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Cancel culture IRL

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Cavemonster said:
I think to the extent that creating consequences makes us a better society, we do need to allow people to change and become better. And stupid things said as a teenager that are later apologized for and rejected as a current view should show the kind of positive growth we want to see.
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Ideally, yes, but unfortunately that'll never happen as this sort of behavior has been thoroughly weaponized. All it takes is for someone to state they don't feel safe around someone based something said in the past and allude to a toxic workplace and HR is going to spring into action to minimize possible damage to the company.

In trying to run down your example of the student denied college admission I found so many examples of this type of behavior that my eyes glazed over. Example.

Indeed there may be more than we're being told but we work with what we've got.
 
It seems that we are being admonished in this thread to be cautious of joining any online campaign to cancel, but we can pretty quickly, without much caution, label actions as cancel culture, and individuals as a part of that culture.
 
pgwenthold said:
How "obviously"?

You admit there would be workplace issues.
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Because the firing is the harm.

If people got fired every time there were any kind of interpersonal conflict, there would be no more jobs. It doesn't justify the firing, so it's neither here nor there.
 
mumblethrax said:
Because the firing is the harm.

If people got fired every time there were any kind of interpersonal conflict, there would be no more jobs. It doesn't justify the firing, so it's neither here nor there.
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Got it no one has ever lost a job because of interpersonal conflict in your world.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Got it no one has ever lost a job because of interpersonal conflict in your world.
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No, in my world people should not lose a job as a result of every interpersonal conflict.

It's like a bunch of villagers stabbed a woman to death with pitchforks, I say, "That's a shame, that really shouldn't have happened" and people are responding with "Ok but what about the fact that one of the villagers was really jealous of her? Do people just never get stabbed to death because of jealousy in your world?"

The reasoning skills on display here are...well, they leave something to be desired.
 
d4m10n said:
How familiar are you w/ Teen Vogue and intersectionalism as an ideology?
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As someone who is somewhat knowledgable on intersectionalism, I have no clue how a legal theory discussing how any particular person's particular barriers faced as a black woman (as opposed to a black man, a trans Asian (as opposed to a cis Asian), etc. have to do with any of this.

I can see how, in theory, it is very useful in explaining why, say, a business with black people and women, but no black women, amongst it's staff should raise eyebrows...but that seems to have nothing to do with the subject matter here.

Stout said:
Ideally, yes, but unfortunately that'll never happen as this sort of behavior has been thoroughly weaponized. All it takes is for someone to state they don't feel safe around someone based something said in the past and allude to a toxic workplace and HR is going to spring into action to minimize possible damage to the company.
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This isn't even slightly new, although the people who can be unfairly (and in many cases, very fairly) targeted has certainly expanded.
 
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Dr. Keith said:
It seems that we are being admonished in this thread to be cautious of joining any online campaign to cancel, but we can pretty quickly, without much caution, label actions as cancel culture, and individuals as a part of that culture.
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Has being labeled as part of that culture cost anyone their livelihood?
 
Mumbles said:
This isn't even slightly new, although the people who can be unfairly (and in many cases, very fairly) targeted has certainly expanded.
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Agreed, it's nothing new it's just a whole lot easier these days with people providing their own material for their own cancellation. As I tell my 15 year old son......Should you ever feel the need to put yourself out there on social media, keep in mind that everything you say just might be screen capped by somebody who in the future, might no longer be your friend.
 
mumblethrax said:
No, in my world people should not lose a job as a result of every interpersonal conflict.

It's like a bunch of villagers stabbed a woman to death with pitchforks, I say, "That's a shame, that really shouldn't have happened" and people are responding with "Ok but what about the fact that one of the villagers was really jealous of her? Do people just never get stabbed to death because of jealousy in your world?"

The reasoning skills on display here are...well, they leave something to be desired.
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It is almost as if people need to support their positions instead of just asserting it.
 
mumblethrax said:
No, in my world people should not lose a job as a result of every interpersonal conflict.

It's like a bunch of villagers stabbed a woman to death with pitchforks, I say, "That's a shame, that really shouldn't have happened" and people are responding with "Ok but what about the fact that one of the villagers was really jealous of her? Do people just never get stabbed to death because of jealousy in your world?"

