Let's keep it simple. Don't ask for apologies, cancellations, suspensions. What she said was stupid and wrong, so call it stupid and wrong publicly and let the debate or verbal war roll forward. Enough with Inquisitions, right and left! I'm with Arnold and good for him for speaking up for the right of a left-wing idiot to be an idiot.
It's good to be current on this important issue. I used to totally agree on Free Speech, that Whoopi shouldn't suffer any cancellation, but now I'm not so sure. Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation talks about how "Tit for Tat" is the best prisoner's dilemma strategy. Offer cooperation, but respond in the next round as they responded this round. 2021 saw lots of wrong speech cancel culture intolerance against conservatives.
The 30 years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, establishing religious tolerance.
We need tolerance. Tolerance from an intolerant, soft totalitarian college indoctrinated elite whose lousy dishonest "political correctness" has already become cancel culture. I don't believe we who want tolerance will get it by tolerating those who spread hate and intolerance. I think we'll only get it when the elite Democrat totalitarians start losing money, and positions, and status, for their dishonest claims of tolerance while actually supporting intolerance.
Only when more Dems suffer from cancel culture will the Dems in power really question it.
Neo has much better discussion of the Jews as (racist) Whites issue, which is much bigger than just Caryn Johnson (who culturally appropriated the name Goldberg for stage).
I was a regular reader of Norm Geras, a reasonable Marxist Jew. Just before he died (2013), he left a great list of Best 100 books. One unlike most others.
Most of his post, and this post by Neo, I agree with.
But:
“Whether you call these groups ethnic groups (most have distinct DNA profiles, by the way) or races does not matter.”
“Racism” applies to races. Language matters, especially in insults and slanders.
While the Nazis called Jews a race, most English speakers recognize 3 or 4 race colors: White, Black, Yellow; and maybe Red (Native Americans).
Jews and Arabs and Hispanics are all “White”. Ethnic, tribal variants of White.
I like to call them all tribes, so it’s tribal murder as with Black Hutus committing genocidal murder on Black Tutsis (in 1994, with Clinton & his Jewish Dem supporters denying it was genocide until it was over).
Talking about intermarriage today, which is much higher, obscures how little intermarriage there was before WW II. DNA analysis of Y chromosomes, which are inherited directly by all sons from their fathers (unlike other combined genes), indicated (in the 80s) that over 90% of male Jews had “Abraham’s” Y chromosome. The Father of all Jews. After 3000 years, an extraordinarily low rate of intermarriage.
Recall the third daughter of Tevye (Fiddler on the Roof) Chava, being cast out for falling for a Russian Orthodox. (Wiki says a later story shows Chava leaving her husband to go back to family on the way to Israel.) My Jewish friends, all secular, explain this mostly as “being comfortable” around others like them. Which is true, but also discriminatory.
It’s a problem for US Blacks – how to be a comfortable minority among a majority, and maintain your “own GROUP identity” without discrimination. All group identities discriminate. The in-group vs the out-group.
It seems that in most 20th century genocides the majority in-group has, on avg., lower IQ & success than the minority target -group, Poor Mulsim Turks (including many Kurds) against Christian Armenians (see the horrific naked Armenian Christian women murdered by crucifixion), pagan Nazis-Jews, poor Hutus-less poor Tutsis (taller, better educated), non-educated Pol Pot Cambodians-educated Cambodians (25% ***); Malays-Chinese; Russians-Ukrainian Kulaks (Holodomor); Great Leap Forward (1958) & later Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-death of Mao; tho this was mixed with political control).
Serbs in Srebrenica-Muslim & Japanese rape of Chinese Nanking (& others) were not quite less successful killers killing of the more successful.
So much killing for so many decades. But in the list above, not many Christian capitalist civilizations were doing the genocide. Germany was nominally Christian, tho tens of thousands of priests were sent to the death camps, along with the 6 million Jews, 3 million Gypsies, and 1 million others.
The Jews get more than twice the publicity as the Roma (Gypsy), more than 10x, maybe more than 100 times. Because the great Jewish writers are great writers; great Jewish scientists are great scientists.
Still, Jewish Zionism was a Marxist, mostly atheist movement.
Many rabbis opposed it at the time: “The power of the human subject replaced the power of the omnipotent God.”
