Lying Away Cancel Culture

[K Graham]

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.

I'm not sure how you could read my response as an attempt to stoke aggression from you, but that certainly wasn't my intent. I think we genuinely have different ideas of what constitutes cancel culture.

You have also reduced any expression of choice or preference into "cancel culture" and thus endeavored to make the term meaningless.

Or maybe, just maybe, that was how I understood the phrase to mean? I'm not trying to reduce or make anything meaningless. I get the sense that we're just talking past one another because we begin from different assumptions.

[Res Ipsa]

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.

I''m not interested in who is "guilty" or sorting people into "haters" and "woke." I am interested in perspective and context. And, in my opinion, just as with the issue of teaching "critical race theory" to school children has been vastly overhyped, so has "cancel culture" been overhyped by treating it as some new woke leftist threat when it affects well off celebrities and academics, rather than recognize it as behavior that has always existed, but targeted at the less well off.

[Kishkumen]

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?

Maybe zebras can change their stripes. Having watched you for years, my impression is that you enjoy a good fistacuffs with your online opponents. I think how you might treat your family or show yourself to your potential clients online might be a different case, but if you say you don't enjoy conflict, I am not going to call you a liar.

Yes, I often make the same choice to avoid conflict. Sometimes I don't. I consider it a kind of art to find the right way to bring things up such that people reconsider the wisdom of what they are doing. Sometimes they make me reconsider the wisdom of what I am doing. Hopefully we all learn and are better people for the interactions.

[Res Ipsa]

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.

Not at all. I'm talking about the societal reaction, not you individually.

[Kishkumen]

I'm not sure how you could read my response as an attempt to stoke aggression from you, but that certainly wasn't my intent.

I didn't. I am basing my impression on having observed you enjoying a good verbal smackdown for the past how many years now?

I think we genuinely have different ideas of what constitutes cancel culture.

Evidently.

Or maybe, just maybe, that was how I understood the phrase to mean? I'm not trying to reduce or make anything meaningless. I get the sense that we're just talking past one another because we begin from different assumptions.

Yes, and I hope you can now see that your version of cancel culture makes no sense to me. Mere consumer preference is not, in my view, cancel culture.

[Kishkumen]

I''m not interested in who is "guilty" or sorting people into "haters" and "woke." I am interested in perspective and context. And, in my opinion, just as with the issue of teaching "critical race theory" to school children has been vastly overhyped, so has "cancel culture" been overhyped by treating it as some new woke leftist threat when it affects well off celebrities and academics, rather than recognize it as behavior that has always existed, but targeted at the less well off.

I didn't figure you actually were. What I am looking at here is the way the issue is being framed in our imperfect online discussion format. I think some of the mechanisms you are using here tend to be offered as litmus tests to identify whether people are really on the right side of an issue or not.

Yes, critical race theory has been overhyped. In the first place, I think it is a fascinating subject. It was hyped long before it was discussed intelligently. I should hope that anyone who wants to engage in an honest examination of American history will understand that race is an indispensable part of the discussion. At the same time, I think there are some well-meaning teachers who engage in methodologically questionable exercises when dealing with the issue of race in the classroom. We can say that those who take exception to their methods are just racists or Trump-voters, and that may often be true, but I think there is still a huge discussion to be had on how most effectively to teach the issue of race in the classroom. My guess is that the conversation will take a very long time to develop because too many people are eager to make hay out of the controversy.

On the other hand, I will quibble with your words about "well off celebrities and academics." Celebrities and academics are convenient targets and surrogates for the real problem people: oligarchs. Let's talk about the oligarchs who own MSNBC and Fox. Let's ask why they are punching at various celebrities and academics while remaining in the shadows, only popping out to take vanity rides into space on occasion, or some such. To be clear, my doubtlessly risky opinion is that these are the people who are choosing candidates, funding the two major parties, and yanking celebrities and academics this way and that as it pleases them. What happened to block Mike Quinn at Arizona is exactly what we should be talking about. We don't because we are provided much more convenient targets. Celebrities, academics, the poor, "others," and each other.

Terry Gilliam is one of those convenient targets. He really isn't a person of much consequence in the big scheme of things.

[Kishkumen]

Not at all. I'm talking about the societal reaction, not you individually.

The societal reaction is split. And I guess that is what you mean to say. And what I mean to say is that perhaps it should not be so split after all. If publicly boycotting small businesses is not really productive--maybe I am wrong about that--then perhaps the cost in creating mutual alienation is too high to pay. If we are incapable of working together politically because the pope in France and the pope in Italy have excommunicated each other, then we may no longer have a shared country to worry about.

[K Graham]

I didn't. I am basing my impression on having observed you enjoying a good verbal smackdown for the past how many years now?

So.... your perception of me always itching for a fight doesn't really explain why you brought it up in the first place, unless you thought I was trying to fight. I'm not. You obviously think less of me than I would have ever imagined, and I'm sorry for whatever I did to deserve that. Honestly, I cannot remember you and I ever getting into a heated argument except for the days when I was defending the GOP during Obama's first Presidential campaign. I was defending Sarah Palin against criticisms from you and others like Brent Metcalfe. But from my recollection you were just as aggressive in those debates as anyone else, but I'd never label you as a someone who enjoyed conflict.

[Kishkumen]

So.... your perception of me always itching for a fight doesn't really explain why you brought it up in the first place, unless you thought I was trying to fight. I'm not. You obviously think less of me than I would have ever imagined, and I'm sorry for whatever I did to deserve that. Honestly, I cannot remember you and I ever getting into a heated argument except for the days when I was defending the GOP during Obama's first Presidential campaign. I was defending Sarah Palin against criticisms from you and others like Brent Metcalfe. But from my recollection you were just as aggressive in those debates as anyone else, but I'd never label you as a someone who enjoyed conflict.

I didn't view you as trying to pick a fight with me in the moment. I saw it a natural thing for you to be comfortable with division and conflict, perhaps more so than I am, and thus defend stoking conflict as inevitable and not anything to be too worked up about.

Would you say that we are kind of different in our personalities on that point? Maybe less so than I think, but I do think we are.

[Some Schmo]

I guess I'm in the "we just got a new name for something that's been happening forever" camp. As I've said here before, I'm tired of hearing about it because it's something that's really only a concern for famous people (and I usually only hear about it from famous people). The word "cancel" is a showbiz word (as in, my show got cancelled). If anybody else "F"s up, they aren't cancelled, they're fired.

I agree that there are a ton of overly sensitive people in the world, and that we are in a place culturally where we spend way too much concern for people being "offended." I have no idea what to do about that, although I will say that the rebel in me will sometimes say things knowing full well it isn't PC, because “F” it. People need to grow up and own their reactions to the things they hear/read.

Here's what I've noticed, and I'll repeat it here again: people don't generally get "cancelled" if they own their mistake. If you “F” up and blame someone/something else, you'll likely get the full reaction to your mistake.