Cancel Culture doesn't exist
In reply to another post to not derail that thread:
Quoting Isaac
There's a difference between taking grievances serious and taking lies seriously. Cancel culture is a right wing lie that doesn't deserve the amount of air time it gets - it should be ignored especially now that it has been politicized. In fact, I think "cancel culture" is about public accountability.
Also, I think on many subjects we're way past let's talk about our "disagreements". Racism needs to stop. Employee exploitation just needs to stop. Talking shit about transgenders, gays, lesbians, transsexuals etc. just has to stop. Joking about disabled people has to stop.
People fought wars over justice to get it. Slavery was abolished thanks to violence. Segregation was ended by government force. Sometimes talking things over is just over. The fact societies are moving in that direction is because the wealth inequality, the abuse, the racism is getting to a point where common people no longer accept it. I don't even think that's really a left vs. right wing thing; that's just a lot of people trying to maintain the status quo because they cannot envisage anything better.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1494027766957678597?s=20&t=2yiTw_6OlgJ3SrT7CFDlaw[/tweet]
Here's a perfectly good reason not to visit StarBucks and to let your grievances known by spamming them. If enough people will join, media will call it "cancel culture" again. But really, fuck Starbucks. I don't need to listen to them explain away their corporate greed, we need them to stop this and have them pay their employees a living wage.
Quoting Isaac
The issue seems to be about whether we 'cancel' on the basis of intent to harm or mere disagreement. The moment we set the criteria to mere disagreement (from a left wing agenda), we put in place social structures to do exactly that same thing (from a right wing agenda) depending entirely on who has most social capital at the time. I think that's a dangerous place to be.
There's a difference between taking grievances serious and taking lies seriously. Cancel culture is a right wing lie that doesn't deserve the amount of air time it gets - it should be ignored especially now that it has been politicized. In fact, I think "cancel culture" is about public accountability.
Also, I think on many subjects we're way past let's talk about our "disagreements". Racism needs to stop. Employee exploitation just needs to stop. Talking shit about transgenders, gays, lesbians, transsexuals etc. just has to stop. Joking about disabled people has to stop.
People fought wars over justice to get it. Slavery was abolished thanks to violence. Segregation was ended by government force. Sometimes talking things over is just over. The fact societies are moving in that direction is because the wealth inequality, the abuse, the racism is getting to a point where common people no longer accept it. I don't even think that's really a left vs. right wing thing; that's just a lot of people trying to maintain the status quo because they cannot envisage anything better.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1494027766957678597?s=20&t=2yiTw_6OlgJ3SrT7CFDlaw[/tweet]
Here's a perfectly good reason not to visit StarBucks and to let your grievances known by spamming them. If enough people will join, media will call it "cancel culture" again. But really, fuck Starbucks. I don't need to listen to them explain away their corporate greed, we need them to stop this and have them pay their employees a living wage.
Comments (156)
I think Margaret Atwood's warnings about the dangers of cancel culture are legit. It's not a lie.
But how much better than the alternative.
Quoting Benkei
Very true. There was no other way. But we are not slaves and not being treated as slaves. So we don't need to use violence. The time for talking is here.
I get scared when I see someone pick up a sword. But when they are convinced it's the sword of rigtheousness I am bloody terrified. Then nothing will stop them.
Cancel culture - Wikipedia
Obviously, the term can be misused for political reasons, but that doesn't mean that the culture, trend, or phenomenon itself does not exist.
But I tend to agree on Starbucks .... :wink:
There is indeed. That doesn't mean anything you think are lies count as lies. That way no discourse can ever take place. You have to have space for something you think is a lie, but might not be, otherwise you're just a dogmatist. So the point is not the existence of a threshold beyond which we don't 'debate', the point is it's location.
Case in point follows...
Quoting Benkei
No they didn't. It's one of those 'undisputed facts' we like so much that absolutely no-one ever fought a war over "transgenders, gays, lesbians, transsexuals". They fought wars (or serious violent protest) over slavery, racial segregation, female emancipation... The fact that you've piggybacked off those conflicts to add your campaign de jour is exactly what I'm talking about. You can't just say that because some matters are beyond reasonable discussion, any matter you care to raise can be put into that pot. If we want to get along, rather than just break into permanently warring factions, we have to hold to some reasonably well-agreed upon common ground.
The point is not whether we should always debate and never fight, I'm with you on that one, there's a time for fighting, there's a time to stop talking and just kick people out of polite society...
...the question I'm raising is how we decide when that time is, not whether it exists at all.
That's one of many definitions of the phenomenon out there where we're allowing framing to distort what is happening. What is happening is holding companies and people publicly accountable.
Not what I said. I said people will fight wars for justice. And I think this particular subject is exemplar for the general issue of disrespect of human dignity by politicians and corporations and the shills that keep defending it. I mentioned those probably because this was lifted from a discussion in the changing sex thread but the problem is broader and the anger is widespread. Just look at the US hiring crisis, the very public unionizing going on in the US to combat all the shit average US citizens have to deal with just to make a living wage. The downright injustice of elites thinking they have earned their millions over the backs of workers.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think it's piggybacking and has a very clear link. Oppression and repression, it all looks the same regardless of who is on the receiving end. But it's always about ensuring the powerless cannot do what they want to do.
Quoting Isaac
Almost all of these issues are about human dignity and class warfare and it looks like a powderkeg ready to explode to me. Does some of the flaming appear retaliatory? Well, no shit, it's poor people finding a voice to call out the Karens after they've been shit upon by Karens half of their lives. The local mom & pop store can't hire anybody anymore because they exploited their employees? Yes, that is personal. That's not cancel culture that's justice where you know you're not going to get it from the courts, politicians or companies you're working for.
Cancel culture is one of many right wing attempts to win what they regard as the culture war that threatens their way of life. The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of examples of right wing cancel culture, as a google search shows.
A helpful rule of thumb: look at what the right accuses the left of to find out what the right is doing.
You talk about elites and the powerless, yet every issue at stake in 'cancel culture' avoids class like the plague.
Are there no rich black people, no rich homosexuals, no rich transgender, no rich transsexuals?
Are there no black CEOs, no homosexual CEOs, no transgender CEOs, no transsexuals CEOs?
I'll tell you what there isn't. There's no working class rich people. There's no working class CEOs.
You want to turn the woke agenda into a class agenda when class is the one thing it avoids mentioning at all costs.
In your OP, you gave examples of (near) universal agreement. Slavery, for example, is something we can all condemn. I'm willing to boycott those who enslave.
I'm entirely unoffended by how much a purveyor of luxury items (your mocha latte or whatever you coffee drinkers drink) pays its CEO though. If you boycott, I don't think that's cancel culture. I just think you're fighting a distinctly first world fight, a bourgeoisie revolution of sorts.
I find cancel culture offensive in instances where people are discarded instead of tolerated in the hopes of reforming, from Rogan to Whoopi. Perfection isn't a human quality. It's just all so sanctimonious, casting stones, as if we're not all in glass houses.
