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Cancel culture IRL

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d4m10n said:
Do you have the sense that the folks making HR decisions at major corporations are well-versed in basic digital citizenship? I'm really asking here, I don't claim to know.
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I’d say that varies widely from industry to industry. Media companies should, construction companies may lag, for example.

People who make a living via social media should be well versed.
 
tyr_13 said:
At town of (checks Google) 2,480 people cancelled a small part of their book fair, which is definitely worth an article from The New York Post.

How will we all recover from this injustice. This will certainly justify a change in the calendar system, or whatever it is you think this means.
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Yes, I'm ashamed to say that the "cancel culture disease" has infected my country as well. :mad:
 
Let's all wait for the usual crowd bleating about cancel culture to come to complain about this political firing of a professor. Any minute now, I'm sure they'll be along...

“When reviewing all the evidence, CAUT Council delegates concluded that the decision to cancel Dr. Valentina Azarova’s hiring was politically motivated, and as such constitutes a serious breach of widely recognized principles of academic freedom,” says CAUT Executive Director David Robinson.

The hiring process was abruptly aborted following concerns raised by a sitting judge over Dr. Azarova’s academic work on human rights in Israel and Palestine. Facing mounting criticism, the University of Toronto commissioned an external review undertaken by Justice Thomas A. Cromwell, but whose mandate did not include determining credibility or plausibility.
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https://www.caut.ca/latest/2021/04/caut-council-imposes-rare-censure-against-university-toronto-over-azarova-hiring

A law professor had a job offer retracted because donors to the University of Toronto objected to her work involving human rights in Palestine and Israel.

I'm sure the Andy Sullivan and Barry Weiss types will be all over this story of academic censorship, let's just wait. Surely conservative cranks that are nonstop whining about "cancel culture" will not ignore this political firing simply because it aligns to their own political interests.
 
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d4m10n said:
Good to see you come over to the anti-cancellation side. :D
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Hold on there, this might not have anything to do with cancel culture. One Donor, One Jew complained intoning that the university might have to field accusations of antisemitism should it hire Azarova. Then came 1500 letters in support of hiring Azarova and the censure of the CAUT.

I guess if we stretch it and twist it enough we can force the university facing cancellation in to the cancel culture mold but one phone call from one guy does not a cancel culturing make.
 
Stout said:
Hold on there, this might not have anything to do with cancel culture. One Donor, One Jew complained intoning that the university might have to field accusations of antisemitism should it hire Azarova. Then came 1500 letters in support of hiring Azarova and the censure of the CAUT.

I guess if we stretch it and twist it enough we can force the university facing cancellation in to the cancel culture mold but one phone call from one guy does not a cancel culturing make.
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It can do. Firstly, if somebody who is a wealthy donor can influence university hiring policy that is a significant detriment to academic freedom. Secondly, even if one person doesn't have the power by themselves to influence the decision, fear of social media backlash (which can easily be whipped up by a small number of people and go viral) can come into play.

Censure is all very well but they need to be made to reverse the decision or face other consequences. That is assuming there is no evidence of actual antisemitism but only harsh criticism of Israeli policy.

One of the problems here is of course that the whole of critical social justice activism is to silence ideological dissent by misrepresenting disagreement with narratives, ideologies and policies as bigotry directed at individuals, and using this to justify trying to make people unemployable because they will make others 'feel unsafe'. This will come back to bite them on issues where activists tend to be divided, such as this one.
 
d4m10n said:
Good to see you come over to the anti-cancellation side. :D
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Academic freedom is a concept that has existed long before the right wing boogie man of "cancel culture". It existed even prior to the last iteration of this same crap known as "political correctness".

That's been my point all along. "cancel culture" isn't a real thing. It's a meta concept bandied about by reactionary conservatives to smear all examples of social norm enforcement they don't like, but is suspiciously silent whenever their preferred forms of social norm enforcement is at work.

Someone getting fired for being racist is "cancel culture", but powerful people making criticism of Israel's human rights abuses academically off-limits is not worth mentioning. The silence on such conservative issues speaks volumes as the true purpose of this bankrupt concept.

"Cancel culture", as a concept, is obfuscation. There are different reasons certain social norms, and consequences for violating those norms, exist. Some have merit, some do not, and sometimes (to the horror of conservatives), those norms change. All of these can be the subject of fruitful discussion, which cannot occur so long as reactionaries insist on this absurd "cancel culture" fiction.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
That's been my point all along. "cancel culture" isn't a real thing.
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And yet we've seen numerous examples of "the popular practice of withdrawing support for...public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive." Most of these were "discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming" although this last one may not fit that description.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/
SuburbanTurkey said:
It's a meta concept bandied about by reactionary conservatives to smear all examples of social norm enforcement they don't like, but is suspiciously silent whenever their preferred forms of social norm enforcement is at work.
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Nothing meta about describing a common social phenomenon in straightforward terms; don't much care what label you want to use or which one happens to have caught on with conservatives.
 
d4m10n said:
And yet we've seen numerous examples of "the popular practice of withdrawing support for...public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive." Most of these were "discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming" although this last one may not fit that description.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/
Nothing meta about describing a common social phenomenon in straightforward terms; don't much care what label you want to use or which one happens to have caught on with conservatives.
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It's a term with a definition so broad that it is largely meaningless.

"cancel culture" is nothing more than the expectation that people will not engage in anti-social behavior, however defined, and that such behavior may carry the risk of some form of social consequence, again largely undefined.

There's nothing novel about this and it certainly isn't the result of modern, online trends. Such expectation and consequences are inherent to living in communities and have existed throughout all known human history.

Your insistence to stick to some dictionary definition, despite the obvious colloquial usage by reactionaries attempting to deflect legitimate criticism, can only be interpreted as wildly naive or willfully obtuse.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
There's nothing novel about this and it certainly isn't the result of modern, online trends.
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There is nothing new about public figures being dependent upon their public reputation, to be sure. Seems to me there is something new when someone like Justine Sacco or Adria Richards or Zoe Quinn becomes instantly known to a much broader public because they've gone viral in some unfortunate way.

SuburbanTurkey said:
Your insistence to stick to some dictionary definition, despite the obvious colloquial usage by reactionaries attempting to deflect legitimate criticism, can only be interpreted as wildly naive or willfully obtuse.
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If you choose to allow conservative activists to redefine terms for you, I won't try to stop you. Don't expect anyone else to play along, though.
 
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d4m10n said:
There is nothing new about public figures being dependent upon their public reputation, to be sure. Seems to me there is something new when someone like Justine Sacco or Adria Richards or Zoe Quinn becomes instantly known to a much broader public because they've gone viral in some unfortunate way.

If you choose to allow conservative activists to redefine terms for you, I won't try to stop you. Don't expect anyone else to play along, though.
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There's nothing new about people becoming social pariahs.

Seems like a strange hill to die on, using the term "cancel culture", when the colloquial usage is significantly different. You're inviting people to misunderstand your point for tedious reasons.
 
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Darat said:
Perhaps we need a new word - I’ll make one up - lets call it “shunning”.
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Using one word to describe the wider array of social consequences is foolish. It's begging the question that these varieties of social consequences are more closely related than they are.
 
tyr_13 said:
At town of (checks Google) 2,480 people cancelled a small part of their book fair, which is definitely worth an article from The New York Post.

How will we all recover from this injustice. This will certainly justify a change in the calendar system, or whatever it is you think this means.
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Anything, no matter how trivial, that can be twisted, misinterpreted or distorted to discredit "the left" is worth a tweet from the Moonie rag.
It saves them from having to make stuff up entirely.
:rolleyes:
 
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