Cancel culture IRL

[lobosrul5]

Is it too much to ask that people speak out against such behavior, and condemn it as unacceptable, instead of hand-waving it aside? I mean, is that such a sacrifice?

I'm unclear what you want? Do you want everyone here to acknowledge that death threats and harassment should be illegal? As they already are? OK, I do, please check my off your list.

Or do you want the definition of harassment to be expanded as codified in US law (its broader in the UK I believe).

ETA: I honestly wasn't being rhetorical. I'm not sure what you want done, is de-anonymzing social media a valid idea? Is that something you want to argue should be done? I can it serving a purpose.

 

[Elaedith]

I condemn the doxxing, threatening, and coercing - that is what I consider cancel culture.

This is the best analysis I have found of the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.

Basically you can't expect it to be anything but irrational, authoritarian and otherwise repulsive if you understand the philosophy underlying it. You also can't expect to be able to reason with somebody who has this mindset because it is ideological fundamentalism.

 

[Mumbles]

I lied I did read some more. David Peterson was at a back the blue rally and students found out and dropped his class. He didn’t even lose his job.

that’s a few steps away from genocide.

For reference, my mother (who lectures at UNC) was asked by the black student union to participate in a BLM rally - and was torn on it. On one hand, the family's familiar with civil rights work and protests, including herself.

On the other, she has to worry about the appearance of neutrality when grading students (mentoring is another matter, but she's careful about even that much). DUnno what she ended up deciding.

But given that Blue Lives Matter/"Back the Blue" were obviously little more than angry retorts to BLM, and that many such people end up denouncing police that dare to tell them they can't freely attack black people, I'd say that those two are far more of a problem than any nonviolent protest.

 

[Distracted1]

This is the best analysis I have found of the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.

Basically you can't expect it to be anything but irrational, authoritarian and otherwise repulsive if you understand the philosophy underlying it. You also can't expect to be able to reason with somebody who has this mindset because it is ideological fundamentalism.

Good link.
My opinion also. Expressed far more clearly than I can myself.

 

[Ron Obvious]

This is the best analysis I have found of the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.

Yes, it's an interesting summary. It's written by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose who also wrote the excellent book Cynical Theories examining "Critical Theory", "Intersectionality", and the intellectually vapid Postmodernism it sprang from.

 

[dirtywick]

This is the best analysis I have found of the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.

Basically you can't expect it to be anything but irrational, authoritarian and otherwise repulsive if you understand the philosophy underlying it. You also can't expect to be able to reason with somebody who has this mindset because it is ideological fundamentalism.

let's talk about it

This is why we saw John McEnroe publicly excoriated for saying Serena Williams would rank around 700 among men in tennis. He said he did not believe it to be earthshattering to say that differences exist between men and women, especially in athletics, but this is because he did not understand that, in Social Justice terms, he was speaking into a dominant discourse that marked women as inferior and thus actually perpetuating that sexist discourse.

first example of cancel culture provided. john mcenroe said something people didn't like about serena williams. people told him they didn't like what he said, including serena williams herself (is she allowed to respond to his comments, or is she "canceling" john mcenroe too?), then he refused to apologize and stuck to his original comments. Apparently at some point in the future he came to regret those comments.

did he incur any penalty other than public disagreement and being aware that people didn't agree with them? it doesn't appear so, googling this incident to find an article that's not behind a paywall requires me to wade through dozens of more recent articles about his other tennis related commentary and opinions, so people are still listening to him and he hasn't been excommunicated from the tennis community, let alone society at large.

if

This conception of how society works is counterintuitive to those of a liberal bent. Those of us who grew up understanding that freedom of belief and speech were not only essential individual liberties, but also that the free exchange of ideas is how knowledge advances and moral progress is made, were not well-prepared to either understand or counter this development.

then why is it wrong that people let john mcenroe know their ideas about his ideas? isn't that the kind of exchange that's essential?

if this is the kind of **** that's so detrimental to society, lol

@lionking sorry I typed a lot of this out without capital letters, I'm trying lol

 

[Elaedith]

Yes, it's an interesting summary. It's written by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose who also wrote the excellent book Cynical Theories examining "Critical Theory", "Intersectionality", and the intellectually vapid Postmodernism it sprang from.

