The fictionalized version of the left that only exists in the fevered imagination of you and other purveyors of the right-wing hysteriaverse, you mean.
And since I’m getting tired of feeding you, I’ll wait until you return to conversations on the actual thread topic before engaging your babble again.
It’s pretty obvious. Your complaint is entirely that people do not like you due to the way that you behave and the things that you say.
People not liking you for saying shitty things is the same as authoritarianism, in your world.
I’d give you a hug, but I’m allergic to seafood. (I’m not really, just seems a good excuse to get out of doing something I’d really rather not)
? Is it “illiberal” that you can’t write, say, “Jesus Was A Bastard and His Mother Was A Whore” on your employer’s website without facing severe consequences for it?
“Tremendous corporate power” and widespread public disapproval (which is the closest approximation possible in rational reality to your “violent mobs of anarchists” delusion) have always been “silencing folks” from many, many forms of unfettered free expression. Where was your concern about “silencing” back then?
I very much doubt that you really want people to have the social and cultural freedom to be outrageously offensive in any context whatsoever. My goodness, it wasn’t all that long ago that you were still constantly whining about the use of profanity here in the Pit, a forum specifically designed and designated largely for the use of profanity.
ISTM that what’s bothering you, and a lot of the other hypocritical denouncers of “cancel culture”, is simply that society and culture are now beginning to view racism and other forms of bigotry as inherently outrageously offensive, rather than merely as differing viewpoints that must be treated with respect in civil discourse.
Exactly. It’s always been the case that saying the wrong thing in the wrong circumstances could get you in trouble professionally and socially.
It’s just now that hate speech against minorities and the marginalized faces criticism that suddenly they get upset about it.
Circling back…that study DT linked said that 55% of college students felt that the culture on their campus “prevented people from saying things they believed for fear that someone would be offended”. White students and Republicans were more likely to express that concern. Like someone said, when you’re used to privilege…
The article expressed concern that students would go through college without ever hearing opposing views. Given that 45% of students apparently felt free to say whatever they liked, that seems unlikely.
And without being able to compare that to the percentage of people in other settings, or college students at other times, who would endorse feeling that way, it’s kind of meaningless.
And that’s the ONLY one of those links that deserves even a minute’s serious thought. One of the others is from a wingnut publication and the other three are opinion pieces by wingnuts saying “Help, help, I’m being repressed”…IN WELL-KNOWN NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS. The irony, it burns.
I think I finally figured out what “cancel culture” means. It’s a synonym for “change”.
Wrong.
One fish, two fish, red fish blue fish.
Being de facto banned because of faux outrage and the fact that the left has completely forgotten personal liberty in order to enact a bigoted, racialist society is what has me bothered. Obviously, standards of offensiveness doesn’t matter to Amazon or ebay because one can still buy stuff like WAP with it’s lyrics of female empowerment such as.
Beat it up, nigga, catch a charge
Extra large and extra hard
Put this pussy right in your face
Swipe your nose like a credit card
Hop on top, I wanna ride
I do a kegel while it’s inside
Spit in my mouth, look in my eyes
This pussy is wet, come take a dive
Now… if the left were being consistent, yes I know that laughable, we’d not be able to buy that from Amazon much less it being an award winning song. Now, I don’t have a problem with freedom of expression and I don’t think stuff should be banned or censored but let’s not kid ourselves about the left’s war against all things so-called intrinsically racist or sexist when stuff like the lyrical art quoted above is celebrated.
No, what they’re doing is insulting transwomen. Just as when somebody says “Same-sex spouses aren’t truly married”, they’re insulting same-sex spouses. Or when evangelical Protestants say “Catholics aren’t Christians”, they’re insulting Catholics.
When you declare categorically that your preferred definition of a term invalidates somebody else’s identification with that term, you are insulting them. You can’t shrug off responsibility for that insulting behavior by pretending that people who disapprove of it are somehow squashing your freedom of belief.
There are all sorts of ways to discuss different preferred definitions of contested terms without resorting to that kind of deliberate categorical insult. When somebody eschews thoughtful discussion in favor of that kind of insulting assertion, as k9bfriender says, they’re not looking for nuanced debate and should not be given a pass on their insulting behavior.
Well, cancel culture is specifically about how nowadays audiences and clienteles are starting to get annoyed when entertainers and employees spout out bigotry, and make this fact known enough that their employers realize that their employee is now a potential liability. This is entirely unchanged from the past, in that it was always possible for an employee or entertainer to get shitcanned if they did something sufficiently offensive (like, say, be a socialist).
The only difference is now racists and bigots are hearing that they are the ones who are unpopular, and the big fat babies can’t take it when the thing that has been happening for generations happens to them.
They fear the day of reckoning is at hand.
It’s like when the armed robber drops his gun, you pick it up, and he wants to call a truce.
So very analogous to the RW shrieks about ‘unity’ after the Cheeto-Faced Shit Gibbon lost the election.
ETA: the sane, non-psychopathic guy isn’t going to shoot the thwarted armed robber. He simply stripped the criminal of the power he once had over a de facto weaker person.
You didn’t even try to address my argument. You said nothing about nothing.
See, this is why no one should take you seriously.
Not only were no Seuss books banned, by any reasonable definition, the book that you cite here isn’t even one of the ones that the publisher decided to no longer publish.
