If that’s the definition of “cancel culture,” then I see no reason for a debate here. Of course people should feel empowered to express disagreement with someone along with a bunch of other people.
Then, this whole thread is just one big cancel culture about cancel culture.
How Meta.
Oh shit, I stopped reading that article because the examples were so lame. And I missed out on the good stuff, where cancel culture gets truly evil:
So, because of the villainous cancel culture, we no longer have:
-Aunt Jemima syrup (well, we have it, but under another name, but still)
-Uncle Ben’s rice and Mrs. Butterworth syrup (okay, we actually do still have them under the same name, but WHO KNOWS WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN)
-Thug Kitchen website (well, we have it too, but under another name, but still, this is as bad as losing Aunt Jemima)
-Eskimo Pies and Cream of Wheat (How DARE you rob us of our CULTURE? How DARE you! Okay, Cream of Wheat is just losing its mascot, but YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS)
-Washington Redskins (we still have them, but --you get the picture)
-Cleveland Indians (they’re still called the Cleveland Indians, but with a racist name like that YOU NEVER CAN TELL WHEN THE CANCEL CULTURE ASSASSINS WILL SHOW UP)
I’m glad I read more of this article, because now I see what a true threat to western civilization cancel culture is.
I guess what “cancel culture” means in the context you describe and in what others have recently posted is an attempt to shame someone publicly for things they may have said and done. Sometimes going as far as getting them fired or expelled, but mostly publicly shamed.
I mean white men being cancelled was a bit of a common meme making its rounds earlier in the year. Few actual white men were cancelled in the process.
I guess if the attempt is public enough, you can joke, “Louis CK is doing a show? Wasn’t he cancelled?!” Everybody laughs knowingly and goes on with their life in the comfortable knowledge that said individual was publicly shamed or possibly even suffered real consequences to which they might have contributed in some small woke way.
Come to think of it… Was Kathy Griffin cancelled? Certainly by the right. I don’t think she got much support from the left though.
I won’t disagree. And if they have a job that has customers that may care about the people that they are supporting, then they may lose out there.
Yeah, I saw a bunch of white guys complaining about it.
Are you saying that the people who would criticize do it just for some sort of smug satisfaction?
(Setting aside that you just implied that it is “woke” to object to Louis CK’s behavior.)
Yeah, pretty much. And yeah, I didn’t really support her. I thought that she was in the wrong. Not enough that I cared, but not enough that I really wanted to invest much into trying to defend what I found to be indefensible.
You do bring up a good point though, the right has been at this cancel culture thing for far longer, and is far more aggressive and successful about it.
Yet, it is the left that is being chastised and blamed.
If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that this whole anti-cancel culture thing is the right’s way of getting the left to shut up. You may be able to get me to feel pity for poor 'ol Kevin Hart and Taylor Swift if I am convinced that my actions hurt their feelings in a meaningful way. You will never get those on the right to stop if they know that their actions are harmful, they will instead know that they are working, and will double down their efforts.
If we accede to the demands of those who are calling for the end to cancel culture, then the only criticisms in the public sphere will be coming from the right.
I think there is some smug satisfaction after the fact, yeah. Especially when the cancel has essentially failed but people want to feel like the cause was more important than the result. Which it is.
Louis CK is a skeevy fuck. It was woke (on message) but also right to call him out for his skeevery.
I frankly never considered the right’s opinion on the subject. I simply assume they always want to shut every liberal up. So fwiw, “cancel culture” was never something I considered to be some genius plot from the right. I did listen to moderates, people like the co-signers of the Harper’s letter, (yeah, I know how you feel about it…) and felt like they had a legitimate point about the left trying to apply strict purity tests. Still do, tbh. But since real life examples are relatively few, I’m perhaps less certain but remain vigilant.
My wife would tease me about it. I’d say I want sausage on my pizza and she’d be all, “Nope. White guys are cancelled. You’ll have mushrooms and like it.”. We had some laughs over it.
The term “cancel culture” is just right-wing political speak for “when we say something stupid and horrible, lefties are mean and won’t listen and sometimes tell other people not to listen, even if what we are saying is only a little bit mean or a little bit horrible”.
