The above, TL;DR, is a Christian writer weighing in on an open-letter that was signed by some 200 writers condemning the 'woke mob' that comes for those who do wrong-think. In the case of JK Rowling, it is her firm belief that "Trans-women are not real women." In the case of, for example, Matt Yglesias, it was probably because he got continually dragged by Bernie-Bros after he tried to sidle up to Bernie as a candidate and wasn't nearly pure enough.
The allegations in the above are:
- When someone goes against the overton window of current morality, those will large voices will try to silence them
- In the past, those with differing opinions would be heard out--or felt entitled to hold differing view points.
- These different opinions are not shouted down with facts and argument--just silencing ( such as a boycott of their books)
- In some cases the canceling tries to get them kicked out of certain schools or to lose their jobs.
- This is similar to what was done to Jesus using the honor-shame mindset of the East 2000 years ago.
What Does The Omnivore Think?
This is bullshit. The objection to 'Cancel Culture' is bullshit. Sorry.
Buyuwhatt? J.K. Rowling Got THREATS. Kyle Kuschev lost a Harvard Scholarship For Some Tweets! He's Totally Right, Omnivore!
And Richard Spencer (1488 Nazi) got punched and Kaepernick got black listed (and won 10mm in a collusion lawsuit) for kneeling. Yeah, brah, The Omnivore knows.
Oh, Straight To Nazis, I See, Left-Tard. You Didn't Address My Points
Because you didn't make any. Let The Omnivore jump to The Endgame here: You see Cancel Culture in the crowd speaking out against speech you happen to agree with or against people you happen to like for doing things you think aren't that bad.
When someone loses a job for "disrespecting the flag" you're like "HE DISRESPECTED THE FLAG! OF COURSE HE'S TOXIC!"
When a billionaire woman gets "threats" (yeah, right) for saying things that align with your views on transgender people, you are outraged--but when someone you have tribal identification with does it, you don't care or ignore it.
What "Cancel Culture" in this context, really means is "the loud-edge of popular culture weighing against me." You don't think Kaepernick was canceled because the majority of pop-culture was uneasy about him taking a knee instead of standing for the pledge.
You out-size what has been done to Rowling--whose books are literally banned in many religious households and institutions--because what she says about transgenders--where you see the tip-of-the-spear of the culture war agree with you.
But when Milo Yiannopoulos gets de-platformed after The Reagan Battalion (yes, hard core conservatives) come out with his weak cultural musing on gay-male pedophilia, you're silent. Your heart doesn't bleed for Milo (and, very well: it should not)--but you've launched nuanced defenses of Steve King's out and out racism so you could very well mount one for Milo if you cared to.
Again: Cancel Culture as you think of it Does. Not. Exist.
Whoa, You Said a LOT There. Let's Do This One At A Time.
Yes. We definitely should.
Do You Know About James Damore? He Was A Google Engineer Who Published Feedback To One Of Your Woke Soc-Justice Courses And Lost His Job For Making Factual Statements About Men And Women
Yeah. The Omnivore knows all. The Omnivore watched his right-wing YouTube circuit appearances.
Well? Wasn't HE Canceled? What He Said Was VERY Factual
Imagine this: "In the 1950's a man in a theater sees another person light up a cigarette while the trailers are running and, hating his fellow movie goers, shouts 'FIRE' to create a panic and stampede." In court, he says he was being completely factual--there was a fire--in that very theater.
Do you think that would be a defense? Of course not.
It turns out that saying things that are disruptive to a company you work for--that will cause strife in the workplace--and legal vulnerability (Google was litigating a diversity suit at the time) can. get. you. fired. Even if they are, in some way, "technically true."
Damore submitted his thesis to the group that gave the diversity lecture and, when they didn't say anything to him, he published it where his fellow employees could see it. The Omnivore's friends at Google say this was entirely in keeping with his character . . . which is in no way a compliment.
