I was all outraged and the like until Jim read the comment of "Get bad butt cancer" and then I realized dear old Jimmy Boy fell for another troll. Poor guy just can't escape witless clown after all these years.
Liberals, progressives and conservatives of note sign open letter to end cancel culture. (Noam Chomsky/J.K. Rowling/Gloria Steinem/David Brooks etc.)
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There simply shouldn't be this amount of debt. There wasn't 30 years ago, we had college then too, just go back to that system. Where I grew up, you had to take a test, not like the SAT but more on each subject, and if you got good enough grades you got into the best school, and the best school was basically Harvard. Yes, normal poor folk were the MAIN student body of our Harvard, not just an outlier oddity on a scholarship. That's true meritocracy. Not this plutocracy they do at Ivy League institutions with legacy admissions and donations and so on.
This may be my silly optimist self speaking, but I don't think normal relatively happy people mistreat others to this degree. Sure, you'll always have psychopaths, but if fewer people have problems in need for a convenient scapegoat, fewer people will be mistreated. If you don't have bad job security you won't blame the immigrants looking for jobs as much, if everyone is taken care off there will not be a need for gangs to form in the streets which will reduce the perceptions of minorities being more criminal, which eventually will change how they are treated. I think this is how you solve all the big identity politics issues we are having to wrestle with right now.
They can make more money in the long run by widening the notion of acceptable thought and behavior because it gives you more different sorts of customers with their own niches for you to monetize more aggressively. You can sell the homophobic hat and the gay pride hat and if both can be worn freely you sell more hats, otherwise the homophobe just goes without and that's a sale you just lost.
What they're doing right now is a short term strategy of caving to the crybabies. You can easily argue for a more long-term liberal values based strategy.
I'd argue that's because of people pushing teens to go to college more for "the better jobs" or "to do what you want" and the colleges are in turn turning into money generators with increasingly pedantic areas of study and increasingly dubious professors. It used to be that you were encouraged to go to college if you were gifted but now everyone's told to go to college.
Because of my interest in historicity and the empirically real, I’ll go ahead and give a brief lesson on why opportunistic right wingers seizing the “free speech” argument is something to never be fooled by. The obvious example is Hitler, who led a militant wing of a fascist party that explicitly called for the removal of Jewish-Bolshevism from society, but cried that he was being “silenced” by the government when he was put under house arrest for attempting to stage a coup, during which he wrote Mein Kampf.
However, more relevant is always GLR. A decade after McCarthy, he went on college campuses and said that Jewish-Bolshevism was controlling American society and preventing him from saying Nazi shit. He also notably organized the most violent counter protest to MLK of the entire Civil Rights era, which included getting the police on his side to crush his protests.
Please learn literally any history before buying nonsense about how war criminals like David Frum who are still allowed to write for the same newspapers he used to con us into the Iraq war are being cancelled. He helped set up the terrorist watch list, the Patriot act, etc. He and his are not arguing in good faith.
Edit: wrong David, but it describes both if memory serves, and Brooks especially.
However, more relevant is always GLR. A decade after McCarthy, he went on college campuses and said that Jewish-Bolshevism was controlling American society and preventing him from saying Nazi shit. He also notably organized the most violent counter protest to MLK of the entire Civil Rights era, which included getting the police on his side to crush his protests.
Please learn literally any history before buying nonsense about how war criminals like David Frum who are still allowed to write for the same newspapers he used to con us into the Iraq war are being cancelled. He helped set up the terrorist watch list, the Patriot act, etc. He and his are not arguing in good faith.
Edit: wrong David, but it describes both if memory serves, and Brooks especially.
The "why aren't we talking about X?" argument can be disingenuous - it's one step removed from whataboutism.
But that aside, yes, death threats are probably worse, but we all agree that death threats are bad. Cancel culture however, is a more morphic beast. It's morphic because it used to be the domain of the (religious) right, but now it's an instrument primarily wielded by the left (not all the time, but most of the time). It's morphic because people can equate criticism with cancelling. It's morphic because there was a time when people more or less universally agreed that this kind of stuff was bad, but now, it operates under a veneer of social justice. And even if you're into SoJus, I'm not convinced that cancelling works even pays off, because as soon as you make a work 'tainted goods,' more people will want to consume it. It's backfire effect in action.
Pff, Chomsky's a liberal by this point, him being upset about McCarthy isn't relevant since the letter is supposed to be about contemporary issues and if he hasn't realised who he has signed it with then that shows even more how out of touch he is. But yeah, Pinker's also getting his ass fried for many things.
