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Cancel culture IRL

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I feel like it's a good time to discuss how this stupid term came to be:

Basically a bunch of black women wanted to literally cancel Bill Cosby's comedy tour, because they didn't like his habit of drugging and raping women.

Also, a bunch of people were losing jobs, speaking dates, and the like - some for good reason, and some not.

some far right goons, who hate black people yet strangely love to clumsily imitate them, decided to use the term "cancel culture" to trick people into getting mad about how other people objected to all the racist things they made money saying.

That's the bare-bones overview of it. There are detours, individual stories, and so on, but that's the three sentence summary.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
These "cancel culture" pundits only squawk when it's their sacred cows being criticized and are silent when their enemies are on the defensive.
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This is untrue of the people discussing "cancel culture" at FIRE, folks like Jonathan Haidt, Samantha Harris, Greg Lukianoff, etc.

Why do you focus on unserious, non-scholarly political pundits instead? At what point did we agree the phrase belongs solely to Fox News and their ilk?
 
d4m10n said:
Faryha Salim is being canceled for encouraging students to debate both sides of cancel culture? Amazeballs and not in a good way.
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I'm not amazed. This is the way universities have been going for some time, first in the US, and spreading to other countries. Academics increasingly have less freedom and cowardly bureaucrats have increasing power.
 
Elaedith said:
I'm not amazed. This is the way universities have been going for some time, first in the US, and spreading to other countries. Academics increasingly have less freedom and cowardly bureaucrats have increasing power.
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When was it ever different? Academic freedom has always been the goal, but execution has always been pretty poor, often requiring quite a bit of legal advocacy and vigilance.

ETA: Controversial issues change, but there has always been "no go zones" where institutions fail to live up to the promises of academic freedom.
 
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d4m10n said:
Why do you focus on unserious, non-scholarly political pundits instead? At what point did we agree the phrase belongs solely to Fox News and their ilk?
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Because "CANCEL CULTURE OMG I CAN'T BE RACIST AND NOT GET FIRED ANYMORE!" IS UNSERIOUS, NON-SCHOLARLY, POLITCAL PUNDENTRY.

There's no serious discussion of it because it's not a serious topic, it's internet whining from people who have no idea what real oppression is.
 
d4m10n said:
Counterexamples to this claim abound, such as this discussion between Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Haidt, and Eugene Volokh.

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Well, in the first couple of minutes, they frame this as a "first amendment issue", when it's not, and then say that that Ronald Reagan, who supported Apartheid and Jim Crow, believed in individual freedom.

I'll just stop now, and assume it's not a serious discussion at all.

 
d4m10n said:
Faryha Salim is being canceled for encouraging students to debate both sides of cancel culture? Amazeballs and not in a good way.
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That's a rather strange one. She's complaining that the school failed to protect her and allowed racialized and gendered attacks where it looks like she should have been demanding a security team instead.

I have no idea why this professor would go down the road with the police officers are not heros thing rather than focusing on the student's examples of cancel culture not actually being cancel culture but if you're going to argue politics from a position of power within the student-teacher dynamic then expect some fallout.

Although I don't agree with the college's decision to axe her, I do feel she should have been more specific with what sort of protection she expected the school to offer her from forces outside the school.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The only way out is through.

Army of God cancel cultured abortion doctors by following them around and gunning them down in church. Timothy McVeigh cancel cultured the feds by bombing the federal building. The KKK cancel cultured black voting rights. The Red Army cancel cultured the Third Reich at Stalingrad.

If you think about it, all of history is simply a series of cancellations.
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See, this is why we use dictionary definitions of what we're talking about. This is twisting the concept of cancel culture so hard it would make Fox News green with envy.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
FIRE is an single issue advocacy organization, not a reactionary pundit pissing their diaper every time some comedian loses a gig. They are effective because they keep their focus on something quite specific and not some nebulous, every growing "cancel culture".

Seems that it would be better to speak in specifics and not lump everything under the sun as "cancel culture".
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They have some......interesting funders.
 
Mumbles said:
Well, in the first couple of minutes, they frame this as a "first amendment issue", when it's not...
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Strossen explicitly makes that distinction clear at some point in the talk. Which part are you talking about?