Many intellectual Jews in Christian countries were either atheist, or explicitly anti-Christian. It’s understandable that Jewish anti-Christianity could grow out of centuries of Christian hatred and frequent unjust mistreatment of Jews. Just as slave hatred against slave masters is understandable. But “understanding” the increasing mutual hatred is not to condone it. [Today it seems many can only understand ideas they agree with.] The atheism of Jewish Marxists & socialists was hated by many Christian leaders. The secular intellectual success of many Jews was envied, and hated, by many almost-as-talented non-Jews.
Envy – the wish of destruction of the good fortune of the person envied.
The worst, yet very common, sinful feeling so many have.
In killing, Holocaust not so unique.
In the historical characteristics of killers and killed, Euro semi-Christian capitalists against Euro citizens, unique.
(1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death,
(2) the comprehensiveness of intent & (2b) global scope
(3) spiritual murder
Whoopi is sort-of almost right: “everybody eats each other.” All groups oppose the out-group, somewhat.
Everybody has a God shaped hole in their heart – what they believe. (Even atheists; they fill it with some beliefs) This has been talked about explicitly.
Everybody has a set of group-identity holes in their heart. This hasn’t been talked about enough — what are the good group identities to have?
The line between good and evil runs thru every person’s heart. (Solzhenitsyn)
Our hearts have a constant battle between a good wolf and a bad wolf.
Which wolf wins? – asks the Indian Chief’s grandson.
The wolf that we feed.
Free will is choosing which wolf to feed.
Or what blogs we write what comments on…
---
Neo's blog and ASKblog have long been my own two favorites for comments - Instapundit for links.
I liked Axelrod's book, and it's worth thinking about, but I don't think this is a context where people are rational enough for 'tit for tat' to work. Even in international relations, Israel-Palestine, the disputes of Schleswig-Holstein, all the crises leading up to WW1, and so many others suggest a retaliatory strategy is a recipe for disaster. I'm more sympathetic to the position that when someone who engages in 'cancellatory' behavior is suspended or fired, one should simply not bother to defend them and let the movement have them (while defending people, even extreme leftists, who aren't 'cancellatory' and especially who challenge that sort of thing). That creates a better incentive structure without leading to never-ending retaliation.
I broadly agree, but there are two points where I disagree.
First, it is reasonable to expect Whoopi Goldberg to either apologize or to lucidly explain her thinking. She chose the stereotypically Jewish name Goldberg for her stage name, and previously claimed to know she is Jewish, so she should understand why her comment was so offensive to so many people -- Jew and gentile alike. (If she had not apologized, I would hope her friends or respected colleagues would intervene and try to explain why any attempted explanation would be soundly criticized.)
Second, she is -- in a very narrow sense -- right that European persecution of Jews, epitomized by the Holocaust, was not race-based as commonly defined in America today. That is mostly a reflection of ideological blinders that are too common in today's world, though: The modern American concept of race is not the only excuse that people use for inhuman behavior to other people. We must not forget that. Such intolerance is still a severe problem today: Half of Jews in France teach their children to hide their religion to avoid attacks.
(In sense that the modern left argues that race is a social construct, I think Jews were treated much like a race in century-ago Europe. Many anti-Semites were explicit about that.)
More seriously, I believe the correct response should be that what she said was horrible, but she shouldn't be canceled because cancelling people is wrong. That way we avoid the problem of people claiming that the right wants to cancel people just as much as the left.
You described yourself as a "free speech absolutist." Surely you know that the concept of freedom of speech applies to the government not being allowed to restrain or punish it. It has nothing to do with private speech. If an ABC employee says something stupid or "hurtful" and ABC perceives this will hurt their bottom line, they are entirely within their rights to discipline said employee. Private citizens are withing their rights to ask ABC to sanction the employee. ABC is free to ignore them. Note my use of the word "free." As long as no government entity tries to sanction the speech there is no loss of freedom.
Employment is a mutually consensual relationship. A contract can specify conditions, but an employer does not owe you a job. You are, in fact, free to work somewhere else.
Sure. But consent by itself is quite a limited notion of freedom. Punishing someone for their choices, or threatening punishment, can take away their freedom even if the punishment involves no violation of consent.
Another example. If your parents stop paying for your tuition because you converted to a religion they don't approve of, that is a form of coercive punishment, even though you have no legal right to their support.
Playing Greenblatt's advocate: the reason why the ADL is the way that it is is because its funders believe that it is more effective at preventing harm to its interests than the free speech absolutist position. You are arguing for the collective benefit of free speech. Greenblatt operates under a different and narrower bailiwick. The Arnold Kling ADL might restrict itself to strict incidents of defamation. The Greenblatt ADL seeks to snip incipient support for Farrakhanism in the bud before it has the chance to spread and create more problems for his clients. Her actual remarks were totally anodyne, and in a different context would not raise much controversy at all. After all, the census classes 'Jews' as 'Whites.'
