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Cancel culture IRL

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My brother teaches at a private school. He does not swear, even in private. He becomes visibly irritated when anyone indulges in "good-natured" stereotypes. He can be a stick in the mud.

A parent complained earlier today that a "privileged white male" used the n-word. Specifically, my brother.

When he texted me about it, I jokingly replied, "Did you?"

Not joking, he tells me he's pretty sure he didn't. If anybody else told me they couldn't remember if they used the n-word, I'd guess that they did.

He teaches To Kill a Mockingbird, and sometimes reads aloud. This struck me as a little crazy. I said, "Well, if you had then one of the students would've undoubtedly mentioned it on Zoom." And then I'm given context: The complaint is about a student he had last year.

The mother now complaining about him was his favorite parent. She helped with some Malcolm X project he was doing (she's a Black professor). My brother's probably one of the most progressive teachers at that school, and the administration has his back (for now). But still.

It's absolutely crazy this lady wouldn't talk to him first to see if it's true.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Alan Dershowitz, free speech defender and author of upcoming book "Cancel Culture", is suing CNN for 300 million for saying means things about him.

https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/ala...him-as-an-intellectual-who-had-lost-his-mind/

lol choice quote at the end:



I'm not saying Dersh is a pedo, but i'm not not saying it either
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This thread has convinced me that the so called cancel culture is nothing new, but that for probably the first time those in less powerful positions are able to do what those in power used to be able to do.
 
Possibly of interest to those following this thread:



I thought the debate was fairly well-balanced, but I wouldn't expect anyone to agree.
 
Dershowitz is now coming out with a daily podcast, which is basically all the proof I need that the man is clinically insane.

Do you think he makes his "I'm not a child rapist" claim at the beginning of each episode, or at the end?
 
Continuing discussion from the “Rioters storm and occupy the U.S. Capitol” thread:

cullennz said:
Yeah

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-...ocumentary-reacts-to-wellington-protests.html
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johnny karate said:
From your link:

Yes, bomb threats are bad. But they apparently screened the film regardless. Who was the victim of “cancel culture” in this incident?
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cullennz said:
No

It is when I either side do it to me.

And it is ****** up either way.
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johnny karate said:
Do you think the boycotts of the American Civil Rights era are “****** up”?
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The thoughtful Will Wilkinson lost his job as VP at the Niskanen Center for Tweeting, "If I Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence." Right-wing free speech advocates went into over-drive claiming it was a call for violence. Insanity.
 
Cain said:
The thoughtful Will Wilkinson lost his job as VP at the Niskanen Center for Tweeting, "If I Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence." Right-wing free speech advocates went into over-drive claiming it was a call for violence. Insanity.
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Presumably only if you bothered looking at randoms on Twitter
 
Cain said:
The thoughtful Will Wilkinson lost his job as VP at the Niskanen Center for Tweeting, "If I Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence." Right-wing free speech advocates went into over-drive claiming it was a call for violence.
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I'm not sure we can rightly call them "free speech advocates" but perhaps you're being just as sarcastic as Wilkinson himself. Hard to tell in print, sometimes.
 
Cain said:
The thoughtful Will Wilkinson lost his job as VP at the Niskanen Center for Tweeting, "If I Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence." Right-wing free speech advocates went into over-drive claiming it was a call for violence. Insanity.
Click to expand...
Wow, hadn't heard about that. This one is probably something of an own-goal, as the principle reason he was less prolific in recent years apparently had to do with his professional obligations to Niskanen. Still, he'd probably prefer to have kept the job.
 
Here's the funny part:

Will Wilkinson said:
Later, Soave suggests that “excessively harsh, drastic disciplinary action in response to one dumb tweet that would otherwise likely have been forgotten in a matter of days” is “textbook cancellation.” I would like to review this textbook, which seems to suggest that the key to “cancellation” is severe sanctions for trifling transgressions. That’s interesting.

But what if you think that a certain racist joke is a hilarious trifle we ought to be willing to shrug off, while I think it is egregiously demeaning and should not be tolerated under any circumstances? Suppose our co-worker gets fired for telling this joke, and you describe it as a lamentable bit of “cancel culture?” If proportionality is the issue, characterizing the firing as cancellation clearly assumes what needs to be proved.

In my experience, tendentious question-begging is the point. Slogans like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” are used again and again to short-circuit debate, avoid the underlying substantive controversy, and shift the entire burden of justification onto advocates of the rival position. The person who believes that the transgression is serious enough to merit severe consequences isn’t given a fair chance to make her case for this position. Instead, she’s forced to earn the right to make the case by acquitting herself of the implicit charge that she is a petty tyrant policing mind-crimes in the name of stultifying ideological conformity. Good-faith discussion of the gravity of racist jokes never gets off the ground.
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Mumbles said:
Here's the funny part:
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I'd say not so much funny as careful and perspicacious. All of these expressions (political correctness, SJWs, cancel culture, virtue signaling, even the skeptic's own lamentable 'woo-woo') exist to put people on their back feet, and where they're effective they are subject to semantic expansion. I had a sense of what people meant by 'political correctness' when I first heard it, and it rapidly expanded to cover a lot of behavior beyond that. Twenty years later, that was replayed with SJW. I don't use any of these vague taunts, because I'm not an idiot.

I do think there's a problem with people ginning up false outrage to get people they perceive as enemies fired (or worse) for innocuous comments (or in this case, a pretty decent joke), and I think that poses a threat to a culture of free speech. I'm just not going to refer to that as 'cancellation', because...I'm still not an idiot. But hope springs eternal.
 
Darat said:
This thread has convinced me that the so called cancel culture is nothing new, but that for probably the first time those in less powerful positions are able to do what those in power used to be able to do.
Click to expand...
Oh I don't know, old Charlie Boycott scared the beejeebus out of a lot of people...
 
Cain said:
My brother teaches at a private school. He does not swear, even in private. He becomes visibly irritated when anyone indulges in "good-natured" stereotypes. He can be a stick in the mud.

A parent complained earlier today that a "privileged white male" used the n-word. Specifically, my brother.

When he texted me about it, I jokingly replied, "Did you?"

Not joking, he tells me he's pretty sure he didn't. If anybody else told me they couldn't remember if they used the n-word, I'd guess that they did.

He teaches To Kill a Mockingbird, and sometimes reads aloud. This struck me as a little crazy. I said, "Well, if you had then one of the students would've undoubtedly mentioned it on Zoom." And then I'm given context: The complaint is about a student he had last year.

The mother now complaining about him was his favorite parent. She helped with some Malcolm X project he was doing (she's a Black professor). My brother's probably one of the most progressive teachers at that school, and the administration has his back (for now). But still.

It's absolutely crazy this lady wouldn't talk to him first to see if it's true.
Click to expand...

Her goal may be to create a problem rather than solve one.
 
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