The only reason it’s become such a talking point is that it one of the few places where the left seems to hold an advantage. Try as they may, the Republicans just can’t seem to successfully get anything canceled - no matter how hard they try. We aren’t fooled by the sanctimonious act, we can see you.
Donald Trump, using the office of the presidency as a megaphone, has tried to cancel CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times and The Washington Post and Amazon and Joe and Mika and…what’s the target today…Goodyear. Trump just tweeted “Don’t Buy Goodyear Tires”.
But he can’t do it. His efforts never work and usually backfire. The right wing just hates it that they can’t make “canceling” work for them. They’re just jealous af. The only reason for all the butthurt whining about cancel culture is based in jealousy.
Now, what I find interesting is the why. Why can’t conservatives effectively organize boycotts like liberals can? At first I thought it was economics, that the hicks from the sticks have less disposable income and tend to spend that on MAGA hats, overpriced collectibles, disaster supplies and colloidal silver.
But that’s not completely true. It may account for some small part of it but not all. There are plenty of conservatives with buying power. So why can’t conservative cancel people who speak out in favor of civil rights, robust social safety nets and environmental action in the same way that the left cancels people who are against such things?
I think it comes down to being on the correct side of these issues. The liberals get away with it because they are on the right side. And conservatives are jealous. It’s really quite simple.
I don’t see that, and I don’t agree. Especially if it fails, what is there to be smug about?
I think that you are giving motives to people that they do not deserve.
It’s no genius plot from the right, like I said, I know better. It’s just an embarrassing self own that plays right into their hands. The only ones that win are the ones who are now allowed to say whatever they want with no possibility of consequence because anyone who would object has been guilted into silence for fear of hurting a celebrity’s feelings.
I don’t see anything in the letter that describes “strict purity tests”. I see in the letter people complaining that people criticized the things that they said.
They call it “strict purity tests” because that makes it sound important, not because it is accurate.
During that time, I, a white guy, grew my business fantastically.
White guys ain’t cancelled, not even close.
Here’s a better example:
And this explains the ridiculous state of young adult publishing, a topic that was also included in the BBC radio 4 documentary on purity spirals AFAIK:
I know nothing about Alistair Stewart, but if you’re in an exchange with a black person, using a quote that alludes to an ape is not just dumb, it beggars belief that it wasn’t intentional and racially motivated.
As for the second article, we’ve been assured this does not happen, and when it does, it’s barely worth acknowledging because far more privileged people are whining and they’ve not even been cancelled.
Finally, an example you’ll tell us is good! I’m gonna assume this is the best you have to offer, because surely you wouldn’t offer something that’s not your best in the hopes that you can substitute quantity of cites for quality of cites.
Now, Alistair Stewart. Here’s an article about him that’s not an opinion piece. You linked to an editorial by a retired editor who still keeps his hand in the game with a weekly column where he angry-old-mans at the world. So let’s look at the facts.
Whereas your editorial claims that he was canceled " for a perfectly innocent, but nevertheless ill-advised, tweet in which he quoted Shakespeare. ," that’s not true.
Instead, his employer
and
Now, does this incident qualify as bullying?
Sort of:
To the extent you’ve finally provided us an example of Cancel Culture, it involves racist assholes using the tools of white supremacy to try to get a black man fired from his job when he stands up against another racist asshole.
Great cite. I think on that note we’re done and dusted.
Here’s a good example of cancel culture:
WaPo gets woman fired for blackface
Long story short:
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Megyn Kelly says some dumb shit about blackface in 2018.
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Random Woman goes to some WaPo cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party in blackface, with a big fat label on her jacket with “HI! MY NAME’S MEGYN KELLY” written on it. Clearly, her intent was to satirise Kelly.
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Random Woman gets confronted by two entitled SJW brats. Leaves party early.
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Two years pass.
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Two entire years.
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Come 2020, one of the aforementioned entitled SJW brats reaches out to the party’s host to demand the name of the Random Woman. Apparently, seeing an obviously satirical blackface costume triggered them so badly that, even after two years of therapy (seriously), they couldn’t let it go.
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Random Woman (who, incidentally, is a staunch anti-Trump liberal) offers to apologise in person to the two entitled brats. Sadly, that’s not good enough. They tip off the WaPo. Inexplicably, insanely, WaPo runs a “story” about the whole thing, even though it’s not in the public interest at all because this woman is not a celebrity.