Well, I've got nothing against anyone being held publicly accountable if they've done something that is legally or morally wrong. In fact, I'm all for it.
But the fact remains that people can be "cancelled", i.e. made to lose their jobs, or "disappeared", etc. in an attempt to silence them for political reasons. It usually happens in repressive societies, but it can also happen in liberal democracies. In which case, I wouldn't say it "doesn't exist" as a phenomenon.
McCarthy was probably not the originator, but surely the epitome of cancel culture.
For the removal of doubt. This is what I mean by cancel culture...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock
https://www.imore.com/spotify-overwhelmed-requests-cancel-following-joe-rogan-saga
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/05/21/why-is-peter-doshi-still-an-editor-at-the-bmj-rfk-jr-version/
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jk-rowling-speaks-out-on-being-cancelled-084934390.html
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/25/blasphemy-is-now-a-sackable-offence-asda-islam-billy-connolly/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/05/transphobia-has-no-place-in-the-whoniverse/
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/07/07/gillian-philip-publisher-sacked-warrior-cats-author-jk-rowling-harpercollins-uk-transphobia/
Are you seriously trying to argue there's a class warfare thread running through those?
I have absolutely no complaint about the many legitimate 'cancelations' of people who have turned out to be racist, homophobic, sexist, far-right sympathisers, holocaust deniers... These people intend harm (they might believe the harm is deserved, or for the best, but they actually intend harm of some kind to their victims).
Disagreeing about the use of the term 'woman', or the best public health strategy, or the proper use of cultural terms might cause harm (depending on who's right), but it is not intended to harm. There's a huge difference
One common thread through the history of philosophy will always reveal a trend for humanity to attempt to justify selfishness and self-centeredness in some way.
Your idea of woke and cancel culture is exactly how right wingers like to frame it, as "political correctness gone awry". If that's your take away then congratulations on being fooled by right wing framing.
Go on... I'm fooled because...
Give me some examples of people being canceled because of their pro-wealth positions, or for supporting slave labour companies like Apple....
Something to back up your claim that this is about oppression in general and not just about the kind of oppression that the rich can have a slice of too.
Without a shadow of a doubt the most oppressed group on the planet are poor children working in near slavery to support Western consumerism. Explain to me how forcing Kathleen Stock out of her job helps them.
You have your head way up your own ass if you think cancel culture doesnt exist. You simply can’t have looked into it in any depth.
Congratulations on being fooled by left wing framing.
The Chicks
Colin Kaepernick
Nike
Target
NASCAR
Keurig
Gillette
Samantha Bee
Beyonce
Ellen DeGeneres
https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/conservatives-love-cancel-culture)
Delta Airlines
Major League Baseball
(https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-accountability-debate)
One of, if not the biggest promoters of cancel culture, is Donald Trump.
It's not clear what point you're making. Both right and left wing try to leverage this new social tool to suppress opposition. The question wasn't which political groups use it, the question was whether it was a dangerous tool to encourage the use of. Do you have a view on that?
Here
It's you against J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, and others.
Good luck with that.
I have no issue arguing with a bunch of writers. I'm not impressed. Chomsky would be fun. We'd probably end up finding common ground relatively quickly.
Take the curious case of the cancelation of Victor Arnautoff's murals at San Francisco's George Washington High School. The murals portray George Washington as a slave owner and a colonialist. They were made by a communist painter during the New Deal. They have historical, political and esthetic value. But the “Life of Washington” was hidden behind solid wood panels because it 'triggered' someone...
The OP states:
Quoting Benkei
The issue is often framed in terms a left wing attempt to limit free speech. To the extent that this is true I agree with the OP that it is a right wing lie. But I don't agree that cancel culture does not exist. Although the terminology is new, it has always existed in one form or another.
Quoting Isaac
That is too vague and general to be of much use. On the one hand, there is no agreed upon use of the term or the extent to which one might go to cancel someone or something. On the other, we need to consider what it is that prompts calls to cancel. Clearly it can be taken to extremes. It can be dangerous in so far as a tool in so far as it restricts communication and attempts to come to an agreement. It can also be dangerous in that it may cause harm incommensurate with what was said or done. But it can also be an effective means of righting wrongs. But, of course, some will think the wrongs right and righting them wrong.
I think people are more and more actually organising. Unions, activism etc. And we can look at separate cases and find fault with some of them but I'm pretty confident that by-and-large what is happening is for the good. We need to be careful to say there's a problem with forcing public accountability because some turned out to be wrongful. That's kind of like saying not take complaints of rape seriously because some women make it up.
I'll just quote some of the stuff that has already been said before on this site as well:
Quoting Maw
Quoting Benkei
Let me rephrase, cancelling as political correctness gone rogue, doesn't exist. I prefer public accountability instead.
We should be wary of a mob mentality.
Political correctness can go rogue. There is always a tendency to push things to extremes.
So much for the persuasiveness of violence. And so wittily put.
A mob acts without regard to whether what they want and what they do is something we agree with.
Quoting Benkei
You lost me here. You said:
Quoting Benkei
You asserted that cancel culture is rightist fiction. I handed you a well-known protest against cancel culture from a very well respected group of social critics, none of which leans toward the right.
I gave you a heads up. Do with it what you will.
You're just trying to cancel cancel culture.
The right's position is that the left bullies them into silence through public shame, personal condemnation, and ostracism if they don't adopt the left's ideology. From the left, I can see why you don't care what consequences befall the wicked, but it does seem the best such a tactic will do is silence them from your ears. What that means is that they won't change their mind and will just move their conversations to the privacy of their own homes. Every now and then you'll hear their mutterings and you'll call them out again, which will just either make them more careful later or they'll start telling you to fuck off and they'll find themselves a leader.
And then we get Trump.
I do think the right has marketed their position well with the "cancel culture" designation, and I do understand why you'd like to erase that from the vocabulary by declaring it non-existent. The problem is that it works, and it works because trying to stomp someone's views out, regardless of how morally repugnant you find them, doesn't work that well against 10s of millions of people.
I'm much more positive about this whole thing than you by the way. The miles and miles and miles we have traveled in the correct direction can't be overlooked. Gay people get married in Alabama today. That was unfathomable when I was a young adult. Trans people are getting elected to public office. Conservatives conserve, they protect the status quo, they drag their feet, but there's value in that too, but they do come around when right is right.
All in good time.
Except nobody is stomping anyone's views out, they are brought out in the light in all their stupidity and found lacking.
In the immortal words of BitterCrank, "oh dear..."
It’s bigotry, it’s censorship, and it’s cruel. The punishment is disproportionate to the supposed crime, which is often no crime at all, not even an act that warrants much attention.
Those who try to gather a mob and go after another’s job and livelihood because they do not like what was said are a far greater threat to the public than anyone who may say something inappropriate.
