Rowling, Gladwell, Atwood, others warn of ‘restriction of debate’ and ‘a vogue for public shaming’ amid justice movements | The Star - "Dozens of prominent writers — from J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood to Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Ignatieff — have signed an open letter that argues social movements pushing to advance justice and equality should be careful not to let freedom go down the drain in the process.The letter, which appeared on the Harper’s Magazine website Tuesday, starts by expressing support for movements such as Black Lives Matter for attempting to advance equality and inclusion while pushing back against what the letter calls “illiberal” forces on the political right, which have “a strong ally in Donald Trump.”... The letter goes on to promote open debate — even of the fiery and controversial variety. The writers argue that censorship has appeared in the U.S. in the form of editors resigning for publishing controversial opinions, which happened in the case of James Bennet, former New York Times opinion editor last month... Early criticisms of the letter on social media pointed out that most of the signatories have prominent platforms and would rarely — if ever — face censorship themselves... The letter was signed by 153 writers and publishing professionals"
To think that not too long ago the left loved Atwood. But today she is one of those who believes in the "myth" of cancel culture and doesn't recognise that this is really just "accountability culture"
If you're going to say the Harper's letter is invalid because the signatories are and will be fine, then what do we make of virtue signallers who claim to care about the "oppression" of others? Can Obama be ignored when talking about racism because he has power?
When even writers are concerned about leftist overreach, it is telling. But then, the Revolution targets intellectuals after all, so those who continue to grievance monger are just setting themselves up for purging
So much for the bravery of the Harper's letter - "The contents were, as at least one signatory admitted, fairly anodyne... the organisers of the letter were clearly careful to signal that they were based in the dead-centre/centre-left of the political culture wars; its opening paragraph spoke of the “forces of illiberalism [that] are gaining strength” and which have, according to the letter, “a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy”.This latter offering probably made good political sense to the writers. After all, the last four years have increasingly seen ‘free speech’ being depicted as some kind of ‘alt-right’ issue. If you are in favour of free speech but would like to be seen as politically respectable then it is crucial that you clear your throat by denouncing the US President as an equal threat (at least) to the illiberal Left. Otherwise your peers may have too easy a time presenting you as yet another tiki-torch-wielding racist.The signatories of the letter were well chosen. There were plenty of women among their number; not all of the signatories were white. And there was even – rarest of all — a degree of political diversity among the signatories. As well as people like Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and J.K. Rowling — all figures identifiably of the political Left — the letter was also signed by David Frum, former speechwriter to George W Bush and ardent ‘never-Trump’-er.In a way this cut-off point only a millimeter to the Right of the political centre told its own story about the extent of political diversity. If you are to get a large group of Left-wingers to sign a letter, even a letter in support of a fundemantal liberal principle like free speech, one must be careful not to contaminate them by proximity to anyone further to the Right than David Frum. Alas even this cautious positioning did not entirely work... J.K. Rowling has come to be viewed by a certain type of activist as to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Donald Trump or Steve Bannon. So the Harry Potter creator affixing her signature to the Harper’s letter was already going to be a provocation too much for some sensitive souls, while the inclusion of even one solitary figure — Frum — from the centre-Right made the whole affair too toxic for others to bear. From the moment that the letter was published its critics were inadvertantly revealing why it needed to be written in the first place. Many asserted that cancel culture did not exist, that it was another example of the interminable ‘gas-lighting’ or ‘dog-whistle’ claims of an increasingly marching Right. Many of the activists making this claim were, of course, also arguing that signatories of the letter should be cancelled, for proximity to transphobia, among other thought-crimes. Vox’s Matt Yglesias was denounced by his own colleague because, of course, political opinions threaten safety; this, again, proved the point of the letter. Elsewhere, and perhaps even more enjoyably, there were those who objected to the idea that in a letter purporting to span the political divide there should be people on the list who, er, spanned the political divide. One of the signatories, a little-known author called Jennifer Finney Boylan, even issued an apology within hours of the letter’s publication. “I did not know who else had signed that letter,” she wrote: “I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.” It must be an awful thing to discover, that. You wake one morning believing that you have just signed the usual “well-meaning, if vague” letter alongside a genocide-denier and other reputable Left-wing authors, only to discover that a former speechwriter to a Republican president is on the same list of names as yours. What a lot of weight that must be to bear. Almost intolerable in its way.Of course, others did not even reach the great point of bravery achieved by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Some authors revealed that the letter had come across their desks but that they had given it a pass, among them someone called Kaitlyn Greenidge... In a way the reaction to the Harper’s letter neatly demonstrates the impossibility of the task it sought to achieve. A letter calling for unity across political divides showed up the great political problem of the era, which is not intolerance in the general, but the absolute unwillingness of the political Left to tolerate the political Right. In trying to be inclusive it was accused of including people accused of bigotry; in attempting to find a common cause for writers to unite around it was accused of providing cover for ‘white terrorism’. In attempting a ‘hang together’ ethic it found some of its number hanging apart within hours of lift-off. It is bad news, this. It suggests the difficulty of finding any ethic around which our societies might unite. For all the decency of their stand, the Harper’s organisers could not reach out in any real way. They dared not, for instance, reach out to any figures who are supportive of the current President of the United States, a figure who, while divisive, happens also to have been elected. Why were Roger Kimball, Conrad Black or Victor Davis Hanson not among the letter’s signatories, for example, if the aim was to show that liberal society offered a wide spectrum of debates that could be reasonably argued?And yet, even in a letter whose lines of delineation were chosen with exceptional, unrepresentative care, the wider, clamouring crowd could not be satisfied"
Why I Signed the Harper’s Letter - "In 1996, the late great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was on stage taking questions at the Lincoln Center in New York City after the premiere of his film Through the Olive Trees, when someone asked why he had used classical music (a piece from Concerto for Oboe and Strings by Domenico Cimarosa) in a movie that was set in a small village in northern Iran? Kiarostami turned to me, his translator for the hour, and said, in his soft voice and even softer manner, “Tell him classical music has long ceased to belong to the West. It belongs to the world now.”That exchange, the way Kiarostami disabused the audience of the notion that music knew borders or that great ideas, once invented, remained the “property” of one nation or region, was on my mind when I signed the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which ran in Harper’s Magazine last Tuesday. What I saw at the heart of the text was a defense of American democracy, which no longer belongs solely to America... The overwhelming majority of the “revolutions,” whose outbreaks glued us to our television screens in the past decade, failed: Egypt, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and Hong Kong… 1,200 protestors were killed on the streets of Iran in the span of two weeks last November. But that was not the injustice Iran’s supreme leader, foreign minister, or president tweeted and spoke about last month. Rather, it was George Floyd. Any day that America is shamed is a holiday for every tyrant anywhere. It is against the backdrop of this onslaught on democratic principles outside of the United States that any threat from within must be viewed. It is in this broader, precarious global moment that the barring of speakers from academic and scholarly venues takes on an alarming meaning. It is in this light that the firing of editors for running “non-factual” or “dangerous” opinions cannot be justified in the name of public safety, as if any autocrat who ever locked up a dissident did so in any other name. With America’s democracy under a ubiquitous siege, not least from inside its own White House, everyone must ask why publishers are suddenly worried that the readers of their opinion page cannot see through a politician’s truth-bending propaganda disguised as opinion—the kind that the Putins, the Zarifs, and other such distinguished thugs have been printing for many years... Vladimir Lenin is rumored to have said, “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.” He was right about Americans having no qualms about paving the way of their own demise for the right price. But if these navel-gazing critics are any indication, it will not be capitalism, which every authoritarian superpower has embraced, but liberalism, which they have not, that will be gasping for air in the noose."
Harper's Letter: Artists and Writers Warn of an 'Intolerant Climate.' - The New York Times - "on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories — who include cultural luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Bill T. Jones and Wynton Marsalis, along with journalists and academics — for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of “relevance.”“Okay, I did not sign THE LETTER when I was asked 9 days ago,” Richard Kim, the enterprise director of HuffPost, said on Twitter, “because I could see in 90 seconds that it was fatuous, self-important drivel that would only troll the people it allegedly was trying to reach — and I said as much.”... there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.Such incidents, Mr. Williams said, both fueled and echoed what he called the far greater and more dangerous “illiberalism” of President Trump." “Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” he said. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”... “We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter,” Mr. Williams, who is African-American, said. “It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.”“We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that,” he said. Signatories include the leftist Noam Chomsky and the neoconservative Francis Fukuyama. There are also figures associated with the traditional defense of free speech, including Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as some outspoken critics of political correctness on campuses, including the linguist Steven Pinker and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.The signers also include some figures who have lost positions amid controversies, including Ian Buruma, the former editor of the New York Review of Books, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor who left his position as faculty dean of an undergraduate residence amid protests over his legal defense of Harvey Weinstein. There are also some leading Black intellectuals, including the historian Nell Irvin Painter, the poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Gregory Pardlo, and the linguist John McWhorter. And there are a number of journalists, including several opinion columnists for The New York Times.Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of Columbia Journalism School, said that he rarely signs letters, but thought this one was important. “What concerns me is a sense that a lot of people out there seem to think open argument over everything is an unhealthy thing,” he said. “I’ve spent my whole life having vigorous arguments with people I disagree with, and don’t want to think we are moving out of this world.”The principle of open argument, he added, becomes especially important outside liberal-leaning enclaves, “where people don’t have the option of shutting down these supposedly completely unacceptable views.” Mr. Pardlo said that as somebody who has felt the “chilling effect” of being the only person of color in predominantly white institutions, he hoped the letter would spark conversation about those “chilling forces, no matter where they come from.”He said he was surprised by some of the blowback to the letter.“It seems some of the conversation has turned to who the signatories are more than the content of the letter”... as someone who had spent more than eight years in prison for a carjacking committed when he was a teenager, he was given pause by what he called the unforgiving nature of the current moment. “It’s antithetical to my notion of how we need to deal with problems in society,” he said... Mr. Williams said he was trying to think through how outrage over Mr. Floyd’s death had become so intertwined with calls for change “at organizations that don’t have much to do with the situation George Floyd found himself in.”But to him, he said, the cause of the letter is clear: “It’s a defense of people being able to speak and think freely without fear of punishment or retribution, of the right to disagree and not fear for your employment.”"
The left is so fanatical that even chanting Orange Man Bad and making the appropriate noises about George Floyd won't save you from even more extreme virtue signalling
Harper’s Magazine’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Letter Kicks Off Circular Firing Squad in Media - "“I did not know who else had signed that letter,” Boylan tweeted, after what must have been a very difficult day fielding criticism. “I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”Which prompted Tipping Point and Blink author Malcolm Gladwell—who also signed the letter—to retort: “I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter.”... the Tufts historian’s sisters—novelist and New York Times opinion writer Kaitlyn Greenidge and playwright Kirsten Greenidge—claimed that Kerri was blindsided by her inclusion among the bold-faced names at the bottom of the Harper’s letter.“A colleague in a professional org my sis belongs to added my sister's name without her consent,” Kaitlyn tweeted. “So mad at this person rn.” She added: “That @ Harpers letter came to me last week and I was so mad about it when I read it have been angry about it for days. My sister does not condone it either and does not agree with its contents. This is a mess.”Kirsten Greenidge, in an email reviewed by The Daily Beast, wrote to the magazine: “I suggest your editorial staff check on the veracity of the signers of the letter. Kerri Greenidge did not sign the letter, and only became aware of its existence when it came to her attention on Twitter.”Kerri Greenidge’s name appears as a copied recipient of her sister’s email, which carried the subject line “Cancel Culture Letter.”However, Greenidge’s sisters’ claims are contradicted by apparent communications between the Tufts academic and Harper’s in late June and early July—a series of emails also reviewed by The Daily Beast... Yglesias eventually backed off, writing: “I would like to de-escalate this. Nobody is losing their job and I think I’ve spoken my mind very clearly on this subject. I am just trying to move on to other things instead of endless rounds of twitter wrangling.”And Vox’s editor-in-chief Lauren Williams eventually stepped in to clear the air amid a perceived airing of grievances among her site’s co-founders: “In real life, I’m the EIC of Vox and the fucking boss. I don't tweet, so folks who don’t know or work with me seem to think a variety of other people wield that power.”This was, she wrote, “Proof that Twitter is not real life.”"
