huh? you think the ‘things that didn’t happen’ part was people who are assholes got away with being assholes in the world?
then i guess i don’t know what you’re talking about.
So on a mechanical level I think what’s actually happening is the death of privacy. As time goes on there is less and less of ourselves we are able to conceal from the internet and our public selves are more and more matching our actual selves.
So what does that mean? Well it means that the bullshit we’ve been feeding ourselves collectively for generations that we have to be perfect has to go. None of us are perfect. We need to learn how to get criticized for doing/saying something fucked up, absorb that information, and then make it right publicly.
In 2070 how many politicians won’t have nude pictures of themselves floating around on the interwebs? How many will have videos of them having sex floating around? How many will have said something stupid when they were young? My guess is it’s going to be close to all of them, because people aren’t perfect.
I think the public record of our failings will be tremendously liberating. Imagine being Lindsay Graham in 2020. I hate the guy as much as any of you, and absolutely LOVED him getting outed because he’s my enemy in what I perceive to be a total political war (another coincidence for my ‘maybe there is a god’ bucket), but just imagine having something as central to who you are as your sexuality have to be a secret.
The LGBTQ people actually showed the rest of us the way on this. We collectively need to let our freak flags fly, and figure out how to become a hell of a lot more tolerant of people ASAP. The faux pas will almost certainly be being anything but tolerant of whatever weird shit people are into in the future. That’s the trend currently, and I think this one will probably still be running after I’m dead.
And yes you’ll be expected to be interested enough in the people you’re talking to to ask yourself if what you’re saying is super super super rude, even if you’re a part of the dominant culture. Jesus Christ this is why we have to start teaching real history. There’s just no way to navigate this with propagandized history classes.
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edit - my post came out more aggressive than I intended.
I have issues with people criticizing a very important advance in society (responsibility for actions that were previously unaccounted for) and attempting to (ta-dam) “cancel” them due to either “slippery slope” arguments (i.e., things that never happened but I decided might happen therefore I am upset about them) or “hypocrisy” arguments.
Your Joey Reid example was weird, as I think everyone figured that you think of her as someone who got ‘canceled’ for the backlash she received. That’s because any sort of consequences, no matter how minor, are perceived as ‘canceled’ by people who use that term unironically.
Isn’t this an argument to put an end to cancel culture?
If people are no longer afraid of being canceled, then they’ll be more honest about their pasts. Otherwise, fear of the angry mob will induce people to try to hide the truth. Maybe everyone here is a saint but out in the real world, human nature is to CYA.
Sure. There’s a lawsuit here and there, but they’re not as litigious as the Church of Scientology. There’s also a tremendous amount of pressure from the hierarchy to keep sexual abuse of minors quiet. If pressure doesn’t work, there’s hush money. There’s also a lot of pressure exerted on those who’ve left the faith (Jack Mormons.) The families of Jack Mormons sometimes completely excommunicate at the behest of church leaders.
No, Joy Reid is an example of someone who didn’t get canceled, for some reason, thus illustrating the capriciousness of the mob. DeSean Jackson might be another, more recent example.
This seems wildly inaccurate to me. No one was running around volunteering to air their dirty laundry before cancel culture, whatever that even means because I’m not sure when out of control cancel culture is alleged to have started.
But you appear to be saying they should “be cancelled” (this is a joke, everytime you say ‘canceled’ i literally cringe). So how the hell did your argument here become ‘we should stop confronting people with their actions because Joy Reid has a show’?
No. Because nobody is actually getting cancelled… they are just having their time in the punishment barrel for doing something dumb… Unless it was really really reprehensible.
The step that people need to master for this to work is taking criticism, internalizing it, and then making it right. If you do those things your cancellation could be fixed extremely quickly.
People at the very top are not supposed to be stable and they are not victims. They occupy the most valuable (financially an in terms of prestige) real estate in our society and have no right to it. That just reeks of the poisonous entitlement that has wrecked our whole country. If you get paid millions of dollars a year to be popular you should probably have pretty great social skills and be able to understand all of this on a first principles level. If you don’t you might be replaced by someone who is as good as you at everything else AND can do that. That’s meritocracy in action, and almost nowhere does that matter as much as at the top.
And let me be super clear the antidote to this is to strive to understand things in a real first principles way… and then act as if those things are true. It’s very hard to get in trouble for being a racist when you’re a real anti racist.
How did you think racism was going to end? It ends when it becomes so socially unacceptable and unpleasant that people stop teaching it to their kids and start going out of their way to leave no doubt about where they stand.
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Do you have any examples of people that were “cancelled” by the “online mob” who you think shouldn’t have?
This keeps coming up and I think thats why I’m so disbelieving of the risk of cancel culture. Like, yes I can see the risk in the abstract but I the actual context of what is happening in the world and who is complaining about this stuff I mostly see conservative leaning people insisting that this is a massive risk and is totally out of control but there’s no evidence. This feels like a Republican fear phantom to rally their base against an imaginary threat.
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Yeah this is very definitely not 1/100 as bad as the blacklist during the red scare for instance… although I gotta be honest being racist in 2025 might be really really risky career wise.
more than that imo, the metoo movement and the BLM support online are direct results of the ‘culture’ that these people are fighting against.
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I am not communicating well today, it’s apparent. I said repeatedly that blatant racism and sexism and IMHO homophobia and anti-semitism deserve to be called out and consequences meted.
Maybe my real issue is that there’s no rhyme nor reason to who actually gets called out for these things, or what merits calling out in the first place. Perhaps I’m feeling a bit stung today by the DeSean Jackson debacle(this one is especially enraging to me, tbh).
Maybe those death threat letters 22 years ago affected me a lot more than I ever thought, leading to me now wondering if my past mistakes would be cause for my public cancellation, thus not wanting to ever put myself through that.
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I can assure you DeSean Jackson thinks he got cancelled.
You can have college photos of yourself in blackface and stay in office, I think you’d need to have pulled some pretty extreme college hijinks to be disqualified from running from office.
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Agree with Yuv and i will say similarly that “cancel culture” signals, virtue signals if you wanna say or whatever, but shows those groups, women/minorities/trans etc that society as a whole does not agree with these views or at the very least they are being challenged and that there is a large and vocal segement of the public that believes they are and wants them to be a valuable part of society.
Agree with others that no one really gets cancelled. It also makes me think of the sexual assault allegations and Kavanaugh in particular. There was huge rage from the right that Kav’s life was literally being ruined by the accusations. They weren’t ruined in the end and even if he had not been confirmed, his life still wouldn’t have been ruined. People are basically saying we shouldn’t publically shame these fucks when public shame is literally all we have to curb the behavior, they’re still going to be rich and powerful for the most part even after the “cancelling”. Not speaking up and “cancelling” them says to me that society doesn’t really give a shit about those comments and as a society trying to move towards equality, thats not something we should let go.
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Me.
2 years ago, I was arguing sports online with a trans women who had recently transitioned. She was still using a masculine name. I made a mistake and referred to her several times as “he” and used her former name. We also dislike each other for sports reasons.
She still goes around telling people I intentionally misgendered her and thus committed an act of transphobia. This got me blocked and shamed by someone else two weeks ago. I wasn’t able to offer a defense due to the block.
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Christine Bailey Ford sure got ‘cancelled’. That’s why this whole debate is completely fake and I really hate that skydiver8 got mixed up in this false narrative. I want to go back to making fun of her for liking Echo and the Bunnymen, as god intended.
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