The following is alarming but no examples are offered and it is therefore hard to take seriously.
To quote an expert
Quoting Benkei
...all you've given me is a reddit group. Who have they 'cancelled'? How does any of that activity link up with trans rights? How does cancelling someone like Kathleen Stock help the plight of the poor?
You're being incredibly occult. If you have a clear point to make about the woke movement linking up with class struggles it should not be this painful to try and extract it.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, I see. The OP was started as a response to my comment, so I took that to be the starting point, not the OP itself.
Quoting Fooloso4
Really? Maybe I've been living in a shell until recently. I can't think of a single example from before 2000, yet can reel off a dozen or so just off the top of my head from the last few years. Can you think of examples from before 2000?
Quoting Fooloso4
True, but to be fair the actual question was more nuanced than my quick paraphrasing. what I actually asked was whether the criteria we use to judge when to suppress speech and when not to were changing and if those changes had negative effects.
Quoting Benkei
Good. I admire your confidence. So some big wins for the world's poorest are...?
Quoting Benkei
Interesting, but quoting @Maw on anything is about as useful as quoting one of those action man dolls with the pull cord on the back, and the other is yourself. I'm not sure what use vitriolic polemics are here.
Quoting Benkei
Isn't that pretty much 'being wary' as advises?
Quoting Benkei
But you've yet to furnish us with any examples to back up this assertion, let alone sufficient examples to justify a claim that it's what the whole phenomena is "about". Notwithstanding that failure, it's not even the point. Let's agree fro the sake of argument, that the main thrust of 'cancel culture' is about holding to account companies, celebrities and politicians such that they can no longer get away with statements and actions that we all agree are egregious. What is the correct response to the example I raised? Are they acceptable collateral damage from a social tool which is doing so much good? Is there any level of collateral damage you wouldn't be prepared to accept for the social gains you see the "phenomena" resulting in?
Quoting Benkei
This is clearly contradictory. You want, on the one hand to say that the movement is positive and on the other to say it doesn't successfully silence anyone. then what are its positives exactly. Either it successfully stops people form saying the things it finds offensive or it doesn't work and so the collateral damage is unjustified.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/06/07/new-york-times-opinion-editor-out-after-publishing-controversial-tom-cotton-piece/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/07/dr-seuss-books-product-recall-cancel-culture
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/15/white-professor-investigated-quoting-james-baldwin-use-of-n-word-laurie-sheck
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech
less than five minutes on Google.
I was thinking: how does `Tom Cotton-NYT` not pop in your mind when someone mentions an editor being squashed for publishing a controversial opinion?
Don't know.
Yes, these are hardly examples which are buried out of the public eye, but I suspect the overwhelming temptation to dismiss the concerns creates something of cognitive block. No doubt we'll hear soon that the journalists reporting these incidents were prompted to do so by Russian infiltrators.
Could be. I think the desire to censor comes from fear. People who don’t even see censorship might be fearful about where things are headed.
It takes some confidence in your fellow humans to say, "Stop being a big baby and grow the ability to listen to opposing views without fear that we'll slide into a holocaust if you let other people have their say."
That said, I can't abide racist talk. So it can be tricky I guess.
Yeah, that's the point I'm at too. I don't have any objection to 'cancelling' people for saying hateful things, or telling lies (especially dangerous ones). This seems normal and has been the way we conduct society for decades.
A journal will effectively 'cancel' a paper if the author is shown to be insufficiently qualified or the work shown to be flawed.
A newspaper will 'cancel' a journalist if they makes stuff up, carry out vendettas, spew hatred of some particular group...
It's all a normal part of running a civilised society. The problem I'm seeing is the co-option of these tools to cancel views which are merely outside of the mainstream narrative. Saying that there are issues with not distinguishing trans women from biological women is not an act of hatred, it's just an unpopular view. It might hurt trans women, but that fact alone isn't sufficient to warrant excluding the view from the public sphere. People disagree about some pretty important stuff and it's going to hurt to have someone deny something that you think is fundamental to your identity, that's not sufficient ground to have that person hounded out of their job, we'd have very few people left.
I'm not sure it is all that tricky though...
There's plenty of well-respected methods we used to use. For example, if the view is held by a qualified expert in the field without any clear conflict of interest, then it's difficult to see how silencing it could be justified. In all my years in academia, I don't think I've ever come across the sort of behaviour Kathleen Stock has had to endure, makes me ashamed to be associated with Sussex.
Miscegenation
Indecency clauses
Lenny Bruce
Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance.
Not always. If we look at animal behavior, for example, there is a tendency to dominate others in the struggle for resources. Bird chicks that are loudest and push their siblings out of the way get rewarded by the parents by being given more food and attention, etc.
Similarly, humans have an innate tendency to impose their views on others. As part of this process, they routinely call others names, etc. This starts in kindergarten age and continues throughout adult life, as can be observed on the social media including discussion forums.
Thanks to the same social media and communication technologies even innocent people can be, and often are, pigeonholed, labeled, and "earmarked" for subjection "to a form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles" as per the Wikipedia definition.
When this becomes permissible or is even encouraged by sections of society for political or other reasons, then it becomes a social trend or culture.
Cancel culture was regnant in McCarthyism and Anti-communism, I would say.
Giving a platform to the idea of using the military against civilians is not good, to say the least, particularly at a time when the fucking president is trying to sell the idea.
Quoting Isaac
I do so like Green Eggs and Ham. I would read it in a car. I would read it in a bar. I would read it here or there. I would read it anywhere.
Quoting Isaac
Investigation is not cancelation.
Quoting Isaac
This one looks like a good example. Apparently fired for a tweet that any reasonable person would regard as an innocuous study.
Quoting Isaac
It shows.
We have found something we agree on.
Wouldn't you rather have it out in the open instead of hidden?
"Democracy dies in darkness"
What do you mean by hidden? He’s a senator. Also, the direction towards militarization of law enforcement is nothing new, unfortunately.
Eliminated from the public conversation? I'm asking for your perspective.
I don't know. What I see is a lot of folks getting a kick out of behaving all judgmental on others, and doing so in a mindless mob-like manner. What I miss is a sense of charity.
Granted that there are millions of assholes out there. Granted that it's a market of ideas and that we consume what we want to. I 'cancel' a lot of people myself that way: I don't watch movies with Steven Seagal, I don't listen to Beyonce, I don't read Naipaul or Heidegger, etc. They are dorks in my book. But I don't go around campaigning against them. I am not wearing my canceled list on my sleeve as a badge of honor.
Not publishing a piece (of shit) in the Op-Ed section of the Times doesn’t eliminate it from public conversation, particularly if the author is high profile, like a US senator.
If you want to immediately validate someone's opinion cancel them.
If you want their book sales to soar.
If "cancel culture" was executed with the right way it would really be the most useful thing for humanity .And a really great spiritual revolution. But the way it is(and will be) executed from people, makes it (and will make it) one of the most dangerous matters-challenges that humanity will have to face.