It is telling that Williams and Yglesias both left Vox a few months later
Is "Cancel Culture" a Myth? - "In a recent letter published in Harper’s Magazine, a group of one hundred fifty-three signatories including Malcom Gladwell, J.K. Rowling, and Gloria Steinem argue against a problem of “intolerance of opposing views” which they argue has led to a “stifling atmosphere.”Condemnation of the letter has been quick and widespread. And at the time of writing the first four articles on a Google search for the letter were arguments against its content.The argument against the letter all revolves around the same idea: This issue doesn’t really exist... Legal methods are far from the only way to restrict speech.Garry Kasparov, one of the signers of the Harper’s letter, ran a campaign to unseat Vladimir Putin as the president of Russia. In Russia to run for office, you must rent a hall that can hold five-hundred people. While Kasparov had the financial ability to do so, the owners of the halls were scared about what would happen if they rented to Kasparov and refused to give him a platform. He was forced to drop out.So while no one should suggest that the United States is suffering from Russian-style illiberalism, Kasparov’s experience demonstrates that legal restrictions are far from the only way to problematically reduce speech... the August 2019 incident of Bret Stephens. Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist, was called a “bedbug” by a George Washington University professor on Twitter.Rather than letting the issue drop, Stephens reached out to the professor to complain about the insult, while CC’ing the professor’s provost.In a column on the matter, Vox described Stephens going to “extreme lengths to make a stink.” The column goes on to describe Stephens’ later insistence that he wasn’t trying to get the professor fired as “implausibl[e].”... unsuccessful attempts at having someone fired are hardly a crisis. Perhaps more concerning are the many firings that have actually taken place. The National Book Critics Circle President and four other board members were recently forced out. Their offense? While helping craft a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, these board members pushed back on sentences they thought went too far. That private conversation was made public and they were soon forced to resign... while these calls to “cancel” public figures worked to a degree, they often don’t—which has led some to insist fears are overblown. But as Ross Douthat recently pointed out, the point of threatening public figures “is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth. So a climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets.”... David Shor, a political data analyst, shared a research study about the effects of riots in 1968 on voter turnout. The study, which was conducted by a black man from Kenya working at Princeton, found that riots depressed Democratic turnout near where they occurred. The conclusion of this study was deemed too racist to share, and after a furor on Twitter with many people targeting Shor’s employer, he was let go. Of course, these are only the examples from those who did speak out. What of the many who are scared to say nothing at all? This points to the larger problem of the many ideas and conversations we could be having but aren’t because those who would otherwise speak choose to remain silent rather than risk the kind of backlash these others have faced.Noam Chomsky was recently asked about the reaction to the Harper’s letter he signed. He wrote, “You’re seeing half of it. The other half is a stream of letters from left academics and activists relating their experiences, but not wanting to be identified because of the toxic culture. The nature and scale of the reaction reinforce the message of the letter.” As an editor, I can attest to the culture Chomsky refers to. I often communicate with potential authors about issues in the news. Not infrequently I will ask one with an interesting take on the issues to publish a piece, and they balk, explaining that they are worried about the repercussions sharing an even well-considered controversial opinion might have on their employment. Those who argue against the letter saying there is no issue, are either unaware of what is happening behind the closed doors of editorial newsrooms, or only focused on the celebrities who survive attempts to “cancel” them... If dissent is discouraged strongly enough then assent becomes meaningless. As Václav Havel points out in his stirring beacon to freedom of expression, “The Power of the Powerless,” if a grocer in Soviet Russia were to put up a sign “Workers of the World Unite,” no one would know whether the grocer really meant it. Similarly, when professors are pressured to put an LGBT+ ally sticker on their office door, as has been reported at US universities, can we believe that the professor really means it? Or would we believe they are merely trying to avoid professional repercussions?Because you can’t believe what someone is pressured into saying, limiting speech through this “cancel culture” has the effect of freezing the national dialogue... “Restrictions on speech have proven at best ineffective, and at worst counter-productive, in the fight against bigotry,” the ACLU has argued. Freezing the national dialogue can, once again, be tempting for those who want to preserve gains made towards important values, but it also necessarily prevents further progress. Imagine if we “ended the debate” by using threats on people’s livelihood to ensure that violations of the values of the day could not stand sixty years ago. Two-hundred years ago? Twenty years ago? What would today’s world look like? What advances not just in human rights, but also in art, technology, and science would not have been made? Would you be comfortable living in that world? Think of that uncle or pastor or professor that you think is irretrievably backward. Would you want them choosing what is and isn’t allowed in the marketplace of ideas?Then why would you wish that on your grandchildren? Many have dismissed the signatories of the Harper’s Letter because of their privilege. They have pointed out that J.K. Rowling and Malcom Gladwell are not going to lose their place in the culture by signing the letter. And that is certainly true. But that does not undermine the original concerns. They can speak; they have the power to use their voice, and that is precisely why it is important that they speak up for those who cannot—like Gillian Philip’s an author who was targeted online and fired because she merely agreed with Rowling.The signatories of this letter are not naive, sensitive reactionaries. They include Noam Chomsky who was arrested multiple times for anti-war demonstrations; Kian Tajbakhsh who was arrested multiple times, jailed for years, and held in solitary confinement for four months for promoting western democracy; Kamal Daoud, a journalist who was threatened with death on national TV for his religious views.And Salman Rushdie, who has been the victim of state censorship and a fatwa from the Ayatollah of Iran ordering him killed for his writing. Yet still, these signatories feel there is something about the attack on free speech in the United States today that demands our attention."
It's only called "accountability" when you disagree with the person you're trying to get fired
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "Forget Mr. Potato Head: a far more disturbing trend is the "cancellation" of what are essentially dull academic debates - about the gender critical movement, IQ hereditarianism, colonialism, etc. - at the level of players like Amazon and the major journals. #boring_stuff_matters"
Indian foreign minister suggests ousting of Oxford student union president was due to racism - "Oxford University's student union has become embroiled in a diplomatic row after India's foreign minister suggested that the recent ousting of its president was due to racism.Rashmi Samant, a graduate student reading for an MSc in energy systems at Linacre College, was elected to the role in February after winning 65 per cent of the vote.She was due to take up the position at the end of the summer term and had promised to "tackle institutional homophobia and transphobia" and "decolonise the curriculum" but resigned days after being elected after a series of Colleges passed motions of no confidence following a backlash over "racist" comments she made on social media.Oxford International Society said at the time that "for a candidate who campaigned for inclusivity, it is crushing to understand this was insincere in nature", citing her "anti-Semitic, transphobic and racist social media posts".Ms Samant was also criticised for an Instagram post from 2019 of a photograph taken in Malaysia with the caption "Ching Chang". She defended the post against accusations that it was "sinophobic", saying it was a reference to a joke with a friend about her vegetarianism... Oxford's Jewish Society said it was "extremely concerned" by her social media posts, including a caption of a photo of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial which showed "severe insensitivity and ignorance" as well as her comparison between Rhodes, a British imperialist, and Hitler... Ashwini Vaishnaw, a member of the BJP, described Samant's treatment as a "continuation of attitudes and prejudices from the colonial areas, especially in the UK". He said Ms Sumant was "cyberbullied" into resignation, adding: "If this happens at an institute like Oxford, what is the kind of message that goes out to the world?"The intervention of India's foreign minister came after Ms Sumant returned to her family in Udupi, a city in the south-west Indian state of Karnataka, and told The Indian Express that she was the victim of a "cancel culture mob"... "There was a conscious attempt made to unearth posts made by me in the past. These posts were always there, but no one raked up any issue during the election process. It was only after I won that they were brought up. I believe my posts were not malicious or racist. To take offence you have to perceive it in a certain manner.""
Condemning racism is racist. There're so many layers here
Ironically given her platform she would've spearheaded cancelling herself if she hadn't left
1/1024th Liberty Memes - Posts | Facebook - "Leonydus Johnson: "In light of Halle Berry apologizing for considering playing a character that is not who she really is in real life, I would also like to apologize. I regret to inform you all that I once played Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast. However, I am not a candlestick, nor am I French. That is not my real hair, and I am devastated and ashamed of my behavior. Actors must only play roles that are exactly like themselves and I'm so sorry. My heartfelt apologies to the French candlestick community. I will use this opportunity to listen, to learn and grow as an ally."
Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "Many of the folks who are rejecting the idea of the ethos of the cancel culture argue as follows: If the cancel culture exists then how do you explain that you've not been cancelled? A truly brilliant point. How could diabetes exist if your uncle Joe does not have it?"
Darren Grimes on Twitter - "Hi @UniofOxford, can you please release a statement confirming your Deputy Director of External Affairs and International Strategy has been fired by the end of the day."
"Owen Jones saying cancel culture doesn’t exist, having spent years now seeking the cancellation of many careers of those he happens to disagree with, is truly a fine thing."
The strangest bit is that Tim Montgomerie, who they were trying to cancel, wasn't doing what they claim he was. This is an epic failure of reading comprehension
Owen Jones says 'cancel culture' doesn't exist—facts say otherwise - "The Guardian columnist Owen Jones took to Twitter on Sunday morning to express his view that "cancel culture" does not exist, but is rather a strategy used by those with large platforms to shut down others who criticize them.Jones tweeted: "'Cancel culture' is public figures using their privileged platforms to complain about people using social media to criticise them, normally because of their publicly expressed views about minorities who are hugely underrepresented in public life."... Martin Daubney, who tweeted that he could debunk Owens' assertion with two tweets.Daubney posted two tweets, both of which featured University of Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal. The first reveals a tweet by Gopal saying that "white lives don't matter. As white lives." The next one reveals a news article quoting Gopal saying: "'White Lives Don't Matter' Cambridge Professor Says She Resists "Urges to Kneecap White Men Everyday.'" Gopal received a promotion from the University of Cambridge after tweeting "white lives don't matter." Meanwhile, David Starkey was forced to resign in disgrace from the same institution for his comments on slavery. Both developments follow Cambridge University's recent statement following criticism against Gopal. "The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks," the institution stated. "These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease." Twitter user Fraser Myers used Owens' own tweet again him, showing that Owens had previously reached out to the University of Oxford to confirm that the Deputy Director of External Affairs and International Strategy would be "fired by the end of the day." In early June, students at UCLA demanded that the university fire two professors for bending to the whims of students amid the death of George Floyd. The first professor was Gordon Klein, who refused to grant students' wishes that they be treated special because of their skin color. The second professor, W. Ajax Peris, was targeted by students for reading aloud MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which includes repeated instances of the n-word."
Douglas Murray on Twitter - Cambridge: "The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks. These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease."
"Nope. Nobody believes that. We remember the cases of Noah Carl (@NoahCarl90) and Jordan Peterson (@jordanbpeterson). Your institution dropped them in 2 secs once the mob came for them. But it’s interesting you’re standing up for someone who actually is a race-baiter this time."
Consequentialism - Hedgewik.com - "FREEDOM OF SPEECH DOESN'T MEAN FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES."
"Hi, Your employee, Max Smith, is a BIGOT. Fire him, or else."
"Hi, Your daughter sells nude pics on OnlyFans. A_cucumber_in_vagina.mp4"
"WELL THEN, SURELY YOU WON'T MIND THIS..."
Meme - "Cancel culture isn't real, you're just being held accountable."
"Slut shaming isn't real, you're just being held accountable."
Philadelphia Staff Inspector Joseph Bologna charged with assault on Temple University student at rally, Delaware County police union leader Robert Skippy Carroll under investigation for Facebook post - "in Delaware County, another police leader is under investigation after a social media post Wednesday night.The post read: "If you choose to speak out against the police or our members, we will do everything in our power to not support your business. 1st Vice President Robert "Skippy" Carroll"County FOP Lodge No. 27 vice president Sgt. Carroll, who serves with the Media Borough Police Department, has been removed from active duty, officials say.Carroll had reposted the message to his personal page with the caption: "Try us. We'll destroy you."... "He can say something like that and get support, but if someone of color were to say that, they'd be a monster." Protesters were especially upset about the phrase "destroy you.""I don't think that word should be used against any American or any person in this country," said Roland Williams of Upper Darby."
I'm sure all the liberals who claim that cancel culture doesn't exist and that it's just "accountability", and falsely equate conservative boycotts to cancel culture are outraged
Of course a BLM leader who said something similar would have lots of excuses made, since even supporting looting and promoting Marxism is meaningles in the left's book
Erick Worrell on Twitter - "Please don’t talk to me about cancel culture. I was a Christian child of the 90s. We stopped listening to Sandy Patty & Amy Grant, stopped watching Disney, & avoided Proctor and Gamble products. Christians perfected cancel culture. They just don’t like it when the tables turn."
"Oh this is bringing back memories! No Harry Potter because witchcraft! Let’s burn Eminem CDs in the bonfire! If someone doesn’t join you for See You at the Pole, FRIENDSHIP OVER! Also lyrics to Christian rock songs were BONKERS. The brainwashing you can do with a catchy melody."
