TOTAS: Cancelled Vs Consequence

So you've said something online and now you are cancelled. But are you, really? in the marketplace of ideas - speech has consequences. People protesting "cancel culture" are really just complaining that the problematic things they have said have been rejected by the more enlightened society who will not tolerate wrongness in public discourse.

That's a good thing, right?

So maybe some people have lost jobs, opportunities, friends, social standing and careers over things they said - even things which can be supported by objective non-politicized review of data. Maybe others who agree with them have silenced themselves because of fear of the same sort of public demonization. Maybe there is a pervasive fear of honest open dialogue because the shifting landscape of acceptable speech is hard to predict. Is that the much protested cancel culture?

How can we tell the difference between cancellation and the reasonable consequences of controversial speech?

Jonathan Rauch's book "The Constitution of Knowledge" includes a helpful chapter which draws this distinction quite well. In today's episode we talk about it.