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Cancel culture IRL

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I have no problem with canceling Griffin...to a point.
We're going to have to disagree on this. Her portrayal of violence was clearly artistic/symbolic and was (A) not intended to inspire political violence and (B) did not actually inspire political violence. The appropriate level of cancellation for that sort of display is to shrug and move on.

He also took in criticism of how he was going about it and changed his behavior accordingly. He went from sitting on the bench to taking a knee.
A strong point in his favor, too often overlooked.
 
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It's precisely because people have agency that it's possible to critique, abhor, or contemn their decisions; if they had no agency, they would not be morally blameworthy. It's a truism that people will do what they will do, but why would that prevent me from commenting on what they ultimately decide to do, particularly if what they decide to do is horrible, misguided, or ill-advised? Respecting other people's autonomy doesn't mean we're bound respect the decisions they make. Sometimes people **** up, even judging them only by their own standards.

I agree. Good description of why I’m not opposed to cancel culture.
 
We're going to have to disagree on this. Her portrayal of violence was clearly artistic/symbolic and was (A) not intended to inspire political violence and (B) did not actually inspire political violence. The appropriate level of cancellation for that sort of display is to shrug and move on.
You're right, we will have to disagree.

I have no tolerance for implied threats of violence. One of the things I despise is how people think their finely crafted veils over something awful somehow makes it ok.

It doesn't.

Now Griffin is a comic and as one, she pushes our boundaries. I tend to look the other way, but man was that offensive. I can't blame people for being upset.
 
People being upset is not a reason to change anything, IMO. People get upset when I tell them Jesus was just another first century itinerant faith healer. Am I supposed to worry about their feelings?
 
I kind of miss the point of all of these "look at all these examples of how bad cancel culture (which doesn't exist) is!!, it totally proves what a good thing cancel culture (which doesn't exist) is!!" arguments as well.

It’s proves that what people are claiming is this new, terrible thing called “cancel culture” is neither new nor all that terrible, relatively speaking. It also proves that the people who complain the loudest are also the biggest advocates of it when it suits them, and are generally just full of **** and not to be taken seriously.
 
People being upset is not a reason to change anything, IMO. People get upset when I tell them Jesus was just another first century itinerant faith healer. Am I supposed to worry about their feelings?

No. and you don't have to be. But they also have a right to express their feelings.
 
People being upset is not a reason to change anything, IMO. People get upset when I tell them Jesus was just another first century itinerant faith healer. Am I supposed to worry about their feelings?

Jesus tried to cancel the Pharisees, IIRC. Then he got cancelled in turn when someone complained to the Romans. Then it was centuries of various denominations and heretical sects cancelling each other. Christianity is pretty much built on cancel culture. Cancel the sinners, cancel Satan, cancel heathens, cancel the denominations who have too many statues, cancel the denominations that don't have enough statues, and so forth.

If someone were to actually succeed in cancelling cancel culture they'd be cancelling culture itself. It's all cancellations! The whole damn system is cancellations, and if we cancel the system it's even more!!
 
Hollywood’s insidious purge of conservatives continues. Noted Republican and Trump supporter Kelsey Grammer has been... *checks notes* ... given the lead role in his own series...

Huh.

They always blame the liberal left for their failures. Tom Selleck has never had problems getting a job. Or Tim Allen, or Clint Eastwood. Although Allen complained that his show Last man standing was canceled because he's a rightie not his middling (not totally terrible, but not great either) ratings.

My experience is when it comes to making money, companies will excuse all manner of sins. And if you're not making them much money, any trifling offense, will justify them letting you go. That never changes.
 
First of all, let’s leave death threats out of it. Death threats are illegal, should be treated as so, and nobody here is advocating for death threats. Death threats are neither a defining characteristic of nor unique to “cancel culture” as we’re discussing it here.

Not really. Mob mentality is the root of cancel culture, and death threats are frequently a mob's calling card. Also, I'm not sure just how clear we are in defining cancelling. It's convenient to accept light cancelling (why, we just don't allow his kind on facebook) while downplaying the darker side.

Aside from that, do you deny that the conduct surrounding “cancel culture” (e.g. calling for someone to be fired) is an expression of free speech, and therefore is protected under the First Amendment?

Free speech? Not really. More like a targeted harassment, which doesn't enjoy much 1A protection.

If so, why should this expression of free speech be tolerated any less than hate speech, conspiracy theories, and other odious expressions of free speech we are told we must tolerate?