Emotional terrorism. Excellent description. And the way that anyone can take part into it, by just pressing some buttons from his couch, is really scary. Anger is the domain emotion behind all that "movement" imo.
It’s funny that many of those who whine the loudest about cancel culture believe that a capitalist society should be self-regulating. Isn’t cancel culture the ideal of this philosophy? Probably only when it works in their favor, I imagine.
True. But in order to have the conversation, the shit is going have to be published somewhere. Where do you prefer?
Newsweek. They’re the go-to source for political mud- wrestling between left and right.
Who are you?
And their coffee is dreadful.
I would greenlight it for the comics section.
There is nothing self-regulating about this kind of ostracism and bigotry, even if they have found less violent means of doing it than in the past. Wherever heretical speech and thoughts are censored, it is nonetheless premised on the base motives found in inquisitions and witch-burning.
The idea of 'cancel culture' is often thought of as where ideas which are seen as unacceptable, as prejudiced, are edited, but it can be the exact opposite where people do not wish to hear views which are different from their own. In thinking about the idea of cancel culture, it may be asked who is being cancelled and on what basis?So, the dislike of 'cancelling' is often seen as problematic for being in line with 'wokism' but it can swing to the other way, whereby people may wish to express all kinds of hostility, including prejudices towards marginalised minorities. What should be acceptable as expressed views and what should be outlawed? Is prejudice or hatred, or objection to such views, to be given expression in 'cancel' culture and how may the differences of opinions be managed fairly?
Social media definitely makes the shunning much easier, like an acceleration of social dynamics
Yep this is it, exactly. Its only cancel culture when you disagree with it; the right (i.e. the most vocal whiners about "cancel culture") is perfectly happy to e.g. talk hysterically about banning "critical race theory" in schools and trying to get people to lose their jobs if they criticize Israel, criticize Trump, criticize the police, or whatever, but then turn around and cry foul if someone gets publicly criticized or shamed for, say, doing or saying something racist.
So its just partisan hypocrisy, about 99% of the time from what I can tell.
The difference, my hyperbolic friend, is that the Salem witch trial executions, for instance, were state-sanctioned. If a private sector employer fires someone because they did something that reduced the businesses profit margin, that’s just good business practice, right?
Right?! I recall Trump announcing to a cheering audience that he would fire any athlete who knelt during the National Anthem (in protest of police brutality). How is that not “cancel culture”?
The motivation of bigotry and resultant actions of censorship and ostracism are wrong no matter who does it, is the point.
Good point, but that obviously is not the only motivation behind cancel culture. Isn’t it really more about something like tribal loyalty? Or maybe you mean that being loyal to a tribe is to be bigoted?
You have a very broad definition of 'cancel culture' which apparently encompasses all social proscription. I'm talking about the trend of small vocal groups calling for sanctions on people who expressed ideas they disagree with. I may be wrong, but I don't suspect the victims in the cases you give would have been surprised. If Kathleen Stock decided to write a paper advocating slavery I don't think she would have been surprised by the response. A key factor in the phenomena is the sense of walking on eggshells not knowing exactly what might trigger the mob next.
By your definition ant-libel laws are 'cancel culture' too.
Quoting Fooloso4
So first the letter's not to be taken seriously because there's no examples; then it's not to be taken seriously because the examples are one's where you'd agree with the cancellations...
Much more efficient that way, eh? Decide you're not going to take it seriously first, worry about why later...
Yes, it makes lynching quite tempting, even righteous.
Right. Good catch. That's the hypocrisy of some imaginary interlocutors well and truly exposed, I'm sure we can all vividly imagine them scuttling back to their imaginary holes and keeping their imaginary opinions to their imaginary selves from now on. Well played.
If you're not too exhausted from fighting the good fight, I wonder if you've anything to say in response to the actual interlocutors who are actually writing posts on this actual thread?
There probably is a tribal element to it. What do you think? By bigoted I mean that one is intolerant of another because of his views, which do not manifest beyond the victimless expressions of thought and speech. There are actions we should not tolerate, however, and censorship is one of them.
Cancel culture is one result of American workers having few if any workers rights when it comes to the ability of their employer to fire them.
If some stupid tweet can get your employer to fire you because someone (not remotely connected to your work or workplace) complained about it, you don't have much rights.
"Imaginary" :lol:
Quoting Isaac
I was replying to praxis, who appears to be an actual person actually writing in this actual thread. So, nice try, I guess? Better luck next time?
So, it seems we all enjoy a good bit of cancelling, only provided its someone we disagreed with. Its almost is if its a natural reaction, free speech/the free market at work, towards people who do or say things we find harmful or offensive or otherwise disagreeable.
This is worrying for new writers and creativity because when the most famous wealthy author in the world is trying to be written out of history what chance is there for up coming authors to express themselves before they have the relative protection of wealth?
It is very draconian and absurd.
But the main intention is to persevere political correctness and Wokeness at all costs. It is a political/power move not the response of an oppressed minority.
Who wants to sell books to these kind of people anyway? It makes you want to opt out of society. I don't want to share ideas with brainwashed and virtue signalling banal people.
2. Life + [s]Agent Smith[/s] = Happiness + [s]Agent Smith[/s] (Cancel Agent Smith who appears in both sides of the equation)
3. Life = Happiness [The anti-Buddha and her (gotta be a woman, right) 1[sup]st[/sup] anti-Noble Truth]
You were just repeating what praxis said. I don't see how that helps, it's a discussion, not an opinion poll, but fair enough, it seems I should be talking to the owner, not the dog.
Quoting Seppo
So which actual person in this thread has made those claims? Or are we just going to wave our little flags so everyone is quite sure which gang we belong to ... Sure, here goes...
Don't you just hate Nazis, with their antisemitism and warmongering? Grrr!
I was agreeing with praxis. I'm pretty sure agreeing with someone is allowed by the forum guidelines.
Quoting Isaac
I never said any person in this thread did. But not having posted in this thread =/= imaginary.
As I stated, I was primarily thinking about about rightwing US politicians who tend to be the most outspoken critics of "cancel culture", despite the fact that they themselves engage in "cancel culture" when its someone or something they disagree with. Praxis gave the example of Trump endorsing the cancellation of NFL athletes who protest police violence. We could give others (for instance, the right's current hobbyhorse of trying to cancel "critical race theory").
So "cancel culture" isn't a neutral descriptive term, but a normative/value-laden one, and criticism of cancel culture in the US tends to be partisan and frequently hypocritical.
Quoting Isaac
:lol:
Much to my disapprobation.
Quoting Seppo
No, of course not, I was being agitative. The point was that since no one here is making those claims, opposing them doesn't progress the discussion. All it does (even if unintentionally) is polemicise an already pretty tribal topic. If there's an argument raised against 'cancel culture', it doesn't help reasonable discussion of it to say "racists and crestionists also complain about cancel culture", it's the equivalent of bringing up the fact that Hitler didn't eat meat in a debate about vegetarianism. Of course some groups are going to oppose cancel culture disingenuously that doesn't mean that all groups opposing it must be tarred with the same brush.