I like how somehow trying to get people fired and stop anyone from selling books, movies etc is the same as Christians not personally buying things they don't want to buy. Of course some liberals are even more deluded with their false equivalences, and claim that executing heretics was the original cancel culture
The liberal who posted this nonsense in one of my groups claimed: "the idea that people want to “punish” racists and bigots like Gina Carano, Louis CK, etc, is incorrect.no one is calling for their heads. that is a strawman that basement trolls thought up themselves.what people are doing is making it known that they will not be supporting any work that these person does.in that regard there is no difference from the conservative right’s “cancel culture”". When I took 15 seconds to find 2 tweets tagged "#fireginacarano", he claimed that the main one visible in the screenshot was "not an actual person saying so, but a podcast that wants to be outraged". Evidently podcasts are produced by ghosts or robots, not actual people. When I pointed out that the second tweet was by a personal account and provided more examples of personal accounts tweeting "#fireginacarano", he went silent
Meme - "SOMEBODY MADE A FALSE ACCUSATION AGAINST MY SON AND THEN AN ANGRY MOB CONTACTED MY EMPLOYER AND GOT ME FIRED SO NOW I CAN'T FEED MY FAMILY"
"LOL THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS CANCEL CULTURE YOU'RE JUST BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE"
Jonathan Tobin: A Jewish opera legend’s family is divided by cancel culture - "The problem began when David Tucker, a 79-year-old medical doctor and a member of the foundation board, responded to an article posted on the Facebook page of Julia Bullock, a successful African-American soprano, about the riots in Portland, Ore., and the use of federal law-enforcement personnel to control them.Tucker blasted the rioters and cheered the efforts to rein them by writing: “Good. Get rid of these thugs and I don’t care where you send them. They are a Pox on our society.”When Bullock took issue with his remarks, he then responded: “The real violence is with many of the so called peaceful protesters … About time someone tough will try to crush the mob before they destroy and kill more innocent people Bravo to Trump to [sic] send in Federal troops.” Rather than debate these points, one of the other participants in the discussion decided that the way to shut Tucker up was to declare that not only were his remarks beyond the pale and justification for losing his job, but that his family foundation was racist. The evidence for that was the fact that only one African-American singer had ever received its top award (although many blacks have won other grants from it) and his assumption that everyone else in his family must share David Tucker’s pro-Trump viewpoint.In response to this accusation, Tucker snapped back, saying “pulling the race card is another convenient excuse to modify excellent standards of vocal artistry.” Even though he went on to note that neither he nor his 82-year-old brother Barry, who has led the foundation, has any part in the selection of award and grant winners, which are chosen by a panel of artists, this statement was seen as more proof of his perfidy. Long before the Black Lives Matter movement or social media, it was understood that it was unacceptable for anyone involved in the arts to articulate conservative political views. Like Hollywood but only more so, the classical arts world has always been almost the exclusive preserve of the left. However, David Tucker may have thought those rules didn’t apply to a man who had done so much to help from the sidelines.If so, he was dead wrong. The exchange was widely shared. Soon, Tucker was being blasted throughout the arts world as a “racist,” a “fascist” and a supporter of “Nazis.” Within hours, a group called the Black Opera Alliance was demanding that the foundation oust David from its board, publicly denounce him and the policies he supports and, in true Cultural Revolution-style, undergo a review of its practices to rid itself of alleged racism.The demands were echoed throughout the opera world, including by some of the foundation’s recent honorees. Their hypocrisy is astounding. If they really believe that Richard Tucker’s sons are racists and that their awards are tainted by the fact that most of them were not African-American, then they can give back the money they received or pass it on to those who they think are more deserving.Perhaps in another era, the foundation could have weathered this storm without sacrificing one of the Tucker sons, but not in 2020. Barry Tucker and the professional leadership of the foundation were faced with a choice between throwing David to the wolves, or sticking with him and watching as decades of work was trashed as the organization wound up being ostracized by the very people it had helped.Within a day, the foundation bent the knee, tossed David overboard and began the requisite struggle-session confession process. Whether that will be enough to allow it to maintain itself in the future is open to question since it’s unlikely that the woke mob that has come for it will be satisfied with only the sacrifice of one of the brothers... It’s possible to disagree with David Tucker about the chaos in Portland and whether or not federal agents should be defending federal facilities against violent mobs. But to characterize a desire to stop groups that appear to be primarily bent on violence as opposed to peaceful protests or support for anything that Trump does as inherently racist — let alone evidence of sympathy for Nazis — is irrational.And the instinct to destroy anyone who would voice such views says more about the toxic nature of contemporary public discourse than it does about David Tucker or Donald Trump. This is a shame because partisans and ideologues are prepared to cancel both an individual and his father’s legacy for no good reason. It’s also another sign that political divisions over issues that would have once been a matter of consensus — like the need for law enforcement to defend public buildings against violent anarchists — are now so deep that Americans can no longer tolerate any dissent from their positions. Cancel culture isn’t just wrong because it’s unfair; it’s wrong because extremists and partisans are using it to transform political disagreements into culture wars in which there can be no compromise, let alone the agreement to disagree that is essential to any working democracy."
Matt Walsh on Twitter - "There is not a single person who lived 80 years ago who did not have views that our culture would find objectionable today. Not one. Either we cancel everyone who committed the crime of being born in the 20th century or earlier, or we stop this madness and get some perspective."
Vivek Ramaswamy on Twitter - "Name ONE time in human history when the group fighting to ban books and censor speech were the good guys. I’ll wait..."
LibertarianScottishTwatterUser️ on Twitter - ""There is no such thing as police brutality, it's called being held accountable."
Netflix censors comedy shows, solves police brutality - "If you want an insight into how mad the world has gone in recent days, look no further than Netflix’s announcement that it has removed The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Booshy from its platform over ‘blackface’ scenes... This follows a number of British comedies and comedy characters being memory-holed, or at least repented for, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. Little Britain has been removed from BBC iPlayer because of black characters played by white actors. And Keith Lemon has issued a tearful apology for once playing black characters on Bo Selecta.Unless you genuinely think that US police brutality and racism were up to now being sustained by Britain’s 2000s comedy output, this makes absolutely no sense. We are in the grip of a collective hysteria that will do nothing to fight racism, but will ramp up censorship, intolerance and cautiousness in arts and culture. This has to stop. This joke isn’t funny anymore."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The staff of the New York Times did successfully complete the mutiny and exited the editorial page editor for allowing Senator Cotton’s opinion piece be published. The Times has since issued a defense of the firing which strains the credibility of the old grey lady of journalism. The senator’s essay was newsworthy and relevant to the issues of the day. Firing the editor for this is remarkable considering the paper has published writings from several controversial individuals"
The Serfs on Twitter - "Hey @YouTube @YouTubeCreators without any strikes or warnings you just deleted our entire YouTube channel. And apparently it was for an old video about how Paul Joseph Watson is obsessed with eggs and targeted ShoeOnHead? Harassment for a video calling out harassments??"
Replies: "You: 'Haha, Parler is down!' Also you: 'me... got... removed too?' Perhaps this is the right time to reassess your views on what freedom of expression means to you."
"The Serfs: You are aware it's a private corporation.This is capitalism, they can do whatever they want
Gets channel deleted:"
Those cheering cancel culture are never happy when they get a taste of their own medicine
The cancel culture twitter mob comes to economics - "Harald Uhlig, a distingushed macroeconomist at the University of Chicago, sent out a few tweets questioning the wisdom of quickly "defunding the police." The twitter mob, led by Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers, swiftly attacked. A petition circulated, reportedly gaining 500 signatories, demanding his removal as editor of the Journal of Political Economy. I saw an astonishing number of tweets from economists that I formerly respected and considered to be level headed, fact-and-logic, cause-and-effect analysts of public policies pile on. The media piled on, with coverage at New York Times, Wall Street Journal Chicago Tribune and a bit of a counterpoint at Fox News, Breitbart National Review and others. By Friday, the University of Chicago caved in and threw Harald under the bus... Janet Yellen is not just an accomplished economist, a former Federal Reserve Chair, and a very nice person, she is the sitting president of the American Economic Association. She is entitled to her views as much as Harald is entitled to his. But here, as in a letter sent to the membership instructing us how to think and behave on such matters (more later), she speaks on behalf of that association. As ex chair of the Federal Reserve, one can expect Janet to be savvy when talking to reporters about personal vs. institutional opinions. This is to my knowledge the first and only pronouncement by a President of the AEA, without disclaiming official capacity, on whether tweets issued by members disqualify those members for employment. It is the first such pronouncement that anyone should be investigated for their speech. The AEA has a "code of conduct," which encourages ""perfect freedom of economic discussion." This goal requires an environment where all can freely participate and where each idea is considered on its own merits. Economists have a professional obligation to conduct civil and respectful discourse in all forums." The Presidents of the AEA have been silent at, say, Paul Krugman's history of tweets, columns and even books that violently contravene this code of conduct. Krugman, the King of ad hominem, violates the code in the third word of the title of his book, "Arguing with Zombies," and over and over again in its pages. Anyone who disagrees with Krugman is a Zombie? (An insult, by the way, with a dark racial history. Where are you, twitter mob?) He writes that other professional economists are "evil," "stupid," and accuses them of being bought... this is an extremely unusual action. I have known the JPE for 35 years. Not once that I am aware in this time has a JPE editor been publicly suspended for anything. There have been good editors and bad editors. There have been editors who found, improved, and published great papers, and editors who did not perform as well. Most of all there have been periodic crises caused by editors who let dozens if not hundreds of papers pile up, leaving many unattended to for years. Yes, those were eased out, and new editors came in to clean up the mess. Not one of these editors was ever publicly suspended. And no mention was made of any untoward action by Harald as editor -- or even that there is or is contemplated any review of his performance as editor. Why do I write? Sure, I'm just as afraid of the Red Guards of our twitter mob as the rest of you, and reluctant to offer contrary opinions. The Krugmans, Wolfers, and other assorted Jacobins are waiting for me to write or tweet one sentence that can be taken out of context and demand my head. I doubt the upper levels of administration at Stanford have any more spine in defense of conservative and libertarian speech than do those of Chicago. But we must speak for free speech before it's too late. If you donate money to a university, you have a special duty to speak up and let them know where you stand. Chicago in particular has a courageous statement in favor of free speech. Demand that they honor their fine words with courageous action. Others, like my Stanford don't even have the courage to state it. Demand that they do.
Update: And to the many colleagues who have written to say they feel this way too but don't dare say anything, you need to speak up too. At a minimum others need to know they are also not alone."
Meme - "No one cares that he robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint. That was 6 years ago, get over it!"
"If you didn't want to lose your job and have your life ruined, you shouldn't have made that problematic joke 6 years ago, bigot."
‘Cancellers are cowards – their beliefs are built on sand’ - "The resurgence of Black Lives Matter over the summer has been accompanied by an intensification in cancel culture. Accusations of racism are being used to justify the silencing of BLM’s critics. It is often cancelled celebrities whose stories get coverage in the media, but cancel culture is particularly dangerous for ordinary people.One of its victims was Nick Buckley, who has worked as a social campaigner in Manchester for nearly 20 years. Earlier this year, Nick was sacked from the charity he founded...
Buckley: This summer was the first time I had heard of Black Lives Matter. I looked into it and found its website. I was completely shocked by what I found there. I felt BLM’s objectives would damage the very people it said it was trying to help. I’m a big believer in personal responsibility – we don’t need to be treating people like victims and telling them society is set up to make them fail. That is simply the wrong message to send. I felt obliged to let people know what BLM is really about. I wrote a 600-word blog about it and posted it on LinkedIn. Some people disagreed with me but did so politely. A week later, somebody put a link to the blog on Twitter. That’s when things hit the fan. Almost straight away, somebody set up a petition to have me sacked from the charity. There were some direct complaints to the charity’s board inferring that I was a racist and a Nazi, and then the board panicked and terminated my position – via email.
spiked: What provoked you to speak out about Black Lives Matter?
Buckley: The first thing was the call to defund the police. I have never heard such a crazy idea. When I worked for the council, I spoke to countless people about their priorities. At the top of everyone’s list was wanting more police in their areas. The people who want the most police are always the people who live in the poorest areas, because they are the ones who are more likely to be victims of crime and anti-social behaviour. The very people BLM says it wants to help are those who would suffer most from this proposal. I also noticed BLM wants to disrupt the Western nuclear family. But if there’s something we need to improve in our country, in the areas where I work, it’s families. We need fathers to stay in households. Having fathers involved in families is what’s going to improve the lives of young people. If this is really all about black lives, why are we talking so much about an American cop thousands of miles away operating under a different system? He did something horrendous – nobody’s defending what happened. But we don’t need to import problems from other countries. We need to deal with our own.
spiked: What did it take for you to be reinstated to your role at the charity?
Buckley: For the first week, I was a beaten man. I talked to a friend who asked why I wasn’t answering anybody who was attacking me on social media. The next day, I decided to fight back. I have spoken to thousands of people, and I always tell them that life’s not fair, but you don’t need to make yourself a victim. It was time to take my own advice... A former trustee of the charity set up a petition to have me reinstated, which got 18,000 signatures. Around then, I joined the Free Speech Union. It was fantastic. It got me a pro-bono solicitor, who said it was an open-and-shut case. The charity thought it could just sack me, but there are laws about these things. Trade unions pushed for those laws to protect workers from unfair dismissal. It’s a shame that some unions are not sticking by that principle and fighting for people in the face of this new persecution.The solicitor wrote to the board. He explained all their mistakes and said I was going to sue them unless they resigned. They did. A new board was appointed, and reinstated me.
spiked: How much of a threat is cancel culture to ordinary people?
Buckley: If you are just an average Joe, you have no resources. You have no voice. At least if you are a rich, famous person, you can get your version of events out there because you have a social-media following, or the press will pick up your story. But when you are an average Joe, and the mob comes for you, you are on your own. You don’t have the financial resources or the know-how to run a campaign. At least I had some experience with the press. But a lot of the success in my story was pure luck. If it had not have been for the Mail on Sunday, I don’t think this would have been a successful story. When we talk about cancel culture, we are not talking about blocking somebody on Twitter. That’s me asserting the freedom not to listen to them. Cancel culture is when you actively try to destroy someone’s life because you don’t like what they say. It’s trying to get someone sacked, or making employers avoid them, or going after their family, trying to destroy the individual by proxy.
spiked: What does your cancelling say about Black Lives Matter and identity politics more broadly?
Buckley: This isn’t a new issue. We have had religious zealots and dictators throughout history who have ‘cancelled’ people... When I speak or write an article or a blog, I think I’m right, but I am always open for someone to educate me or to say I have misunderstood a point. But when you speak to these individuals, they don’t think they are right – they know they are right. They are so adamant about it that they believe Gandhi and Mandela and Martin Luther King would be marching with them if they were alive today. They equate being wrong with being evil. If you think someone is evil, why would you debate them?
spiked: What would your advice be for people who find themselves in a similar position to the one you were in?
Buckley: Unless you think you crossed the line, don’t apologise. An apology will not make it go away. It will just make people come after you harder. Fight back. If everything is taken from you, you are a dangerous individual. You have nothing to lose, so don’t take it lying down. Find people like me and reach out to us. Get your voice heard, and try to speak to the press. It’s hard, but what I proved is if you can manage a reasonable attack and defence, people like those who went after me will crumble. They are easy to beat if you mount a campaign because they are all cowards, and what they believe is built on sand."
