De-Friended Moderates: The Collateral Damage of Cancel Culture

How many times this year have I seen a frustrated political post like this one (on Facebook)?

"If you believe X, just de-friend me now!"

Or this?

"I've de-friended people who continue to post about X, and will do so again"

 As someone who loves a good argument (I prefer to lose, as I learn more when I was incorrect to start with), I have enjoyed parrying with old friends over the past decade. My kids grew up as I did - as critical thinkers - thanks to the habit of always checking {"speed bumping"} their convictions. A lot of this goes back further than my high school debate team. My dad would explain what a "fallacy" was starting when I was 4 years old, and I'd hear him explain it again to my younger brother and then younger sister (so I got it 3 times).

Unfortunately, as Socrates learned, the majority of people prefer confirmation bias, and get irritated if they are on the losing side of an argument. This is playing out in social media, and I'm observing a consequence in "cancel culture".

Thesis: As people click to de-friend opposition opinion, they lose antibodies. Like a too-clean floor (no longer recommended for toddlers), they lack exposure to true disagreement. And consequently, they go after moderates.

{Good Essay by Elizabeth Bernstein in WSJ}

Picking The Wrong #ewaste "Underdogs" Part I

Happy 4th of July (from France).  Everyone here is talking about "underdogs" - though without a solid French translation. Different translations convey different assumptions.  Opprime is "oppressed", perdants is "losers". Sous-estime is "underestimated" (which works after the unexpected victory, in hindsight).

When Iceland beat England in the Euro Cup, and Wales beat Belgium, it was a surprise.  When Leicester City - facing elimination from the Premier League a year earlier - won the entire British Isles championship, the French sportscaster seemed to be missing a handle for the story.

Could 2016 be the Year of the Underdog?   One long-running theme of this Good Point: Ethical E-Waste Blog is our critical look at how #photojournalism can create, leverage, or ignore underdogs.  The audience of mankind is highly evolved to nurture the young and oppressed (what I call the Steve Pinker "nurture" instinct), which causes us to support scrappy underdogs vs. big corporations. Mass media is not an umpire - it's a player in the game.  Media controls who's perceived as worthy of nurture, and who's perceived as "imperialist" or "bully".  We nurture the oppressed, we root for the underdogs.  And when it's an obscure, technical, or foreign story, we depend on the media to tell us who the bullys and who the underdogs are.

Here's a kind of derivative take.  Mass media can create a "loser" who "wins" the underdog blessing. Being an underdog is a blessing of "moral currency". We see this in everyday society, people exaggerating their "rags to riches" history, the tourists' propensity to validate their "close encounter" with poverty.  And I need of course little excuse to repost the greatest comedic clip of all time, BBC's "The Four Yorkshiremen" sketch (pre-Monty Python's "Finally 1948" show).



So on July 4, Superpower USA reflects back on the scrappy 1776 Minutemen who overcame the King of England, the United Kingdom's rule.  Like Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo and Princess Leiah, a handful of colonies "against all odds" threw off the yoke of the 1700's greatest superpower, Great Britain.  Iceland, Bernie Sanders, Wales, Leicester City, and George Washington, the lovable underdogs.

The underdog card...