Video interview with Helen Pluckrose discussing this:

 

[Mumbles]

Hm. Last time I saw Lindsay he was claiming that "woke" jews were pushing people to become neo-nazis, pushing the claim that AOC lied about being in her nearby office during the Jan 6 insurrection attempt, because she was actually in...her nearby office, and claiming 'Critical Race Theory" is responsible for random anti-Asian street crime.

Not so sure I trust his word on the matter. Maybe he really fell into hard drugs or something recently, but this sort of thing doesn't bode well.

 

[Elaedith]

Hm. Last time I saw Lindsay he was claiming that "woke" jews were pushing people to become neo-nazis, pushing the claim that AOC lied about being in her nearby office during the Jan 6 insurrection attempt, because she was actually in...her nearby office, and claiming 'Critical Race Theory" is responsible for random anti-Asian street crime.

Not so sure I trust his word on the matter. Maybe he really fell into hard drugs or something recently, but this sort of thing doesn't bode well.

I heard he went a bit bonkers in the last few weeks and Pluckrose had some type of falling out with him. Not that this has any direct relevance to anything.

 

[Emily's Cat]

This is the best analysis I have found of the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.

Basically you can't expect it to be anything but irrational, authoritarian and otherwise repulsive if you understand the philosophy underlying it. You also can't expect to be able to reason with somebody who has this mindset because it is ideological fundamentalism.

Postmodernist philosophy is a blight.

 

[Ron Obvious]

Hm. Last time I saw Lindsay he was claiming that "woke" jews were pushing people to become neo-nazis, pushing the claim that AOC lied about being in her nearby office during the Jan 6 insurrection attempt, because she was actually in...her nearby office, and claiming 'Critical Race Theory" is responsible for random anti-Asian street crime.

Not so sure I trust his word on the matter. Maybe he really fell into hard drugs or something recently, but this sort of thing doesn't bode well.

Twitter is just the wrong platform for insightful analysis and discussion of any depth whatsoever.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Not only that, he now operates a celebrity featured podcast and has had several media appearances. If you got a half a million dollars and a celebrity podcast you didn’t get “canceled”

This is really just a thread about people losing their jobs. Sometimes, sometimes they don’t.

This reminds me of perhaps the most egregious example of this kind of thing - Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a mask that said "censored" across the front. While she was speaking into a microphone, addressing the rest of the US Senate, in a chamber in the heart of the US government.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Twitter is just the wrong platform for insightful analysis and discussion of any depth whatsoever. for humans

Fixed that for you...

 

[HansMustermann]

They are illegal, yes. But when they're done anonymously, it's rather hard to investigate. And apparently, people seem to think it's just fine, because hey - some of those people came out of it just fine, no big deal!

You know that if there's an investigation, a warrant can be issued to get all information from Twitter, Google, Apple, whatever, right? Just like the rest of your narrative, it just relies on distorting what reality actually is.

But more importantly: your argument seems to be, or at least imply, that if some action X (e.g., protesting someone) MIGHT SOMETIMES be done in conjunction with criminal activities Y and Z (e.g., libel, sending death threats, etc), then somehow that means X is inherently horrible too.

Which is textbook association fallacy:

P1: A is a B
P2: A is a C
therefore
C: All B are C

In this case:

P1: X is (an example of) a cancel culture tweet
P2: X is also horribly morally wrong (on account of being a death threat)
therefore:
C: cancel culture tweets are horribly morally wrong

But there's a reason it's a fallacy. It's broken logic.

By literally the same logic:

P1: The protest in city X was a BLM protest
P2: The protest in city X was morally wrong (because it turned into a violent riot)
therefore
C: BLM protests are morally wrong

That's literally the kind of nonsense guilt by association that you keep peddling.

Here's an idea: if you have a problem with death threats or libel, then just speak against those. I wouldn't even mind more people speaking against death threats.

But damning something by association is just utter nonsense.

 

[HansMustermann]

Postmodernist philosophy is a blight.