Paul Joseph Watson on Twitter - "Just a thought, but relying on mob intimidation, violence, the threat of personal ruination, and the power of giant monopolistic corporations to terrify everyone into thinking the same way probably suggests you’re not on the “right side of history.”"
Facebook - "The Woke Stasi are finally coming for Pinker. We'll remember who remained silent when it happened."
Iranian-Canadian man fired after speaking out against honour killings - "A man was released from his position at a top Vancouver prep school after sharing a condemnation of Iranian honour killings on his personal Facebook page.The man, Corey, who is Iranian-Canadian, shared this story of honour killings and his condemnation of the religion that allows it... he also had harsh words for radical Islam, which sanctions the killing of young women by their disgruntled family members... Corey was called a racist for criticizing the religion of his parents. A man who was born in Islamic society and was raised in an Islamic family, who knows Arabic and the Koran, was told that he is racist for lashing out at his own nation, his family’s religion, and the barbaric practices it sanctions. How is this a liberal position? Perhaps Wray doesn’t know Corey’s background, but if he did, would he feel the same way? In the contemporary progressive ideology, a person of a given identity is allowed to vocally critique their own culture.Corey noted that Wray didn’t ask about his background, or why he is opposed to honour killings. Wray didn’t reach out to Corey to find out what it was about his experience growing up with Islam that made him so unable to be tolerant of Iran’s state sponsored religion that allows young women to be butchered by their families... why is it more socially acceptable to remain silent on the brutal killing of innocent young women than it is to criticize the religion that condones it?"
Islamophobia!
What Are You Going to Do When They Come for You? - "Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the latest to face the wrath of the mob.As Breitbart reported, “According to a number of videos posted to social media, protesters in DC placed a model guillotine in front of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Washington complex. A flyer for the event stated ‘End the abuse and profiteering. Abolish the police, the prisons, and Amazon.’”And note that, “Alongside the guillotine [was] a sign reading ‘support our poor communities, not our wealthy men.’”... a DC protester said, “when they become threatened, and we have no voice, the knives come out.” And the protester delivered these comments while standing in front of the guillotine.All clear on the meaning of “knives”!... Bezos is also famously liberal. He is the owner of the leftist Washington Post. In 2012, he pledged $2.5 million to support same-sex “marriage” in Washington State. And the award winning transgender comedy series, Transparent, was produced by and aired on Amazon.But Bezos is also rich. Very rich. And that makes him a target. After “defund the police,” it will probably be “defund the rich.” (In Beverly Hills Sunday BLM protesters were actually chanting “eat the rich.”) Jemele Hill has also felt the wrath of the culture-cancelling mob. (Hill formerly worked for ESPN and is now a writer for the Atlantic.) But 10 years ago — yes, a decade ago — she cracked some jokes on Twitter that were considered transphobic and homophobic.Yet as Breibart notes, “This is the same Jemele Hill who several years later went hammer and tong against Milwaukee Brewers relief pitcher Josh Hader for racist and homophobic tweets he posted when he was a kid in high school... Now, Hill is being targeted by the Twitter crowd, with comments like this: “Time’s up. We are coming for every last one of you [expletives] right now. No more playing nice, we played by your rules, now you get to, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time now. #CancelJemele #CancelJemeleHill.” Sounds like a scene straight out of Animal Farm. What goes around, comes around. You cancel one day, you get canceled the next... we want to be on the front lines of racial reconciliation and since we reject racism as sin. And, understanding the significance of the phrase to our black brothers and sisters, we want to shout out, “Yes, black lives do matter.”... But that movement is, at base, a Marxist-driven, LGBTQ-affirming, anti-Christian movement. And if you will not affirm transgender activism and march for Queer Pride, the knives will soon come out for you. I mean that both figuratively and literally.You have been forewarned.I find it even more disturbing when Christian leaders across the nation fall over each other in their zeal to prove their wokeness. They fail to realize that some of the very people they are trying to impress are the same ones who will turn on them in an instant the moment they take a strong stand for biblical values."
Why won't liberals defend liberalism? - "It maybe that mainstream liberals perceive the woke threat to be an exaggeration — perhaps an outright invention of the populist Right. If the calling-out of bigotry does occasionally tip over into cancel culture then any excess is the work of irrelevant fringe. And, anyway, where’s the harm? Will democracy be irreparably damaged if the likes of Katie Hopkins are kicked off Twitter?Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions — and what is being done to people with mainstream views.Look at what happened to James Bennet, who was, until recently, a well-regarded comment editor at the New York Times. He was forced out after internal ructions a few weeks ago. The controversy was over the paper’s publication of an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator. It happened at the height of the unrest in several American cities — and Cotton argued for “an overwhelming show of force” to restore order. It was a hawkish piece, but one that drew a distinction between a “majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “bands of miscreants.” Nevertheless, that was too much viewpoint diversity for the paper’s activist-employees — and Bennet had to go.It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line. Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed... we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees. Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”. What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much... For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth... in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)? If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself."
Jon Davis's answer to Was it hypocrisy for MCU actors to defend Chris Pratt but not Brie Larson? - Quora - "Amy Berg didn’t really do much wrong, as far as I know, but the toxic following she created did the rest. They responded with attacks specifically against Chris Pratt, that he needs to be cancelled (for no freaking reason) other than that he, as one tweet said, “radiates homophobic white christian supremacist energy.”But the firestorm happened after he did two things: First, he poked fun of other celebrities urging fans to vote... Then Pratt failed to attend what seemed to be a mandatory gathering of Avengers alumni called the “Voters Assemble: The Cast of The Avengers Unite for Democracy.” Basically, many Avengers went to a pro-Biden fundraising and “awareness” event, pooling their collective billion or so social media followers into making sure that America democracied hard. In reality, only about half the Avengers were there, but Chris needs to be punished for the faux pas.As if that wasn’t gross enough, Pratt is being attacked for… nothing. He did nothing at all. He goes to church, a church that is far from Christian fundamentalist or evangelical, one that is basically just famous Christians meditating to Christian Rock, and he’s well liked in Hollywood. But he’s also white and male, which I guess is enough strikes against him. Now, since he radiates that homophobic white Christian supremacist energy, hasn’t crusaded for Biden yet, so of course, he needs to be cancelled... But just calling out the toxicity of fans wasn’t good enough. They shouldn’t have defended Chris Pratt because they didn’t defend Brie Larson in the same way.Not so fast.Pratt’s crimes against the mob were thus:Too white.Too male.Too Christian.Not enough of a Democrat.That’s not exactly a strong base for the attacks he received.Brie Larson, however, was criticized for other things, things that warranted criticism... Brie Larson was a trainwreck of things you shouldn’t do, including alienating your coworkers, alienating your fans, and being the victim of less than stellar storytelling... Scarlett Johansson has been beloved, mostly because she doesn’t act this way. Her character has (finally) been developed, but even without that, she was an amazing character who hung with literal gods — with no superpowers. Just a catsuit. But Scarlett’s behaviour off camera, to the other stars and the fans, mirrored that of the Robert Downey Jr.’s and the Chris Evans’. She was respectful and acted as if she was grateful for her fame. And skipping over outside of MCU, Gal Gadot is beloved by fans, as well... Literally the worst thing she’s done was that Imagine video at the start of the plague. It was cringy and tone deaf, but… okay… look, she tried to do something nice and we can’t really fault her for that.Oh, but wait, apparently she’s being cancelled because… wow… she’s too white?... A tweet, started by someone who has her own biases issues which is displayed in the openly toxic bigotry of her fans, attacked someone not for doing anything, but for things that you’re not supposed to attack people for — his skin color, what’s between his legs, and his religion.But his skin color is white, his gender is male, and he’s a Christian, so it’s open season because reasons. All that, and not being Democrat enough."
Dataracer on Twitter - "Chris Pratt's MCU co-stars are defending him from the cancel mob. They're now being bullied & harassed too. Zoe Saldana is getting the worst with racist slurs like "coon." Marvel panders to these woke ideologues who are now attacking them for defending a "cis white man.""
Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences."
Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1862 - "It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a n----- ). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also n----- -like."
Of course, the left is never going to cancel Marx, even if BLM was founded by trained Marxist
Proud Jew on Twitter - "Last night @USC’s student Vice President resigned. Had she made offensive comments? No. She just was a Zionist, so people claimed she was unfit for office. 90%+ of Jews are Zionists. Are we all unfit to have a political voice?"
Cisco Fires Workers for Racial Comments During Diversity Forum - "“Black lives don’t matter. All lives matter,” one worker wrote in the comments during one of the virtual all-hands meetings, according to screen shots obtained by Bloomberg. Another said the phrase Black Lives Matter “reinforces racism” because it singles out one ethnic group. “People who complain about racism probably have been a racist somewhere else to people from another race or part of systematic oppression in their own community!” a third worker wrote in the chat section visible for all those online.Cisco, the world’s largest networking company, said it fired “a handful” of workers for inappropriate conduct because it “will not tolerate” racism... “Employers should be striving for zero tolerance when it comes to racism and discrimination, period,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The protests we’ve seen in the streets have become part of our new normal and will eventually make their way inside workplaces if employers fail to meet the moment.”... LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, also held an all-employee meeting about racism last month that ended up mired in bitterness, an event that was reported earlier by the Daily Beast. The company had an anonymous comment section, which some workers filled with vitriol against Black people. Among the posts were those saying Black people weren’t hired as much because they weren’t qualified; that LinkedIn was trying to foist White guilt on workers; and that law-enforcement killings of Black people weren’t important because more African-Americans were murdered by members of their community. The meeting devastated many Black employees, who were outraged by the remarks and became suspicious of some of their White colleagues, according to people familiar with the situation. Since the meeting, some Black workers at LinkedIn have been angered by what they see as a failure by senior executives to adequately respond to the incident, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the internal communications.Executives at LinkedIn didn’t seek to unmask those making the offensive statements because they had pledged anonymity for the online comments section to create a “safe space” and felt they needed to honor that pledge, a spokeswoman said. LinkedIn’s leaders also suggested the incident was the result of a few bad apples rather than any larger issues with the culture at the Mountain View, California-based company, the people said. LinkedIn has one Black executive in its C-suite, Chief People Officer Teuila Hanson, who joined in June. The company’s workforce is 3.5% Black -- in line with its tech peers -- according to its most recent diversity report.After the meeting, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said the display was “appalling,” apologized to employees and promised anonymous feedback wouldn’t be allowed in future virtual gatherings."
Promoting racial equality is racism. Having your own thoughts is not allowed
Hiring woke employees just destroys your company
James Lindsay - Posts - "Wokeness, as an ideology, hijacks anything it gets into and makes it all about itself and its narrow concerns. It's completely self-absorbed and fractures cultures around itself, installing a mafia-like project where bullies take all by forcing constant attention and obeisance.It takes very few Wokies plus a small fraction of sympathizers (which are everywhere now) to completely shatter the internal culture of any organization. The external pressure to fold is already there. You can't withstand it except by saying no firmly. Take it on at your peril.Bear in mind that those antiracism, unconscious bias, and diversity trainings you're all bringing in are designed to create a few Wokies, more sympathizers, and a briader culture of silence and obeisance that removes any ability to stop the coup once it starts"
Renowned Photographer Martin Parr Has Resigned as Artistic Director of the Bristol Photo Festival After Being Accused of Racial Insensitivity - "Parr came under fire for contributing an introduction to a 2017 reissue of a 1969 photography book titled London by the late Italian photographer Gian Butturini that has been accused of featuring racist imagery.The book of black-and-white photographs, taken in late ’60s London, includes a picture of a Black woman on one page, with the facing image presenting a photo of a gorilla at a zoo. Mercedes Baptiste Halliday, a 20-year-old University College London anthropology student, received London as an 18th-birthday present from her father and was shocked to see Butturini’s “appallingly racist” spread... In addition to stepping down from the photo festival, Parr has published an apology, calling the photo spread in question “offensive and demeaning” and his failure to notice it “inexcusable.”He has asked that remaining copies of the book to be removed from sale and destroyed, while pledging to donate the fee he received for writing the essay to a relevant charity.When Parr first addressed the controversy, in December on Twitter, it was mainly to clarify that, contrary to claims published in Phoblographer in June 2019, he didn’t edit the book."
And this just for writing a foreword
I hope the father feels bad for getting someone fired
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter - "The term “cancel culture” comes from entitlement - as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience,& one is a victim if people choose to tune them out. Odds are you’re not actually cancelled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked"
Replies: "NORMAL PERSON: “I disagree with what you said.” CANCEL CULTURE: “Let’s see what your employer thinks about what you said.” This isn’t complicated."
"Sweetie when you lose your livelihood over posts you made on a social media account unaffiliated with your place of employment and as a result can't make rent or get health insurance thats just a clap backClapping hands signNail polishMouth"
Comment (elsewhere): "Imagine wanting to have a job and eat food, you entitled fuck."
Gad Saad - Posts - "1,000,000th such message that I've received over the past few days: "Hello Dr. Saad, My name is xxx. Please don't reveal my identity but here is the astonishing insanity that I've witnessed/experienced...." These messages are coming from people from all walks of life. This includes physicists, physicians, geologists, and countless other folks whom you might have thought might be immune from the idea pathogens. I warned you that these idea pathogens would come for everyone. I'm now afraid to open my emails/social media lest I might be exposed to yet another infuriating story of someone being bullied, harassed, attacked, targeted, fired, silenced because they said the wrong thing, thought the wrong thing, did not display sufficient commitment to the cause, etc. This is not hyperbole. It's happening before our eyes. And despite my having warned people for many years about these growing dangers, many people remain silent in their cowardice. Unwilling to risk ANYTHING to fight for a just cause, namely the protection of the most fundamental tenets of a free society. We shall regret this apathy."
