It’s entirely reasonable for consumers to take all kinds of things, including the morality and politics of those benefiting from your spending, into account, when spending money. Apparently the free market decided Taylor Gourmet wasn’t competitive in the DC area. It’s not the end of the world. Other sandwich shops, perhaps with less immoral proprietors, will benefit from their absence.
They didn’t fail because they produced an inferior product or overcharged for it. Additionally, a year later, the store space remains empty with no new vendor taking it’s place. So there is a knock-on impact on another business that had nothing to do with how Taylors owner voted.
So you have become inoculated against cancel culture, and will do more research next time before joining in. Sounds like everything it working the way it should.
Like I said, I wouldn’t boycott someone just because they gave money to a major political party (if they gave to the Nazis, then yeah), or voted for a member of a major political party. I’d give it a thought if they sang praises of a political opponent, or made other arguments advocating or advancing their administration, but likely not.
I actually didn’t think that those who went to the business summit were doing anything wrong. I liked that there were grown ups and industry leaders that may rein Trump in.
I certainly would not have boycotted over it.
But liars, no thanks.
So, in the course of writing this, I just had a client come in. We talked a bit about the weather, then she starts going on about how the $600 a week is just making everyone lazy. I did not offer a counter opinion.
Was I being silenced?
It really sounds to me like there were those who decided to blame cancel culture, rather than their ineptitude.
Sounds like they were struggling anyway. It may be that the investors pulled out due to the owner’s meeting, or because of his dishonesty, or just because they just didn’t think that the numbers looked good. Hard to say.
But, the official company spokespeople specifically do not credit the boycott for their problems, just anonymous people whose offered information could not be confirmed.
What this is starting to demonstrate to me, along with several other instances of people making similar excuses for their failures, is that cancel culture isn’t a thing, it’s just a boogieman that one uses to blame one’s failures on.
I expect COVID has something to do with the lack of a new business.
But so what if it wasn’t just about the product or prices? That’s the power of the consumer. It’s a great characteristic of our society, at least when the markets are fair (as I believe they mostly are for things like sandwiches) – consumers can decide, as a group, to put certain folks out of business. That can be used for good (say, punishing a business that uses overseas slave labor) or ill (punishing a proprietor who is gay). It can also be used for meh (maybe this Taylor Gourmet qualifies). But this is a good thing we can do with our society. It’s fine to discuss individual instances, but you appear to be implying that consumers should only make decisions based on price and quality. Is that really what you believe?
They closed in September of 2018, so Covid probably didn’t have much to do with it not reopening.
If there is no new vendor taking its place though, that means that demand for sandwiches in the area is pretty low.
I see mostly full strip malls, and I see mostly empty strip malls. When someone moves out of a full one, they are replaced immediately. When they move out of an empty one, there is another open bay that no one wants to rent.
So, maybe it wasn’t a good location, either.
.
it does occur to me that the landlord may not want to rent the space out to another entity, if they are still getting paid by Taylor’s Gourmet on a lease guarantee. In which case, it’s a great location, and it is still being paid for.
This business was punished based on who the owner voted for. We can argue whether the boycott put him out of business or if it was just another nail in the coffin. The crux of the conversation is whether people, myself included, acting to “cancel” the business did so for justifiable reasons.
Well, if there are justifiable reasons for boycotts, as you say, then who gets to decide which should or should not be justifiable reasons to do a boycott. I would imagine it should be the boycotter, no?
We’re seeing sports leagues speak out on some social justice issues quite a bit lately. A number of people tell them to ‘stick to sports’ and that they are done watching those sports leagues. In essence, trying to silence them from speaking out about politics. I don’t think this attempt at cancel culture is wrong, however, misguided I may think it to be. MLB doesn’t have a right to other people’s money after all.
So what’s the problem? Consumers get to make this call. You made a decision as an individual, and that’s fine. It’s fine to reevaluate your decision too. But why is it so bad to buy a sandwich at a different place, even for a little reason like voting for Trump? That’s a pretty small punishment for a pretty significant moral transgression, IMO.