So, to change the ADL, you would have to convince it that an environment of free speech on the ancient Anglo-American model is superior to the model that it has sought to advance since 1913. Greenblattism has a lot of credibility, but it has also accumulated many critics over the years. I would say more cynically that the Anglo-American model of free speech only exists insomuch as it serves corporate and secular interests, with the original telos only existing in a vestigial and rapidly expiring form in reality. You can instantly assemble billions of dollars in legal firepower to fight for the right to publish soft porn on HBO, or the right to host illegal material on a server, but it is significantly tougher to assemble that much for genuine issues related to political speech issues. To judge which side of a conflict is stronger, it's helpful to look at these types of resource cycle issues. Lady Chatterley's army is very big and very strong, whereas James Madison's is very puny and quite raggedy, especially now that the former no longer needs to feign support for the latter.
Can you explain why "the demands for apologies from Goldberg, and her suspension, are likely to increase rather than diminish the rise of anti-semitism."?
That seems way too broad to me. Setting aside calling for her suspension, it seems to say that we shouldn't even exercise our own free speech against things that are wrong and insulting.
I've read that a lot of woke tactics do generate anti-minority sentiment, and generally agree with that view. But I think this is a clearly different situation than haranguing people about their privilege and arguing for the infallibility of POCs. Here we have an individual who said something stupid. She shouldn't be censored or punished (I totally agree with that!), but asking people to refrain from something as prosaic as an apology seems like self-censorship
Suppose you are a black person who often hears that Jews have too much power and that they exploit blacks. You are likely to hear Jewish outrage at Goldberg as the assertion of Jewish power and white supremacy against a black figure. That will increase anti-semitism.
"Suppose you are a black person who often hears that Jews have too much power and that they exploit blacks."
Then I would already be anti-semitic, and Goldberg's initial statements would, by themselves, be likely to increase my anti-semitism.
Quite literally, if I'm the typical sort of person who believes what they hear over and over, if I never hear any opposition to this kind of anti-semitism, it would grow unchecked!
Suppose you are a black person who thinks the vast majority of whites are gullible, milquetoast, guilt-ridden suckers who can be bullied into capitulation on every cultural front by the mere threat of reputational harm via allegations of racism. You are likely to hear the lack of outrage, pushback, or punishment of Whoopie Goldberg as evidence of the fact that white people are gullible, milquetoast, guilt-ridden suckers...
The Deplorable in me says that plenty of the people you describe (both black and white) exist, but I would just point out that you can have pushback without punishment or outrage, and in fact that is in my opinion the most reasonable approach to take. I consider Goldberg's comments to be stupid, myopic, and historically illiterate much more than they are offensive, so I don't see why they should generate outrage, and if we all went around suspending people from work for saying stuff that was stupid, myopic, and historically illiterate, nothing would ever get done.
I don't think the outrage over this stems from a desire to suspend Whoopie Goldberg for saying stupid, myopic, or historically illiterate stuff. She does that literally every day. No one cares. The outrage emanates from the bankable assumption that if she were white and had made far more benign, if stupid, statements about black oppression she would not only lose her job, she'd be removed from polite society altogether.
This is about reestablishing symmetry, because without it our principles are less than useless, they are an unmitigated liability.
Your assumption is certainly correct, but I would just say that I think your goal of "reestablishing symmetry" is hopeless. I don't envision the identitarian left is ever going to accept that the same standards should apply to everyone equally. Their entire worldview is based around assigning people to different groups, slotting those groups into some kind of hierarchy based on victimization or oppression, and then crafting different standards for different spots in the hierarchy as recompense for past oppression or to ensure equality of outcome for the future. This isn't going to change. With that in mind, I think copying these people's tactics isn't going to "establish symmetry" but rather create a terrible equilibrium.
What I guess at issue is what is an acceptable level of pushback. Everything is "outrage" these days, but I'd argue that a strong "This is stupid and offensive and you should apologize" response is legitimate, even if it might be seen as "outrage".
Saying she should never work again or be fired is not.
No one should be fired for saying stupid things. But everyone should be fired for saying stupid things if anyone is going to be fired for saying stupid things. I stand by this principle.
Isn't the ADL's stance (maybe unofficially) that principals are meaningless and only power matters.
What the average black person is going to learn from this episode is that if you cross Jews they will severely punish you and have the power to follow through on that.