Gad Saad - Posts - "It seems untenable that in a free society, the only people who can now truly express their freedom of speech are those who are forevermore to be unemployed. If you are currently employed by any entity, you can no longer express the most BANAL of opinions that is contrary to the expected narrative as your employer can fire you for holding the wrong views. If you are unemployed but plan on being employed in the future, you better not say anything that some future employer might find objectionable, so you will keep quiet. Of course, via outrage archaeology (H/T to Stephen Knight), anything that you might have said in the past can be dug up and used against you. If you are self-employed, you cannot express any opinions because if it goes against the PC orthodoxy, you might be cancelled via mass boycotting. Hence, it is LITERALLY the case that we are creating an environment where everyone (even the most courageous amongst us) are being beaten down into silence. I am truly tired. I'm losing hope and this is saying a lot as few people have my dogged love for freedom and my unshakeable optimism."
Palmer Report on Twitter - "People who promote the racist propaganda hate speech on OANN are dangerous thugs. They have no place in respectable society. Mike Gundy cannot remain the OK State head coach. Too influential of a position in society. Fire him, unless he agrees to get extensive psychological help.
It’s time we acknowledge that conservatism isn’t just some political view. It means you’re the very bottom rung of society, dangerous and deranged. Some conservatives are trying to become better people. Great. But people who flaunt their conservatism are psychotic.
Conservatism means you don’t believe in equality. It means you want it all for yourself, and you’re willing to destroy other groups of people to take it all for yourself. That’s not a crime against the law. But it’s a crime against humanity – and we must acknowledge as much.
Conservatives CANNOT be teachers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, coaches, or bosses. It’s constitutionally unfair to others who are subjected to the conservative’s deranged judgment. Conservatives can do menial work, until they’re ready to join the human race.
We shouldn’t be cold hearted about this. But having a conservative as police officer, for instance, isn’t much different from having a KKK member as a police officer. It’s just not something that a civilized society can ever, ever tolerate.
We should rehabilitate any conservatives who are willing to try. We should pay for them to undergo therapy and retraining so they can understand the world around them. But first we must get them out of positions of influence, because they’re infringing on the rights of others."
Domino's Pizza on Twitter - "@kayleighmcenany That's one heck of a compliment! Thanks for the love! #WEAPPRECIATEIT!"
"You just killed your brand. #ETTD"
"Welp. It's unfortunate that thanking a customer for a compliment back in 2012 would be viewed as political. Guess that's 2020 for ya."
Cancel Culture and the Problem of Woke Capitalism - The Atlantic - "The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool. But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival... Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social-media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy, and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface... hen the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, the communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards? This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful, a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative... In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired... not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same. It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets... Let’s look at another example of how woke capitalism operates. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’ paperback-nonfiction chart. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was … to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism. Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. White Fragility is a staple of formal diversity training... In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.” Part of the problem is that although those delivering them are undoubtedly well-meaning, the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications. “Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.” Yet metrics-obsessed companies love these forms of training. When the British Labour leader, Keir Starmer, caused offense by referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment” rather than a movement, he announced that he would undergo implicit-bias training. It is an approach that sees bias as a moral flaw among individuals, rather than a product of systems. It encourages personal repentance, rather than institutional reform. Bohnet suggested other methods to increase diversity, such as removing ages and photographs from job applications, and reviewing the language used for advertisements. (Men are more likely to see themselves as “assertive,” she argued.) Here is another option for big companies: Put your money into paying all junior staff enough for them to live in the big city where the company is based, without needing help from their parents. That would increase the company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay raise.This, however, would break the iron law of woke capitalism—better to have something you can point to and say “Aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem. Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar... In my book Difficult Women, I wrote that the only question I want to ask big companies who claim to be “empowering the female leaders of the future” is this one: Do you have on-site child care? You can have all the summits and power breakfasts you want, but unless you address the real problems holding working parents back, then it’s all window dressing. Along with anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts, LGBTQ politics suffers a similar confusion between economic and social radicalism. The arrival of Pride month brings the annual argument about how it should be a “protest, not a parade.” The violence and victimization of the Stonewall-riot era risk being forgotten in today’s “branded holiday,” where big banks and clothing manufacturers fly the rainbow flag to boost their corporate image. In Britain and the U.S., these corporate sponsors want a depoliticized party—a generic celebration of love and acceptance—without tough questions about their views on particular domestic laws and policies, or their involvement in countries with poor records on LGBTQ rights. Some activists in Britain have tried to get Pride marches to stop allowing the arms company BAE to be a sponsor, given its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, an explicitly homophobic and sexist state. When Amazon sponsored last year’s PinkNews Awards, the former Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T. Davies used his lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech to tell the retailer to “pay your fucking taxes.” That’s economic radicalism... For activists, the danger lies in the cheap sugar rush of tokenistic cancellations. Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all."
Since leftists cheer and support woke capitalism, this is still part of the excesses of the left
Liberals Worried That Without Cancel Culture They'd Actually Have To Defend Their Ideas | The Babylon Bee - "It's especially hard for the Far Left, as Communists much prefer silencing people and exiling them to having to explain their defense of a system that has killed over 100 million people. "It's what Joseph Stalin would have done," said Portland anarcho-communist Jayde Wilson. "You didn't see him worrying about defending his ideas -- he just canceled people -- straight to the gulag.""
It Wasn’t My Cancelation That Bothered Me. It Was the Cowardice of Those Who Let It Happen - "I learned how easily an institution will cave to a mob. I learned how quickly the authorities will run for cover, notwithstanding the lip service they may pay to principles of free speech.After all, they’re terrified. They’re afraid that if they don’t beg forgiveness and promise to do better, they’ll be next at the guillotine... the cultural revolution has entered its mass-spectacle Reign of Terror phase, and so my story made news across Canada. I was depicted as a racist, anti-feminist heretic whose mere presence inside Massey’s halls would have presented a threat to students... I was even accused of “self-plagiarism,” the journalistic equivalent of #MeToo-ing oneself... She wasn’t specific about the allegations, but apologetically told me she would have to strike a committee to look into them. She also told me she hoped this unpleasantness could be resolved by respectful dialogue. I thought this sentiment was utterly naïve. Mobs aren’t interested in dialogue. The whole purpose of a mob is to punish heretics and prove to everyone where the power lies... everyone at Massey was in full panic mode, completely focused on protecting their own positions... Massey’s statement announcing my resignation followed a now familiar formula, with the authors reciting lurid confessions of vast thoughtcrimes that extended well beyond inviting a former newspaper columnist to occasional literary cocktail parties. The governing board promised to launch a “fundamental rethink… in order to eliminate any impediments to an environment that is completely free from anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-gender identity views and discrimination of any kind.” It pledged that this effort “will become the primary focus of the Governing Board in the months to come.” In the few weeks between my joining the Quadrangle Society and my leaving it, the group had apparently gone from a cheese-plate book club to a full-time woke struggle session.Without a hint of irony, the Massey College statement also described the school as “a beacon for the expression of the widest range of academic viewpoints.” But as my case shows, these two goals are completely contradictory. You can raise a beacon for free expression. Or you can run a puritanical campaign to enforce moral purity and root out heretics. You can’t have both. And to an astonishing extent, the people who run places with names like the Quadrangle Society have chosen moral purity. I’m not ashamed to find myself in the company of the cancelled. Indeed, I’m proud to share this honour with some of the finest minds in the world... The wrong kind of science is now seen as hate speech. The same is true of any failure to place Black Lives Matter activists in the firmament of earthly angels. Even liking the wrong tweets can cost you your career. Mike McCulloch, a math lecturer at the University of Plymouth, was recently investigated by his employer for liking a tweet that read “All lives matter.” Here in Canada, Michael Korenberg, chair of the board of governors for the University of British Columbia, was forced to step down because he liked some tweets praising Donald Trump. Nobody is safe—not even the phenomenally popular author J.K. Rowling, who has been hounded and harassed for saying that, when it comes to trans women, biology is still a thing. My own field, journalism, has become notoriously full of little inquisitors. In the most disturbing example, James Bennet, opinion editor of the most important paper in the world, the New York Times, lost his job in June for publishing an opinion piece that many of the younger staffers didn’t like... If you think the radical mob is now editing your daily paper, you might well be right. Last month, Stan Wischnowski, top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was forced to resign over a headline that read, “Buildings Matter, Too.” All of this is dolefully reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution, during which students denounced their elders and made them parade through the streets in dunce hats before they were packed off to the pig farms for re-education.And there is no statute of limitations. Last week, Boeing’s communications chief, Niel Golightly, abruptly resigned after an anonymous employee filed an ethics complaint over an article he wrote in 1987, 33 years ago. In it, the former military pilot had expressed the opinion that women shouldn’t serve in combat (a mainstream position at the time). “My argument was embarrassingly wrong and offensive,” he said in another cringeworthy mea culpa... So be warned. Everything you ever said or wrote is fair game. As the well-known social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tweeted the other day, “If scholars scan each other’s collective work—every word written or recorded—searching for the least charitable reading of every snippet, we can all destroy each other.”... As a columnist, I had strong editors to back me up. And I wrote at a time when you could speak your mind. In the last few years, by contrast, the window for even mildly controversial opinions has shrunk dramatically. It has shrunk the most at places that have traditionally prided themselves as champions of free expression. As ideological correctness becomes the modern currency of spiritual virtue, rational dissent has been cast as heresy. I wish the folks at Massey College well. But they’ll have a hard time turning their 1960s take on Oxford into a woke utopia that will satisfy their critics. And the sight of their panic is blood in the water for the same folks who came after me. There is no way they can cleanse themselves of the stain of white privilege. Ultimately, the only way they’ll be able to atone for their sins is to cancel themselves."
Michigan State University VP of Research Ousted Because of His Past Scientific Statements - "as best I can tell, what he said was indeed serious commentary on serious academic questions, which university professors (whether or not they also have administrative roles) are right to seriously discuss. Indeed, even if you firmly believe that there are no meaningful genetic group differences as to intelligence or temperament (as Hsu says is his view), and that the scientific consensus supports your views, you can't have any confidence in that scientific consensus unless all sides of the debate are freely aired and discussed: It's precisely the fact that a scientific consensus endures in the face of disagreement that gives us reason to trust it... Whether there are race- or sex-based differences in intelligence, temperament, and the like is a scientific question, not a logical question or theological question. It can't be resolved by abstract theory, and it shouldn't be resolved as an article of faith. It needs to be seriously discussed, in light of the constantly developing research in the area (which surely is still in its infancy, given how much we are only now learning, and have yet to learn, about the human genome and about cognitive science). This MSU incident is likely to just further interfere with such serious discussions."
The true war on science: on Steve Hsu/Stephen Hsu's ousting
Op-Ed: There's No Such Thing As Bully Culture, It's Just My Fist's Free Market Response To Your Stupid Face, Dweeb | The Babylon Bee
Lucas Lynch - "If Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, and Margaret Atwood don't convince you that McCarthyism 2.0 is a problem, nobody will."
Comments: "Ironically, the personal experience of people concerned about suppression of free speech doesn't count, apparently."
“Noam Chomsky telling you your left-wing activism is getting out of hand is like Snoop Dogg asking you to ease up on the weed. It's probably time to take a good hard look at yourself.” –Mike Nayna
India on Twitter - "Cancel culture: If you are “cancelled” but do not wish to be, you must WORK to EARN back people’s respect by owning up to the thing that cancelled you in the first place, LISTENING to others, EDUCATING yourself, and ADVOCATING on behalf of the people that you have offended/harmed"
"If you are 'raped' but do not wish to be, you must work to earn back people's respect by owning up to the thing that got you raped in the first place, wearing a short skirt, having a glass of wine, and walking down a dark street alone." Is that how it works?"
Thread by @luinalaska - "Some of you have done NOTHING with your life and you’re mad. You have a college degree & a smart phone with access to virtually *anything* and you can barely get out of bed in the morning while you spit on people who built a whole world with nothing but a horse, map, & axe.
You’ve made nothing with access to everything. You’ve conquered nothing. Hell you can’t even conquer yourself. So go tear it all down. Scream into the void how unfair it all is. It’s not that you’ve wasted your short time here. Surely not.
Don’t bother with your own legacy you’re busy shitting on the long dead who aren’t here to care. Go burn down every Starbucks. That’ll show them. Torch the Target. Tear down every monument. Deface every memorial. But what have you built? What do you leave behind?
So take your benzos. Watch your porn. Get Uber to drop off your dinner. Buy an adult coloring book. Have sex with strangers to ease your crippling anxiety. It’s not you. It’s the system really. It isn’t fair. Go cancel someone. Dox someone. They deserve it. You’re the good guy.
Don’t write an epic novel worth building a statue to remember you. Go troll seven year old problematic tweets ever on the hunt for the boogeymen. See now you’ve accomplished something. Cancel everyone. You’re a warrior now. A real hero.
And lastly whatever you do never ever take even a moment to self reflect on your own failures. Never own them. Never take a hint of responsibility. Remember you’re just a helpless victim of circumstances beyond your control. This all means nothing. Its like you weren’t even here."
Ben Norton on Twitter - "In addition to being a gov snitch, fraud George Orwell spent WWII demonizing the USSR as it defeated Nazism As the Red Army sacrificed millions fighting Hitler, and as the Nazi regime shoved Jews into gas chambers, Orwell was writing Animal Farm Vile man"
RyanMcGoverne on Twitter - "Orwell cancelled. Stop reading Orwell everybody. There is nothing you are allowed to learn from his books. Ben says."
