I was actually surprised to hear you say that, because in my experience people who use that term wouldn’t.
Going back to your earlier question about the use of the term by Obama et al…it seems to me that the term has been hijacked by people who use it ONLY to complain that conservative views are being “cancelled”, as we have seen in this thread. Looking at the wiki page for the book you mentioned, it appears it dealt with a much broader array of cases including people being shamed for things like plagiarism and other non-political offenses. That is a worthwhile thing to talk about, but I think you need to find a new word for it.
Like what? It’s like asking me to discuss religion without saying I don’t believe in god, because hearing that is terribly offensive to you. Which is it you object to, the idea or the language?
I agree. That’s not what I’m doing – I’m talking about the “canceling” that was separate from Jim Crow, slavery, abuse of women, etc. I’m talking about the fact that black people and women who spoke out were less likely to get book deals, public speaking, publishers, TV spots, etc. They were canceled, but wide society didn’t notice or care, because they were black or a woman.
I read that Ronson book years ago, and it was good. It demonstrated that this tactic (boycotts, public shaming, etc.) can be used for ill, or just go too far sometimes. But this has always been the case. This is a useful tactic, and occasionally it’s used poorly or unfairly. This isn’t new. What’s new is that suddenly the powerful are noticing and concerned, because they are facing the same risks that everyone else has always faced.
True, however the debate over transgender rights is a particularly messy one. I’ve observed a lot of bad faith on both sides (not here, particularly, but elsewhere online) and it’s not uncommon for someone who raises an objection to, say, the idea that pre-op trans-women convicted of violent crimes should be housed in women’s prison being treated the same way as genuine bigots who think transgender people are all mentally ill fetishists. This kind of bad faith argumentation can easily snowball into online campaigns to punish people who hold relatively timid objections to certain requests made by advocates of transgender rights. That’s why, to go back to MrDibble’s point earlier, I think we should be careful before deploying conversation-stopping terms like TERF because being too free with them makes it nigh on impossible to reasonably separate the legitimate issues people have from outright bigotry.
I completely agree. My opinion (as very much a non-expert) is that gender identity is largely (perhaps not wholly, but definitely largely) performative. That is to say, someone assigned male at birth who has a deep inner conviction that they’re a woman deserves to be acknowledged as such. There may be areas where some kind of compromise might need to be made, but they’re few and far between and are exceptions, not the rule.
Thanks for pointing that out. That’s exactly what I was trying to say.
Sexually explicit is all the commentary? Hell, if someone posted a thread talking about the legs of a famous actress 120101 threads would sprout like mushrooms about muh sexism!!1!! Yet absolutely no critique of a song that uses so-called intrinsically sexist and racist terms. It’s ART!!!
“Conservative Discovers That Poor and Powerless People Are Hit Harder By Negative Consequences of Stupid Thoughtless Behavior Than Wealthy and Powerful. News at 11.”
Seriously, Walter, I’m not dissing your concern for the non-elites here, but surely you see that there’s something rather inconsistent about it. Anything stupid and thoughtless is likely to produce “extremely disproportionate consequences” for one of the “little people” compared to wealthy elites.
To take another example, if a small-time entertainer shows up for a gig drunk and incapable and gets booed and complained about, he may very well lose his reputation and his livelihood and his show-business career. If a big star does the same thing and gets the same reaction from the audience, he’ll probably be able, as you say, to “just shrug it off” and have his career largely or entirely unaffected by it.
Is that fair? Hell no. Is it the way of the world in a highly unequal capitalist society? Hell yes. Are you going to try to argue from that unfairness that audiences shouldn’t boo and complain about performers being drunk off their ass when they’re supposed to be giving a show? Somehow I doubt it.
If somebody does something stupid and thoughtless—like getting blind drunk before a performance, or tweeting a racist joke visible worldwide on a social-media platform—then of course how badly they end up suffering for it is going to depend largely on how rich and powerful they are. Duh. Trying to make out that that’s intolerably unfair only in the case of the racist behavior is just blatant special pleading.
I believe that the general conclusion here was that the fault was not with the viral objectors, though - it was with the overreaction by her employers. This is not emblematic of a problem with the so-called mob rule; this is a problem with bad judgement on the part of those who give more credence to a transient shitstorm than they should have.
But let’s consider the theory that they weren’t overreacting and the populace really had turned against the woman…as was entirely their right. The before-they-got-whiny conservatives would have said that it’s the right of the consumer to choose what they like and where they shop. And if the consumers really were going to boycott the company if they kept the woman employed, well, that’s an odd hill to die on but more power to them. And if the consumers really did that then the business would be justified in firing her.
Of course modern conservatives are whiners who don’t think that people should be allowed to stop approving of them and supporting them, no matter what they may say or do, but these people are clearly babies who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Good heavens, this is getting eerily reminiscent of trying to have a rational discussion with the departed Starving Artist.
octopus, not only do you evidently not understand the difference between a children’s book and an adult pop song, you also don’t understand the difference between an S&M kinkster narrator character in an adult pop song and a participant in an online discussion forum with specific rules of discourse.
Yes, octopus, as impossibly headsplody as you may find the fact, it is indeed true that a songwriter can get away with saying way more sexually explicit and dirty stuff in a raunchy pop song with a sexually insatiable and transgressive narrator bragging about her “wet-ass pussy” than you can get away with saying in SDMB discussions.
That’s not about “wokeness”, it’s about context. If Cardi B joined the SDMB and posted a thread talking about the legs of a famous actress, people would be complaining about the sexism of that too. Conversely, if you want to go write a raunchy pop song off-boards with a narrator bragging about how sexually indefatigable and kinky he is and how all the women throw money at him for his [anatomical specifications], none of us here will mind in the least. Maybe it would be a nice hobby for you, in fact.
Exactly. Amazon has torpedoed the old-style author-publisher-bookstore way of doing business, and as a result it’s taking on water fast. It used to be that the publishers sat in the captain’s chair and dictated in both directions, but not anymore- authors can go straight to Amazon if they want to deal with their conditions, or they can go through publishers, who may or may not have the power they once had.
It’s similar to what has already happened with music artists, record labels and streaming music, at least from where I sit. Except that we have this weird idea in this thread that the retailer has some sort of obligation to sell anything that’s published simply because they’re a huge retailer of books.
You all aren’t living up to the standards that I set for you. You’re refusing to align yourself to my definitions; therefore, you are guilty of endless rank hypocrisy.
Did you mean, when you use their messaging software?
Yes, they should be able to censor you. I’ve been on messaging systems where they DO censor you, you f***er. Don’t like it? Get different messaging software.
Amazon chooses content and offerings all day long. If they take a violent video game out of their app store (things like this happen all the time), that’s a much better analogy.
The Department of Transportation reports that the train derailed for no apparent reason, and that – because it was full of natural gas – the implosion [sic] could be seen for miles.