Thanks for your reply. I debated linking to the other thread, but I was afraid of turning this one into the same sort of trainwreck. Guess I didn’t need to worry. Your views make a lot more sense with context, and I’m relieved to hear you don’t actually support corporate personhood.
Totally agree about the lack of conservative principles; and don’t forget evangelicals supporting a president who can’t name a single bible verse and had to borrow a bible for his photo op.
I do, however, want liberals to stick to the principle of free expression. Here’s a useful reference:
Private censorship campaigns are what I was attempting to talk about, and I wasn’t meaning to propose the remedy should be legal. If people don’t support them and speak out against them then they can be stopped, in the same way as the cancelling of James Gunn that k9bfriender mentioned.
That he was a liar, and a bad one, is a rather justifiable reason. I am not sure why you would make the claim that he was punished based on who he voted for, even you have said that there was much more to it than that, when you chose to punish him for the actions that you were made aware of.
You are one of the ones who “canceled” the business. Do you feel that your reasons were justified? If not, did you feel that they were at the time?
If you do feel that you overreacted, did you learn anything from that? Is it something that you would be able to share with others to help them from repeating your mistake?
My view is that it’s bad for society in general when people take this sort of action for relatively minor transgressions. Sure, you always have a right to do it, but we should use our rights responsibly. Would you decide differently if it happened today?
That seems the best answer there. If you feel that something is being unfairly attacked, then defend it.
To use @QuickSilver’s example, if you don’t think that it is fair that people are not eating at his restaurants due to his politics, then talk about how great his sandwiches are.
I do think that you would find far more productivity in defending the positives than trying to rationalize the negatives.
I have mentioned in this thread that I don’t eat chickfillet. But, that’s not entirely true. I was out and about in an unfamiliar part of the state a while back. I stopped to grab something to eat, and the McDonald’s really annoyed me. There was a Chick-Fil-A across the street. Now, I kept hearing people talk about how great their customer service was, and I was just in the mood for some good customer service. So yeah, I went through and got a chicken sandwich. It was okay, but the customer service was efficient and polite.
Now, the reason that I went there is because people would always talk about the positives, and that is what ultimately drew me there. Defending the negatives never would have.
If that was the only reason then we wouldn’t see significant numbers of centrists and liberals who also don’t feel free to speak their minds. We wouldn’t see liberals cancelling each other in knitting circles, or in cases like this:
https://arcdigital.media/contrapoints-and-the-scandal-that-shouldnt-be-15ac97f330d4
But all he decided was to get a sandwich somewhere else. Are you saying that’s irresponsible? If there are two sandwich shops, and one has an owner who praises Trump (an admitted abuser of women and an obvious bigot) and another has an owner who criticized Trump, are you saying it’s irresponsible to choose the latter?
Twitter has made it easy for anonymous assholes to harass strangers. She wasn’t driven off social media because of criticism, but harassment. I don’t think you’ll find any of “my side” advocating for harassment. Harassment is wrong and platforms like Twitter should ban it.
You say that it’s simple to ignore a minority shouting hate at you, but on the internet, even a small minority can be hundreds or thousands of people. I think this video on Cancelling by Contrapoints was pretty interesting watch (you can also read the transcript if you prefer). I don’t know if you are of the opinion that Natalie is someone who deserves to be shouted down, but a lot of people on Twitter had that opinion. Do they represent just a minority, or were they representing the majority opinion?
There’s also this quote from the video:
I mean, I’m a politically opinionated trans woman who publicly transitioned while making anti-fascist content on a notoriously right-wing platform. Sweaty, I am so used to reading mean things about myself online, most of you probably can’t even begin to imagine how used to it I am. And the way you psychologically survive in that situation is you block the people and platforms who are harassing you, and you pay it no mind.