I saw a tankie who claimed that the gulags were a lie
Nandini Jammi on Twitter - "Hi, I'm the other half of Sleeping Giants. This is my story."
"Every White Male Democrat is running a playbook of throwing lesser White men to the Woke Police to be devoured, believing such gestures buys him immunity from cancellation himself.This strategy is crumbling over and over, and I, for one, am enjoying the bloodbath.This is a particularly delicious chapter. The Cancel Crew of Sleeping Giants whose founding mission is to dox and harass advertisers on conservative-leaning platforms just threw their White founder under the bus.Live by the Cancel sword ... "
Ricky Gervais calls out ‘cancel culture’ as facism, condemns outrage mob calling everyone ‘Hitler’ - "The social media warriors leading the latest round of “cancel culture” are no doubt going to be upset after their efforts were referred to as a “weird sort of fascism” by comedian and actor Ricky Gervais. Speaking in an interview on talk radio, Gervais criticized the “mob rule” mentality that has swept and destabilized the western world."
Marquette University threatens to rescind a student’s acceptance over pro-Trump TikTok video - "Triggered haters took to the comment section.“Girl—not mad, just feel sorry for you,” one viewer wrote. “how can i help. she will not be going to college next year,” wrote another. “Free speech does not mean no consequences,” commented one user. “i love love LOVE conservatives getting their school offers revoked,” another added.Some moved from censorship to violence.“I hope you get shot,” another commenter threatened. "I hope you get hit by a semi,” a user echoed. “I’d pray for you but you’re not worth it,” another added... Some Marquette administrators challenged Pfefferle with a series of baiting questions meant to judge her character and shame her for her publicity... “They also asked me hypothetical questions regarding Dreamers,” she said. “How would I respond if a Dreamer who lived down the hall from me came up to me and told me she didn’t feel safe or comfortable with my views and me being on campus.”... An Instagram user had created an email template requesting to have Pfefferle’s admission redacted and calling on others to send the email to Marquette’s administration... This cancel culture promoted by Marquette University officials may mark an all-time low in higher education. Perhaps conservatives aren't just the minority on campus; they're also the enemy."
Does Judd Apatow Deserve to Be Cancelled? | Penthouse" - "In this video, I have used the long-heralded journalistic “gotcha” technique of spending hundreds of hours looking through Apatow’s work in order to find some footage that portrays his hypocrisy in positioning himself as a moral arbiter of the comedy world. Everyone should be aware of this technique. No one should trust journalists. And I say that as one. To that end, I have spent the last few weeks doing what all tabloid-bred shit-heels do, which is dig through the corners of the internet, researching Judd Apatow: the man, the myth, the hypocrite... I’ve written a separate piece about the increasing despair I’ve felt these past few years, sussing out the growing hysteria around comedy and free speech and media manipulation (and how Apatow uses it), but this is just a video description... I realize it was a joke when he said to Jon Stewart that he enjoyed getting actors to show their dicks. (I almost wrote “young actors” and realized I’d be given a pants-on-fire rating by the Washington Post for that! “It’s more complicated…”)... I don’t really think Judd Apatow should be “cancel culture”-d by any means, but I’ll tell you one thing. By Apatow’s standards, he surely does."
Congressman Introduces Bill That Would Have Democrat Party Change Name Or ‘Be Barred From Participation In The House’ Due To Past Support Of Slavery, Confederacy - "Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) introduced a bill Thursday on the floor of the House of Representatives that would ban the Democratic Party due to the party’s history of having supported slavery and the Confederacy, saying “that is the standard to which they are holding everyone else, so the name change needs to occur.”"
Rob Henderson on Twitter - "The Group Monkey Dance "In this ritual, members of a group compete for status and to show their loyalty by how vicious they can be to an 'outsider.' Pleading, fighting, passivity will be interpreted as proof of 'otherness' and justification to escalate.""
Facebook - "There is a genuinely Stalinist vibe in the UK right now. ‘Problematic’ culture is being erased. Public monuments are being torn down. Controversial comedy shows are being shoved into the memory hole. Un-PC people are being denounced and cancelled. Furious mobs of morality police stalk the internet in search of people guilty of wrongthink. Politicians, professors and footballers are all publicly ‘taking the knee’ — ie, bowing down — to the politics of identity, swearing their devotion to the new religion of wokeness. And woe betide any blasphemer who refuses to follow suit: Dominic Raab has been hounded simply for refusing to kneel down and prostrate himself before our new ideological overlords. Everywhere you look, fingers are being pointed, thoughtcrimes are being punished, dissenters are being shamed.It is chilling. And it is going to get worse. I’m starting to understand how tyranny begins."
Teletubby Tinky `outed' as a closet gay - "Mr Falwell issues a warning to parents in the latest edition of the National Liberty Journal, which he publishes. The headline reads: ``Parents alert: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet.''The publication points out that Tinky Winky has a male voice yet carries a purse. ``He is purple the gay-pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle the gay-pride symbol,'' the article said."
Liberals keep claiming Christians were trying to cancel things, pretending that criticising something or boycotting it (so you or people you have control over can't consume it) is exactly the same as trying to get people fired or getting a cultural product withdrawn so *no one* can consume it).
Here, Falwell was just telling Christian parents not to let their kids watch Teletubbies. This is not the same as getting them cancelled.
Alloying Heavy Metal And God - The Washington Post - ""There's always resistance," says the group's 25-year-old drummer, Robert Sweet. "But the only reason it's there is that some people have never seen us in concert. Throwing the Bibles to the crowd -- some people think that's disrespectful. But that's not why we do it. We think it's great to get the Good Book out there . . . these Christian people or these churches that boycott our shows, and come out with picket signs and bullhorns and banners from TV, they've never seen us in concert. It just seems weird. Here we are standing up for Jesus and they are too. Yet they boycott us... While Christian radio generally has been receptive, Sweet says that Christian television effectively has banned
Stryper. He says he's heard a variety of reasons why TV evangelists have shunned the group"
Robert Sweet, drummer of the Christian metal band Stryper, said that other Christians who disapproved of his heavy metal didn't try to get him cancelled - they just boycotted or protested them.
Introduction to the Occult - "In a lengthy federal lawsuit against the Bedford school district, plaintiffs Ceil Dinozzi and Mary Ann Dibari allege that school officials in their community are promoting New Age occultism."
Christians criticised Magic: The Gathering and said schools shouldn't promote and/or allow it. That's not trying to get Magic: The Gathering cancelled
One liberal still claimed that it was. So presumably if I don't think porn should be allowed at school, I am trying to cancel porn
Fantasy Game Tangles With Reality - The New York Times - "Mrs. Di Bari, a lawyer, said she believed that by allowing Magic to be played in the schools, Dr. Dennis is violating students' First Amendment rights, denying the children their right to worship freely and without intimidation. She has enlisted the support of the Christian Coalition, a group that describes itself as a nonpartisan grass-roots organization representing Judeo-Christian values, and plans to continue her fight against the game, first with the school board, and if necessary, she said, in the courts"
The great 1980s Dungeons & Dragons panic - "Pulling continued her campaign by forming Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983.Pulling described D&D as "a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings".Pulling and BADD launched an intensive media campaign through conservative Christian outlets as well as mainstream media, including an appearance on current affairs show 60 Minutes opposite D&D co-creator Gary Gygax."
Christians criticised Dungeons & Dragons. They didn't try to get it cancelled
Bozell's Entertainment Column -- 02/11/1998 -- 'South Park' Reconsidered, Sort Of - "I used this space to call it "filth" and "toxic sewage," and suggested, "It doesn't just push the envelope; it knocks it off the table. It shouldn't have been made, period."... I stand by my earlier words. "South Park" should shape up. There are limits, and this show's gone too far."
Some Christians criticised South Park, But criticism isn't the same as trying to get it cancelled
Catholic group rails against new 'South Park' - "In a statement issued Thursday, the group demanded that Viacom, Comedy Central's parent company, issue an apology to Roman Catholics and "a pledge that this episode be permanently retired and not be made available on DVD.""
In all the articles I have gone through looking at Christian so-called cancel culture in retrospect (since liberals keep going on about how Christians used to cancel things), this is the one example that might truly qualify. Which just underlines how different modern cancel culture is
Opinion | What happened with New York Times reporter Donald McNeil? - The Washington Post - "The Constitution protects people from being prosecuted twice for the same offense. “Double jeopardy” protections are also written into union contracts at workplaces like the New York Times, to assist employees facing the same complaint for a second time. All the safeguards in the world, however, won’t prevent the allegations from creating a public furor, as now-former reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. discovered on Friday, when he resigned over a controversy that promises to reverberate through the paper’s virtual corridors.In the summer of 2019, McNeil joined a group of students on a Times-sponsored educational excursion to Peru. In the wake of the trip, the Times received a number of complaints about the longtime science reporter’s conduct. Some of them cited allegedly racist remarks and behavior, including that McNeil had stereotyped African American youths. After an investigation, McNeil received a reprimand in September 2019.A far more public tribunal considered the same conduct in recent weeks. The Daily Beast revealed McNeil’s 2019 reprimand on Jan. 28, prompting a Times statement that McNeil had “used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.” Executive Editor Dean Baquet explained, “I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.”Then Times management pivoted after receiving a letter from 150 Times staffers. That letter, sent on Feb. 3, said, “Our community is outraged and in pain. Despite The Times’s seeming commitment to diversity and inclusion, we have given a prominent platform — a critical beat covering a pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color — to someone who chose to use language that is offensive and unacceptable by any newsroom’s standards.” It also asserted that since the controversy became public, “current and former employees have suggested that he also has shown bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years.” The letter furnished no specific examples of that, but it requested a “renewed investigation” into the 2019 controversy... A Friday email from Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn announced McNeil’s resignation and laid out the standard: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”With those last three words, the Times lost its foothold for criticizing a politician for flip-flopping. In his initial assessment of the McNeil case, Baquet wrote, “It did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.” Now, suddenly, intent means nothing... The legacy of the McNeil controversy will be to blockade intelligent discussion. In December, Hannah-Jones posted a tweet using the n-word in the context of exploring mores regarding the use of the epithet. There was no national controversy because the intent behind the tweet wasn’t vindictive or hurtful; it was journalistic. If intent no longer matters at the Times, however, wasn’t this a problematic posting?... it issued a clarification saying that “the note to staff should not lead anyone to conclude that we will not use difficult language in our news coverage when it’s warranted.” The use of “difficult language” in news coverage, however, requires Times journalists to discuss such matters in editorial settings. So long as the intent-blind standard remains in place, they might just keep their mouths shut"
Whoopi Goldberg rips cancel culture targeting Pepé Le Pew: 'I don't know why you've got to erase everything' - "The Hollywood Reporter reported Monday that Le Pew will not appear in the forthcoming "Space Jam" sequel. In addition, the world's most famous skunk is "not featured in any current Warner Bros. TV projects and there are no current plans" for his return, the outlet reported.The news came after New York Times columnist Charles Blow accused Le Pew of "normalizing rape culture."... Blow also accused fellow Looney Tunes mainstay Speedy Gonzales of "helping popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans.""
Speedy Gonzales is the opposite of drunk and lethargic. Sounds like Blow has never watched Looney Tunes
And Then They Came to Cancel Pepe Le Pew - "It should be clear now that the New York Times is waging culture war against everything and seeks to impose Year Zero... It’s a bit of a leap to go from a cartoon skunk to “this is how you should behave, young man.” Skunks are by their nature reclusive and extremely smelly creatures. They spray a horrible-smelling musk when they believe they’re threatened but they smell bad all the time. Pepe isn’t written to be a behavioral role model. He’s a skunk. The comedy is that he’s so amorous while he smells so bad but doesn’t realize he has a BO problem, because he’s a skunk, and, by the way the target of his affections is a cat. That’s the joke. It’s not terribly sophisticated. Pepe Le Pew was the villain in the cartoon, anyway. He’s not depicted heroically and I can’t believe my life has come down to analyzing Pepe Le Pew cartoons. I never liked that character in the first place. Growing up, we did have cartoons that were explicitly supposed to show behavior role models — Davey & Goliath. That stop-motion cartoon was produced by the Lutheran Church. We knew the difference between that and other shows and cartoons. The Three Stooges weren’t role models, either. They were intentionally idiots — white, male idiots. Gilligan was a white, male doofus. Looney Tunes did teach classical music, between hunting for wabbits and such, but it’s about silly laughs. Classical music is racist now anyway, according to the cancel culture shock troops. If you listen to Bach and Beethoven, report yourself for reeducation, comrade. Pepe Le Pew will be leaving YouTube shortly and eBay will likely forbid you from selling your old DVDs of the cartoon. Amazon has a lot of products to memory-hole. Porky Pig — a fat-shamer who mocks speech impediments! — will be right behind him. That’s how this goes. The new Puritans will eventually get around to canceling everything they don’t like or have over-analyzed, even if they lose a battle every now and then. By the time they do cancel all the things, those today who think this or that isn’t an example of cancel culture either still won’t understand what’s going on or they’ll join right in on the digital book and film burning... here’s another take. Pepe Le Pew is a product of Hollywood and Hollywood really is terrible. Hollywood Babylon hates basic American ideals as much as the New York Times does. It’s full of awful people who did and do despicable things to get rich and obtain power, and they made a sewer of our culture along the way. Harvey Weinstein was their king and they’re really not worth defending. So now do “George Lucas appropriated Japanese culture to make Star Wars.” Because he totally did. Let’s see Mao’s House at Disney deal with that."