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With utter predictability, Random Woman gets fired. She’s in her mid-fifties and so is unlikely to find a commensurate position elsewhere.
Is this the the best example I have? I dunno. Probably not. There are so many examples that it’s hard to keep track. Examples like these don’t get as much attention because they involve little people who can’t fight back. They’re the main victims of cancel culture.
That’s actually a decent example. I disagree with a lot of your framing, and I’ll address that in a minute, but yeah: assuming this woman is reporting accurately what happened (i.e., that her government employer fired her solely for the fact that a story like this came out), that’s bogus.
This article gets into some of the reasons the WaPo published the story, and whether their reasoning was good. In short: there was some real doubt, even from the reporters involved, that the story was newsworthy. The two women who confronted the fool in blackface were pissed, and wanted some sort of consequences for the WaPo employee and party host, and were planning to go public with the story themselves. The WaPo went public first, possibly because they wanted to make sure the story was fully told, but also possibly because they wanted to get out in front of it and limit the PR damage. Tom Toles, the party host, never faced any consequences (which, I’m definitely not sure he should have, although it sounds like he lied to his employer, but then, it was an incident in his own private life, so I’m not sure I care).
Now, you imply that because her costume was satirical, Shafer’s costume was therefore okay. This is a blatantly obvious point, but satirical behavior and shitty behavior can be the same behavior. Aren’t we past the point where we need to keep telling white people that there’s no reason to wear blackface? Can’t we just take that as given and move on?
Your description of the women who was bothered as “SJW brats” is a stupid description and undermines a lot of what you say. Be better, if you can.
You say there are so many examples that it’s hard to keep track. There are a buttload of terrible examples. This is one that’s sort of good.
But even here, while it’s a good example of someone getting fired who probably shouldn’t have, it’s not an example of the Intarwebz Hordes rising up and getting someone fired. Two people saw someone being an idiot. These two people demanded media coverage. The media in question published an article out of a sense of self-preservation. The woman’s employer fired her out of a sense of self-preservation.
The blackface woman, Morgyn Kelly, the WaPo, and the employer all bear some responsibility for this outcome. And maybe the people who gin up terror about cancel culture, for scaring the employer into an unnecessary action. But the two women who saw the blackface and complained? C’mon, they had every right to complain.
I have nothing to add to LHOD’s excellent analysis of the Alistair Stewart situation, but I’ll tackle the second citation here.
Now first of all, I really want to say, “A negative book review is cancel culture? Come on.” But I’ll go deeper into analysis.
The author of this book has been participating in a review system where people get early copies of the book, specifically to look for cultural sensitivity issues or otherwise “problematic” content. He has participated and led others in criticizing other books that he did not feel were sensitive enough. The article points out a book that he lead such a campaign against, whose author pulled the book prepublication due to the feedback. I don’t know exactly how all that played out, but I can point to the fact that you can currently order a book by that name and author on Amazon.
So this author puts his book out there for people to read, and it comes back with criticism. I haven’t read it, obviously, but those who have feel that it had some rather problematic aspects to it. It used the backdrop of genocide to tell a romance, and the villain of the story was of the people that was being genocided.
So, he chose to pull the book, due to the feedback that he solicited.
Let me repeat this. They solicited the opinions of others. They wanted others to express their opinion. They had an entire program where people got free early copies of books in exchange for their opinion.
People wrote very thoughtful and meaningful reviews. The criticized the particulars of plot and character that they saw as problematic. They didn’t call the author names or threaten him. They didn’t call for a boycott of his work or of the publisher. They just pointed out what they saw was wrong in the book that he had written.
I could not find anywhere that Jackson himself complained about the feedback. It seems to be only others complaining on his behalf.
To accuse people of cancel culture when their opinion was specifically asked for seems to make the term cancel culture meaningless. Which it is.
BTW, he has a new book coming out in a bit that seems that it will be doing very well. Something about a love triangle and a time machine.
First, this is exactly the sort of disingenuous write-up that hurts the claims that cancel culture is a real thing that we need to be concerned about. Many of the things that you say are barely true, and are couched in very insulting terms.
Second, are we saying that back in the long ago days of 2018, it was not known that blackface was pretty problematic?