I get that in your mind that this will build resentment that will eventually cause blowback, but that's just a theory. Isn't it just as valid a theory that people conform to power and that it it better to be feared then loved. That seems to be working for the ADL for a long time now.
P.S. I haven't even read Whoopi's statement, but there is a long enough list of people being punished by the ADL that I think the actual content is almost meaningless to the point above.
For what it's worth, ADL CEO Jon Greenblatt came out against punishing Whoopi Goldberg. So, technically, the preeminent Jewish organization dedicated to trying to discourage people from saying bad things about Jews is also saying that the usual social and economic deterrents *shouldn't* be used on Whoopi. Whether or not you think the ADL is actually mostly about Jewish group libels anymore (I don't), this still weighs slightly against "Cross the Jews and they will try to punish you" framing.
Now a lot of people claim - within reason - that this is just a fully left-captured institution ("converso" in this case) which, like ACLU, has a focus which is increasingly remote from its original intended mission and increasingly indistinguishable from every other progressive activist group, and so of course it's just one progressive covering and making excuses for another progressive in the typical way, by abusively leveraging some kind of credential to having special expertise and personal authority on the matter, "My opinion is official and authoritative on this matter, and thus you have to take my word for it."
That's probably mostly true. The way you can tell is whether the ADL is similarly forgiving and merciful and magnanimous when the target is not a progressive, as opposed to being a bunch of hypocrites lying about their real, double standards. Which, ah, they are not.
Nevertheless, he had what I thought was a clever line, "I don't believe in cancel culture, I believe in *counsel* culture." That is, instead of punishment, you should just try to explain, repeatedly, to the target (and everybody else too) why they were wrong, and try to get them to understand why they should change their erroneous opinion on the matter. The solution to bad speech is good speech and civil engagement to convey it.
Now that is a pretty good sentiment, one I wish were more widely shared, and furthermore, written into labor law as a cost of a restriction on liberty worth paying to protect an even more important - and endangered - liberty.
However, it turns out that before 'correcting' Whoopi, the ADL CEO should have checked with ... the ADL ... on what does and do not qualify as "racism", for instance, at their "What is racism?" webpage, which gets its own org root webpage at adl.org/racism
"Racism: The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people."
Uh oh. People of color, but, Jews, but, maybe ... The latest AI toys just spit out "syntax error" at this stuff.
Look, any interpretation is possible if you are willing to twist the meaning of words to whatever degree necessary to 'prove' your point, but the common sense reading of that definition does not look good for the ADL's claim that the Nazis went after Jews because of 'racism' that is in the same category of the kind of 'racism' against black people that Whoopi asserts is unique. That's the issue at dispute, right?
The definition mentions social construction, but it is *not* making some kind of absolutist post-modern claim that 'racism' is fundamentally arbitrary and subjective and so socially constructed that, whenever one group oppresses another and uses the term 'race' as a categorization, then it's automatically 'racism' by definition, and it's kind of up to everyone to decide for themselves on what their own definition of 'racism' is, yadda yadda.
Instead, they were standing very firmly and publicly behind the woke Who-over-Whom assertion that identity is everything that only white people can be racist, and discrimination and other problematic acts are only racist when white people do it or are disproportionately helped by it.
Which is just totally nuts. And evil. But there it is. And the ADL is all-in on it. And then Whoopi says something which is completely correct and accurate *by that idiotic and evil standard*, the same one the ADL is standing behind. Perhaps why they aren't exactly so interested in seeing her get punished.
But to go out in public and claim that she's wrong to apply the ADL's own definition of racism ... well, it takes a lot of chutzpah.
We are living in the insane world of outrage both fake and real.The thought and speech police need to get a grip on themselves. They themselves (tv executives) are worried about being called out! -rating$.
As ill informed as the ironicaly named Goldberg may be there are actually ultra-religious Jews who believe and say that the Holocaust was divine retribution for collective sins. Perhaps they too should be called out and cancelled for being Anti-semitism. Imagine the outrage that would follow.
Let's keep it simple. Don't ask for apologies, cancellations, suspensions. What she said was stupid and wrong, so call it stupid and wrong publicly and let the debate or verbal war roll forward. Enough with Inquisitions, right and left! I'm with Arnold and good for him for speaking up for the right of a left-wing idiot to be an idiot.
John Stalnaker
It's good to be current on this important issue. I used to totally agree on Free Speech, that Whoopi shouldn't suffer any cancellation, but now I'm not so sure. Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation talks about how "Tit for Tat" is the best prisoner's dilemma strategy. Offer cooperation, but respond in the next round as they responded this round. 2021 saw lots of wrong speech cancel culture intolerance against conservatives.
