Liberals, progressives and conservatives of note sign open letter to end cancel culture. (Noam Chomsky/J.K. Rowling/Gloria Steinem/David Brooks etc.)
- Thread starter Dreiko
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Enjoying the highly privileged white people framing possibly facing consequences for bigotry as the great free speech issue of the age while protesters are being imprisoned across the US.
What it's supposed to seem like and what it is are two very different things. Even if you can assign the words to any of them equally, just being a signee and not the listed author prevents readers from contextualizing the words to any individual.
Because as we all know, only white people are cancelled, only privileged people are cancelled, and all such cancellations stem from bigotry.
People who screech the loudest about cancel culture never act like it, so I somehow doubt that's what this petition was about. This is just about more spoiled elites not wanting anyone to criticize them when they have a shitty opinion.
That's a matter of perspective but you can have that opinion, sure. I think it's expert writers, journalists (with the notable exception of Bari Weiss) and professors, some of whom have been met with a lot of persecution like Salmon Rushde and Noam Chamsky, cautioning society about the importance of freedom of expression being eroded.
When a guy has had a death warrant put out against him for decades for writing books about Islam and has to live with private security, he has earned the right to speak about this issue and is not really an elite as much as an expert.
Wow. What a surprisingly reasonable movement.
I admit that the letter very clearly is using extremely left rhetoric, but then again... if it didn't use that rhetoric then it would be dismissed out of hand as a right wing conspiracy. Which is unfortunately where we are now. People have to deny being a witch before anything can be said.
Hahahahaha!
Last edited:
While I don't like twitter (it's so easy to mis-word something, or not have the space to provide the full context) and I DO think a lot of people are WAAAAAYYYY too eager to jump the gun and cancel people...
The thing is, "cancelling" is a completely natural social phenomenon. Humans often resort to tribal thinking, and deviance that's perceived to be harmful to one's tribe is ejected. We do it all the time in our personal lives.
It's only getting so juggernaut-huge because the entire goddamn internet is our society now (and the internet is worldwide and your words are immortally preserved), not just the small world of our family, town, or even state/province or country.
People got full on exiled, excommunicated or executed for saying controversial or mean things as far back as ancient rome. The only thing new about it now is just the sheer massive SCOPE of it all (and the game of broken internet telephone that accelerates it).
Because when millions of people go "hey, you said something really hurtful and dangerous towards a certain group"...It tends to pick up steam, and "feel" like censorship to the person who is being shouted at by a million people who are exercising THEIR free speech to voice their discontent.
Also...As usual, the problem is exacerbated by bad actors ruining society for everyone else. Like...The "ok" hand sign used to just mean "ok", but then a bunch of pricks were like "hey, it looks like a WP, we can use this otherwise innocuous symbol to signal our bigotry in a way that we can have plausible deniability for!". Assholes will always try to find ways to be bigots in an under-the-radar way in public, and when called out on it, will claim their being censored for something innocuous. Subtle signals and dog-whistles are what subcultures DO to find like minded people and express themselves.
And here's the funny thing, Conservatives cancel people too. Colin Kaepernik was full on ejected from the NFL because of the huge furious reactions of the fans when he took a knee at the anthem. Conservatives filmed themselves as they smashed their coffee machines and burned their nikes, and screamed bloody murder about Gilette razors when corporations took a stance they didn't like. So it's clearly more of a societal issue than just "angry libs wanting someone banned because they made a bad 'lulz gay' joke in the 90s".
Hell, those with actual power LOVE to weaponize cancel culture themselves, any time they see some upstart with issues in their past that they can exploit. If the mass media or established politicians see someone trying to dislodge them, they will HAPPILY dredge up something from their past, or mis-represent something they said just to get people to turn on them, even if it was 20 years ago and the person has absolutely proven that they have changed.
Honestly, the only solution I can see is the same one I always tout for things like this.
We need to teach people critical thinking skills at a young age, teach empathy from kindergarten, and then encourage the everloving hell out of those things in our society.
