Lying Away Cancel Culture

[Kishkumen]

My reserves of things to worry about is kinda tapped. Which aspects of cancel culture should I be most concerned about:

1. Terry Gilliam gets to put on his production at a different theater?
2. New state laws prohibiting the teaching of accurate U.S. history?
3. New wave of banning books from school libraries?

Cancel culture became a "thing" only when someone noticed that it was happening to a certain class of people.

So, I don't think that the correct response here is to start bickering over who is the more guilty party. That is a dead-end enterprise, not to mention a distraction from the original question.

We agree that cancel culture exists. We may disagree about some details regarding its history. Now the question, for me at least, is what a good response to this phenomenon ought to be. I would say that winking at less egregious forms of it is not an optimal response.

ETA: Oh, and by the way, I was put off by the "cancelling" of the Dixie Chicks and the renaming of French Fries to Freedom Fries. I am horrified by the state laws prohibiting the teaching of U.S. history in schools, and I find wholly repugnant the banning of books from school libraries.

The mistake here is to be sucked in by what is occasionally called "bundling." We have become expert at dissecting exactly where the boundaries between right and wrong-thinking people are located these days. If someone stumbles upon and comments on an issue that has been captured and bundled with a certain group on the ideological spectrum, it has become dangerous to make those comments because now one has "outed" themselves as being sympathetic with that ideological group.

I am not accusing you of engaging in any skullduggery here, Res Ipsa, but presenting these dilemmas is one of the tools people use to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Those who appear to get more upset about Gilliam when they could have been posting instead about Texas schoolbook issues are now silently judged as being sympathetic to the wrong causes, and they have thus outed themselves as being crypto-fascists, haters, or what have you. Forget the fact that there are many hours in a day and one can be upset about both. Indeed, it is very important that one be concerned about both.

[K Graham]

FOX News didn't invent it but they've certainly tried to do their share of canceling over the years, and they'd been doing this well before "cancel culture" became a thing to criticize. I mean, does anyone not remember the Dixie Chicks? FOX canceled them in a heartbeat for merely expressing their opinion about then President George Bush. I also remember when France refused to go along with the UN Resolution to invade Iraq, Bill O'Reilly called for a boycott of all things French.

Indeed! And this is what makes the whole mess so hilariously awful. The answer is not to question "cancel culture," but to imitate it?

What's there to question though? It exists, and always has, and it is because people are free to accept or reject people based on what they say and do. Everyone does it to some degree whether they realize it or not. For instance, when I avoid eating at the local Wendy's and Varsity restaurants because I hate that they have FOX News running on all TVs, that's me engaged in cancel culture. A buddy of mine told me he had to cancel his membership to Planet Fitness for the same reason. He said he didn't want subliminal indoctrination going on while he's trying to work out, and the employee there told him it was corporate policy to keep FOX running at all times. So, by getting a membership elsewhere, he just engaged in cancel culture.

When President Obama told people to stop complaining about what politicians do, and tells them "don't complain, VOTE." He is effectively engaged in cancel existing politicians who are not doing their jobs. It's what we do. It's entirely justified I think and it is very American.

[K Graham]

ETA: Oh, and by the way, I was put off by the "cancelling" of the Dixie Chicks and the renaming of French Fries to Freedom Fries. I am horrified by the state laws prohibiting the teaching of U.S. history in schools, and I find wholly repugnant the banning of books from school libraries.

Oh I agree completely on this, but this is a different form of cancel culture in that it uses tax dollars and the government to enforce cancellations, it isn't simply a case of private citizens choosing to associate or disassociate with people based on what they say and do. That's how I generally understand cancel culture.

[Res Ipsa]

Of course it exists. It has always existed. We just gave a name to it when it started happening to people we like.

Actually, I beg to differ on that point. It always existed in some form, but it took its frank use as a phrase by people involved in leftist identity politics for it to receive that name. I recall very clearly tweets saying "cancel white people." I don't take umbrage to that tweet. I quote it to provide a more historically valid datapoint regarding the creation of the term than "people we like." It was this use of the term "cancel" that gave its present iteration a name, a new form, and the kind of attention it has received.

But, please, let's not deny that it exists and refuse to consider the pros and cons thereof.

Who's denying it? Not me.

Here's a pretty good explainer of the history of the term. https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-cul ... ity-debate

So, "celebrities" would have been a better choice than "people we like." But why did it become an existential threat when it was applied to people in a favored position like Terry Gilliam and not a gay couple looking for a wedding cake?

[K Graham]

Yes, I think my step-dad is an idiot for refusing to watch any movies with actors Tom Hanks or Leonardo DeCaprio or Alec Baldwin. FOX News has effectively demonized those actors and hope to hurt their careers by doing so. But he's just being an idiot, and those actors are millionaires with or without him.

[Kishkumen]

What's there to question though? It exists, and always has, and it is because people are free to accept or reject people based on what they say and do. Everyone does it to some degree whether they realize it or not. For instance, when I avoid eating at the local Wendy's and Varsity restaurants because I hate that they have FOX News running on all TVs, that's me engaged in cancel culture. A buddy of mine told me he had to cancel his membership to Planet Fitness for the same reason. He said he didn't want subliminal indoctrination going on while he's trying to work out, and the employee there told him it was corporate policy to keep FOX running at all times. So, by getting a membership elsewhere, he just engaged in cancel culture.