I think expressing goofy or hateful ideas and opinions is one thing, and pressuring someone to take away someone else's livelihood is another. Try it on for size: would you accept being fired because some rando didn't like your tweets?
 
I think expressing goofy or hateful ideas and opinions is one thing, and pressuring someone to take away someone else's livelihood is another. Try it on for size: would you accept being fired because some rando didn't like your tweets?

It's the employer that doesn't like the tweets.

I mean let's be real, millions of people don't like millions of other people's tweets at any given moment. Pretty rare that it matters.
 
It's the employer that doesn't like the tweets.

I mean let's be real, millions of people don't like millions of other people's tweets at any given moment. Pretty rare that it matters.

Yeah, but jk asked about a hypothetical calling for someone to be fired, not the boss deciding it.

A boss firing you because you bring direct harm to his business might be defensible. But a mob (+/-) calling for cancelling and a boss bending to that absent a threat of harm to his business (ie: those calling for the firing are not his customers) taint quite right.
 
Yeah, but jk asked about a hypothetical calling for someone to be fired, not the boss deciding it.

A boss firing you because you bring direct harm to his business might be defensible. But a mob (+/-) calling for cancelling and a boss bending to that absent a threat of harm to his business (ie: those calling for the firing are not his customers) taint quite right.

Oh, c'mon. Let's get serious. It is almost always is about the business. The mob represents the customers. Or does it? The businesses determine if it does and take whatever steps they feel is necessary.

Both sides play this game. It's as prevalent on the right as it is on the left.
 
Yeah, but jk asked about a hypothetical calling for someone to be fired, not the boss deciding it.

Yeah, but I don't care if anyone calls for my firing, I only care if my boss listens.

A boss firing you because you bring direct harm to his business might be defensible. But a mob (+/-) calling for cancelling and a boss bending to that absent a threat of harm to his business (ie: those calling for the firing are not his customers) taint quite right.

Yeah, I agree it's not right. I'd imagine those tweets would have to be awfully offensive for a boss to take some action on it since the business or boss isn't being threatened, right?

Of course, I guess there's the rare case that the employee has written nothing offensive and still somehow mistakenly gotten a giant mob on the internet so mad at them that they're trying to get them fired and the boss, who's business is not effected in any way by the mob's calling for the firing, also somehow mistakenly agrees that this employee should be fired.

But that sounds crazy now that I wrote it out.
 
Not really. Mob mentality is the root of cancel culture, and death threats are frequently a mob's calling card. Also, I'm not sure just how clear we are in defining cancelling. It's convenient to accept light cancelling (why, we just don't allow his kind on facebook) while downplaying the darker side.

That's still a textbook association fallacy. Which is to say, broken logic. That's what "fallacy" means.

What the BS peddlers have been doing through all this thread has basically been a texbook example of this:

P1: A is a B
P2: A is also a C
therefore
C: Therefore, all Bs are Cs

In this case

P1: some example of a tweet is a case of "cancel culture"
P2: same example of a tweet is morally or legally wrong (e.g., by being a death threat)
therefore
C: Therefore, all cases of "cancel culture" are morally or legally wrong

Or in more layman terms, for those who can't follow all this newfangled logic (after all, it's only been around for 2500 years, some people may still not have gotten the memo;)): almost anything can be associated with anything. More to the point, just about anything can be used in conjunction with something immoral or illegal. I could use a car or pickup truck to carry the explosives for a terrorist act, like Timothy McVeigh did. I could use a fork to stab the wife. (And in fact, fork wounds tend to be worse than knife wounds.) I could sic my dog on my ex. Etc.

But it would take someone really stonking stupid to deduce that if some people use cars to carry around bombs for terrorist attacks, then the whole driving culture is to blame. Or that the whole pet-owning culture is to blame for the last one.

Even in the case of death threats, people have sent them for pretty much every reason imaginable. E.g., some people literally sent death threats to, say, Stardock over their games' bugs and balance issues. (That's not a hypothetical, btw. I'm using a real company name because it's a case that actually happened.) E.g., anime companies routinely receive death threats: it turned out at one point that one single woman had sent literally 3,852 death threat emails to a bookstore chain that also sells anime and manga, while another chucklenuts escalated from sending death threats to Kyoto Animation to an actual arson attack that killed IIRC over 30 people.

