Cancel Culture and Virtue Signaling -- What’s the case against them?

Great Debates
253

I can see where you’re coming from but, giving our esteemed colleague Roger_That’s argument proper attention, I think you are mistaken in attributing simple hedonism to him. Look at the examples given, and you will notice each time that Roger_That is sacrificing something he enjoys.

He used to like watching football, but now doesn’t, because he doesn’t like the NFL’s handling of the Kaepernick kneeling, and therefore he sacrificed that pleasure in protest.

He used to like watching and even playing baseball, but doesn’t like a proposed rule, and is considering sacrificing the sport in protest.

He used to shop at Home Depot and Lowes, probably with some convenience, but because he doesn’t like the politics of the CEOs, he sacrificed that convenience in protest.

There is a pattern here, but I don’t think it’s blind pursuit of pleasure. You could say it’s a noble dedication to social justice, but I think one of these is not like the others: the baseball example betrays something more base, a “my way or the highway” approach to personal association. And no one states this better than Roger_That himself, in the very first post, hidden in plain sight:

To which I respond, everything is fundamentally flawed. I personally choose a higher standard of non-association than “fundamentally flawed” - I ask myself if association is worthwhile. If it’s going to weigh on my conscience, if I’m losing sleep, maybe it’s not worthwhile. If there are alternatives that are less flawed, maybe sticking to a more flawed one isn’t worthwhile.

But I’m a registered Republican. Your mileage may vary :wink:

~Max

254

She didn’t say that:

Looking at my link, the one thing everyone from Dershowitz to the student association that pushed for the two firings agree on is that law professors commonly think this way. The teachers just can’t say it before getting tenure.

And you would also fire someone who claimed local white clients were often arrogant, I presume.

I have no idea what kind of generalizations might be thought in your workplace and locality, but one bias I see here is class, as upper class people, with many exceptions, are more reserved in their speech. Abiding by upper class taboos doesn’t say anything about what people think. A good book giving examples of overreaction to taboo remarks is So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Regardless of whether my presumption, about your firing a frustrated employee who makes an unkind remark about white people, is correct, the idea that this class of statement is a no-warning firing offense is a big reason (the other being low pay) that we need stronger unions. Even if most union reps are left of center (and I had to tell one where I work, obviously a few years ago, to turn off Rush Limbaugh so I could think), those I have encountered understand that it is wildly unfair to judge people harshly based on probably rare offhand remarks. (There is a union for Georgetown adjunct faculty and the two teachers seem not to have grieved the violation of academic freedom – so I’m not talking about this union, just generally.)

P.S. I wish to distance myself from one sentence in my link, saying that, aside from tenure, the case of Penn Law professor Amy Wax is “similar.” Without going into the details, or engaging in character assassination of someone where I don’t have all the facts, that seems a more difficult case for a free speech advocate.

255

News flash-- Walgreen’s Pharmacy may be worth boycotting:

https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1494469211837587459

This is too bad for me, if true–I have a Walgreen’s on my corner, and all my prescriptions are there. I shop there at least once per week, but if this proves true, I may feel that I must weigh the convenience of shopping there against the distasteful support I am giving to a company that supports Trumpist insurrectionists. I’ll certainly look into weighing it and, if I decide that the inconvenience is too great for me personally, then I’ll feel better about some of the other things that I choose to give up. There’s a link in that Twitter thread to Mark Cuban’s online pharmacy that I might explore.

256

So you want me to do serious research into every aspect of the company after I find out the CEO is a big contributor to politicians I vigorously oppose? Why? That’s sufficient information for me–I don’t want to put an extra nickel into his pocket, and I would like to put my nickels into his competitors’. Why do you think I should have to jump through extra hoops when I have enough information already? Because YOU like his politics?

257

Doncha know, money is speech, and all speech is to be censored if it is in response to someone else’s speech or actions.

In order for speech to be free, any critics of that speech need to shut up.

And don’t complain that that doesn’t make any sense, because if you do, you are violating someone’s right to free speech.

258

I didn’t say that she did.

What I said is what she said revealed her biases.

Yes, everyone acknowledges that systemic racism is a real thing. The difference is whether one thinks it should be celebrated or mitigated.

They shouldn’t say it after getting tenure either. Tenured or not, I wouldn’t want to take a class from her.

Well, you 've entirely changed the context, and made presumptions about that altered context. I’m not sure where your imagination is taking you here, but I don’t think that I really feel the need to indulge it.

I’m not sure where you got that generalization. I suppose you said, “with many exceptions” but that’s like saying that, “water is pretty dry, with many exceptions.”

My business has around 10 employees. By saying you want stronger unions, you are saying that you think that a 10 employee business should be unionized?

And here I am always hearing about how teacher’s unions are too powerful, and keep all the bad teachers.

I’m not sure, are you calling yourself a free speech advocate now? How do you reconcile that with telling people what they can and cannot say? Freedom of speech is also freedom of association. And freedom of association doesn’t mean that you are free to associate with anyone, just the people that want to associate with you.