If people empathize more, there will be less assholes and bigots that need to be called out, there will be more sincere apologies for errors in judgement, and there will be more accepted apologies.
If people critically think more, they will do their research before jumping the gun, and less "broken telephone" stuff will happen. Also, people will wait before firing/"cancelling" people under them until they know for sure it's valid.
Sadly, critical thinkers who are empathetic are not easy to control to fit the agenda of the people who run our societies, so....They have no incentive to encourage those things.
In fact, those with power are far more likely to just cave on the symbolism and pretend they've improved things instead of actually fixing the problem. (See politicians focusing on statues instead of "hey, the entire police force needs a complete and total overhaul, there are power hungry assholes in the entire thing who have engineered the system to oppress people with less power and money, typically minorities").
Because that's why these corporations often signal progressive values even when they're decidedly NOT progressive. Because they go "Hey, to have the biggest market, we should at least appear progressive. Because minorities are customers too, and if we add them to the more left-minded people, we think we can sell more if we stick with them".
I assure you, if they thought they could make more money being openly bigoted assholes, most large corporations would at the very least be dogwhistling like no tomorrow, if not actually being openly bigoted. That's how these big businesses work. It's similar for most of the other groups you mentioned too.
The thing is, "cancelling" is a completely natural social phenomenon. Humans often resort to tribal thinking, and deviance that's perceived to be harmful to one's tribe is ejected. We do it all the time in our personal lives.
It's only getting so juggernaut-huge because the entire goddamn internet is our society now (and the internet is worldwide and your words are immortally preserved), not just the small world of our family, town, or even state/province or country.
People got full on exiled, excommunicated or executed for saying controversial or mean things as far back as ancient rome. The only thing new about it now is just the sheer massive SCOPE of it all (and the game of broken internet telephone that accelerates it).
Because when millions of people go "hey, you said something really hurtful and dangerous towards a certain group"...It tends to pick up steam, and "feel" like censorship to the person who is being shouted at by a million people who are exercising THEIR free speech to voice their discontent.
Also...As usual, the problem is exacerbated by bad actors ruining society for everyone else. Like...The "ok" hand sign used to just mean "ok", but then a bunch of pricks were like "hey, it looks like a WP, we can use this otherwise innocuous symbol to signal our bigotry in a way that we can have plausible deniability for!". Assholes will always try to find ways to be bigots in an under-the-radar way in public, and when called out on it, will claim their being censored for something innocuous. Subtle signals and dog-whistles are what subcultures DO to find like minded people and express themselves.
And here's the funny thing, Conservatives cancel people too. Colin Kaepernik was full on ejected from the NFL because of the huge furious reactions of the fans when he took a knee at the anthem. Conservatives filmed themselves as they smashed their coffee machines and burned their nikes, and screamed bloody murder about Gilette razors when corporations took a stance they didn't like. So it's clearly more of a societal issue than just "angry libs wanting someone banned because they made a bad 'lulz gay' joke in the 90s".
Hell, those with actual power LOVE to weaponize cancel culture themselves, any time they see some upstart with issues in their past that they can exploit. If the mass media or established politicians see someone trying to dislodge them, they will HAPPILY dredge up something from their past, or mis-represent something they said just to get people to turn on them, even if it was 20 years ago and the person has absolutely proven that they have changed.
Honestly, the only solution I can see is the same one I always tout for things like this.
We need to teach people critical thinking skills at a young age, teach empathy from kindergarten, and then encourage the everloving hell out of those things in our society.
If people empathize more, there will be less assholes and bigots that need to be called out, there will be more sincere apologies for errors in judgement, and there will be more accepted apologies.
If people critically think more, they will do their research before jumping the gun, and less "broken telephone" stuff will happen. Also, people will wait before firing/"cancelling" people under them until they know for sure it's valid.
Sadly, critical thinkers who are empathetic are not easy to control to fit the agenda of the people who run our societies, so....They have no incentive to encourage those things.
