It’s a boogeyman created by the same conservatives who cheered when Colin Kaepernick got blacklisted. Just like boasts of non-political correctness it’s an attempt to deny responsibility and escape consequences for acting like a fool in public. It’s a declaration of the “right” to be racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc., and then whining when called out on it.
It’s an attempt to divert attention from their own actions to the reactions of others.
To the extent that it’s an outcry against the possible professional and financial damage that might be part of the fallout, it’s pure capitalism. To suggest that such an adjustment in the marketplace should be prevented or managed is pure socialism.
So fundamentally, the wails decrying cancel culture are just another example of conservative hypocrisy.
No, there is most definitely indeed cancel culture. It’s a very real thing on both sides. It’s just that conservatives only complain when it goes against them.
For many years, Christian conservatives were perfectly happy to call for boycotts when someone promoted LGBT. The Dixie Chicks were “canceled” for criticizing George W. Bush. People called for boycotts of Ford, Disney, etc. People began boycotting singer Lauren Daigle when she said “I can’t say because I’m not God” when asked about her view of homosexuality. When Trump was president, all sorts of formerly respected Republicans such as McCain, Romney, Bolton, Sasse, Pence, etc. were vilified because they refused to join, or stepped off of, the Trump train.
I’ve even read of a fundamentalist family that walked out of a concert merely because the performing violinist began to play some jazzy bluegrass music, which the family disapproved of.
I think we can debate the nomenclature and the definition of ‘cancel culture’ until we’re blue in the face. I definitely think there’s a mob mentality when it comes to viral outrage that is unhealthy and unfair, and I’ve felt that way since long before Carano and McCammond got ensnared in controversy.
I wish we could evolve to a point where we could not immediately put people on the defensive and let them apologize and grow from the experience without fear of losing a job, losing an income, losing friends and associates, and whatever else comes with cyber-shaming. I don’t care if it’s a “business decision”; I’d like to see businesses have values beyond just their brand, speaking as a social capitalist.
When I said, on the other thread, that they (social conservatives) are “not reading our pamphlets …”
What they are doing is:
Packing local governments and school boards
Engineering redesign of our K-12 curriculum
Filling the air waves with their agenda
Filling the houses of worship with their agenda (within or outside of IRS laws)
Packing the courts at every single level
They have mechanisms, machinery, and money to impose their agenda on the rest of us.
And the rest of us have always been on defense. As I said elsewhere, trying to regain masses of lost ground is still defense.
If it can’t be made unpopular, a bit painful, and have a cost to it, what motivation is there to change repugnant, insidious, and invidious behavior ?
Logical, rational arguments ? The pure Marketplace of Ideas ? This just ain’t that cohort or we wouldn’t still be fighting the same battles that we’ve been fighting since our nation’s founding.
I think it never occurs to conservatives that liberals can disagree with Obama because they, conservatives, literally cannot imagine disagreeing with Republican leaders. That kind of blind, unthinking loyalty is largely what got us into the mess we’re in today. “But Obama” is never a good faith argument.
I suppose Noam Chomsky is also a right wing shill, because he cosigned (along with 150 other people) " A Letter on Justice and Open Debate", an open letter published in Harper’s magazine denouncing cancel culture.
When conservatives, and the so-called patriots who believe waving a flag makes them patriots, refused to hear or understand what Kaepernick’s harmless protest was about, or the above mentioned Dixie Chicks episode, they were all in favor of what they would later decry as “cancel culture”. Their selfish hypocrisy is as obvious as… something really obvious.
Well, no; if you actually read the article about Obama’s speech, you see that what he’s decrying is the idea that merely “calling out” other people’s errors, and feeling smug about one’s “wokeness”, counts as “activism”.
He’s not saying that people shouldn’t be calling out and criticizing errors, which is what today’s right wing seems to be saying in its laments about “cancel culture”.
He’s talking about Call-Out culture. Yes, he mentions cancel culture, but he’s really talking about how progressives police other progressives.
Here’s my favorite article about it. I had the good fortune to attend a seminar by this person called Compassionate Responses to Call-Out Culture. Really fascinating stuff.
Another appeal to blind loyalty. I read this letter when it was first published and it reminded me then that even old Noam isn’t right all the time.
Its flaw is its inconsistency. On the one hand it encourages free speech, even if it’s disagreeable: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.” The authors seem not to grasp that their remedy to protect free speech is effectively to stifle speech that disagrees.
To point out bad behavior is speech. To lament the consequences of that exposure is a separate issue and has nothing to do with the marketplace of ideas, but rather everything to do with the “marketplace” of capitalist iconography.
Eh, that letter’s pretty weaksauce, though. It makes some nice if vague general points about supporting open debate and freedom of speech (which, absolutely, go civil liberties!), and I don’t in any way fault Chomsky or anyone else for endorsing that. But the letter doesn’t actually identify any specific act that it claims is wrong, or why.
The closest it seems to get to a defining principle is this:
Yeah. The Harper’s letter seems to be less about real issues of freedom of expression and more about a lazy desire to maintain a comfortably privileged position where one never has to worry about a possible “threat of reprisal”.
? “Threat” of what kind of “reprisal”? I am of course totally in solidarity with the principle that nobody should have to face a threat of violence or physical intimidation or unconstitutional censorship because of what they write. But why, in a free marketplace of ideas maintained by commercial journalism, should anybody expect the default to be that anything they write will be protected from any kind of “reprisal” at all?
“Cancel Culture” does not exist in the sense that right-wing media is currently peddling, i.e. a creeping scourge that is effectively stifling free speech and posing a threat to society. The vast majority of things and people that get “canceled” are still widely available if you care to look for them. People and ideas may get de-platformed from the largest means of dissemination (Twitter, etc.), but these platforms are privately-owned and have the right to decide who can use their services, and for what purpose.
Things get “canceled” when most people don’t like them anymore. It is one of the most capitalist phenomenon we have.
I will agree that there is such a thing as “outrage culture” or “call-out culture,” and it can be annoying and stressful, though I also think that it is kind of the dark side of people trying to make the world a more inclusive place, and the negative experiences it can create do not outweigh the overall good of people trying to be kinder and more inclusive.
Try mentally substituting “accountability culture” or “natural consequence culture” every time you hear “cancel culture” and see what that does for your viewpoint.