![\"witchunt-lego\"](\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/witchunt-lego.jpg\")
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#Shirtstorm quickly became a controversy, not about hostile workplaces for women per se, but instead about what are legitimate forms of debate. (If you don’t know what #Shirtstorm is, Phil Plait summarizes it here<\/a>.) Although I saw several good articles patiently explaining <\/a>why the shirt Dr. Taylor wore matters<\/a>, it’s reasonable to say that overall, the debate has become very ugly.<\/p>\n The best thing I’ve seen in the meta-debate is what Ken White wrote<\/a> about the perennial accusations of “witch hunts” and “lynch mobs.”<\/p>\n We’re Dishonestly Obsessed With Metaphors of Violent Oppression<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n People get criticized on the internet. Sometimes this criticism is unfair, irrational, and\/or ridiculous. But when you say they’ve suffered a “lynch mob” or “witch hunt,” unless people are actually calling for the person to be hanged or jailed, you’re almost certainly full of shit.<\/p>\n Criticism is not censorship. Criticism is what we have instead of censorship. Preserving the ability to criticize vigorously is how we convince ourselves \u2014 tenuously \u2014 not to censor. Criticism is often leveled for incredibly stupid reasons, but then, so is the mechanism of government censorship.<\/p>\n When you say that someone criticized on the internet (or in the news) is the victim of a “lynch mob,” here are the notions you are trying to sneak past your listeners:<\/p>\n In other words, you’re likely just saying “I disagree strongly with this criticism and I will use lazy shorthand to say so.” That’s how you get a discourse in which lynch mobs are apparently chasing each other in circles \u2014 first the lynch mob after Dr. Taylor, followed by the lynch mob chasing the people who criticized Dr. Taylor, etc. This makes the shirt itself look profound in comparison.<\/p>\n We also use related rhetoric about what we’re allowed to say. You hear a lot of “you’re not allowed to . .” or “these days you can’t . . ,” by which people mean that we live in a time where if you do certain things it will have significant social consequences. But we always lived in that time. If I got up at a town meeting in 1914 and said “homosexuals should be allowed to marry each other,” that would likely have had one set of strong social consequences, if I got up in a town meeting in 2014 and said “homosexuals should not be allowed to marry each other,” it might have a different set of strong social consequences. The “you’re not allowed to” rhetoric implies two false things: (1) that social consequences are equivalent to force or government coercion, and (2) there has been some sort of magical bunny-rabbit-gumdrop time when people could say whatever they wanted without social consequences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s just a tiny portion of a lengthy post, which I recommend reading<\/a>. I also recommend Conor’s post on the same subject<\/a>, which opens with Conor’s alternate world fic of how a disagreement between reasonable people about #shirtstorm could have gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" #Shirtstorm quickly became a controversy, not about hostile workplaces for women per se, but instead about what are legitimate forms of debate. (If you don’t know what #Shirtstorm is, Phil Plait summarizes it here.) Although I saw several good articles … Continue reading \n