When President Obama told people to stop complaining about what politicians do, and tells them "don't complain, VOTE." He is effectively engaged in cancel existing politicians who are not doing their jobs. It's what we do. It's entirely justified I think and it is very American.

Fair enough. I think it is fair to say that you enjoy conflict and get a certain thrill out of stoking displays of aggression, so I am completely unsurprised that this would be your reaction. You have also reduced any expression of choice or preference into "cancel culture" and thus endeavored to make the term meaningless. Your decision not to go to Wendy's is really not cancel culture. It is consumer preference. It is when you elevate your personal preference to the level of a public campaign to shame people out of eating at Wendy's in an attempt to get them to turn off Fox News that you have cancel culture.

In other words, these differences make all the difference in the world.

What you forget is that some people like watching Fox News, and all a cancel culture campaign is doing is moving those people off to find other restaurants where they can feel free to watch Fox News without the public campaign spoiling their enjoyment. A cancel culture campaign also moves off those people who weren't suffering because Fox was on and simply liked eating Wendy's enough that Fox was not a make or break issue for them. Maybe in the process the leaders of the campaign gained a fair amount of notoriety for themselves and felt the thrill of power of forcing Wendy's to respond to their bad publicity. It also may have caused Wendy's and other businesses to lose a lot of money at some locations, even to the point of driving them out of the local economy.

My guess is that at some point people are going to get fed up with all of the howling, holier-than-thou idiots who make life miserable for others by engaging in their holy crusades against everything that does not measure up to their utopian ideals. These loudmouth idiots are located at various fringes of the political spectrum and among populists. At some point, people will stop listening to them, and the majority of us can go back to not caring whether a restaurant plays Fox News or MSNBC. Maybe, better yet, we will enjoy a world where people don't feel the need to be governed by the display of holy ideological viewpoints, and the whole question will cease to exist as something to worry about. No Fox News. No MSNBC. What a wonderful world that would be. (Not so much that I am going to campaign against restaurants with TVs in them.)

[Kishkumen]

Who's denying it? Not me.

Here's a pretty good explainer of the history of the term. https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-cul ... ity-debate

So, "celebrities" would have been a better choice than "people we like." But why did it become an existential threat when it was applied to people in a favored position like Terry Gilliam and not a gay couple looking for a wedding cake?

So, is the implication here that I was not concerned about the gay couple looking for a wedding cake? Whether you realize it or not, you are doing the same thing again. You are trying to find the wedge that splits me into one category or the other. My answer, what I really stick up for, at least according to your judgment, is what pegs me in your mind.

Maybe you are not doing this consciously, but I think it is odd that after all of these years of me being genuinely upset about the mistreatment of gay people, now you are asking me this question.

Or maybe you were asking me to ask Fox News.

[Kishkumen]

Oh I agree completely on this, but this is a different form of cancel culture in that it uses tax dollars and the government to enforce cancellations, it isn't simply a case of private citizens choosing to associate or disassociate with people based on what they say and do. That's how I generally understand cancel culture.

Yes, there is a legitimate question regarding what governments should do in response to demands of censorship. I am against censorship, so I have little patience with such campaigns and thus I vote against politicians who indulge these things. There is, after all, a reason why I don't vote R.

But what I am talking about here is no less concerning. It is the Balkanization of society into mutually exclusive groups of intolerance governed by strident voices with unforgiving mechanisms of social manipulation and boundary maintenance. I am not saying it is anything new, but I think it has reached a fever pitch and is potentially dangerous.

Moreover, I just don't like anyone lying to me by saying "cancel culture does not exist" when it clearly does.

ETA: The potential cost to mutual alienation is that we cannot have a Republic because we fail to meet the minimum requirement of sharing enough sense of common interest with each other.

[Kishkumen]

Yes, I think my step-dad is an idiot for refusing to watch any movies with actors Tom Hanks or Leonardo DeCaprio or Alec Baldwin. FOX News has effectively demonized those actors and hope to hurt their careers by doing so. But he's just being an idiot, and those actors are millionaires with or without him.

I think it would be great if we could find a way to tease stepdad about his avoidance of Tom Hanks without making him feel so threatened that he escalates the conflict. Could he be made to laugh at his own silliness without feeling the need to rush to Fox News's defense?

[K Graham]

Yes, I think my step-dad is an idiot for refusing to watch any movies with actors Tom Hanks or Leonardo DeCaprio or Alec Baldwin. FOX News has effectively demonized those actors and hope to hurt their careers by doing so. But he's just being an idiot, and those actors are millionaires with or without him.

I think it would be great if we could find a way to tease stepdad about his avoidance of Tom Hanks without making him feel so threatened that he escalates the conflict. Could he be made to laugh at his own silliness without feeling the need to rush to Fox News's defense?

Better yet, I say nothing and let him do his thing. I don't confront him in any way over this. Also, when someone on my Facebook wall goes on an ignorant Trumpian rant I respond by blocking them as opposed to engaging in a public display of aggression. Kind of weird for someone who enjoys conflict, huh?