“may” in the rhetorical sense of accepting your stated premise. But I think you knew that.
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I really didn’t. There was a time I would have taken it as such, but after 40 years of Libertarian free-speech absolutism in service to an anti-progressive agenda, the dying out of those who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, and that combination resulting in a resurgence of right-wing sado-populism over the past 8 years, I’m looking for a straightforward “is laudable”. Thank you for clarifying.
So, accepting that you accept the premise that disagreeing with and shaming someone for supporting thoroughly discredited ideologies is not the equivalent of shaming someone for being LGBTQ or Black or what have you, where’s the problem you claim exists?
[ETA: please don’t waste our time by bringing up the Red Scares and McCarthy witch hunts, which in the main were driven by false accusations by power-seeking RWA government officials of sympathy with Stalin’s Russia on the part of their victims]
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Excellent short Twitter thread on this topic.
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Yeah, well, I’m queer and trans and the more bullshit that gets spouted like that leads to even more people wanting me dead so you can fucking shove that idea.
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Sometimes people need a big ass reminder that for some people, this isn’t an abstract, intellectual exercise about rights being debated in some old timey coffee house by a bunch of elite white dudes - it’s real fucking life!
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May I suggest that you submit your post to the NYT as an editorial for publication therein, at least only to see where they really stand on “cancel culture”. Make them put their money where their mouths’ are.
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As a (surprisingly) recent example, while I was working for a private company doing training of a combination of direct employees and independent contractors, I kicked one of the contractors out of my classroom for using the N word with me before class. He got really angry, but I told him to take it up with HR if he thought I was being unfair. His contract was dropped for cause.
If that’s “cancel culture,” sign me up!
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Also, fuck the NYTimes for this bit of false equivalency that’s the heart of the opinion piece:
This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.
How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.
To sum: on the one hand, we have “cancel culture” which according to their articles is usually a few people “on the left” (or disingenuous right-wingers) on social media or college campuses getting “overly” upset about something (or a general decline in popularity of a celebrity who did something awful), and on the other side, we have Republicans passing laws criminalizing speech. Only one of these is an actual infringement on free speech, and the Republican actions are somehow being framed as a response to “cancel culture”? Oh, but wait, “In passing laws that restrict speech, conservatives have adopted the language of harm that some liberals used in the past to restrict speech…” Oh gosh, so the liberals are to blame for what the right is doing!
Also, the whole framing of “we have a free speech problem because people have ‘held [their] tongue because [they] were concerned about retaliation or harsh criticism’” is another false equivalency. On the one hand, you might not express your opinion because, e.g. Trumpers, will physically assault or harass you mercilessly, on the other hand, you might not express your opinion because someone will just think you’re an asshole, and the two are the same.
Oh, but they address that:
It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent).
Oh wait, no - they keep blurring or eliminating the line between those two things in how they’re talking about “the issue” (as if it even were a singular issue).
And oh, Christ, this at the end: “Free speech is predicated on mutual respect”. I mean, that’s the fundamental problem here they don’t seem to be getting. That’s what “cancel culture” (if such a thing actually exists) is responding to - a total lack of respect. That lack of respect has been normalized, so maybe cis het white male Christian types don’t even recognize it. Trying to deny groups of people their basic human rights gets treated as just “conservatism.” The modern Republican party has never respected certain groups, and they’re being more overt and extreme about it in recent years with the party’s right-wards drift. So when you have actual fascists demanding the podium, the fundamental basis for free speech just isn’t there, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. More generally, people are saying, “No, I’m not going to just put up with this shit anymore,” and the people who got used to dishing the shit are upset about being called out on it.
It’s even worse than both-siding two completely different and unequal things, because they’re also saying that the right are doing all this in response to the left’s “cancel culture.” (As if the right hasn’t been trying to censor things forever.) They’re so desperate to turn this into an issue for “the left,” basically.
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But how can you be ok with someone being fired for using ethnic slurs, and not ok with someone being fired for being black? Both involve firing someone for reasons that were believed ok at some point in human history, so they must be morally equivalent!
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Cancel culture is getting right-wingers elected. It doesn’t matter that they invented moral panics, their moral panics fit thousand year old norms, while progressives’ moral panics do not, so they get much more friction.
Yeah, it’s not fair, but then again, there wouldn’t be a point if it were. You fight the war on the terrain you’re given.
The problem with progressives is that they assume that not only are they right, that they’ve already won, when neither is true. Their arrogance and passive-aggressive “mean girl” tactics are a gift for the right-wingers to work with. Their use of weird jargon and adherence to ideologies descendant of critical theory and postmodernism is a gift for right-wingers to work with. It does not matter that right-wingers don’t understand what “CRT” is, because hardly anyone does, and all that leaning on vagueness and nuance, while a feature in academia, is an exploitable bug in the real world.
We don’t win unless we get people who have voted for Republicans to vote for Democrats instead. Cancel culture tactics accomplish nothing but making that flip go the other way.
Yeah, pretty much none of that is true. Democrats win by inspiring people who wouldn’t have otherwise voted to turn out, and they don’t do that by abandoning the rights of human beings in hopes of appeasing right wingers who want to step on them.
A nice dig at out-of-touch elites and academia in there for good measure, just in case anyone wonders what kind of perspective you’re really coming from. Don’t pretend you’re trying to help us by inviting us to shut up.
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wtf is wrong with self-censoring? I mean if you feel uncomfortable saying something maybe it means you need to ruminate awhile longer before opening your trap. That article is weird. If you believe whatever it is you have to say how can you be shamed?
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Cancel culture and crt ARE the moral panic.
There is no mean girl progressivism. Nice try at gaslighting though. But our fundamental rights are under assault and no amount of “stop hitting yourself” can hide it anymore.
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The actual maxim is that you do your best not to fight the war on the terrain/terms of the enemy.
As I’d like the DNC establishment to realise, it’s not 1992 anymore.
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Forgive me if I remain unconvinced that ‘we’ are on the the same “team.”
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Apparently, critical race theory panic is a marketing tool designed to sell horrible things.
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Actual CRT is a scholarly field of research in law schools. That information is readily available to anyone who wants to know what it really is. The people citing it as a danger as you describe don’t want to know what it really is and are operating in bad faith and/or willful ignorance. They should be called on that, not have their BS indulged.
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When I read slop like this from the NYT, it just feels like more coal in the fire of their general distaste for collective action of any kind. I fully believe they see real equivalence in their false equivalences, as everything but management / ownership class is rabble if varying flavors that pose interchageable threats to the status quo. Their COVID op eds consistently oozed concern for managers and downtown real estate. Whinging about groups using a collective voice to try to match the volume of one powerful voice is practically navel-gazing for them at this point.
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