Do You Think Kyle Kuschev Should Have Lost His Scholarship For Some Stuff On School Chat from Years Ago?
Harvard can set whatever standard they want--but giving his slot to someone who didn't spew a bunch of racist shit in a chat room and then, wonder of wonders, go on to have a Conservative Speaking Career seems okay to The Omnivore. Wait, The Omnivore has just been handed a paper stating that yet again, Carlson Tucker has had to get rid of another out-and-out racist white supremacists from his writers team. Huh. Are you shocked? The Omnivore is shocked, he tells you.
So You Don't Believe In Woke Mobs?
Until 1967 The Omnivore's marriage was fucking illegal (interracial). Tell The Omnivore about the time in which people were able to politely hold different opinions on things like this--race-mixing--and 'the other side' would have a nice, fact-based argument (about defiling the pure white blood).
When was this exactly? When could you advocate for integration of gays in the military and be met with "facts and logic" from the other side? What was the date on this the guy at the top was referencing?
So You Think Someone Should Be Able To Lose Their Job For Thinking Marriage Is Between One Man and One Woman? Seriously?
How do you feel about 'Right to Work' legislation?
What? Answer The Question.
For decades the political right has fought for legislation that made it legal to fire anyone for any reason. Only certain protected classes were exempt from that due to other legislation. They called these bills, hilariously, "Right to Work" bills.
So now that it is conceivable--not likely--but conceivable--that speech you might want to engage in could get you fired, suddenly you think maybe there should be some protections? My dude, you just spent decades tearing them down. Maybe a union or something could stand up for the trad-marriage guys or something? You think?
What If It's Speech Off The Job? Even Then You Think They Should Lose Their Job?
What part of "For ANY Reason" do you not understand? That's the bill your tribal-allies put together. If you want to start making some workplace protections all of a sudden, welcome to The Woke.
NOTE: The paper-person in BOLD does NOT represent the Facebook poster for whom The Omnivore has great respect. It DOES stand in for the NUMEROUS people The Omnivore has seen defending this case online. The paper person's pronouns are he/attack-helicopter.
A few points about this:
ReplyDeleteA minor nitpick: it makes more sense to say “outside the Overton window” than “going against the Overton window ”.
You have badly mischaracterized the Right to Work laws which, I agree, are very misleadingly named — but are actually about prohibitions on “closed shops” and compulsory union membership. I suspect you actually meant to refer to “at-will employment”, which is the law in at least 36 states + D.C., last I checked. That more closely matches the situation you describe: in essence, employment contracts can be terminated by either party at any time for any or no reason, with exceptions varying by state except for violations of Federal antidiscrimination laws. Most states also have “public policy” or “whistleblower” exceptions on the books, and some also recognize “implicit contracts” in some cases, but even so, the burden of proof usually falls upon ex-employees in wrongful-termination lawsuits. And, of course, the large-to-enormous power imbalance in such actions produces a grossly tilted playing field, so to speak: few labor lawyers will even take on such cases without rock-solid proof of something egregiously illegal.
I mostly agree with your analysis of “cancel culture” in the broader sense: that the right-wing attacks on it are primarily a smokescreen for the same old ugly shit that most of us have been trying to shove out of the Overton window for a long time. It’s rather like the way that “All lives matter” is superficially a fine and noble sentiment, but the people using it as a sort of anti-BLM slogan clearly don’t mean it that way. That said, however: “cancel culture” writ small is definitely a thing, and the analogue of the Overton window in, say, corporate cultures can be very narrow indeed. What we’re seeing now is the perhaps-inevitable overreaction to decades and centuries of terrible injustice; at this point, the various “intolerance” labels are so politically radioactive that most organizations — with the obvious far-right exceptions I need not list here — will tie themselves in knots to avoid them. And this dynamic unquestionably does produce injustices in the other direction, though I cannot claim that they compare, either in number or in magnitude, with the blatant rottenness which engendered the backlash. But even so, the individual-level impact can be severe. If you’re stuck with an unethical or incompetent manager who looks like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, you might — might! — be able to get a fair hearing. But if said manager happens to be a member of a “protected class”, the deck is even more stacked against you. We all know this, and yet dare not speak of it except in private whispers.
