141–150 of 633 posts
Cancel culture happens because it works, and it not even be true. Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.
That's the good thing about cancel culture: it works. The bad thing is that anything that works eventually goes corporate. > Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue. You can wait on that, but I prefer labor laws.
Cancel culture happens because it works, and it not even be true. Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue.
That's the good thing about cancel culture: it works. The bad thing is that anything that works eventually goes corporate. > Until businesses, universities, and institutions say no to the digital mob, it will continue. You can wait on that, but I prefer labor laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity less than 60 years ago. The civil liberties around speech went through a series of challenges and expansions very recently. The ACLU used to defend nazis. Now they prefer not to, to the chagrin or dismay of more traditional civil libertarians.
The one thing that's remained constant from times when civil rights activists were imprisoned for "offending" people to now when right wingers are canceled for offending people seems to be that the bulk of the population is incapable of, or unwilling to, set the principle of speech over their own feelings about that speech. I think it's because most people just can't imagine themselves being on the wrong end of a cen…
Exactly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.
What are things that you would say in the 1990's that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying today?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an aspirational norm, but it's nobody's practiced norm; virtually everybody has lines they draw. So what does it tell us that we can aspire to having that norm? I'd argue: not much.
The extent to which a society aspires to this norm has a great effect on the extent to which that society flourishes and prospers.
May on the right refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture has always existed (and that they historically used it to their advantage). It seems their outrage has more to do with the loss of social influence.
It wasn't that long ago when knowing a Communist was enough to be blacklisted from jobs. Lots of famous, intelligent, and influential people were cancelled by McCarthyism.
Criticizing your opponent for using your own tactics against you is a time honored tradition.
> "Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this. When some people vaguely complain about “cancel culture” in a way that lends itself to promoting this constant partisanship, other people not unreasonably see it as partisan." Popehat seems to be falling into the trap of thinking the precisely defining something will lead to clarity. It rarely, if ever, does. Each one of us h…
I'm not sure that accepting certain spaces becoming unwelcome is the same as a reduction in speech.
The quote toward the end of the article really hits the nail on the head for me:
> The room felt tense... I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
Feeling tense and unwelcome in a space where people disagree with you is totally normal and to be expected. A huge fraction of people grow up feeling exactly like that in virtually every space they inhabit.
(BTW, I'd be unsurprised if the tenseness in this case was more about annoyance with a loudmouth once again derailing a seminar with what they think is profoundly courageous iconoclasm but is actually annoying low-effort culture war trolling that's spoiling a quite expensive educational product for the rest of the paying customers...)
I grew up non-straight and atheist in the midwest, decades ago, and not in a city. The feeling of tenseness described here is totally normal. Gays are not entitled to a complete absence of tenseness in midwest churches or sports bars. That tenseness and unwelcomeness will result in lost opportunities for socialization, employment, etc. even without overt discrimination.
Not everyone will feel comfortable in every space. Not everyone will fit in everywhere. That's life. It seems like literally everyone except a certain brand of conservative hothead understands this.
To me, the entire cancel culture thing can be summed up as: "apparently some people went through a lot of life without ever desiring to inhabit a space where they weren't 100% welcome and, unsurprisingly, react in an emotionally stunted and frankly embarrassing way when encountering this situation."
IDK. Half the country -- and a much larger percentage of its landmass -- is wholly hostile to anyone who isn't a died-in-the-wool conservative. Whence the entitlement to also fit in perfectly everywhere else with zero friction? As a queer person, I don't even have that much sympathy for fellow queer people who try to get along in conservative religious communities. You have a right to free association. If you don't like feeling tense and unwelcome, exercise that right. If you choose to inhabit spaces where you aren't welcome... well, I can sympathize up to a point, but I'm mostly going to roll my eyes if you complain too much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when it was the religious right doing it. The religious right continues to do it. They've somehow been grandfathered in while we gather lynch mobs to attack pink-haired community college liberal arts professors.
If only the people who condemned the religious right would also condemn the fanatic left, I'm sure the world would be a more consistent place.
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> I don't know what Popehat actually wants here. For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. People not wanting to patronize or associate with you when you cause harm to people they care about is really not a bad thing, and it's not new either, and yet it is what gets called "cancel culture" by a lot of people.…
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start. Someone having an opinion different than you does not cause you harm. This is the Big Lie underlying a lot of the rhetoric that has been labeled "cancel culture". The potential harm at shutting down the opportunity to find out you were wrong about something by heari…
You are saying that someone can use freedom of expression to say people I care about should not have human rights, but I can't say those people shouldn't be employed by some company.
Freedom of expression swings both ways. I agree we should think about the harm done, ensure it is real, and what level of consequence is reasonable before acting, but that doesn't mean there are no situations action is justified.
That's a lot of words to say "people are free to steer clear of people they don't like and always have been". And not much of thought into "what changed that now it is a problem perceived by some?" There has been a fundamental change to our reality over the past couple decades: things you say and do are now by default in public and permanent record. If your not-too-famous grandpa said something outrageous, he ruined…
I actually think that there is a solution that not many people have mentioned.
What we can do is actually fund enforcement of the actual really bad stuff that people do during these hate/harrassement type situations.
And by that I mean, when people make death threats against someone, or harassment or target them in a similar way, then you have a government run doxxing squad that finds out who sent the death threats, and they arrest them, send them to jail, and put a felony on their record, even if it is a 1 time/first offense.
Right now, if you send a bunch of deaths threats to people, you'll probably get away with it. But if the government actually enforced the law, and sent you to prison, the first time you did that to anybody, well I think the worst of the "cancel culture" type harassment would end really quick.