The reasoning skills on display here are...well, they leave something to be desired.
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Yes, exactly like that, except she wasn't so much viscously murdered as she was told "We don't like you. We don't want to work with you anymore. Go find a job elsewhere."
...but that's pretty much the same thing, I guess.

As to reasoning skills, it's wrong to jump on the cancel bandwagon with nothing more than an accusation... which is exactly why many here are refusing to do that. You are objecting to the people here refusing to automatically jump on the bandwagon against the employees who forced this issue or the magazine which fired her, and instead considering the possibility that the "offense" could be a bit more complex that what's being presented.

In other words, you're mad that we're not on board with cancelling them.

To be clear, that doesn't mean she deserved to be fired. It means we simply don't currently have the information available to us to work out where fault lies in this particular hodge-podge of office politics, so it isn't reasonable to "cancel" either side.
 
Irony said:
Yes, exactly like that, except she wasn't so much viscously murdered as she was told "We don't like you. We don't want to work with you anymore. Go find a job elsewhere."
...but that's pretty much the same thing, I guess.
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Did I suggest that the severity of the harm was the same? No. The analogy illustrates the poor reasoning--the motivation for causing harm to someone does not justify causing harm to someone.

As to reasoning skills, it's wrong to jump on the cancel bandwagon with nothing more than an accusation...
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What makes you think I'm on a "cancel bandwagon", whatever that means?

You are objecting to the people here refusing to automatically jump on the bandwagon against the employees who forced this issue or the magazine which fired her, and instead considering the possibility that the "offense" could be a bit more complex that what's being presented.
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No, I'm objecting to the fact that someone suffered applied consequences for the things they said as a teenager, and the poor reasoning deployed to attempt to justify it. I haven't expressed any opinion about the staffers.

In other words, you're mad that we're not on board with cancelling them.
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I'm really not, and you can tell by the way I said nothing of the sort. Is "cancelling" them even on the table? It's not what I would want to see happen. Recall that the measure I proposed was automatic expiry of social media posts.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Conde Nast probably could have saved themselves some embarrassment had they involved the staff more in the hiring process. They tried to call the staff's bluff and lost bad. Sucks for them.
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I do find it humorous (in a sad way) that one of the major complainors about her prior derogatory use of the term "asian" was a person how previously had sever posts including the n-word.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I do find it humorous (in a sad way) that one of the major complainors about her prior derogatory use of the term "asian" was a person how previously had [several] posts including the n-word.
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A-word was used more maliciously, IMO, but N-word is the word that shall not be invoked. It'll be fascinating to see how this all sorts out in the progressive stack.
 
Cavemonster said:
Diving a little deeper, I found less that was objectionable in that case. So I have to wonder if there isn't more to this story as well. It's been my experience that in the large majority of "OMG it's PC culture gone crazy!" kind of stories, the initial headlines and articles often mischaracterize or are missing some key things.
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And, yet again, it's very often in the form of "Here's a handful of tweets that got a few likes and retweets".

An, again, it's *twitter*. Someone's always going to scream about any minor thing. Most people aren't too concerned about the internal politics of Teen Vogue - even I only caught it because a few major figures wrote a tweet or two once teenage jerk #2 was found out. And then they moved on to discuss voter suppression, the Suez Canal, the recent mass murders, and so forth.
 
Why does it matter that's it's only a handful of tweets?

If I saw a handful of tweets promoting the modern myth that the prefatory language of "well regulated militia" carries no jurisprudential weight, I'd call that an example of "American gun culture" even if only a few people were tweeting on that narrow topic.

If I saw a handful of tweets saying that women must avoid orgasm until their wedding day because [Bible verses] I'd call that an example of "purity culture" even if only a handful of tweeters made that specific claim.

If I saw a handful of tweets demanding that some specific speaker must be deplatformed, I'd call it an example of "cancel culture" even if only a couple people were trying to make it happen.

In each case, the handful of tweets carries memes from a larger cultural context, and in each case they are attempting to shift the overall culture to be more in line with their own subcultural norms.
 
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Fair enough. But if cancel culture shifts from an organized effort by a large group of people to effect change to any amount of people having an opinion of something on Twitter I have even less of a problem with it.
 
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