Acceptable? I would never try to boycott them or anyone based on what charities their executives support. But it’s not nearly as odious as trying to get a specific person fired for a view they hold. Like if boycotting the Montgomery transit system is a 0 and getting the Washington Post to write a 3000 word expose on the dumb Halloween blackface costume some idiot wore two years ago (resulting in her firing) is a 10 I’d put it at like a 2 on the problematic boycott scale.
Literally nobody on earth is saying that. I’m not being hyperbolic by saying literally nobody.
Nobody is arguing people can’t disagree or call out bad ideas. We are saying the how matters.
I am saying the “how matters” is a form of censorship and a blatant attempt to stop free speech. I’m not being hyperbolic. This is the literal intent of the overwhelming majority of people using the phrase “Cancel Culture”.
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This is obviously nonsense. If you don’t like the NYT any more or find it valuable, don’t buy it. Obviously. If the Times realizes that some of their columnists have been putting out garbage columns for three straight decades, of course they can and should fire them. Both of those things are different from trying to actively get someone fired for expressing a particular political view.
“Cancel culture” is merely an application of the tools for enforcing social norms.
You are legally allowed to buy the New York Times. You’re just not be able to buy it while avoiding the label of deviance.
I honestly can’t tell if the whole NYT thing is some joke on the term cancel.
So once again, you decide when is the appropriate time to organize a readers boycott (and in essence fire workers, that what boycotting does). It’s not the mechanism you’re against, is your personal approval of the situation.
The whole ‘how matters’ is exactly the same of “why are you complaining now/like this” of the anti #metoo movement (the most obvious ‘cancel culture’ movement we have witnessed in the Twitter-era).
No, I’m against organizing reader’s boycotts and calling for someone’s firing for expressing a particular view. I would never participate in that because it is censorious and ultimately harmful.
what do you mean, you just said it’s okay to fire a person if he expresses a particular view point over a span of time. You specified 3 decades, but i imagine that is not set in stone. So again, the practice isn’t in question, it’s a matter of you deciding the correct amount of time.
This is just absurd. It’s total false equivalence.
It’s OK to fire someone for being a bad columnist. Like it’s OK to fire Tom Friedman because he sucks at writing and writes incredibly dumb columns. It’s not OK to fire Tom Friedman for expressing a controversial view.
Oh, okay then. Well argued. The extreme center strikes again.
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exactly. Centrist brain genius Clovis accepts the right wing framing because he has more common cause with the right wingers moaning about cancel culture than he does the actually marginalized people who suffer at the hands of the far-right who will use any and all tools at their disposal in bad faith, including cancel culture, to silence dissent and keep the marginalized in fear.
The phrase “particular view” is doing so much work here you could call it James Brown.
The NYT’s editor resigned because he approached a sitting senator for a column about why the U.S. should use military force on protesters. Should an open and free society “debate” whether or not certain human lives have worth? Should the nation’s leading newspaper be providing space to advocate for martial law and the stripping of basic constitutional rights from people who want the government to stop murdering them?
(And if you want to talk about how the NYT is supposed to be a bastion for Open Debate and the Free Expression of Ideas, where are the editorials by Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists? Why does their editorial page only hire thin-skinned cryptofash failchildren like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens-- so thin-skinned that everyone else at the NYT knows, especially the Black writers, that there are unspoken rules against criticizing them openly?)
Is Nazism a “particular view” that it’s unfair to “cancel” someone for? Should we allow the debate of whether certain human beings should be exterminated in a free society?
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Ok I’ll take my own advice and assume you are being genuine.
Is it your claim that concern about how someone like contrapoints was attacked online by a mountain of vicious hate is the same as people who pretend sexual harassment and assault are fake?
Nailed it. I’m all for oppression of marginalized people. It’s all I think about. I spend hours a day working on it.
You know me so well. Thanks for your good faith contribution to the discussion.
Ok, I’ll take your own advice and assume you are being genuine with your question.
I’m saying that arguing ‘how matters’ is a terrible awful idea that I only believe you are genuine about it due to numerous times you took this obviously wrong approach.
It’s the “why” that matters.
“how matters” is the argument used by people who pretend sexual harassment and assault are fake (and clovis8).
Not really. South Africa was not cancelled, they were boycotted. You’re making up the definition of the word more than people who say it’s just being mean and online bullying.
At the end of the day, there’s a perception that we live in a diseased culture enforced by archaic social norms. Cancel culture (or call-out culture or whatever you want to call it) is a cudgel that can be used to tear down structural bigotry. And, sure, some people might be dinged unfairly along the way, but that’s just collateral damage.
I would argue that you can’t effectively fight against people who pretend that sexual harassment and and assault are fake without enabling the possibility that people like contrapoints get swept up along the way. As a society, we lack the surgical precision to differentiate that well. We will make mistakes. The question is whether we want to err on the side of being too cautious or being too reckless. In matters where we are in dire need of societal change, I am in favor of going a bit too far. If that means some non-Confederate statues get toppled, then so be it.
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I’ll bite, what is your definition? (aka - the right one, of course)