sitting here watching the Premier League and I got sucked in. Real quick like... I was blithely nominally aware of the brouhaha over the Times ed (I've been sort of more apoplectic about goings on in Ukraine) but I find it ironic that the Times should be complaining about the perceived demise of free speech (and I agree with everything you say about freedom of speech being conflated with freedom from shame or shaming or, for that matter, praise, and the board's inflation of the defition) when certain of us remember (or at least know of) the time when the Times itself was guilty of same. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/aids-new-york-times-obituary-history.html
It’s what you so often want to shame people for. With a preening conviction that things ‘will get better’ as you put it. So, for instance, you would most likely want to shame anyone who expresses publicly that they feel it wrong that a biological male is winning collegiate women’s swimming competitions. No? Tell us where you stand.
Because people have lost jobs expressing that thought and certainly many more have been shamed for it and countless others have declined to share their thoughts at all out of the fear of what might happen to their lives. Starting with being publicly shamed.
But you’re not only okay with all that you would also necessarily have to be firmly behind the idea of biological males competing against biological female swimmers in NCAA women’s events. To you, apparently, that constitutes this things-are-finally-getting-better outcome. And damn, quite literally, anyone who thinks otherwise.
Long time listener, first time caller (commenter)... thanks for writing this! I am a digital subscriber to the NYT and I had not seen or heard about the piece (clearly I am insufficiently active on social media). I agree with you on the failed juxtaposition of "cancel culture" and active legislative attempts to invalidate and criminalize speech, but I'm in more violent agreement with the revelation (which should not be revelatory to the NYT editorial board) that free speech is not now (nor has it ever been) free of social consequences. Ever since I found my voice I have always been an outspoken person and I have taken a ton of grief for it over the years. In other words, I've never operated under the notion that the constitution should protect me from the fallout of my words.
Also, my grandma never told me that bull$h!t about not saying something nice, either. They were two peas in a pod those two...
Shaming may be fundamentally communitarian, not divisive. The one who shames accuses the shamed of hypocrisy in light of their presumed shared values.
Perhaps you have this precisely backward.
The GOP legislative efforts to limit the speech activity of public servants is the result of a lawful political process. (Public employees do not have 1a rights at work, see Garcetti.) The remedy to legislative overreach could not be clearer: elect different representatives who will pass better laws. The policies might be wrong, but we have a set of rules so we can change them.
The corporate infringement upon political expression is much more pernicious because there is not a political remedy. If Amazon, or Haliburton, or Yale decide that certain political expressions are disqualifying for anyone who wishes to work for them, they are not violating anyone's 1a rights, but they are infringing upon the political sphere in ways that are difficult to undo. We can't easily undo them because we can't vote out the board at Amazon, or Haliburton, or Yale Law.
And sure, companies have always tried to use their power over employees to serve their political interest. The difference is that, during the GWB administration, when companies were pressuring employees to donate to, and support political candidates favorable to those industries, we on the left objected to threatening employees' livelihoods to compel political cooperation against their own interests.
If you think that you are simultaneously expressing the muffled voice of the unheard and getting Ivy League universities and Fortune 100 companies to enforce your opinions through threats to the livelihoods of the wage slaves that work for them, perhaps it is time to reassess.
The labor rights movement is full of efforts to extend free speech protections to insulate employees from employers. That the new left sees this corporate power as a new tool for social engineering and not a threat to our political sphere is a truly sad development.
Sorry, for the "but it is not happening!" peeps: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html
I'm not really a poster of comments but this hit my inbox as I'm sitting here watching the Premier League and I got sucked in. Real quick like... I was blithely nominally aware of the brouhaha over the Times ed (I've been sort of more apoplectic about goings on in Ukraine) but I find it ironic that the Times should be complaining about the perceived demise of free speech (and I agree with everything you say about freedom of speech being conflated with freedom from shame or shaming or, for that matter, praise, and the board's inflation of the defition) when certain of us remember (or at least know of) the time when the Times itself was guilty of same. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/aids-new-york-times-obituary-history.html
It’s what you so often want to shame people for. With a preening conviction that things ‘will get better’ as you put it. So, for instance, you would most likely want to shame anyone who expresses publicly that they feel it wrong that a biological male is winning collegiate women’s swimming competitions. No? Tell us where you stand.
Because people have lost jobs expressing that thought and certainly many more have been shamed for it and countless others have declined to share their thoughts at all out of the fear of what might happen to their lives. Starting with being publicly shamed.
But you’re not only okay with all that you would also necessarily have to be firmly behind the idea of biological males competing against biological female swimmers in NCAA women’s events. To you, apparently, that constitutes this things-are-finally-getting-better outcome. And damn, quite literally, anyone who thinks otherwise.