I’m not being sarcastic and I’m basically asking everyone but you. Not that I’m excluding you, I’m just asking the people who say “lol cancel culture, only right wing hypocrites say that”.
“So was Contrapoints cancelled?”
Ok. Have you watched the Yoootooob?
She talks about it for over an hour and it’s all good. If you don’t watch her that’s your loss. No, I’m not going to do a 30 word summary of it. If you think yoootooob necessarily means bad, that’s wrong. But, maybe you’re boycotting YouTube generally.
Chomsky replied to a couple of emails regarding the subject
https://twitter.com/ud880/status/1282311000285315075?s=21
https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1282406840127623168?s=21
Not really. The point partly has to do with the emotional impact and that would not get through. And Contrapoints does a lot of production. It’s not just like reading an essay.
I didn’t ask you specifically. If you don’t want to watch it, shrug.
I’ll do a summary for you but second micros point that she is highly worth watching. She is not really “political yoootooobes”. She is a transwoman with an advanced degree in philosophy. She is brilliant and makes the best social cause videos I’ve ever seen.
Her “cancelling” was due to her making a video and having a trans man named buck angle do a voice over for a few minutes. Angle has some questionable views on trans people. For this, contrapoints was widely attacked my the social justice and trans community. Hundreds of attacks videos and thousands of posts were created calling her out and all kinds of names.
As a trans women, who makes her living online, this is her community and how she feels safe as a minority. This episode was very harmful to her emotionally leading her to stop working for a period, drink too much, and suffer depression and even thoughts of suicide.
Ok. Pretty good summary, but there’s a lot more in the video about the topic.
Is that a cancel thing or people being mean thing?
I think that’s the point really, some people are saying a bunch of people being mean is cancelling. Others are saying it’s not cancelling if you are still able to speak and have some audience.
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I think this is where my concern comes.
It’s not just people being mean. It’s people being far meaner than they use to be, in my opinion. Over the past decade, debate has far too often completely abandoned any attempt at cross understanding. It goes from 1 to 10 so fast. People are either allies or pure evil. Good or bad. All nuance is gone.
Contrapoints could have been engaged with thoughtful dialogue about Angle. If anyone understands the nuance of being trans it’s her. I followed the whole thing real time. There was maybe 5% of this. 95% was vitriol, name calling, exaggeration, saying she was not better than anti-trans bigots etc. This happens too much.
We need to all try to assume the best of people when it’s warranted. So often it seems all our default is to assume the worst of everyone. Even people we are closely aligned with.
It really can be boiled down to we all need to be nicer.
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This is where your worldview radically differs from mine.
Well I think the university ethos right now is a decent example of this same phenomenon in the real world.
I have several friends working in academia and I hear many stories of students simply refusing to engage certain topics or ideas if they come from someone they deem canceled or if exposure is uncomfortable to them. Not only wont they engage these ideas they complain to the university and try to harm the prof.
A friend was teaching the history of archaeological theory last year and had to defend teaching about phrenology, something that was a huge part of 19th century archaeological theory. It’s just absurd.
Inb4 someone claims I’m defending Nazis speaking on campus.
Are those students successful in their attempts?
We are back to definitions again. I conceded already if the definition is “ended their career and social standing forever” nobody is cancelled. The point is there is a lot of harm someone can experience before that point.
I’m not interested in providing people with a life ensconced in bubble wrap.
Students are more emboldened to have minds of their own these days. Sometimes they are going to be wrong. This is related to people being more comfortable in expressing religious views outside of mainstream organized religion, to people being more comfortable in expressing sexuality and having relationships outside of traditional norms.
This is a natural consequence of people being more willing to question authority. I don’t think necessarily good or bad.
Bari signing that letter is obviously lol. I don’t know why Bari or Rowling signed the letter, but for someone like Chomsky it would be from a position of genuine advocacy for free speech and understanding how censorship works. And a big way censorship works is just getting people to “voluntarily” just not express certain viewpoints. And you do that by having campaigns to fire people, boycott, etc on the one hand if they say certain things and then rewards for saying other things. And that’s why people like Taibbi and Chomsky have refused to call for people to be fired or try to organize boycotts of news organizations if they have someone who expresses views they find abhorrent. They will of course criticize that person and their viewpoint, but not try to get him fired or pressure the outlet to not express that viewpoint. They’ll try to win the argument.
That is a good way to summarize my worldview succinctly. Try to win the argument, not end it.
Trying to win the argument might be an out-dated tactic in a post-truth environment.