ETA: Oh, the intro dude. No idea about him; you can safely skip that part and get on to the bit with the actual guests I mentioned above.
 
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Graham2001 said:
Just found an interesting case on TheFire.Org, in this case the person cancelled was a member of the Left...


https://www.thefire.org/fire-demands-answers-from-cypress-college-over-cancelled-professor/
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There's a good bit in Fire's letter regarding "Heckler's Veto"
This pernicious form of censorship, in which those angered by expression seek to silence it through the threat or use of violence, incentivizes outsiders to issue more threats whenever they dislike a speaker’s views. Silencing a speaker in order to quell public outrage is fundamentally inconsistent with higher education and the First Amendment, which rejects efforts to cast a “pall of orthodoxy” over the classroom—whether by force of law or threat of force.
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That's kind of at the heart of the problem. There is a definite chilling effect at work, bolstered very strongly by anonymous people on social media. It makes several topics verboten, even when they're topics that truly merit discussion and consideration.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Let's all wait for the usual "cancel culture" pundits to come to the professor's defense. Surely it's not just a bad-faith tactic deployed by reactionaries cynically to shield their sacred cows from consequences.

I'm really failing to see how an institution taking the coward's path in response to a disruptive campaign of Fox News fascists sending violent threats fits the given definitions offered here.

Colleges trying to lay low and wait for the reactionary freak-out to subside is nothing new. Does the ever broadening to the point of meaningless definition of cancel culture now include the heckler's veto?

ETA:

Is this really the same phenomena? Right wing freaks engaging in a campaign of deliberate disruption of campus activities, largely by violent threats, is the same as some actor getting fired for embarrassing Disney and alienating a large portion of the intended audience of a popular TV show?

The example of Gamergate was given earlier. Seems to me that these incidents of reactionaries deliberately disrupting a community or institution is pretty different than other examples of "cancel culture", even when this term is broadly defined. The reactionaries seem to understand that their complaints will not actually be effective in swaying opinions, so they resort to the heckler's veto. Gamergate feminists weren't cancelled as their conduct wasn't really anything objectionable to the broader community or lead to ostracism. A campaign of harassment and threats of violence was instead employed because the reactionaries rightly understood that they did not have the power to "cancel" them for their alleged offenses. Likewise here, the professor wasn't cancelled because the college was embarrassed by her positions, they pulled her because they were afraid that continued reactionary attention would cause serious disruption, even violence.

The problem of the reactionary outrage cycle and the wielding of decentralized, violent harassment is very real. Institutions need to think in advance how they might respond to being featured on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour or other reactionary outlets and be prepared for the torrent of hostility that will surely follow. Concerns about safety are valid, but decisions must be made in concert with involved parties and the institution should be committed to back their people if they are willing (as they often are) to not be cowed by threats of reactionary violence.
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Who are you arguing against here? You seem to keep trotting out this strawman of "reactionary right wing freaks" and all sorts of other labels suggesting guilt by association... even though nobody in this thread appears to exemplify any of the behavior you are so ardently calling out.

Do you believe that if you merely insinuate enough times that people opposed to this phenomenon are "bad people", they will be cowed into silence?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The silence on issues that involve honest-to-god censorious activity speaks volumes. These "cancel culture" pundits only squawk when it's their sacred cows being criticized and are silent when their enemies are on the defensive. Perhaps one should examine their motives in light of such obvious selective outrage.

Perhaps the blatant hypocrisy should cause the public to pause when these same people are screaming from the rooftops about the great "Cancel Culture" emergency.
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That's not true.

I've provided several examples from Matt Taibbi, in his series "Meet the Censored", a great number of whom are NOT AT ALL these imagined sacred cows that you reference.

Your selective acceptance of information doesn't bolster your point any.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Who are you arguing against here? You seem to keep trotting out this strawman of "reactionary right wing freaks" and all sorts of other labels suggesting guilt by association... even though nobody in this thread appears to exemplify any of the behavior you are so ardently calling out.

Do you believe that if you merely insinuate enough times that people opposed to this phenomenon are "bad people", they will be cowed into silence?
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I guess you missed Mr. Potato Head week and the performative readings of Cat in the Hat
 
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