The two SJW brats, as you call them, were actually people of color. Speaking of which, since their names are known publicly, they have received quite a bit of hate and death threats directed at them. Even randos on the internet, without knowing anything about them, call them “SJW brats” and infer all sorts of hateful things about them.
The number of people that confronted her about her choice of costume should have been pretty much the number of people at the party, or maybe just one, the host as he turned her away (or at least escorted her to the bathroom to wash off). To leave it to the minorities to point it out was a bit insensitive of the host and other white party goers.
You don’t have to be “triggered” in order to see something as problematic. And I don’t even know what “obviously satirical blackface” is supposed to mean. Maybe that could refer to RDJ in Tropic Thunder, but even that got quite a bit of negative feedback, and “random woman” is no RDJ.
As far as your bullet point as to the “Random woman” offering to apologize, that’s just not true. One of the women had contacted the host to ask who she was, in order to get an apology, and the host lied and said he didn’t know who she was. That’s when they contacted WaPo, the host’s employer. The fact that one of their employees was involved in this is why the WaPo ran a story about it.
So, one of the “entitled brats” actually lost her job over this. Both of them have received death threats and harassment. They are referred to as SJW brats and entitled and “triggered” by online mobs who latch onto whatever hateful and disingenuous notions that they can in order to hurt and bring these minority women down.
As an example of cancel culture, you almost have it. In that the lesson to be learned by this is that if you see racism or other forms of bigotry, don’t speak up, as if you do, you are just an entitled SJW brat that is triggered and should be shamed for expressing your opinion.
I’ll address the rest of your nonsense later, but you’re flat out wrong here. From the article:
“ In response Toles offered to connect Gruber with Schafer who he said wanted a chance to explain and apologise to you herself.
Gruber replied that she has a “hard time believing you are genuine in remorse…I do not feel comfortable reaching out to a woman who publicly harassed me and my friend simply because we are not white. This happened in public and so I want a public apology, not a private one ”
So, as you can clearly see, your assertion that Schafer didn’t offer to apologise is horse shit. She did offer, but she was rebuffed. Because the entitled SJW brat wanted blood. Also, there is absolutely zero evidence that Schafer ‘publicly harassed’ Gruber and her friend. Nothing in the WaPo article or the NY Mag article suggests that.
Rushed to conclusion and retracting my statement. Having read the review that appears to have contributed to the author’s retraction of the book, I think the criticism was justified in the sense that the story was written from a pretty superficial and not at all well considered point of view on the period of history. The author would benefit from reading, “The Book Thief”, and doing a full rewrite.
You have changed the timeline of events to fit your narrative. It was only after they had contacted Toles’s employer that he offered to connect them. Prior to that, he claimed he didn’t know who she was.
Anyway, referring to anyone who objects to black face as a triggered SJW entitled brat is a bit too hateful and disingenuous for me to continue to respond to.
I’m trying to not get baited into such back and forths.
If you have actual substance, then I’ll take a look, but all you have presented so far is hate and insults and a deliberately twisted narrative.
For accuracy sake, is “harassed” the appropriate word? As I understand it, the lady wore make-up that the complainant found objectionable but the lady wasn’t directing anything towards the complainant. “Harassment” seems overly dramatic.
Someone gave the book a bad review, so what?
Not having read the book, I can’t speak as to whether it’s a good or bad or mediocre. But it is fiction.
I like good fiction and good fiction writers use what are known as literary devices. One of those devices might be understating or minimizing a tragic event, even an epic one like genocide. I don’t feel there is anything inherently wrong with that. Just like I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with writing from the POV of an unsympathetic character like a racist or a terrorist ( I meant to type rapist but the typo works).Sometimes literary works are intended as thought experiments.
But it’s art and art carries risks. Some people might not like your book if you do these things, especially if you don’t do them well. Your book or story might even be labeled controversial. So, in spite of how I feel I think the review in the link is legitimate. That review wouldn’t stop me from reading the book and it might even make it more interesting to me.
What I find more enlightening is the authors reaction to the review. The reaction tells me that the imbalances in the book were probably not well thought out. Either that, or the writer is just way too sensitive. Because if you’re going to make art - musical or visual or literary - you’ve got to know going in that it’s not going to appeal to everybody. If you think everyone is going to love your work, you’re in for a reckoning.