The 30 years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, establishing religious tolerance.
We need tolerance. Tolerance from an intolerant, soft totalitarian college indoctrinated elite whose lousy dishonest "political correctness" has already become cancel culture. I don't believe we who want tolerance will get it by tolerating those who spread hate and intolerance. I think we'll only get it when the elite Democrat totalitarians start losing money, and positions, and status, for their dishonest claims of tolerance while actually supporting intolerance.
Only when more Dems suffer from cancel culture will the Dems in power really question it.
Neo has much better discussion of the Jews as (racist) Whites issue, which is much bigger than just Caryn Johnson (who culturally appropriated the name Goldberg for stage).
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/02/01/whoopi-goldberg-the-nazis-and-those-white-jews/
Comment copy from Neo to Arnold:
I was a regular reader of Norm Geras, a reasonable Marxist Jew. Just before he died (2013), he left a great list of Best 100 books. One unlike most others.
https://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/10/a-book-list-with-a-difference.html
Thanks for Neo for keeping him on the blogroll.
Most of his post, and this post by Neo, I agree with.
But:
“Whether you call these groups ethnic groups (most have distinct DNA profiles, by the way) or races does not matter.”
“Racism” applies to races. Language matters, especially in insults and slanders.
While the Nazis called Jews a race, most English speakers recognize 3 or 4 race colors: White, Black, Yellow; and maybe Red (Native Americans).
Jews and Arabs and Hispanics are all “White”. Ethnic, tribal variants of White.
I like to call them all tribes, so it’s tribal murder as with Black Hutus committing genocidal murder on Black Tutsis (in 1994, with Clinton & his Jewish Dem supporters denying it was genocide until it was over).
Talking about intermarriage today, which is much higher, obscures how little intermarriage there was before WW II. DNA analysis of Y chromosomes, which are inherited directly by all sons from their fathers (unlike other combined genes), indicated (in the 80s) that over 90% of male Jews had “Abraham’s” Y chromosome. The Father of all Jews. After 3000 years, an extraordinarily low rate of intermarriage.
Recall the third daughter of Tevye (Fiddler on the Roof) Chava, being cast out for falling for a Russian Orthodox. (Wiki says a later story shows Chava leaving her husband to go back to family on the way to Israel.) My Jewish friends, all secular, explain this mostly as “being comfortable” around others like them. Which is true, but also discriminatory.
It’s a problem for US Blacks – how to be a comfortable minority among a majority, and maintain your “own GROUP identity” without discrimination. All group identities discriminate. The in-group vs the out-group.
It seems that in most 20th century genocides the majority in-group has, on avg., lower IQ & success than the minority target -group, Poor Mulsim Turks (including many Kurds) against Christian Armenians (see the horrific naked Armenian Christian women murdered by crucifixion), pagan Nazis-Jews, poor Hutus-less poor Tutsis (taller, better educated), non-educated Pol Pot Cambodians-educated Cambodians (25% ***); Malays-Chinese; Russians-Ukrainian Kulaks (Holodomor); Great Leap Forward (1958) & later Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-death of Mao; tho this was mixed with political control).
Serbs in Srebrenica-Muslim & Japanese rape of Chinese Nanking (& others) were not quite less successful killers killing of the more successful.
So much killing for so many decades. But in the list above, not many Christian capitalist civilizations were doing the genocide. Germany was nominally Christian, tho tens of thousands of priests were sent to the death camps, along with the 6 million Jews, 3 million Gypsies, and 1 million others.
The Jews get more than twice the publicity as the Roma (Gypsy), more than 10x, maybe more than 100 times. Because the great Jewish writers are great writers; great Jewish scientists are great scientists.
Still, Jewish Zionism was a Marxist, mostly atheist movement.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-how-israel-went-from-atheist-zionism-to-jewish-state-1.5488653
Many rabbis opposed it at the time: “The power of the human subject replaced the power of the omnipotent God.”
Many intellectual Jews in Christian countries were either atheist, or explicitly anti-Christian. It’s understandable that Jewish anti-Christianity could grow out of centuries of Christian hatred and frequent unjust mistreatment of Jews. Just as slave hatred against slave masters is understandable. But “understanding” the increasing mutual hatred is not to condone it. [Today it seems many can only understand ideas they agree with.] The atheism of Jewish Marxists & socialists was hated by many Christian leaders. The secular intellectual success of many Jews was envied, and hated, by many almost-as-talented non-Jews.
