Yes, thank you.
Why do people on the left insist on falling for these tricks by those on the right?
I’m with Robert Frost: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
That’s glorious. Frost was so great.
Shame on his estate refusing to license “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” to Eric Whitacre, though.
Edit: To clarify the flow of discussion, I wrote this phrased as a response to @charmtrap’s post but I’m not sure if Discourse kept it pointing to his post since I also quoted several others.
It sounds like you’re using “cancelled” extremely broadly as merely a synonym for “oppressed” or “discriminated against”.
Again, I’ll grant there are bad actors who are crying that they’ve been cancelled when you could more accurately say they’ve been “disagreed with” or “saddened to find freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence”.
But that’s not all we’re talking about. Not everyone here who thinks cancel culture exists agrees on the particulars, but I think there’s a through line here to something that could be more narrowly defined than simply calling it discrimination.
Here are bits I’m quoting not to wholly summarize what these people are saying or speak for them, but to illustrate my point.
I don’t think we’re wasting our time trying to determine if there is something to this; I think it’s worth more discussion and consideration.
In the same way even that within your own explanation of how people have been “‘cancelled my for centuries” people would probably protest if you came into a discussion about sexual discrimination and said “this has been happening to Jews for centuries!”, there are overlap and similarities in the results of the discrimination, but the differences matter too.
Two of the definitions being offered here are wrong. It’s not the case that very many people lose their job or their income or even get silenced for things they said or did 40 years ago. It’s not the case that very many people have been shamed or silenced or lost their jobs or their incomes because their views are simply not ‘heterodox’.
The third definition is just a restatement of what @charmtrap said. It’s true that the range of unacceptable views has gotten broader — or, I should say, even flipped. The view that segregation was wrong would have gotten you canceled in 1950s Mississippi; whereas the view that segregation was right might get you ‘canceled’ now. The question is, why is that something to lament?
Neither do I. By all means, continue.
Well, I’m not seeing a meaningful difference…I’m happy to consider them if someone can come up with a coherent definition of “cancel culture”.
But let’s just go ahead and leave aside race and religion and stick to: “labor organizer in the 20s/30s”, “Communist Party meeting attendee in the 40s/50s”, “civil rights worker in the South in the 50s/60s”, “gay rights or women’s rights worker in the 70s/80s”.
Being silenced isn’t anything new just because it’s happening to rich people now.
That isn’t really the point. The point is that it’s policing all communication, in any context, no matter how long ago it was.
To give a counterfactual, imagine someone pulled a letter you wrote a professor and mentioned you had read The Bell Curve - but today, Charles Murray is discredited. Does that mean you’re a monster who should be cancelled? Imagine a bad joke, or an off color comment, or a comment that was actually bad but poorly worded, twenty years or thirty years ago. You were a kid in college? Too bad. No mercy.
The question about Cancel Culture isn’t some black and white “here are racists, saying racist things, who are obviously bad, and you’re defending them because you’re racist because obviously they’re racist and should be cancelled”, it’s saying that everything ever said no matter the context is liable. It’s the sort of nightmare world of the internet where everything you’ve ever said anywhere, no matter the age you said it, even if you’ve changed your mind, is in a sense a Sword of Damocles hanging over your head forever. It’s also the incredibly annoying retroactivity of judgement and standards, where what matters is how i feel about it right now, all that matters are the standards right now. It’s the epistemological elimination of “past” as a category - everything is present, and always present. (Maybe some philosopher can wax poetic one day about this phenomenon thanks to the internet.)
All that said i said elsewhere on the site that this was part of “politically correct” policing that was probably necessary for culture to change. All i really argue for, i guess, is a clear eyed view that the National Twitter Razor swings wide and that you’re willing to accept casualities that probably ought not to have been cut down for the benefit of the greater good, and not mistake the rolling heads after razor’s wide arc has passed as proof of their undeniable guilt.
The thing is, almost nobody is doing this. Every so often someone (usually a person on the right) with an elite career is found to have said or written or done some really bad things — some of which are not even that far in the past! — and the result is that they lose a job, after which they get invited to share their views in pretty much every media outlet available. There they cry about how unfair it is that people object to the words they’ve said or written and lament the advent of ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’ and never seem to quite grasp that ‘cancel culture’ is murdering Emmett fucking Till because he was allegedly rude to a white woman.
You mean like utility workers who someone in the car next to them thinks they might have made the OK symbol?
Or Palestinian immigrants who’ve built a business out of nothing?
I mean, we can pretend that nobody did anything to deserve being called out here, but who are we kidding?
I guess that was a predictably dishonest response. When you use “called out” to mean “destroyed a 200 employee business because of the speech of the owner’s daughter while she was a teenager” you are being wilfully blind.
I don’t really grasp what you think the crime is here, or what the solution would be. The daughter of the owner, who was also an employee, offended a ton of people who decided not to frequent the business anymore. The things that happened were 1) the daughter wrote a bunch of racist and anti-Semitic stuff, 2) someone made it public that she did, and 3) people decided not to give their money to that business.
Is that ‘cancel culture’? How would you fix it?
CraigM
3513
I mean there is the oft repeated axiom ‘vote with your wallet’
I shop at Lowes instead of Home Depot because the HD owners were big Trump boosters.
I would not shop at a store flying a Trump/ Confederate flag or sign
And there are people who would not shop at a store with a rainbow flag, or owned by certain ethnic groups. People burned their Nike merch when they supported Kaepernick.
What is new here? Just the distribution and dissemination that makes it harder for certain behaviors to hide. What, 20 years ago, would have been people talking in their country clubs, bow gets out in the open.
1.5) years previously, as a teenager
2.5) Was immediately fired, despite being the owners daughter.
But it seems that punishing the speaker for her speech wasn’t enough.
And you’re still exhibiting the same wilful blindness. We’ve all seen this happen. Some instances have been cheered along in this forum. Once these episodes blow up on social media, there’s always a subgroup of internet detectives willing to find employers, landlords, advertisers, corporate customers, and face them with the choice of cancelling contracts or facing sustained public embarrassment. These aren’t things that just happen. People choose to make them happen. Stop pretending.
Bummer for them. You can be fired for any or no reason in the US (with rare exceptions). If anything, you can ruin a business even more easily.
I’m as skeptical of the value of social media as anyone, but if a tool exists, any idiot can pick it up. If that’s a problem for people, they’re not powerless. They can do something about it.
No, actually, I’m asking you how you would prevent this sort of thing.
So to summarise. You accept that your original assertion was completely false, and it’s just tough shit for whoever this week’s victim is.
Be a better parent? Obviously the guy really dropped the ball when it came to his daughter.
Anyone that is that bad a parent probably should not run a business.
Yes, that occurred to me too.
