Cancel Culture: “It should be banned”

As I said earlier in this thread we need to define "Cancel". Fox News, OAN or Newsmax aren't being actually canceled. My understanding is their ratings are doing fine and they are still profitable. Criticizing them isn't cancelling them anymore than criticizing MSNBC means it is being canceled.

 

People on the D&D don’t understand what shows are
This is why all these ‘shows’ are successful
Sure you can categorize shows like game of thrones or the bachelor or even nba football
They only make money if they have viewership
They compete with video games and YouTube for your time
Which means money

 

Cancel Culture Exists
It’s fashionable to claim there are no real consequences for online callouts. The truth is, there very often are.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cancel-culture-exists/

excerpt:

Those who argue that cancel culture is a myth claim that no one has really been injured by it. A few people might lose their jobs, but they get new ones. Bari Weiss claimed she was bullied out of The New York Times, and now she’s the Queen of Substack. The columnist Suzanne Moore, who left The Guardian after 338 of her colleagues signed a letter clearly aimed at her, accusing the paper of producing “transphobic content,” soon surfaced at The Telegraph. Yes, someone might lose a prize or an opportunity to give a talk or be on a panel, but no one has a right to those things. After the lesbian memoirist Lauren Hough praised her friend’s forthcoming novel, which some tweeters accused of transphobia, and then got into an expletive-filled Twitter fight about it, she was either not nominated or de-nominated for a Lambda Award. But hey, she can always write another book.

The journalist Adam Davidson responded to a rather woolly New York Timeseditorial decrying cancel culture: “Can one of you believers in cancel culture just write one piece that gives evidence and doesn’t just speak to a feeling you have? Maybe some data that helps your readers know the size and scale of this problem? Also, some examples of people actually fired?”

It’s true that numerous writers have published pieces about “a feeling they have,” i.e., a fear of dire consequences for expressing themselves freely. A lot of people responded to Davidson with specific examples, though, including me. His response: The supposedly canceled are doing fine, and anyway there aren’t very many of them. But in fact, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has documented hundreds of cases across the political spectrum in academia alone—firings, demotions, lengthy investigations, and so on—which is more than enough to make others wary. And pace Davidson, not everyone sails happily on. Here’s a small sampling.

Donald McNeil Jr., a prizewinning science journalist with a long career at The New York Times, took some high school students to Peru on a Times-connected summer trip. When a student asked his opinion about a classmate’s use of the N-word in a video, McNeil uttered the word. He says he was asking if the classmate had said the word as a slur or was quoting a rap song or similar. The use/mention distinction beloved of analytic philosophers cut no ice with management. He is now writing the occasional piece on Medium, where he recently described himself as retired.

Gillian Philip, one of a group of writers producing popular children’s books under the pseudonym Erin Hunter, put #Istandwithjkrowling in her Twitter bio, for which she was subjected to a storm of online abuse and fired by her publisher. Whatever you may think of Rowling, Philip isn’t her. Without the security that comes with unparalleled wealth and celebrity, she’s just a person with an opinion—right or wrong, that’s what cost her her job. She now works as a truck driver.

Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, made its prestigious pages more inclusive and diverse. But that didn’t help in 2020, when he was attacked for publishing a long poem by Matthew Dickman that included a racial slur uttered by the poet’s demented grandmother. (That pesky use/mention distinction again!) Share issued a self-abasing apology and left. I’ve been unable to find out what he’s doing now.

Gary Garrels, the top curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, led the sale of a Rothko to raise funds to buy the work of women and artists of color. He resigned in 2020, after an uproar kicked off when he said, “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists” and that to not collect work by white men would be “reverse discrimination.” He is now an independent curator.

David Edelstein, a veteran film critic, was fired from his longtime job with NPR’s Fresh Air after he made a tasteless joke on his Facebook page referring to the butter scene in Last Tango in Paris. Furloughed by New York magazine at the start of the pandemic, he is now a freelancer.

April Powers, a management specialist, resigned as equity and inclusion chief at the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Editors after being furiously attacked for a statement condemning anti-Semitism because it did not also mention Islamophobia. She’s trying to make a go of consulting now.

These are just a few of the better-known cases. But then there are the ones you don’t hear about, because the person on the receiving end isn’t well-known, or no journalist picks up the story, or the cancellation is more subtle: the offer never extended, the assignment that doesn’t come through.
​

more at the link

 

20/20 called they want their talking points back.

My god, you are starved for attention, running out these stale issues.

Are there no current Republican talking points?

No CRT?

 

People have been boycotting and complaining about things forever.

Rock and Roll music in the 50s.....was of the devil....lol.

There is nothing new other than a slogan for stupid people to be able to say over and over again.

DD

 

The right will never have the moral ground on this issue until they own up to their own cancel culture activism

 

I would say this is notable, given that it's an article in The Nation. The author was also (to her credit, IMO) one of the signers of that Harper's Letter that annoyed many progressives, so her stance here looks to be admirably consistent.

 

jig doesn't care about any of that, he's just trying to score points in his ongoing beef with O's

 

That's well and good I am glad you enjoyed the article, but it does not change the fact this is rehashing old **** that really has no bearing in 2022.

People have seemed to self correct, thank god.

That letter was almost 2 years ago, maybe it was the tipping point.

What about the article is notable to you?

 

How do you fix it though? People on the left and the right are losing their jobs (more on the left I'd say) because of this stupid nonsense where organizations are hypersensitive to any kind of potential controversy. This isn't new, it's just that with social media, it's much easier to blow something up than say 20 years ago.

What's the solution?

 

LOL you think I have beef with you?

I just like calling out your BS and how pathetic your life must be for you to spend so much energy spamming this board.

 

What I found particularly notable was less the content, and just the fact that the headline is so straightforwardly affirming the concept of "cancel culture" in a very left-wing publication.

 

Like I said I am glad you found the article to your likeness, but that does not make the article very relevant IMO.

The fact that this sentence leads of the article shows that they have a specific agenda, and nobody who actually matters thinks cancel culture never existed or never cost somebody their job.

Those who argue that cancel culture is a myth claim that no one has really been injured by it. A few people might lose their jobs, but they get new ones.

Who is she talking about and how is that currently relevant?

I have been decrying cancel culture since it was actually a thing and most here did the same thing, I don't understand why you think this article is turning over new ground.

 

I don't have a good answer for you here, although @jiggyfly tells me there's nothing to see here, to move on, and so I take solace in his wise counsel and soldier on

 

I think what you often find on the left is a combination of denying that cancel culture exists and rationalizing cancel culture as a positive thing. This Vox article is typical of the latter, where the closing paragraph frames cancel culture as an "important tool" for civil rights activists.

 

Thread starter hasn't posted in half a year. Hope he's alright.

 

I agree that this kind of cancel culture - where you cost people their jobs for saying something politically incorrect but not malicious in anyway - is getting worse and worse.

The left does it, and the right engages in it too. Someone says something they don't like and people jump all over and demand they get fired.

 

How does this article represent all of the "left".

Media catering to the loudest and the people who need to aggravated about something all the time, color me shocked.

Why are you using this particular article to make a point?

Here is a article from the same magazine saying cancel culture is harmful.

Here is Obama saying how bad cancel culture is.



Here is Trevor Noah




That's a wide swatch of the "left"

I can show you other left leaning people and publications, it seems you have not actually looked for the dissenting opinions on cancel culture from the left.

 

If you're including Obama, you have a much broader view of "the left" than what I was considering, true.