Envy – the wish of destruction of the good fortune of the person envied.
The worst, yet very common, sinful feeling so many have.
In killing, Holocaust not so unique.
In the historical characteristics of killers and killed, Euro semi-Christian capitalists against Euro citizens, unique.
(1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death,
(2) the comprehensiveness of intent & (2b) global scope
(3) spiritual murder
Whoopi is sort-of almost right: “everybody eats each other.” All groups oppose the out-group, somewhat.
Everybody has a God shaped hole in their heart – what they believe. (Even atheists; they fill it with some beliefs) This has been talked about explicitly.
Everybody has a set of group-identity holes in their heart. This hasn’t been talked about enough — what are the good group identities to have?
The line between good and evil runs thru every person’s heart. (Solzhenitsyn)
Our hearts have a constant battle between a good wolf and a bad wolf.
Which wolf wins? – asks the Indian Chief’s grandson.
The wolf that we feed.
Free will is choosing which wolf to feed.
Or what blogs we write what comments on…
---
Neo's blog and ASKblog have long been my own two favorites for comments - Instapundit for links.
I liked Axelrod's book, and it's worth thinking about, but I don't think this is a context where people are rational enough for 'tit for tat' to work. Even in international relations, Israel-Palestine, the disputes of Schleswig-Holstein, all the crises leading up to WW1, and so many others suggest a retaliatory strategy is a recipe for disaster. I'm more sympathetic to the position that when someone who engages in 'cancellatory' behavior is suspended or fired, one should simply not bother to defend them and let the movement have them (while defending people, even extreme leftists, who aren't 'cancellatory' and especially who challenge that sort of thing). That creates a better incentive structure without leading to never-ending retaliation.
I broadly agree, but there are two points where I disagree.
First, it is reasonable to expect Whoopi Goldberg to either apologize or to lucidly explain her thinking. She chose the stereotypically Jewish name Goldberg for her stage name, and previously claimed to know she is Jewish, so she should understand why her comment was so offensive to so many people -- Jew and gentile alike. (If she had not apologized, I would hope her friends or respected colleagues would intervene and try to explain why any attempted explanation would be soundly criticized.)
Second, she is -- in a very narrow sense -- right that European persecution of Jews, epitomized by the Holocaust, was not race-based as commonly defined in America today. That is mostly a reflection of ideological blinders that are too common in today's world, though: The modern American concept of race is not the only excuse that people use for inhuman behavior to other people. We must not forget that. Such intolerance is still a severe problem today: Half of Jews in France teach their children to hide their religion to avoid attacks.
(In sense that the modern left argues that race is a social construct, I think Jews were treated much like a race in century-ago Europe. Many anti-Semites were explicit about that.)
From the Babylon Bee. "While Watching 'The View' In Hell, Hitler Surprised To Learn Holocaust Wasn't About Race" https://babylonbee.com/news/while-watching-the-view-in-hell-hitler-surprised-to-learn-holocaust-wasnt-about-race
More seriously, I believe the correct response should be that what she said was horrible, but she shouldn't be canceled because cancelling people is wrong. That way we avoid the problem of people claiming that the right wants to cancel people just as much as the left.
While I agree with the sentiment, I am beginning to understand that Alinsky was right all along.
You described yourself as a "free speech absolutist." Surely you know that the concept of freedom of speech applies to the government not being allowed to restrain or punish it. It has nothing to do with private speech. If an ABC employee says something stupid or "hurtful" and ABC perceives this will hurt their bottom line, they are entirely within their rights to discipline said employee. Private citizens are withing their rights to ask ABC to sanction the employee. ABC is free to ignore them. Note my use of the word "free." As long as no government entity tries to sanction the speech there is no loss of freedom.
If your employer fires you for getting married, are you truly free to choose whether you want to get married?
Which would be a more meaningful infringement on your freedom, a $500 fine from the government or the loss of thousands in salary when you get fired?
Free speech is a moral right, not only a legal right.
Employment is a mutually consensual relationship. A contract can specify conditions, but an employer does not owe you a job. You are, in fact, free to work somewhere else.
Sure. But consent by itself is quite a limited notion of freedom. Punishing someone for their choices, or threatening punishment, can take away their freedom even if the punishment involves no violation of consent.
Another example. If your parents stop paying for your tuition because you converted to a religion they don't approve of, that is a form of coercive punishment, even though you have no legal right to their support.