Dan Campbell, Detroit Lions HC favorite, made anti-gay remark in 1998 - "Dan Campbell, Detroit Lions coach front-runner, made controversial anti-gay remark in college" - Marlowe Alter
Marlowe Alter on Twitter - "I apologize for the unacceptable tweets from my past. There is no excuse for the language I used and I'm embarrassed. I do not condone that language. I’m sorry to anyone I have offended and deeply regret my actions."
Replies: "so the whole time you were writing the article you never thought hey i made more and worse comments than that ?"
"This is why people hate the hypocrisy of journalism."
"Bro it's not the language from 2011, it's the present-day hypocrisy and lack of forgiveness. Apologize for the right thing."
"Don’t apologize for your stupid tweets. Apologize to the guy who’s career you tried to destroy."
"Not to worry. You’re in the media so we really didn’t have very high expectations about you anyway."
"I believe the rules people like you have set up dictate that you should now lose your job and any future opportunities.*Personally*? I don't think so, but *you* tried to ruin somebody else, sooooooo..."
"The woke virtue signalers are always compensating for something they did in the past that they don't want to come out.Busted"
Meme - ""CANCEL CULTURE HAS GONE TOO FAR!" - Man about the be crushed by a huge stone wheel which has crushed others in its wake, while the person in front of him is just noticing the wheel and others further in front are oblivious"
It's telling how upset liberals are by Stonetoss. As we used to be told about humour and authoritarianism/government, humour is the most effective way to critique power
Facebook - "I truly wonder how it's not illegal when people with whom you disagree on Twitter start tagging one's employer as a means of attempting to intimidate you/fire you. A free society thrives on disagreements among competing ideas. I point to the racism of anti-white hate: Cancel him!The reflex of most humans is to eliminate one's ideological opponents in any possible way. Cancel Culture is simply a modern-day manifestation of this deeply rooted dark instinct. People who engage in such criminal behavior should well be criminally charged."
Comment (elsewhere): "Tagging people's employers in Twitter feeds is the equivalent of those cowardly colleagues we all know of who insist in CCing all the bosses in every email they send out to wayang.It's not "accountability", it's cowardice and an inability to argue for themselves to solve their own problems"
AmericanDigitalNews on Twitter - "88 years ago this month, the nazi party began gathering and burning books they found subversive, or opposed to their ideology. Just a little history lesson."
The N-word row engulfing SOAS university | The Spectator - "The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)’s newly-appointed director, Adam Habib, has become the latest victim of cancel culture having been suspended from the university. His crime? During an online meeting, a student asked Habib if SOAS’s commitment to the BLM movement was sincere, when some academics continued to use racial slurs, particularly the N-word, in the classroom. Habib responded by saying that he would personally address any of these allegations but in doing so, he ‘verbalised’ the word in question. It was a cardinal mistake. The incident caused an uproar at SOAS, with selectively edited versions of the video adding fuel to the fire.Those on the left at SOAS (which is pretty much the entire student body) soon wanted their pound of Adam Habib's flesh and now the director has been forced to step down while his comments are investigated.Habib is a mixed race South African, with impeccable social justice credentials: he has spent most of his life working for academic institutions at the forefront of promoting racial equality in post-apartheid South Africa. Now his downfall has come at the hands of a group of students sitting at home reprimanding him harshly on Zoom about racial sensitivity. For a university that supposedly wants to engage with uncomfortable issues such as racial injustice, global inequality and human rights, SOAS students are often incredibly sensitive. It is hard to see how you can discuss colonial Africa, racial hierarchies or oppression – themes which appear in a number of SOAS modules – without first acknowledging the existence and connotations of the N-word. Its use in an appropriate academic context, if anything, ensures that the centuries spent combatting racial inequality are not forgotten. Dick Gregory, the famous American comedian and civil rights activist, would surely have agreed: he called his autobiography ‘Nigger: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory’ as an anti-racist statement... The rumour now is that if Habib is unable to revive its financial fortunes, SOAS will be sold off to the highest bidder – which at this point seems likely to be UCL. SOAS students appear unwilling to let Habib undertake any meaningful change (they have challenged his sensible and much-needed financial reforms too), and instead would rather drag him through the quagmire of a scandal. The institution's end now seems more inevitable by the day. It would be a shame if SOAS disappears. But its treatment of Adam Habib suggests that it has already lost its way."
Presumably to liberals, this is not cancel culture but "accountability culture", and academics should not just not be able to use The Word That Shall Not Be Named, they can't even use it when talking about it
Once again, to liberals, words speak louder than actions
mirax on Twitter - "What a world the zealots have created. A mixed race South African lost his job immediately on verbalising the N word in the context of a discussion on race. The same word is on air constantly in pop music."
Teen Vogue: America Has Forgotten How to Forgive - The Atlantic - "Condé Nast, the publisher of Teen Vogue, announced that Alexi McCammond, a 27-year-old former reporter for Axios, would not be taking over as editor of the magazine after all. She had been done in by her own social-media posts, little time bombs she’d unwittingly armed when she tweeted them at age 17. Those posts groaned about her “stupid asian T.A.” and mocked Asians’ “swollen eyes.” She apologized for the tweets in 2019. The Teen Vogue staff discovered these comments, spurned the apology, and revolted. My own half-swollen eyes widened at this news. McCammond’s tweets are a kind of denigration familiar to Asian Americans—an expression less of hatred than of social difference. If you regard Asian people as a distinct social type, never conceivably overlapping with your own circles, ineligible for friendship or romance or conversation, you might think that you can ridicule them and never suffer any consequences. Then the bombs go off, and instead of standing amid mock-ups for your “Summer Style” package, you are standing amid the ruins of your career. I suppose a magazine aimed at teens and preteens would strain to acknowledge what every adult knows, which is that the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life. “The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes,” the artist Kimon Nicolaїdes once wrote, “the sooner you will be able to correct them.” Then, at some vague point when the first digit of your age is no longer a 1, you experience a cleansing bonfire of your sins, and your adult permanent record begins. If Teen Vogue, even in its current woke incarnation, does not exist to celebrate this period of still-expungeable error, then it may as well be calling for the abolition of the teenage years altogether. Its staff, as well as many of its advertisers, evidently think its readers deserve no bonfire, no sin jubilee, and should be hounded eternally for their dumbest and most bigoted utterances. This suggests an intriguing editorial mix of beauty tips, celebrity news, and vengeance... if Teen Vogue has its way, I suppose I should consider myself hostage to the idiocy of my wayward teenage self until I am safely dead. Teenagers lose from this decision. Asian Americans do too. I know nothing about the racial composition of the staff of Teen Vogue, but the policing of anti-Asian tweets, no matter who does it, is a cheap exercise in identity construction. In an interview published Wednesday, the writer Cathy Park Hong told The Atlantic that fixing political problems requires that we “talk about our racial identity, because people feel intimately close to that.” The solution is to “build an Asian American identity that’s beyond loving boba tea and K-pop.”The coup d’état at Teen Vogue is the result of a debased form of identity building—one that mistakes an identity worth having for one founded on the pitiless prosecution of offenses by members of other races regardless of whether they are large or small, intended or unintended, ongoing or long-disavowed... Like everyone, Asian Americans should meet racism and violence with the contempt they deserve. But they should decline to model their outrage on the vindictive excesses that have become commonplace. They should do so independently of existing structures, which originated in categories of Black and white, and don’t work very well for discussion of those races either. Nor is it any failure of allyship with Black people, or for that matter white people, to opt out of these structures. Black identity and white identity are lamentable realities, difficult to unravel because they are legacies of America’s original sin. If, as Hong says, Asian identity is something still being built, a real act of allyship would be to reject the defective templates of its predecessors. No one wants to be stuck in a prison of racial identity, but the prison walls do not crumble because some people volunteer to be inmates with those who have no choice. The strongest argument for McCammond’s ouster is that she has not been especially gracious in accepting the apologies of others. (This is Wesley Yang’s “Dexter rule,” named for the TV serial killer who kills only other killers: Cancel only the cancelers.) But let’s grant her maximum charity. A world in which McCammond apologizes for her old tweets is better than one in which she sees nothing wrong with them. Possibly worse than the latter, though, is one in which the highest aspiration of racial pride is to slam the doors of repentance permanently in the faces of your enemies. In many religious traditions, expiation of guilt is an earthly process; you can confess your sins to a priest, or wander Earth in sackcloth and ashes. For the sake of today’s Teen Vogue readers, I hope that by the time they are McCammond’s age, the current culture has developed its own process of expiation. Most people were 17 once, and those who haven’t gotten there yet will be 17 someday, and 27 too."
Live by the woke...
The problem with extending charity to people who extend none is that they get to run roughshod over everyone
Teen Vogue Staffer Who Encouraged Alexi McCammond’s Ousting Caught Tweet N-Word - "Christine Davitt, a senior social media manager at Teen Vogue, was among the miserable staffers who authored a letter, a staffer who spent her past tweeting out the n-word. Uh, what?... Less than one hour after McCammond announced she would not join Teen Vogue as editor-in-chief, Davitt celebrated that she helped ruin the young woman’s life... The successful attempt to wreck McCammond’s career at her brightest moment is sickening, a word that also describes Davitt’s character. Did Davitt forget her past while calling for McCammond’s ousting, or was she hoping it’d cover up her own history? If one joins Team Cancel Culture, they can’t be fired themselves, right?"
Oops
Disney+ gives ‘The Muppet Show’ an ‘offensive content’ disclaimer before select episodes
Cancel culture contagion continues: Mumford & Sons banjo player forced to apologize and "take time away from the band" for liking a conservative book!
The free-speech crisis is not a right-wing myth - "In a piece entitled ‘The myth of the free-speech crisis’ Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik waves away people’s ‘overblown fears of censorship’, and argues that those defending the principle of free speech are only doing so because they want to normalise ‘hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it’. As she sees it, her attack on free speech is really an attack on the ‘racism and prejudice’ that is supposedly advanced in its name... ‘Manufactured.’ ‘Invented.’ ‘A right-wing myth.’ They really do believe that the very real existence of a free-speech crisis is not only a fantasy, but a product of a right-wing, no doubt Tory conspiracy. It is a mode of argument we’ve seen before, in relation to political correctness during the 1980s and 90s. Then, as now, the clear policing of language and the invention of a new, acceptable vocabulary was dismissed as a product of the right-wing imagination... Those who dismiss the free-speech crisis as a myth possess a shallow, instrumental view of the value of free speech. They simply do not take it seriously. And they certainly do not regard free speech as an inviolable moral good. Hence they can voice their nominal support for it in one breath, before, in the next, calling for the censorship of views they despise. That is why free-speech denialism often coexists with the conviction that it is okay to No Platform people. So an academic called Evan Smith, who is now making a career out of denying the existence of a free-speech crisis, can casually insist that No Platforming is not only okay, but should also be celebrated... free-speech-crisis denialism coexists with the conviction that some voices are not worth hearing and others should be shut down because they are dangerous and hateful – two categories which have expanded hugely since No Platform policies were instigated against fascistic and neo-Nazi views. Unsurprisingly, the likes of Smith are committed to a very thin and limited definition of free speech. And what’s more, many are now becoming self-conscious critics of the unconditional value of free speech... The portrayal of free speech as a threat has long been a key component of the anti-democratic imagination. It is based on the premise that the demos lack the requisite intellectual abilities to participate in public life. People cannot be trusted to distinguish between truth and lies. They are likely to be misled by populist demagogues. They are at the mercy of propaganda, advertising and the media. As one commentator puts it in the New York Times, ‘good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas’. Which is another way of saying that if our ‘good ideas’ don’t sell, we need to prevent the ‘bad ideas’ from reaching the market.The recycling of such age-old, reactionary arguments highlights the depths of elite disenchantment with free speech and, by implication, democracy itself... The second argument justifying the moral devaluation of free speech is that it needs to be curbed because of its harmful impact on different identity groups. Enshrined in the ever-expanding categories of hate-speech legislation, this argument rests on the assumption that free speech poses a threat to the wellbeing of certain identity groups.Such a view is most vociferously voiced by proponents of trans culture. They claim that just debating the idea that gender trumps biology amounts to an attack on ‘trans people’s right to exist’. Free speech is therefore presented as a threat to trans people’s lives.Others also associate regulating speech with saving lives. Liz Fekete, director of the Institute of Race Relations, warns that the ‘privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life… has emboldened identitarian and neo-Nazi activists, who are experts at manipulating naive liberal arguments about freedom of speech’. It is a point echoed by Malik, who states: ‘Free speech as an abstract value is now directly at odds with the sanctity of life.’Counterposing freedom of speech to the ‘freedom to life’ is a form of moral blackmail. From this perspective, to defend free speech is to show a callous disregard for people’s lives. This view was dramatically expounded by the cultural theorist Judith Butler in 2017... Butler transforms free speech into a malevolent force that wreaks havoc on minority groups... Butler’s argument is so redolent of those made by 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, Hobbes argued that such was people’s fear of death, and their aspiration for security, that they would be willing to give up their freedom in exchange for the safety provided by an all-powerful sovereign. Today, the call for limiting freedom is justified on similar grounds; namely, to protect the dignity and psychic security of minority groups. For Butler, insulating identity from hurtful language is a small price to pay for restricting the right to free speech.Once free speech is presented as something to be balanced with and traded for security – indeed once it is presented as a threat – it loses its moral authority. This is clear in students’ attitudes towards free speech. They tend to accept its importance in theory, while supporting its restriction in practice. A 2017 report on American colleges, published by the Brookings Institute, revealed that 51 per cent of students agreed that ‘it was okay to shout down a speaker with whom they disagreed’. Even more disturbing was its finding that 19 per cent of respondents thought the use of violence to prevent a ‘controversial’ speaker from speaking was acceptable. It seems that once free speech loses its moral authority, even violent intolerance is legitimised... The devaluation of the moral authority of free speech among those who identify as left-wing or liberal is particularly striking. Historically, freedom has tended to be a cause supported by the left and liberals, while conservatives tended to be opposed to its expansion. This situation has changed dramatically in the 21st century... The debate around cancel culture has tended to get bogged down in arguments about precisely how many high-profile speakers have been No Platformed on campus – as if showing that relatively few prominent figures have been No Platformed proves there is no free-speech crisis.This ignores the really corrosive aspects of the moralising project of cancel culture that aren’t captured in No Platform stats. On campuses and in the workplace, self-censorship is rife... Cancel culture’s greatest success lies in language control. It has not only imposed a new vocabulary on society; it has also delegitimised the use of age-old words and expressions. It has even changed the meaning of some words, making them far more negative than they used to be.Take the word ‘controversial’, for instance. Not so long ago, to describe something as controversial was deemed a good thing, a sign of a flourishing democracy. Today, ‘controversial’ is a pejorative, to be levelled at those who dare to cause offence. So students’ unions insist that so-called ‘controversial speakers’ sign a form promising not to say things that make people feel uncomfortable. The UK’s National Union of Students even published a guidebook called Managing the Risks Associated with External Speakers, in which it offered helpful advice on how to protect students from the words of controversial speakers... The concept of ‘outdated language’ has no legal or institutional formulation. There are no formal laws against the use of outdated language. And yet anyone accused of this cultural crime is at the very least forced to issue an apology. Gordon Beattie, the boss of a public relations company, discovered this when he tweeted the following:‘At Beattie Communications we don’t hire blacks, gays or Catholics. We hire talented people and we don’t care about the colour of their skin, their sexual orientation or religion. That’s the way it should be with every Company — only hire people for their talent, experience, knowledge, and wisdom.’As a result of this tweet, Beattie was forced to apologise and then resign. The power that the cultural elites now have to decide what language is out of date, and what language people should be punished for, is not unlike the power once possessed by the Church, which could determine what was blasphemous or profane. But at least the Church was a publicly recognisable institution. One knew where one stood.That is not the case today. Cancel culture appears as an invisible power without a name. Hence its practitioners can deny its existence, just as they deny the existence of the crisis of free speech. That they do so while cancelling and censoring with impunity makes the task of defending free speech more urgent than ever."