When you can’t even get the most basic facts of what you think you are arguing correct, then it is obvious that you are not looking for a good faith debate.
You are looking for a hug.
If the producers of this decide that this song is problematic and chooses to stop publishing it, will you continue to feign your position here?
All you have done here is to undermine what shreds of an argument you did have, by pointing out that Amazon doesn’t censor stuff for social pressures.
Of course Amazon does. It just has to be the WOKE! that do the pressuring.
Sometimes, if you find what you think to be a discongruity like this, it is not a sign of hypocrisy, but a sign that you don’t understand what is actually going on.
Hell you think that one fish… is one of the books that the publisher chose to no longer publish. How can anyone take any of your conclusions seriously when you are so poorly informed?
To clarify (because I wouldn’t want you to think I was drawing any kind of equivalence), I wouldn’t trivialize the oppression of black people and women in past generations by calling it “cancellation” (I know that wasn’t your intent either, I just wanted to get that on the record).
I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The problem with cancel culture (or, at least, the problem I have with cancel culture) is that all too often the punishment meted out by the masses is grossly disproportionate to the perceived offense.
Granted, it’s not always very easy to see this, because cancel culture is at its most visible when people try to cancel the uncancellable. For example, when J.K. Rowling tweeted something widely perceived as transphobic she received a great deal of criticism (some of it legitimate, some very much not), but she’s still writing successful books. She hasn’t been “cancelled” in any meaningful sense. For people whose only exposure to cancel culture is incidents like that, that it’s easy to assume that “cancellation” is just a big fuss over nothing.
The trouble with this is that it’s a form of survivorship bias. The people who are successfully cancelled are people who nobody, including those who are skeptical of cancel culture, have ever even heard of. They’re regular people with typically precarious jobs who are hugely vulnerable to the kind of intense, short-term pressure a motivated online mob can exert.
The emblematic case is that of Justine Sacco. She had a small twitter account (about 100 followers), and she tweeted a racially insensitive joke before she boarded a long flight to South Africa. By the time she’d landed the tweet had been picked up by Gawker, gone viral, and she’d been fired. As I recall, it took at least a couple of years before she was able to find another job.
The joke itself was definitely problematic, but the consequences Sacco suffered were in no way proportionate to the offense. While the joke was definitely racially insensitive, it was also intended to be self-deprecating. Her intention was to poke fun at her own obliviousness and privilege. The trouble was she isn’t a comedian and she didn’t pull it off. But you could easily imagine a skilled “edgy” comedian (Sarah Silverman, for instance) telling a similar joke without consequence.
It’s stuff like this that I find troublesome. I don’t get particularly agitated when the mob goes after the powerful, because they’re largely insulated from real consequences. I may disagree with the mob. I may think they’re being unnecessarily mean spirited and uncharitable. I may think that many of them are (to use a phrase I don’t particularly like) “virtue signalling”. But if the people they’re targeting are rich enough to just shrug it off then I’m not going to pretend that it matters too much in the great scheme of things. The trouble is, that’s only the most visible aspect of cancel culture, not the most harmful.
In short, the nuance that I think you’re not fully taking into account is that cancel culture is frequently employed to great success against people who don’t actually have any meaningful power. These people then suffer extremely disproportionate consequences, often on the strength of a single thoughtless action or remark. A lot of people seem to have this idea that “cancellations” are always David vs. Goliath type battles between powerful individuals and individually powerless mobs, but this is a false perception. Often, the mob is Goliath, David is just some poor schlub who made a dumb joke, and Goliath ends up curb-stomping David and gets to walk away feeling good about himself.
If you haven’t read it already, I’d highly recommend the book ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ by Jon Ronson. He takes a deep dive into cancel culture as it applies to regular people. I found it very eye-opening.
That’s an excellent example. Cancel culture is certainly not exclusive to the left.
More factually unsupported word salad. “De facto banned” is a meaningless phrase; “faux outrage” is a completely unsubstantiated accusation, as is “the left has completely forgotten personal liberty”; and you don’t even know what you mean by the term “bigoted, racialist society” in this context, except you’re aware that those adjectives are terms of disapproval among liberals.
If the right were being capable of rational thought (yes, I know that’s laughable), they’d recognize that there’s nothing intrinsically inconsistent about a vendor having a policy that racist images in a children’s book count as offensive content but sexually explicit language in an adult pop song does not.
Like I said, what’s freaking you out here is simply the notion that racial bigotry should be considered more socially unacceptable than explicit descriptions of sexual behavior (especially when the former is in media for children and the latter in media for adults). Conservatives have spent their whole lives in the mindset that you can poke fun at the “coloreds” but it’s not decent to talk dirty in public. And conservative mindsets really struggle with the notion of change.
Heh. This from the guy who was always trying to “cancel” or “censor” or “de facto ban” other posters’ use of profanity in the Pit by whining about their “potty mouth” behavior.
You obviously forgot to put on your readers and look at the actual lyrics.
And if you’d engage your brain to do more than parrot you’d realize what I’m actually concerned about is the growing authoritarian tendencies in the far left cloaked in the saccharine words of wokeness.
I can’t tell whom you’re intending to respond to here, but yes, I have read the lyrics to “Wet Ass Pussy”, and my description of them as “sexually explicit” is accurate.
More unsubstantiated word salad.
I like how the argument is now that Amazon isn’t “censoring” enough. Like how the bad things aren’t happening to the right people.