In fact, those with power are far more likely to just cave on the symbolism and pretend they've improved things instead of actually fixing the problem. (See politicians focusing on statues instead of "hey, the entire police force needs a complete and total overhaul, there are power hungry assholes in the entire thing who have engineered the system to oppress people with less power and money, typically minorities").
Seems like you have an issue with Late Stage Capitalism, and the whole "I must sell as much as possible and make as much profit as possible" thing.
Because that's why these corporations often signal progressive values even when they're decidedly NOT progressive. Because they go "Hey, to have the biggest market, we should at least appear progressive. Because minorities are customers too, and if we add them to the more left-minded people, we think we can sell more if we stick with them".
I assure you, if they thought they could make more money being openly bigoted assholes, most large corporations would at the very least be dogwhistling like no tomorrow, if not actually being openly bigoted. That's how these big businesses work. It's similar for most of the other groups you mentioned too.
Bingo. Businesses aren't making empty gestures of faux-wokeness because they're being bullied. They're doing it because being a shithead to trans people isn't popular in the court of public opinion anymore.
It's where we are now, and where we will be so long as people keep playing that game. Theoretically, they're trying to normalize civil disagreement, but at the same time trying to not seem disagreeable to the people who won't disagree civilly.
Think of it this way: what do they want in theory? Civil disagreement and not demonizing people. What did they do? Pretended not to disagree while demonizing people.
I guess I just find it heartening that there's any level of self-awareness right now. I know that it's a drop in the eye dropper but I've had dry eyes for a long time. It's more a signal to me that things aren't already lost.
These groups exist because they have their own "safe-spaces" where they can be free from outsiders exposing, arguing, and persuading them.
When they leak out into the real world, it does work.
This is laughably naive and not at all grounded in reality.
I'm an optimist in this sense. I'm confident at every point that the vast majority of people don't want to be horrible, hateful people reveling in the destruction of others. I even believe that a lot of the people who come across as horrible, hateful people reveling in the destruction of others think better of themselves than that, and don't realize what they look like. There are only select few who generally want to burn the world to the ground, there are just a lot of people sucked into the lies and the rhetoric of that small group.
But like, that's the issue with this. What good is it for people to acknowledge the lack of reasonable discourse while accepting all the false premises that lead people away from reasonable discourse? "The windmills are totally giants, but your battle strategy is lacking" is hardly a constructive message. Edit: Even if the battle strategy really is lacking.
Last edited:
I used to post on the Flat Earth Society forum, about 90% of the posters were outsiders arguing that the Earth isn't flat. There were also a bunch of forum regulars pretending to be FE believers to troll the outsiders. Some people just love the conflict.
The second sentence of the letter talks refers to the protests, racial and social justice and an overdue demand for police reform. Did you even bother to read it?
It's not mutually exclusive to support social justice and also oppose cancel culture.
That is the entire reason flat earth theory exists. It started as a myth invented to ridicule the Catholic Church for scientific ignorance; the idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat was basically just invented whole cloth to start a fight. And then in turn, combative people took up the mantle of flat earth to pick a fight with the scientific consensus instead. It's a silly, purposeless argument from start to finish.
Of course I do.
It's why I'm for socialist economic policy (free college/healthcare/UBI/slavery and conquest reparations, all for all for all of these).
I'm just also a fan of art and freedom of expression though, so I am not for cultural marxism, which is what cancel culture is a spawn of. I don't wanna eat the rich, I just wanna shave off their diamond mansion a bit and allow folks to live in reasonable comfort and dignity.
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I interpret your response as a sort of "gotcha" attempt because of your supposition that I'd be some sort of capitalism-fan or what have you, and you couldn't be further from the truth. Recently I've heard the term "class-reductionist" which I do embrace wholeheartedly. The idea that it's not about identity politics issues and what have you, that if we fixed the economic issues everything else would fix itself too. Yep, I'm smack dab in the middle of that.
So yeah, to reiterate, this is about giving these people and corporations the motivation to suffer the economic damage accompanying being for free speech and freedom of the arts and of expression. To solemnly nod and tell them they're doing the right thing and that they have powerful support.