But there’s some things you can’t block. And a big one is that you can’t block people from going after your friends and colleagues. And that is exactly what people did to me at the height of the Buck Angel incident.
Lindsay Ellis, Olly from Philosophy Tube and Hbomberguy all got inundated with tweets demanding that they publicly disown me, a person they’ve all been friends with for years or else.
and also
During the height of this most recent canceling, a creator I admire DMd me to let me know, “I cut the shout-out to you in my last video because I was nervous to draw the ire of your detractors, who are getting genuinely scary. But I wouldn’t want you to think I was disavowing you, regardless of how many people are asking me to.”
Jesus Christ. The situation here is that any cis person who defends me, or even associates with me in any way, will be labeled a transphobe. Any binary trans person who associates with me will be branded an enby-phobe. And any non-binary people who associate with me will be ostracized from their own community.
So on the Internet I find myself increasingly alone. I’m isolated by the harassment. And that is ultimately the point, to exile me from my community and from any community. And it’s all because I refuse to participate in doing exactly that to Buck Angel.
So is supporting Contrapoints an unpopular opinion that is rightfully being suppressed by fear of retribution from the online mob?
From what I have read, cancelling is not just criticism - people aren’t just attacking ideas, they attack the person:
And I realize that some people will say that I’m the one who’s overstating harm to evade criticism. But look, you’ve seen the tweets, the furious demands for me to be exiled, the doxxing and threatening and ordering around of my colleagues, the attempts to isolate me from my community, the attacks not on my actions but on who I am as a person. There’s not really anything ambiguous about this. It’s just abuse.
But I don’t think it feels like abuse to the people who are doing it. They feel like they’re punching up because I’m a “celebrity” with a platform and lots of Twitter followers. And it’s true that I do have more power than any of them individually. But as a collective, they have a terrifying power that they don’t seem to be aware of as individuals.
As Jon Ronson, author of a great book on public shaming put it: “I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”
And that’s how you get these situations where you have hundreds of people endlessly bashing someone who’s already been knocked to the ground, and feeling all the while like they’re punching up.
Anyways I encourage you to watch the entire video and would like to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I would much rather have a world where people critique Natalie’s ideas rather than bombard her with attacks on her character. Sure, she could stop producing content to fall out of the spotlight and probably avoid these attacks, but I think the world would be a poorer place for it.
Nobody is advocating for a world where people are afraid to criticize other people - they are simply saying that there is more than one way to criticize something, and character assassinations/doxxing/browbeating people for ever associating with someone who’s ever done something wrong is not an environment conducive to open discourse. Nobody should be afraid to not tip at a restaurant, but everyone still should still tip (in the US). I feel like a similar principle is what the Harper letter is trying to communicate (though apparently it has failed to communicate that to a lot of people) - cancel culture shouldn’t be illegal, it is just a negative influence on society.
But this wasn’t just me deciding to not to buy their sandwich. This was a social media organized call to join a boycott based on how the owner voted and which business meeting he attended (even if he lied about it). As far as I know, he didn’t commit a crime. He voted wrong. And the punishment he suffered arguably contributed to him losing his business.
I have never heard of any of these people, I don’t know their politics or positions any further than has been quoted by you. I may delve into your video if I have time later tonight.
However, my first take is that she is complaining about literally “hundreds.” In a country with hundreds of millions, we are talking about literally less than one in a million. I don’t think that there are any effective ways of preventing hundreds of individuals from voicing their opinions, even if they are rude about it.
That her colleagues distanced themselves from her based on the opinion of the opinion of less than one in a million says to me that her colleagues should have been more willing to support her. Like I said earlier, the best defense against “canceling” is positive.
She is complaining about the power of the collective against the powerful, but that’s just it, we mere peons do not have individual power, we only have collective power. If we do not exercise that, then we have no power at all. That’s what she wants to use her platform to shame us into giving up.
I’m thinking that I rushed to join a boycott that I probably would not today. Which is not to say I would never join any boycott going forward. I just think I’ll put more thought into making that decision.