But, again, it would take a complete idiot to deduce that if some people use death threats in conjunction with wanting a game patched, then the whole culture of expecting bugs to be patched is to blame. Or to blame the whole culture of cartoon fandom, because SOME are outright deranged fanboys or fangirls.

It's downright stupid to blame a whole category X just because sometimes it's done in conjunction with illegal activity Y... and a lot of times not.

Pretty much ANY movement or activity will include a number of deranged people, if it's grown past being just a couple of people. If nothing else, by sheer probabilities alone, 1% of the population at any given time are outright schizophrenic. You can find deranged people in everything from "cancel culture" to football to Star Wars fandom to politics to stamp collecting. ANYTHING you don't like can be painted as evil by picking some extreme example and pretending that everyone else in it is just the same. It's in fact THE most prevalent technique of dishonest and bigotted idiots and the like: try to handwave that every Muslim is just like Osama, every atheist is just like Stalin, every black rights activist is just like <insert deranged black supremacist>, and in this case apparently everyone who's ever criticized someone on twitter is EXACTLY like the few guys who've escalated it to death threats.

But then I guess when some people can't make their case otherwise, they also feel they're entitled to do fallacies and/or, as I've said before, to flat out lie about their premises.
 
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Yeah, but jk asked about a hypothetical calling for someone to be fired, not the boss deciding it.

A boss firing you because you bring direct harm to his business might be defensible. But a mob (+/-) calling for cancelling and a boss bending to that absent a threat of harm to his business (ie: those calling for the firing are not his customers) taint quite right.

I do have to wonder where all the Conservative crying was when Juli Briskman got fired.
 
It might come as something of a surprise to everyone here that the phrase "cancel culture" was apparently invented (or at least popularized) by "Black Twitter."

Here's the actual link, rather than a broken link to google. And I think you're misreading it.

The idea of canceling—and as some have labeled it, cancel culture—has taken hold in recent years due to conversations prompted by #MeToo and other movements that demand greater accountability from public figures. The term has been credited to black users of Twitter, where it has been used as a hashtag. As troubling information comes to light regarding celebrities who were once popular, such as Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr, and Louis C.K.—so come calls to cancel such figures. The cancellation is akin to a cancelled contract, a severing of the relationship that once linked a performer to their fans.

I don't think that's saying that "cancel culture" was used as a hashtag by black twitter users, but that black twitter users were using "cancel" hashtags (e.g. #CancelBillCosby or #BillCosbyIsCancelled).

For a supportive reference:

In 2016, the hashtag #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled trended on Twitter after Kim Kardashian shared clips revealing that despite Swift’s claim that Kanye West did not warn her about his provocative lyrics, he actually did ask her permission and Swift thanked him.

It was the first popular use of “cancel” on Twitter, which Swift labeled as unfair because she was “falsely painted as a liar.”

But cancel culture’s biggest spark—the catalyst that would propel the whole movement—would occur a year later in 2017 when #MeToo became a global phenomenon. People called out public figures and demanded accountability for their alleged misdeeds and crimes, which mostly involved rape and sexual harassment in the workplace.

It was mainly African-Americans who pushed #Cancel to the top of Twitter’s trending topics, along with the hashtag #MeToo: #CancelBillCosby, #CancelHarveyWeinstein, #CancelKevinSpacey, #CancelMarioBatali, and a slew of other canceldt celebrities and public figures.
 
I don't think that's saying that "cancel culture" was used as a hashtag by black twitter users, but that black twitter users were using "cancel" hashtags (e.g. #CancelBillCosby or #BillCosbyIsCancelled).
I don't think it has to be one or the other, I get the sense that Black Twitter popularized the phrase "cancel culture" as well as the new meaning of the old verb.

Here are the earliest Tweets I could find with the entire phrase:

https://twitter.com/unicorninkk/status/792025338616418304

https://twitter.com/MikeOfDoom/status/829397742933987331

https://twitter.com/chazzsplash/status/829402406656077825

https://twitter.com/sharkyshood/status/844530052360536065

https://twitter.com/PumpkinSpPapi/status/846054299939540993

https://twitter.com/MallamSawyerr/status/856673798191325184

https://twitter.com/gatx_negrx/status/857616830302650368

https://twitter.com/DaShaunLH/status/867790661390651393

https://twitter.com/EyeSwear/status/868126577221042184

https://twitter.com/blaqueword/status/873189870184931329
 
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