I can agree with that original Facebook post only insofar as “reasoned debate” seems vastly preferable to this, and that, yes, the tough part of freedom of speech has always been when that belief gets tested by speech we don’t like or agree with. But though the specifics are okay up to a point, I agree that the overall thrust is not, and appears to be yet another in the wearying litany of rose-tinted callbacks to the “good old days” when people knew. Their. Roles and the Bible was all anyone needed...
Yeah, no thanks. We tried that and it sucked.
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Yeah--At-Will-Employment is what I was thinking of. Although to be fair, right-to-work got rid of unions which led to being able to fire anyone for any reason (or, well, helped get rid of unions, I guess).
DeleteReasoned debate is FAR preferable to ANY of this--but, yeah: we NEVER had that. We just had different kinds of silencing. And, YES, today the woke-mob or whatever CAN produce injustices--yes. Absolutely. We know that. We have SEEN it.
But there has always been injustice. I am not sure if there is more or less now, just that it is probably somewhat differently distributed. Note that 'Cancel Culture' expands to fill all potential uses such as SWATTING and bomb threats to kids not coming to Thanksgiving if Uncle Bob is going to be there spouting MAGA. It's just a label for "disapproval I don't approve of."
I suppose it’s true that we never had reasoned debate in general, but the level of vitriol on display these days does seem new. And that is even when we account for the way the vast reach of technology has exposed us for what we truly are, individually and collectively. Hard to be proud of what we’ve learned.
ReplyDeleteI’m unsure that the “cancel culture” label has blurred as much as you seem to suggest, though. My understanding was that it was primarily (originally?) applied to organized large-scale forms of suppression such as “de-platforming”, on which you’ve written extensively. Has it truly grown to encompass things like the preemptive removal of problematic relatives from family gatherings?
If so: yikes. “All politics is local”, indeed.
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One of the reasons cancel culture feels different today is that we seem to have developed a sharp intolerance (across the board) for dissenting views....and those who hold he dissenting views dig in twice as deep when confronted about them. I liken it to an experience I had this morning, when a neighbor pulled out onto the road and I noticed he had a "this is my peace symbol" bumper sticker with a crosshairs. My first thought was, "Well that's a neighbor we won't be getting to know. Does he realize what a jackass that sticker makes him?" but after a bit I realized I had seen that sticker on other cars a long time ago, and it occured to me that 25-30 years ago I would have laughed and blown it off as a gun owner being amusingly offensive....but today's culture has conditioned me without realizing it to assume that the bumper sticker is a tacit symbol of the person being intrinsically horrible and unredeemable without any further evidence. And the irony is, he might indeed be offensive, probably as a reaction to being attacked and causing him to double down on something that I am sure he doesn't inherently have a real stake in, outside of mere posturing.
ReplyDeleteA random anecdote, but it was spurred by your post so thought I'd share.
While I think the sentiment is good, the rise and election of Donald Trump--and the party falling in line behind them--and buckets of American blood on their hands--shows that, indeed, they are who we feared they are.
DeleteAddressing this to the right feels odd to me given that the signatories to the letter were predominantly of the centre-left and included an explicit swipe at Trump. One of those whose stuff I read, Yascha Mounk, happens to be pushing a new platform/publication/whatever and when I clicked over to have a look pretty much the first article was an argument against at-will employment. This really seems like a misdirected critique.
ReplyDeleteI can assure you that "cancel culture" is what the left does. When the right does it, it's something else--something saintly and justified. Sure, there's plenty of left-wing voices who get shut up (everyone legally protesting who got teargassed by a cop)--but "Cancel Culture" by name is what the right calls it when the left objects to their feels about gender or whatever.
ReplyDelete