Quoting Seppo
That is becoming more evident than I perhaps anticipated.
Indeed. And now we have a system where justice is on the side of those who have money. What a victory.
Not really, they just went from being openly enforced on the level of government to being openly enforced on the level of interactions between individual people, or subtly on the level of culture at large. In many ways, this is even worse, more sinister, because now the official discourse can be that "those are the acts of individuals", the government gets to wash its hands, and the country gets a good report on the respect for human rights in it.
But is there anything better?
Can people actually live in some better way of organizing social and economical life?
If history is anything to go by, then no.
Boycotting a company will only result in the people working there in lowly jobs to lose those jobs. And then you will be to be blame that they lost their jobs!
A defining feature of bigotry is that it is unreasonable. We can have well-reasoned objections to what people say and do.
There is something of a contradiction in what you're saying though. Public objection to what influential people say or do is just words, right? Yet those words lead to actions, like people getting fired from their jobs, so it seems that thought and speech do at times result in actions, and those actions have victims. I assume that you wouldn't support disallowing objections to what influential people say and do.
You need to work on your reading comprehension.
The defining feature of bigotry is that it is intolerant. Even the unreasonable can tolerate another’s thoughts and words.
A public objection is just words, and they do not necessarily lead to this or that action. It doesn’t lead to people getting fired from their job any more than it leads to people not getting fired from their job. The contradiction arises when you believe correlation implies causation.
It seems that you agree with the title of the topic, that cancel culture doesn't exist.
Neither your agreement nor your disagreement were the point. The point was entirely that you designated people's serious concerns as "hard to take seriously" on the grounds of a lack of specificity that two minutes of internet research could have settled for you.
Why are you calling them a "mob"?
Quoting Benkei
Really? There is a "universal chemistry process" of sorts where this happens, and people are merely passive observers and passive enacters of this?
Something can only be considered "stupid" or "found lacking" by someone. It doesn't happen on its own, without people actively considering something stupid or finding it lacking. Something cannot be "stupid" or "found lacking" per se, regardless of the people making such an assessment.
In short, what you're doing is arguing in favor of objectivism, objectivism in the form of objective morality and objective epistemology, where you take for granted that the "how things really are" can be accessed readily by people and that this access has nothing to do with their volition. And further, that some people have such access, and others don't.
It's a common human tendency to externalize like that, and to take no responsibility for one's thoughts and words.
It's a common human tendency to consider oneself "the mouth of objective reality", as if when one opens one's mouth, it's "The Truth" that is doing the talking, not the person.
Insistence on using this popular epistemic and moral strategy is where the fundamental problem is that the OP is pointing at. No progress toward goodwill can be made as long as this strategy is used.
So work this out: How does a person "stop being a big baby" and how does a person "grow the ability to listen to opposing views without fear that we'll slide into a holocaust if you let other people have their say"?
Have you worked out an actual didactic program for this? Can you present it here?
It was not a lack of specificity but a lack of supporting evidence, and it's still not settled for me.
From where I sit, pursuing social justice over the interwebs is pretty simple. You read the arguments, sometimes you make a post and then you call it a day.
That's about the size of it.
Social change is not always brought on by social will; mostly it's social economics that does it to societies.
In Russia they disregarded the role of economics for 80 years. The country went into an economic decline. It was economics that destroyed the left. Not weapons or coercion or the ruling class.
You can't disregard the role of economics, which is a system much bigger than what humans can handle. We cant' fathom it, we can't control it. It controls itself, and via itself, it controls people.
We, the People, think otherwise. Fine. We are fools.
It's not new. The same phenomenon has existed as scapegoating for millennia. Scapegoating is apparently a psychological need.
Quoting Isaac
I once heard an interesting hypothesis about scapegoating: People resort to scapegoating when their own adherence to the values they profess reaches a critical low where even they cannot deny it anymore. Instead of admitting it and deliberately changing their ways, they metaphorically cast their own sins onto someone else and this way free themselves of the burden of a guilty conscience. This way, they clear the slate and can start fresh.
Hence the name: Originally, the practice was for people to take a goat and throw stones at it; before throwing each stone, naming it with their own sin, and saying that the goat should take their sin and pay for it.
(This was one of the functions of "animal sacrifice".)
In fact, the animal or person to be scapegoated should be as innocent as possible. Like lambs, infants, or Jesus.
Why should there be charity? Can you provide an argument for charity?
(I'm not disagreeing, btw.)
There is no left in mainstream US politics.
Indeed, resorting to private consumerism is often advocated as the solution for all of our problems ...
Because nobody's perfect. Errare humanum est. When YOU make a mistake, do you prefer it not when people show a little charity? Or do you prefer to be treated without mercy?
Judge not, least you be judged.
Another argument is that, without things like forgiveness and redemption, societies tend to accumulate hatred until people kill one another.
More like the weakness of organized labour unions. Without collective bargaining, an individual worker doesn't have much chance in getting a good deal, except if the employee is some kind of superstar that various employers are fighting for.
That because of "cancel culture" you are dismissed just show this legislation is quite weak. And in the US?
Hence cancel culture can have real effects, not just silly social media ranting.
Not so in countries where you have had organized labour able to influence the legislation. Like France, Canada or other countries.
A lot of the people "canceled" by cancel culture actually resigned due to public uproar. They weren't fired per se, so I don't think you're grappling with the main problem. It's public intolerance and the vulnerability of a university, newspaper, etc. to public anger.
Or it can just be a social media thing. Richard O'Brien has been pretty thoroughly attacked for his opinion that trans women can't be real women.
So let's squash the composer of "Sweet Transvestite" because he didn't say what we wanted to hear.
It's that kind of nonsense. The opposition to cancel culture (the sane part of it anyway) is saying we really need to grow the psychological muscles necessary for listening to a view we don't like.
Alright then...
Quoting Isaac
Quoting praxis
Why not? You lamented the lack of examples, examples were given. Is there something else you're missing?
Quoting baker
As I said to another poster making the same point, I don't think that it's particularly useful to over generalise. 'Cancel culture' can be robustly defined as it is, we needn't simply generalise it to 'all forms of social proscription'.
That said...
Quoting baker
Is an interesting perspective. So maybe I'm wrong about the unhelpfulness of such generalisation.
Resigning due to "public uproar" is one's own choice. Here one should really think what is genuine "public uproar". It's one thing that you are attacked in the social media, it's another thing is some person tracks you down and attacks you physically in the street!
Good example that sufficiently support the claims. The examples that you so generously provided do not match the claims very well, though I think the last example is a good example of cancel culture.