259

You’re relying on someone’s tweet. Credulous people like yourself are very useful to the tweeter. You make the call.

I have no idea what the “Sedition Caucus” is. Do you? Someone in the company voted Republican once? I’m sure the “Sedition Caucus” is irrefutable. Since it doesn’t actually exist, and is defined by this tweeter.

Way back when, Proctor and Gamble had a logo on the back of their packages that had a moon in it. Periodically there would be rumors that P&G was owned by The Moonies, aka the Unification Church. This was way before the Internet, and it’s not like people just stood around talking about P&G or any other conglomerate. These were people at my church who would hand out a mimeographed or dittoed piece of paper spilling the beans. Conservative people, this was a conservative deal. People would write letters to the editor or to Dear Abby or Ann Landers about it. P&G would refute them, explain that this logo dated back to the early years of the company, with documentation. The rumors would die down for a while, then start right back up again with the exact same accusations. Eventually P&G got tired of dealing with the issue and took the logo off the back of their packaging. Later it was discovered that the rumors were all the work of a single individual that had some sort of ax to grind against P&G or just wanted to make mischief. It was all a lie.

I have no particular allegiance to P&G or really know what they do or did, good or bad. They were huge. Had a cousin that worked there. If more people believed those false rumors, I suppose he could have lost his job.

If people like you are going to believe these tweets, there are going to be more of them. I’m sure someone working for CVS or WalMart, or some freelancer who hopes to do the same, or some short seller of Walgreens stock, would absolutely love for you to believe this and act on it and influence others. Because I can guarantee that people are going to be incentivized to send this sort of vague, irrefutable stuff out there. It sure worked on the conservative people at my church.

Were the conservative people at my church who handed this stuff out about P&G doing something bad? Yeah, I think they were. They may not have meant to, but they were wrong. They shouldn’t have done it. Could someone like yourself do the same with incomplete information? You be the judge.

260

The fact that you’re defending Walgreen’s knowing no more than I do is just another reason for me to patronize other pharmacies. Did you research what the tweeter meant by “Sedition Caucus”? No, you just assume he means “any innocent legislator who ever cast a vote for anything GOP-endorsed,” telling me that you’re more biased in favor of the GOP than I could possibly be against them, which is saying something.

261

There’s an extensive Wikipedia article on it, for fuck’s sake. It must have taken you 15 minutes to write that diatribe about credulous people making hasty judgments on incomplete information, and you didn’t spent 5 seconds googling it?

And it’s hardly just a lone tweeter talking about donations to the Sedition Caucus. From the many other hits on googling the term:

262

The skinny of it is that Walgreens made a public promise after 1/6/21 to suspend donations to Congresspeople who actually voted against certifying President Biden’s election, but come November 2021, donated $25k to said Congresspeople’s campaigns.

Many companies made similar pledges, but not all have kept them for even one year.

~Max

263

Thanks for the info, I was not aware of this. If I need another jab in the arm, I’ll probably use them, as they were by far the easiest to set up an appt for, but for other pharmaceutical needs, I’ll try elsewhere.

264

Is that the actual weasel wording they used? It should not be a surprise, then - they should have been called out at the time for no saying “terminate”. But I guess we all had other things on our mind at the time.

265

01/16/2021

Walgreens confirmed to Insider on Saturday that it has suspended contributions to the GOP members of congress who voted to overturn the election results.

“Walgreens holds in high regard the role of government and the peaceful transition of power that is core to our democracy. As such, our political action committee suspended contributions to members of Congress who voted to object the certification of U.S. electoral college votes,” Walgreens wrote in a statement. “As Walgreens continues to deliver the essential testing and vaccinations that will help America end the COVID-19 pandemic, we value the importance of unity as a means for addressing the many challenges we face together as one great nation.”

~Max

266

So what changed?

267

Nothing. The public has always had a short attention span and this was a PR stunt from the beginning - campaign season wasn’t underway the January immediately following an election.

~Max

268

Something along the lines of…

This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.

(Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s Press Secretary)

269

“What? We said we would suspend donations and we did. We never said how long we’d suspend them for.”

Still … $25,000? That’s change-in-the-sofa money, even if it should be zero. I wonder how much they gave to Dem candidates.

270

If they get that from every major corporation, it’s far from chump change.

271

The only source of Walgreens breaking its pledge is CREW (probably best known for initiating the Trump emoluments lawsuit) in an article published today - back in January CBS had reported that Walgreens kept its pledge.

Elections campaign law limits how much can be donated directly to a political candidate. Here is a link to the Federal Election Commission’s website on that topic. The cap for political action committees, which Walgreens was referring to in its pledge, is $5,000 per candidate.

According to CREW Kevin McCarthy and Steven Scalise got the full $5k anyways.

~Max

272

Honestly, if they were just giving money to the people that they were giving money to all along, I really wouldn’t care.

But their claim to be suspending donations to these individuals, then going back on it when it’s convenient and no longer in the headlines, is actually an excellent example of Virtue Signalling.