You are defining freedom in a way that is foreign to me.
I'm defining it the way Mill defined it in On Liberty
Playing Greenblatt's advocate: the reason why the ADL is the way that it is is because its funders believe that it is more effective at preventing harm to its interests than the free speech absolutist position. You are arguing for the collective benefit of free speech. Greenblatt operates under a different and narrower bailiwick. The Arnold Kling ADL might restrict itself to strict incidents of defamation. The Greenblatt ADL seeks to snip incipient support for Farrakhanism in the bud before it has the chance to spread and create more problems for his clients. Her actual remarks were totally anodyne, and in a different context would not raise much controversy at all. After all, the census classes 'Jews' as 'Whites.'
So, to change the ADL, you would have to convince it that an environment of free speech on the ancient Anglo-American model is superior to the model that it has sought to advance since 1913. Greenblattism has a lot of credibility, but it has also accumulated many critics over the years. I would say more cynically that the Anglo-American model of free speech only exists insomuch as it serves corporate and secular interests, with the original telos only existing in a vestigial and rapidly expiring form in reality. You can instantly assemble billions of dollars in legal firepower to fight for the right to publish soft porn on HBO, or the right to host illegal material on a server, but it is significantly tougher to assemble that much for genuine issues related to political speech issues. To judge which side of a conflict is stronger, it's helpful to look at these types of resource cycle issues. Lady Chatterley's army is very big and very strong, whereas James Madison's is very puny and quite raggedy, especially now that the former no longer needs to feign support for the latter.
Can you explain why "the demands for apologies from Goldberg, and her suspension, are likely to increase rather than diminish the rise of anti-semitism."?
That seems way too broad to me. Setting aside calling for her suspension, it seems to say that we shouldn't even exercise our own free speech against things that are wrong and insulting.
I've read that a lot of woke tactics do generate anti-minority sentiment, and generally agree with that view. But I think this is a clearly different situation than haranguing people about their privilege and arguing for the infallibility of POCs. Here we have an individual who said something stupid. She shouldn't be censored or punished (I totally agree with that!), but asking people to refrain from something as prosaic as an apology seems like self-censorship
Suppose you are a black person who often hears that Jews have too much power and that they exploit blacks. You are likely to hear Jewish outrage at Goldberg as the assertion of Jewish power and white supremacy against a black figure. That will increase anti-semitism.
"Suppose you are a black person who often hears that Jews have too much power and that they exploit blacks."
Then I would already be anti-semitic, and Goldberg's initial statements would, by themselves, be likely to increase my anti-semitism.
Quite literally, if I'm the typical sort of person who believes what they hear over and over, if I never hear any opposition to this kind of anti-semitism, it would grow unchecked!
Suppose you are a black person who thinks the vast majority of whites are gullible, milquetoast, guilt-ridden suckers who can be bullied into capitulation on every cultural front by the mere threat of reputational harm via allegations of racism. You are likely to hear the lack of outrage, pushback, or punishment of Whoopie Goldberg as evidence of the fact that white people are gullible, milquetoast, guilt-ridden suckers...
The Deplorable in me says that plenty of the people you describe (both black and white) exist, but I would just point out that you can have pushback without punishment or outrage, and in fact that is in my opinion the most reasonable approach to take. I consider Goldberg's comments to be stupid, myopic, and historically illiterate much more than they are offensive, so I don't see why they should generate outrage, and if we all went around suspending people from work for saying stuff that was stupid, myopic, and historically illiterate, nothing would ever get done.
I don't think the outrage over this stems from a desire to suspend Whoopie Goldberg for saying stupid, myopic, or historically illiterate stuff. She does that literally every day. No one cares. The outrage emanates from the bankable assumption that if she were white and had made far more benign, if stupid, statements about black oppression she would not only lose her job, she'd be removed from polite society altogether.
This is about reestablishing symmetry, because without it our principles are less than useless, they are an unmitigated liability.
Your assumption is certainly correct, but I would just say that I think your goal of "reestablishing symmetry" is hopeless. I don't envision the identitarian left is ever going to accept that the same standards should apply to everyone equally. Their entire worldview is based around assigning people to different groups, slotting those groups into some kind of hierarchy based on victimization or oppression, and then crafting different standards for different spots in the hierarchy as recompense for past oppression or to ensure equality of outcome for the future. This isn't going to change. With that in mind, I think copying these people's tactics isn't going to "establish symmetry" but rather create a terrible equilibrium.