The list of claims is as follows:
Editors are fired for running controversial pieces - The Tom Cotton example is an expression of cancel culture, in my opinion, just not a strong example. I think running the Op-Ed was a bad choice (was there nothing better to run that day?) and wouldn’t disagree with a reprimand. I wouldn’t ask for resignation though.
Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity - No example of this has been provided.
Journalists are barred from writing on certain topics - No example of this has been provided.
Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class - Regarding the New School example, as I said, I’m glad that they investigate accusations of racism.
A researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study - The David Shor saga is a good example.
So Frank, I can’t help wondering how committed you are to ‘growing the psychological muscles necessary for listening to a view we don't like’. Imagine, if you’re willing, that Marjorie Taylor Greene submitted an Op-Ed piece to the New York Times on weekly basis, assuming she knows how to read and write. How often do you think they should publish her esteemed options (instead of something more substantive)?
I don't think you're denying the existence of anything, you're putting forward a different characterisation of behaviour you agree exists, one that presents it in a positive light. And I also may not want something to be lumped into "cancel culture" if I think it's meaningful or useful, because I understand that label is a negative and demeaning one.
Quoting Benkei
On the surface, most people should agree with you, if I didn't think about it too much, I would agree with you. But then I know you a bit too well for that, I don't want your interpretations of racism is or sexism is to be mainstream, let alone to have them enforced unilaterally on others. I am completely opposed to it.
I'm not right-wing, I'm a liberal who wants to live and let live but I recognise that sometimes that's not good enough, there are some things that require us to stand up and do something. Cancel culture may not be a bad thing, just by itself, the issue is the ideology behind it, which is held by an extreme minority, with a particularly loud voice and a lot of power in the tech field, among others.
Cancel culture targets unimportant issues, the average age of these activists is probably around 20-22, it's immature and shallow. A white actor plays a monk. An anime shows too much cleavage. A comedian makes an inappropriate joke. You're comparing this kind of garbage to abolishing slavery? Not only does cancel culture follow a disagreeable ideology with absurd interpretations but it's rarely doing anything of importance.
I'm struggling to see your point...is it that two minutes of internet searching wasn't enough? Yes. Probably ten or more might have been better. I'm not sure why I'm doing your research for you. I've no interest in convincing you that these things happen. I'm just not willing to engage on that intellectual level. If you have an opinion on whether they're right or wrong, whether they're overkill, or have hit the balance just right, whether they're right-wing inspired or cross the political spectrum...I'd be interested to talk. But I'm not scouring the internet archives to prove that the phenomena even exists! If you're at that level you'll have to find someone else willing to hand-hold you through the history of the issue.
You asked me what was missing, Isaac, and I made a complete list. I honestly didn’t know that it would upset you so. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t too bad for a five minute effort.
What 'upset me' if you want to put it that way, is that you thought it reasonable, on a debating platform, to dismiss @frank's contribution with a dismissive (and, it transpires, disingenuous) "hard to take seriously" rather than any kind of charitable inclusion of those concerns in the discussion.
If you seriously thought that there wasn't any evidence for the claims in the letter (an already fairly absurd position given the general academic standing in which some of the signatories are held), then at the very least we might have expected a "...really! Are you sure those things happened", not an assumption that they probably didn't and concomitant smearing of the author's intentions as non-serious.
The entire and sole counterargument in this thread has been some variation of "some right-wing people also complain about it so it must be nonsense", yours simply misses off even the pretence of justification and rests on "...it must be nonsense" alone.
Hence the cancelers would lack the capacity to suffer that opinions they don't like will be expressed publicly.
The question is whether or not all opinions should have access to the public space, or do some opinions deserve to be shunned? If yes, where do you draw the line?
I would think that, whereas public opinion can sway and is easy to influence, the law of the land ought to define unambiguously which opinions can be expressed, and which cannot, and for what reasons.
I think the NYT should publish nothing but QAnon content on every page from now on. Like QAnon recipes, QAnon gardening tips, and so forth.
And little snippets from Mein Kampf. The whole block of lasagne.
Maybe there should not be charity. Yes, I want to be forgiven when I make a mistake.
Be judged, so you can judge others.
Without judgment social structure would crumble. I do keep to the law, because I fear the punishment after breaking it.
Without forgiveness and redemption, hatred will accumulate until people kill each other.
I don't think somehow that forgiveness and redemption could be enforced. It is great to have it. My uncle has it, he claims it's because he is a Roman Catholic, but I think he has it because he is that way inclined. Everyone has a degree of forgiveness for insults and damages, everyone has redemption and a feeling of lifted from sins, or moral badness, but everyone has this feature to different degrees. And whatever degree they are capable of it, is not going to change no matter what.
So since forgiveness and redemption can't be enforced, it is futile to wish for that. It is the same thing as teaching to a bunch of thieves and blasphemers the Categoricus Imperativus.
Without that? Or..
Quoting god must be atheist
I think it's still the fear of punishment unfortunately, that does mostly the work for people and societies in general.
I agree. The first quote you quoted from me had been quoted from Olivier5. My mistake (and I seek forgiveness for it) that I hadn't indicated that.
But I agree with both. Small damages are forgiven, large ones are punished... that's how it should be, and generally speaking, that's how it is done in the society I live in.
The problem with cancel culture: small and large "sins" or "crimes" are both treated in an unforgiving way.
What we forget is that there is a balance to cancel culture, and it has also been going on as long as CC; the creation of what we now call Celebrities, and generally, the creation of Cults of Persons.
In Communist countries it was Marx, Engels and Lenin. Plus the local party secretaries.
In the west it morphed from the Christian god to Christian saints to heads of states to political leaders to movie stars and rock singers.
If Trump says something, half the country swoons, the other half spits in his directions.
If M-Toe, or T-Bone J, or Pamela Lee Anderson says something, at least for five minutes the entire world will hold as much weight to it as to the words of Marcus Aurelius (the latter, a bit longer.)
So while the rabble can dethrone almost randomly a statue, an institution, and a person who is institution-strong, the rabble can also erect new ones, just as almost randomly.
Thus, equilibrium state is achieved in society, with as many people leaving celebrity status or at least leading roles in shame as many are entering in pride, due to the constant action of the social catalyst "rabble". Much like in chemical reactions, it is IMPOSSIBLE by by deterministic means to predict who is going to leave, and who is going to come in. The individuals in the process are indetermined and indeterminable before each event of the transition.
No harm done. The point is the same.
Quoting god must be atheist
Punishment satisfies the need of revenge that someone demands (and fairly imo) when large damages occur on him by someone else. And that's how justice works I think. Small damages don't need punishment cause they don't trigger so much that desire of revenge to the ones who "suffers" them. Cause exactly they are so small.
That's folks fault though, not any Pamela's.
And exactly cause the average spiritual level of humanity is still at low level, that's why the "concept of cancel culture" will get fucked up as many other similar concepts throughout history. But it will also bring some good. As everything bad always entails some amount of good. Any kind of change has both sides.