It's also the current boogeyman for when someone is grasping at straws for some reason to blame anything. It's like in the 30's Germany anything you didn't like could be blamed on judeo-bolshevik culture / zionism, or in Stalin's USSR you could blame anything you didn't like on imperialist or trotskyist influence. You don't like, say, Jazz music? Just blame it on jewish culture in Germany or denounce it as imperialist in the USSR.

(NB, I'm not even talking hypotheticals. Both literally happened. The USSR literally had a guy in charge of enforcing Socialist Realism in all arts, lest they fall under that evil imperialist influence. A guy who hated it, apparently, but hey, if Stalin says you have to enforce Socialist Realism, you just do it.)

It doesn't matter if there's actually any connection at all, much less a causal one, or even if there's any such thing as the entity being blamed. Just say it's their fault and it's job done. Bulverism successfully achieved.

Anyway... Yes, actual postmodern philosophy has its flaws, even major flaws, but most people blaming everything they don't like on it don't even know what those actually are. It's just the buzzword of the day for when one wants to sound all intellectual about damning something, while actually their intellectual contribution or knowledge is a big fat zero without a border.

It's kinda like Quantum Mechanics, really. If you hear it mentioned in anything that isn't an actual particle physics discussion, chances are overwhelming that it actually has nothing to do with it.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

FWIW, I read that article, but it seemed like a lot of assertions with little in the way of evidence or presented reasoning. The closest it seems to get to backing up any of its claims is a vague "many people felt", which doesn't seem particularly academically rigorous to me.

I haven't read the book they refer to, but I did read some reviews. According to those reviews, the authors have done their homework on the history of the development of postmodernism, but their arguments are not logical and do not flow, and if you follow their references you'll see that their citations are misrepresentations of the source material, and full of dishonest quote-mining.

I can see some of that in that article. If you look at the defence of Rowling, they claim that none of the Harry Potter actors who spoke out against Rowling addressed her arguments. I don't think I read everything by every actor, but let's assume for the sake of argument that that's true. The implication is that nobody addressed her arguments, when the fact is that her arguments were gone over in detail.

If that article is truly the best analysis of "the underlying basis of the woke/critical social justice approach to 'cancel culture'.", then that's definitely saying something about how valid that argument is.

 

[HansMustermann]

I agree that students ought not have organized in this particular case as described in the article. . I may be missing some critical context and I haven’t heard the students reasoning behind it. I don’t agree that they never ought not organize to get a teacher fired for attending a protest, as I can imagine a context in which it would be acceptable. I’m also not the authority on when it’s ok and not ok and how badly a teacher is allowed to offend a student body before they should not want them working on campus.

We already have means for assessing that. If you've got tenure as a professor, you're very hard to fire and it absolutely requires a proper inquiry into whatever violation you're accused of, that would justify sacking. Not saying you can't be fired, but unless you can show stuff like that you were already planning to remove the whole department or something, you really have to show that the guy actually did something wrong and let him plead his case too in any case. Skipping that part is a violation of employment contract, and gives that professor a slam-dunk case of wrongful dismissal.

Meaning that if he wants to, he can even demand to be reinstated in the same job as part of the reparation, and almost any court will cheerfully award that. And "but some anonymous Internet Brave Guy(TM) sent me a death threat" REALLY won't cut it as a defense for breech of employment contract.

In fact, especially in the USA (where many other people can't get anywhere near the same level of job protection) professors are probably THE worst example for the narrative of poor victims that can be cancelled overnight, on a whim, just because some guy posted a lie on twitter.

But hey, not that it will stop anyone from making up their own fiction on that topic, that they can dutifully be offended by.

Edit: mind you, the students can still be in the wrong, and can still be idiots. But they're nowhere near the claimed unstoppable authority, that you must obey just because they have twitter

 

[Cain]

The New York Times' Donald McNiel has been embroiled in controversy because in 2019 he uttered a racial epithet (the worst one -- yeah, that one) in a conversation with students on a class trip. The context was... well, apparently the context doesn't matter; the bosses now say, "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent."

 

[cullennz]

The New York Times' Donald McNiel has been embroiled in controversy because in 2019 he uttered a racial epithet (the worst one -- yeah, that one) in a conversation with students on a class trip. The context was... well, apparently the context doesn't matter; the bosses now say, "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent."

A link might help.

 

[Cain]

There's a video of how it went down.