What I guess at issue is what is an acceptable level of pushback. Everything is "outrage" these days, but I'd argue that a strong "This is stupid and offensive and you should apologize" response is legitimate, even if it might be seen as "outrage".
Saying she should never work again or be fired is not.
No one should be fired for saying stupid things. But everyone should be fired for saying stupid things if anyone is going to be fired for saying stupid things. I stand by this principle.
Isn't the ADL's stance (maybe unofficially) that principals are meaningless and only power matters.
What the average black person is going to learn from this episode is that if you cross Jews they will severely punish you and have the power to follow through on that.
I get that in your mind that this will build resentment that will eventually cause blowback, but that's just a theory. Isn't it just as valid a theory that people conform to power and that it it better to be feared then loved. That seems to be working for the ADL for a long time now.
P.S. I haven't even read Whoopi's statement, but there is a long enough list of people being punished by the ADL that I think the actual content is almost meaningless to the point above.
For what it's worth, ADL CEO Jon Greenblatt came out against punishing Whoopi Goldberg. So, technically, the preeminent Jewish organization dedicated to trying to discourage people from saying bad things about Jews is also saying that the usual social and economic deterrents *shouldn't* be used on Whoopi. Whether or not you think the ADL is actually mostly about Jewish group libels anymore (I don't), this still weighs slightly against "Cross the Jews and they will try to punish you" framing.
Now a lot of people claim - within reason - that this is just a fully left-captured institution ("converso" in this case) which, like ACLU, has a focus which is increasingly remote from its original intended mission and increasingly indistinguishable from every other progressive activist group, and so of course it's just one progressive covering and making excuses for another progressive in the typical way, by abusively leveraging some kind of credential to having special expertise and personal authority on the matter, "My opinion is official and authoritative on this matter, and thus you have to take my word for it."
That's probably mostly true. The way you can tell is whether the ADL is similarly forgiving and merciful and magnanimous when the target is not a progressive, as opposed to being a bunch of hypocrites lying about their real, double standards. Which, ah, they are not.
Nevertheless, he had what I thought was a clever line, "I don't believe in cancel culture, I believe in *counsel* culture." That is, instead of punishment, you should just try to explain, repeatedly, to the target (and everybody else too) why they were wrong, and try to get them to understand why they should change their erroneous opinion on the matter. The solution to bad speech is good speech and civil engagement to convey it.
Now that is a pretty good sentiment, one I wish were more widely shared, and furthermore, written into labor law as a cost of a restriction on liberty worth paying to protect an even more important - and endangered - liberty.
However, it turns out that before 'correcting' Whoopi, the ADL CEO should have checked with ... the ADL ... on what does and do not qualify as "racism", for instance, at their "What is racism?" webpage, which gets its own org root webpage at adl.org/racism
"Racism: The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people."
Uh oh. People of color, but, Jews, but, maybe ... The latest AI toys just spit out "syntax error" at this stuff.
Look, any interpretation is possible if you are willing to twist the meaning of words to whatever degree necessary to 'prove' your point, but the common sense reading of that definition does not look good for the ADL's claim that the Nazis went after Jews because of 'racism' that is in the same category of the kind of 'racism' against black people that Whoopi asserts is unique. That's the issue at dispute, right?
The definition mentions social construction, but it is *not* making some kind of absolutist post-modern claim that 'racism' is fundamentally arbitrary and subjective and so socially constructed that, whenever one group oppresses another and uses the term 'race' as a categorization, then it's automatically 'racism' by definition, and it's kind of up to everyone to decide for themselves on what their own definition of 'racism' is, yadda yadda.
Instead, they were standing very firmly and publicly behind the woke Who-over-Whom assertion that identity is everything that only white people can be racist, and discrimination and other problematic acts are only racist when white people do it or are disproportionately helped by it.
Which is just totally nuts. And evil. But there it is. And the ADL is all-in on it. And then Whoopi says something which is completely correct and accurate *by that idiotic and evil standard*, the same one the ADL is standing behind. Perhaps why they aren't exactly so interested in seeing her get punished.
But to go out in public and claim that she's wrong to apply the ADL's own definition of racism ... well, it takes a lot of chutzpah.
We are living in the insane world of outrage both fake and real.The thought and speech police need to get a grip on themselves. They themselves (tv executives) are worried about being called out! -rating$.
As ill informed as the ironicaly named Goldberg may be there are actually ultra-religious Jews who believe and say that the Holocaust was divine retribution for collective sins. Perhaps they too should be called out and cancelled for being Anti-semitism. Imagine the outrage that would follow.