Quoting god must be atheist
That's exactly all the juice of all that cancel culture discussion. And its main danger. It absolutely glorifies Hypocrisy,the way it is executed.
It's great to have if you want to be able to move on, and not let your life get dragged by endless grudges.
Quoting god must be atheist
And once punished, large damages too are forgiven. Otherwise, people's life is finished as soon as they are found guilty of one single offence.
Justice is somewhat different from your average mob viciousness. It's imperfect, complicated and slow, because it must consider the rights of the accused.
Frank receives more than his share of charity in many many discussions. Trust me on that. :wink:
Quoting Isaac
Oh to be young and innocent.
Quoting Isaac
I searched the web for hours looking for examples that would support the claims and I could not find anything more supportive than what you found. People ‘exaggerate’ when doing so benefits them in some way, Isaac.
Exaggeration is one thing, making something up entirely another. I don't believe the letter mentions numbers. Let's say, then, that the entirety of 'cancel culture' consists of nothing more than the dozen or so events we can verify, or even just a single event.
Take Kathleen Stock being hounded out of her job. Are you suggesting that the students at Sussex are an aberration (believe me, I've taught at Sussex, this would not be an unreasonable claim!), or was there something in the water that day. What convinces you that the event, this one event we can totally verify happened, was not indicative of a trend?
That’s an excellent example. Goodonya, mate. I just bought Material Girls and may have more to say on the subject after reading it.
It never ends well for anyone.
I am all for the law and its application. Attempts at self-righteous lynching is what I object to.
It has effected the highest levels of government. For example, Shirley Sherrod getting booted from the Obama Administration for parts of an NAACP speech that were taken out of context where she seemed to be talking about her racial bias against white people. In fact, the speech was about a personal journey of overcoming said bias. It had been selectively edited by Andrew Brietbart for a cancelling campaign, more manufactured outrage.
Since the US is a large country, you can find plenty of ludicrous examples of cancelling or ridiculous behavior.
For example, attempts to pressure a student into an apology at Yale over what seems like a quite innocuous email:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/19/email-from-yale-law-student-sparks-national-discussion-on-racism-and-free-speech/
Versus Yale's inability to condemn what should be an obviously condemnable speech, choosing rather to censor it so that it can't be seen in context. I'll quote it since it's at a level that I think most people would say goes beyond provocative, into the realm of being inappropriate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html
Or you have a medical student being forced to accept psychological counseling and later being banned from campus as a threat for asking a pointed question about the definition of microaggressions at a presentation.
https://apnews.com/article/lawsuits-virginia-charlottesville-0a477beb7e406b5a3360c00420af4cce
Others abound. An aspiring Asian American journalist was canceled for posting an interview with an African American demonstrator in Oakland who mentioned the need to also mobilize against violent crime in the community, which had taken the lives of his family members, but which had sparked no outage or protests. Apparently this should have been censored out of demonstration footage. I have to imagine this is not that uncommon of a statement since I heard it in various forms at BLM protests in my own hometown. Censoring it is itself taking away the voice of marginalized communities.
Anyhow, it's easy enough to brand these as strange one offs. In a country of 320 million, having a few hundred cancelation stories isn't indictive of a mass movement. What I think is more illustrative of deep problems is that academics certainly feel they are at risk if they pursue investigations of sacrosanct topics, and that academic rigor and the process of science gets thrown out the window if a topic is politically sensitive.
Take implicit bias tests. These things were everywhere for a while. Police departments had implicit bias training mandated as a response to BLM. Implicit bias testing showed up prominently in the syllabi of liberal arts classes; the science of racism had been unveiled. Businesses were urged to have employees take the tests and to hire anti-racism instructors. Governments took steps to mandate the tests and training. It is still a huge business.
Laudable intentions, but there is a serious problem: implicit bias tests do not hit even the low end of bench marks for reliability used in psychological assessments. That is, your score on the test one day is not good at predicting your score on subsequent days. Your score in one sitting accounts for about 50-60% of the variance in subsequent sittings, meaning swaps between different ends of the bell curve are not abnormal. By contrast, IQ tests, which are often attacked as being inaccurate by the left, generally have reliability metrics in the high .9s; taking one test predicts 95+% of your future scores.
Simply put, without political salience, it is hard to see the tool not getting rejected on internal reliability grounds alone. What is worse, it has shown absolutely abysmal predictive validity for outcomes we actually care about. To be sure, a few studies have hit statistical significance. Implicit bias scores for grocery workers in France predicted more customer complaints from minority shoppers. However, attempts to test the validity of the tests which fail to show scores' predictive power are more common. This is despite a bias against publishing null findings, and likely an additional bias against publishing a paper that calls into question a politically charged methodology. At worst, it's arguable the field, as it is currently represented, is pseudscience.
Anti-rascism training fares even worse, with almost no standardization or study of if the specific trainings employed actually do anything to help racial biases. College campuses rushed to implement these trainings, often with no attempt to measure them scientifically.
Research has tended to show no effect from these trainings, and in many cases, they appear to actually be increasing metrics used to gauge racial bias.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/an2018.pdf
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/12/05/research_shows_diversity_training_is_typically_ineffective_652014.html
In general, if your college anti-racism classes make students less likely to associate with people of other races, that seems like a serious problem.
The lack of scientific rigor, or outright hostility to science goes beyond diversity training. When James Damore, a software engineer at Google circulated a memo criticizing the company's diversity policies (for which he was terminated), the response in the media bordered on ridiculous.
Rather than commit to a nuanced critique explaining how a non-expert was misusing the research, and drawing conclusions that could not be supported, a general response was to call both the letter and the articles cited (peer reviewed papers in respected journals) "junk science."
On NPR I heard a professor of psychology make one of these statements. She tried to demonstrate the invalid nature of the science in question because it "called women neurotic." I don't know if this was disingenuous, or if somehow a professor of psychology made it through a PhD program without encountering the Big Five Personality Traits. "Neuroticism" in personality measures (also much more reliable and predictive than implicit bias tests) is not the "neuroticism" of common parlance.
Personality differences between men and women are the product of different but overlapping distributions. They are replicable and cross cultural to varying degrees. Causal mechanisms have been identified, as exogenous testosterone or testosterone suppression shifts scores in line with observed differences in sex. The exact nature of these differences is impossible to quantify and is always shaped by culture, but the claim that any differences based on sex is junk science is less supportable by scientific evidence than claims that humans don't contribute to global warming. Not to mention that the differences should be of no surprise as differences in behavior based on sex are ubiquitous in animals and in other primates specifically.
These anti-scientific leanings have real consequences and are more damaging when they come from the political left because the left tends to wield more influence on college campuses.
For instance, a scientific understanding of sexual violence in humans would help us prevent such attacks. But works such as Thornhill's A Natural History of Rape are faced with protests, canceled lectures, etc. which obviously have a chilling effect on publication and researchers' decisions to investigate certain topics.