Oh look, Goodwin's Law.
Why is it that every time this is debated, Hitler is brought up? It's like we can't help but jump to the most extreme example out there.
I'm not worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world. I'm not even that worried about the Lin Manuel Mirandas of the world, or the J.K. Rowlings of the world, because even though Hamilton and Harry Potter are deemed insufficiently woke (despite the fact that they WERE deemed sufficiently woke 5 and 20 years ago respectively), I'm sure they'll be fine. What worries me more are the little people. Y'know, likes James Gunn, who got fired because someone dug up something he'd said over a decade ago. People like Amelie Zhao, whose debut novel was nearly cancelled because some people are idiots. People like Kosovo Jackson who, despite being a hypocrite, shouldn't have had his own novel temporarily pulled because he wasn't in the right identity group to write about the people in said novel. Heck, even people like Alexander McCall Smith who, if he tried to pitch No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency today, would have been rejected by his publisher because he was a white man writing about black female protagonists. This isn't me saying this, this was straight from the horse's mouth.
We're already at the stage where people are flirting with the idea that in voice acting, your complexion should match the complexion of the person you're portraying. We're at the stage where people, like Jackson, are seriously suggesting that one should only write inside their own "identity group." We're at the stage where in the space of five years, Hamilton of all things, is in the cancellation crosshairs.
Again, I'm not worried about the Hitlers of the world. I'm worried about reasonable people who are punished for things they've said in the past, or go outside the borders as to what they can and can't write. That isn't the biggest problem in the world, but if we want to solve the biggest problem facing humanity, then we should all be working on a way to survive the heat death of the universe.
Well in this particular case the person bringing Hitler up is a communist so it's possible he does it because making sure everyone keeps thinking about Hitler means everyone won't be thinking about Stalin and Mao.
You notice David Brooks, right?
Edit- I severely do not care about cancelling people or not cancelling them, just think it’s important to keep this thing in mind. By and large I’m more of a free speech absolutist.
Mao strikes me as particuarly apt, considering the Cultural Revolution. For awhile, I thought it was people on the right being hyperbolic, but when I started reading articles by Chinese people who lived through the period and found the landscape of today to be eerilly similar...yeah, that set off alarm bells.
TBH, I don't think we're at that stage yet, and I don't think we'll necessarily reach it. But for me, the real alarm bell was the statue of Frederick Douglas coming down. The way I see it, there's two possibilities:
1) There's people out there who know absolutely nothing about history, but have appointed themselves the arbiters of it.
2) People are pissed at other statues being torn down, so pulled Douglas's statue down as a kind of historical tit-for-tat.
Both possibilities are disturbing.
This is in no way causally related to the rising tuition, legacy programs and financial nepotism that plague the university system. This is grinding an axe. And a very anti-intellectual axe at that. Yes, the rise in demand means there's going to be more overhead, but then again we now have a job market where over 60% of the available jobs expect you to have a degree of some variety or another. On the other hand, state funding for public colleges is getting slashed. In order to maintain facilities, colleges have to raise tuition. The financial aid system as-is has backfired by effectively removing a cap from tuitions, allowing students to fall deeper and deeper into debt. That they're hiring professors to teach people subjects you would really rather students not learn about is a very small part of the equation.
Given my adamant loathing of Stalin and Mao I’d be pretty fine with you keeping them in mind. I’m not any sort of Blanquist.
Actually, the cultural revolution is a good example of the sort of terrible thing this kind of response is definitely warranted against and was kinda China’s point of no return, though I’d honestly go back to when Mao brought in Lysenko.
Yeah, I've recently started reading about Mao and it's... oof.
Well if you're at least aware and admit that communism can go very wrong then fair enough.
Ah, fair. I just hate all the war criminals that brought us in to the Iraq war. If you don’t know who that spoiled prick is, fair enough. But yeah, he and his are the guys whining about cancelling I’m frustrated with, or dudes like Jordan Peterson who will tattle on “Cultural Marxist professors” while complaining about cancel culture. It’s two faced bullshit.
Love the presumption by centrists that leftists are incapable of criticizing other leftists because they criticize centrists. Feels like projection.
We live in a time where the left is the side predominantly in control of the media so I get hit over the head by them more right now so I find them more annoying. It's like the right went after games as a scapegoat for shootings and then the left came after games as a scapegoat for sexism. Not a fan of either of those.
The media must not include most major newspapers and literally all cable news then.