Liberal antagonism to the suggestion that genetics effect anything other than humans' physical traits is wide spread and hurts research.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters
Notably, attempts to shut down investigations of human genetics gives ammo to "race realists," and the revival of "scientific" racism. Evidence of censorship is taken as proof that liberals "don't want you to know the truth about heritability." Research that could rebut racist theories is risky for scholars to pursue, less they be labeled rascists themselves.
Arguably, this leads to a bias in the field where only people comfortable with these accusations pursue controversial research areas, leading to confirmation bias that supports the very findings liberals want to attack.
Rather than educate people on how to interpret complex scientific questions, the extent to which different but overlapping bell curves don't tell you anything about a given individual, or the myriad problems (sometimes intractable) of teasing out genetic and enviornment causal factors (e.g., the huge shifts in IQ distributions seen in the Flynn Effect), there is a trend to opting for censorship. This ultimately has been a huge boon for the far right.
Do you mean to say that, you would like to see the cancellation of cancel culture?
Quoting Benkei
No, it is about dominating human beings. I owe no accountability to anyone regarding anything I say, ever. To assume the right of controlling my expression, as well as any who would choose to listen to me is an exercise in tyranny. It is also self-contradictory, as to violate free expression is to assert the right of the free expression violator to freely express. But, fascists don't win the battle in the end, so no real worries.
Quoting Benkei
Then don't be racist. What you regard as racist is different from what I regard as racist. Meaning you're flying blind.
Quoting Benkei
Employer exploitation is far more prevalent. Also, you might want to focus on exploitation of everyone by the state, they're the one stealing your money, and protecting slavery, and establishing segregation, and invading Ukraine and stuff.
Quoting Benkei
I'll do as I please, you have no authority over the content of my thoughts. LGBTQ people are, just like everybody else, subject to criticism and comedy. Don't like it, you stop talking to people, we owe you nothing.
Quoting Benkei
Violating individual Consciousness has to stop, and here you are promotoing it. What happens if I say no, and that I'll do as I damn well please? Does force enter the equation of what your brain has been indoctrinated to conclude "needs to stop?" When you say "need," are you meaning to imply that if the jokes don't stop, that these individuals will die as a result?
Quoting Benkei
Justice is a meaningless word. Justice was also touted by Hitler to justify mass slaughter. Slavery was abolished by the very state that instantiated it to gain bodies to defeat an enemy in war, not because it was noble. Segregation was ended by vote, not violence. The very same halls that instantiated slavery as an institution were occupied to vote segregation away from America for gain on the part of the Capitol Class of Washington statists, not your movements. Yes, sometimes talking things over is over, such has been the case between humans and states for millennia.
Quoting Benkei
No, it's because the populations that are causing noise are willing to vote for power hungry statists that play them like fittles, instead of disbanding from the disgusting state that has caused all of these problems.
Quoting Benkei
That's correct, those terms mean nothing. This is about good vs evil. And your anger regarding things that the state will only ever allow the change of in exchange for other powers is a part of that evil feedbackloop that is growing more and more oppositional to human homeostasis. It's even convinced you to desire the very same power that was used to create all of the problems in the first, which is what you mean when you say "needs to stop." You mean, if only I were king, I'd make it stop. If you really want to make a change, unplugg from all political material and direct your own path. Nohing else can, or will save society from the brink we now face. I hope racism and wealth-inequality were worth your computational resources when Russia ignites the coming global conflict. That's when the monsters behind the TV's will be coming out to play, and then you'll see first hand just who your real enemies are. Keep your on the East, the cataclysm is before us.
How does a person "stop being a big baby" and how does a person "grow the ability to listen to opposing views without fear that we'll slide into a holocaust if you let other people have their say"?
Have you worked out an actual didactic program for this? Can you present it here?
The issue at hand is still scapegoating. What is different, in comparison to more traditional cultures, is that modern culture has lost all sense of perspective and measure, so anything and everything can be considered "unacceptable", or "acceptable", but one can never know in advance which. As you've noted before, there is that sense of constantly walking on eggshells.
In more traditional cultures that have relatively clearly defined value systems, one can predict with good certainty what effect a certain action will have in the public space. What will be merely ridiculed, and what severely punished. But in modern cultures, one can never really know.
No, that's a weak defense. "People should be given something because they need or prefer it" is far too general, too open-ended.
Evidently not true. You can be a total sheep, and still be judged. Witness the history of illegitimate children, for example.
Do you have actual real-life examples of that?
Because if anything, it seems that it is the tension between people, the tension born of perceiving each other as dangerous and merciless that keeps people in check.
I think he's arguing for a kind of immersion therapy. A little QAnon here, a little Mein Kampf there, until you become desensitized and nonreactive.
A sheeple, easy to manipulate?
"Nonjudgmentally listen to the views of others" has never actually been a virtue, anywhere.
That was more charity than I needed. Thanks.
Afghanistan. Somalia. The US.
Yes, I think social media acting as a rapid multiplier has exacerbated the problem massively recently. Within days an issue which no one had even thought of last week can become socially unacceptable, with everyone acting as they hadn't themselves committed those exact sins a fortnight ago.
I kid, but that is the general idea, yes?
You said "without things like forgiveness and redemption, societies tend to accumulate hatred until people kill one another."
What evidence can you present that people wouldn't be killing eachother if they had "forgiveness and redemption"?
Resources needed for living are scarce and require considerable effort to be obtained. No amount of "forgiveness and redemption" can change that. People compete with eachother for the resources needed for living, and sometimes, this competition escalates to killing.
Unless Jesus makes haste and feeds multitudes with a few loaves of bread (and provides them with 5G internet while he's at it), from then on until forever, "forgiveness and redemption" are going to be as powerless as they've always been.
Is "the ability to listen to opposing views without fear that we'll slide into a holocaust if you let other people have their say" something one can learn, or is it something one simply has or doesn't have, but cannot learn?
I am not sure what kind of evidence would satisfy you. I imagine one could plot murder rates in various places vs some indicator of the prevalence of forgiveness in society. The latter indicator would be hard to develop though. Or one could appeal to faith: all religions call for it. Or to logic: hatred breads only more hatred, so how else can one break the cycle than through forgiveness?
What sort of evidence are you looking for?
It makes life bearable. You should try it one day.
You were the one to make the claim, so it's on you to provide the evidence.
This would take a bit to explain, but it's not clear that "all religions" call for forgiveness and redemption, or what they actually mean by them.
"Logic" cannot determine the truth value of the premises we use in a syllogism.
Quoting Olivier5
When "forgiveness" becomes a channel for contempt, then it no doubt makes life bearable, even more than that.
To provide you with convincing evidence, I would need to have an idea of the type of evidence that would be likely to convince you. I suspect none whatsoever.
Quoting baker
It is never clear to him who doesn't want to see.
Quoting baker
I trust you will forgive me for it.