When people claim there is no free speech crisis when a majority of American college students believe you can shout down a speaker with whom you disagree and 19% think violence is justified, it is clear that they're not actually thinking of free speech, but the freedom to say things they approve of
Since saying you hire people for their ability and not their identity means you need to resign, it's clear that the left doesn't actually think that you should hire the best person for the job - but instead hire based on social justice grounds.
Presumably Beattie must be held "accountable" for not committing to hire "minorities" just because they're minorities
‘A climate of fear prevents people from speaking out’ - "In March this year, the University of Cambridge proposed new, repressive changes to its free speech policy. Arif Ahmed, a lecturer in philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, led a fightback, forcing the issue to a vote. The new proposals were overwhelmingly rejected in a rare victory for free expression in education...
Arif Ahmed: This university has a free-speech policy, which consists of the limitations on what you can do in exercising your free speech. The university council – the executive body of the university, which runs it on a day-to-day basis – published a proposed updated version of that in March, which contained various things that I thought were restrictive.It included the requirement that, in exercising your freedom of speech, you need to show respect to the opinions of others. I thought that was particularly dangerous... I needed 25 signatures to do this. That was difficult, because there were a lot of people who agreed with the drift of what I was saying, but were not prepared to come out and say it in public. There were people agreeing but who did not want to sign anything because they had applied for promotion. Whether fears like that were well-founded is one question, but what is clearly the case is that there is a climate of fear that has an impact on at least some people’s willingness to speak out on this issue, and presumably on many others. I did manage to get the signatures. Then we had a campaign and there was a vote. Both the amendment that I proposed to get rid of the requirement for respect, and a couple of other amendments that I also proposed, were passed by large margins... I did manage to get the signatures. Then we had a campaign and there was a vote. Both the amendment that I proposed to get rid of the requirement for respect, and a couple of other amendments that I also proposed, were passed by large margins... It may be in part to do with universities thinking of students as consumers and thinking that their main task is to give students the experience that they feel they want, combined with the misperception that what students want is a comfortable environment. By that is meant somewhere they do not feel challenged on some of their most fundamental beliefs. What is the point of going to university if you are not going to have these things challenged? It is a waste of nine grand a year.Also, there is a broader movement in the culture as a whole. It is not just universities. For instance, there is the politicisation of a whole range of national institutions whose job is not to pursue any particular political agenda at all. There is the BBC, football clubs, the National Trust and a range of other public institutions. There is a broader cultural change – I would say a cultural threat – in this direction.
spiked: Proponents of ‘inclusivity’ seem particularly keen on censorship. But doesn’t it have the opposite effect – the exclusion of particular opinions and people?...
Arif Ahmed: The debate at Cambridge will hopefully show people that they are not alone in their views – in thinking so much of this is crap. The next time they are in a meeting, and there’s some repressive, soft-totalitarian proposal and everyone in the meeting is nodding along to it, at least they can know that actually, their own inner reservations are probably being shared by a lot of people in the room."
Social justice warriors are waging a 'Cancel Cultural Revolution' - "Eventually, they came for Bon Appétit, as we always knew they would... In the course of a week, three editors went down: James Bennett of the Times was canceled for publishing an opinion on the opinion page, Senator Tom Cotton’s defense of the Insurrection Act, which permits the use of federal troops to quell riots; Claudia Eller was pushed out at Variety (suspended, formally, but not expected to return to her position) after penning a white-privilege mea culpa that was found to be unconvincing; Adam Rapoport of Bon Appétit was canned for much the same reason, his offense aggravated by a turn-of-the-century photograph of him dressed as a stereotypical Puerto Rican at a Halloween party. But racial outrages are far from the only thing that can cost someone a job in these stupid times, and it isn’t only public figures who are targeted. Fender, a guitar maker, exiled a master guitar-builder after he tweeted an ugly joke (a blood-covered Jeep over the caption “What protesters on the freeway?”) at the expense of the recent demonstrations. But better manners won’t save you: A data analyst and veteran of the Obama reelection campaign was fired by Civis Analytics for tweeting a link to a paper written by a well-regarded (and, worth noting, biracial) Princeton professor of African-American studies finding that riots are bad for black communities. No criticism, however respectful or intelligent, is to be permitted.These men were not fired for using racial slurs or engaging in abuse. They were fired for giving voice to views that the mob wishes to see silenced. Of course there is rampant hypocrisy. The editor of Bon Appétit had to go, but as recently as 2019 the Liberal prime minister of Canada and the Democratic governor of Virginia both survived blackface scandals resulting from some of those “youthful indiscretions” the politicians are always going on about. Fender will fire a luthier but maintains a relationship with Eric Clapton, who has been known to use racial slurs in vicious denunciation of British immigrants and as recently as 2007 talked up Enoch Powell, the politician whose “Rivers of Blood” speech was a cri de cœur for British racists. Clapton’s name can move a lot of guitars. On the “Animal Farm” of social-media scalp hunting, some animals are more equal than others. The same progressives who once held themselves out as checks on corporate power now have decided to deputize the Fortune 500 to enforce political and social conformism, making political correctness a criterion for employment — not only in high-status jobs but also for fast-food workers and obscure middle managers. They believe that they have the cultural power, and that this way of doing things will advantage the Left. But culture changes: Today’s social-justice warriors are relying on the same strategy that once kept openly gay actors out of the movies and black musicians off the radio, an irony that is lost on our progressive friends.The imbeciles on Twitter are unserious people, but unserious people can produce serious problems. There is a word for the situation in which there is no room for disagreement. The word is not “justice.” It is “totalitarianism.” That is what cancel culture is, and we have seen it in highly developed form in such places as East Germany under Honecker and China under Mao and the Cultural Revolution."
Mark Dice on Twitter - @Alyssa_Milano: "Cancel culture is being weaponized by the right/Putin. Take notice of who they are targeting & what is trending. Are they trying to hurt Trump’s most vocal critics? Yup. The misinformation campaign has begun. Be vigilant in what you post on social media. Truth still matters.
The replies to this tweet are proving my point. Thank you."
"She's hiding the replies of people who post the picture of her in blackface, FYI."
Harvard grad Claira Janover lost Deloitte job over TikTok 'stab threat' - "The Harvard graduate who said in a TikTok video that she would “stab” anyone who told her “All Lives Matter” revealed in a new pair of recordings that she has lost her job over the perceived threats and ensuing furor.“Standing up for Black Lives Matter put me in a place online to be seen by millions of people,” a teary Claira Janover said in a new video posted Wednesday afternoon. “The job that I’d worked really hard to get and meant a lot to me has called me and fired me because of everything.”... Janover gestured to what appears to be a page from the company’s website, and noted that she was axed “even though they claim to stand against systematic bias, racism and unequal treatment.”... she blamed supporters of President Trump for going after her job... “I’m sorry, Deloitte, that you can’t see that,” she said. “That you were cowardice [sic] enough to fight somebody who’s going to make an indelible change in the world and is going to have an impact.”"
I like how threatening violence against people who say something you disagree with is "standing up for BLM"
Somehow I doubt the left considers this "accountability culture". Probably "white supremacy" instead
Facebook - "ARM YOURSELF WITH FACTS:Her actual name was Nancy Green. She was a cook, activist & a storyteller. She was born a slave in 1834 in Kentucky. In 1890 she was hired to represent Aunt Jemimia as an advertising character. It was her job to operate the pancake cooking display at their expos.Her personality and cooking talent made her an instant hit. She won a medal for her performance. After the expo she was offered a lifetime contract. She was working until her death until 1923.Her career allowed her the freedom to become an activist and engage in anti poverty programs. She used her status to become a leading advocate against poverty and in favor of equal rights.Green was known to be an attractive woman. A magnificent cook with an outgoing personality and a friendly nature. Her original painting, found on the syrup bottle, sold for $9030.00. It was rendered by A.B. Frost one of the great illustrators of the Golden Age.The left has cancelled a black woman who went from actual slave to famous philanthropist.SHARE HER STORY (Because, for some reason, they don't want you to)."
Archbishop of Canterbury destroys Harry and Meghan's wedding story - "The Archbishop of Canterbury has railed against the creeping trend of cancel culture as a 'huge threat' to the Church of England's future. Justin Welby also defended the right to freedom of speech after a teacher was suspended for showing his class a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. In a rare intervention, the head of the Church waded into the row engulfing the school in Batley, West Yorkshire, where the teacher has gone into hiding after furious protests from Muslim parents... 'We can't erase the past. It's impossible. We have to learn from it sometimes, often, always. 'We have to repent of it quite often. But we cannot erase it. We cannot cancel history. We cannot cancel differences of opinion.' The Archbishop noted it was an alarming trend growing at UK universities, where controversial speakers have been no-platformed."
Support of President Trump on Twitter gets cyclist banned - "Cycling team Trek-Segafredo has suspended the 2019 junior road race world champion Quinn Simmons after he made comments in support of President Donald Trump on Twitter... "My dear American friends, I hope this horrible presidency ends for you. And for us as (former?) allies too,” Been wrote, via the Associated Press."If you follow me and support Trump, you can go. There is zero excuse to follow or vote for the vile, horrible man." Simmons replied to Been with “Bye,” and a Black-skinned waving hand emoji. After another Twitter user replied to Been with "Apparently a Trumper," Simmons replied again with "That's right" and an American flag emoji.
The racing team released a statement late Wednesday night about Simmons’ tweets and his use of a Black hand emoji.
"While we support the right to free speech, we will hold people accountable for their words and actions. Regrettably, Simmons made statements online that we feel are divisive, incendiary, and detrimental to the team, professional cycling, its fans, and the positive future we hope to help create for the sport In response, he will not be racing for Trek-Segafredo until further notice.""
You know the "far right" is in the ascendancy when supporting an elected politician with massive popular support loses you your job, and condemning the same politician gets you feted
Telling half a country to "go" is apparently not "divisive, incendiary, and detrimental"
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear' - " Sir Kazuo, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, warned that a "climate of fear" was preventing some people from writing what they want. He said they may be concerned that an "anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery"... he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences... the author, who was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but moved to England when he was five, insisted there was no subject or viewpoint he would "shrink back from". "Novelists should feel free to write from whichever viewpoint they wish or represent all kinds of views," he said. "Right from an early age I've written from the point of view of people very different from myself. My first novel was written from the point of view of a woman."... He has called for "a more open discussion" about cancel culture and freedom of speech."
Singer St. Vincent blasts cancel culture - "Singer St. Vincent is not a fan of cancel culture, because no one has lived a “flawless life.” The musician was inspired by her father’s recent nine-year prison stint for her new album, Daddy’s Home, and she wanted to use her work to highlight stories of struggle... Addressing the tendency for social media users to call for someone to be blacklisted following a public misstep, St. Vincent said, “We’re in a strange time where there’s a lot of new information and we need to be able to integrate it in a way that causes less human suffering, (rather) than more.”"
Cancel Culture: Cronkite School of Journalism Caves to Student Activists - "The first sign of cancel culture bubbling up at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication involved Sonya Duhé, whom the university named dean this spring. Her tenure was cut short almost instantly after she published a tweet praying for “the good police officers who keep us safe.” The protest-allied campus revolted against the incoming dean’s “racist” tweet and provoked a former student to accuse Duhé of committing “four years of microaggressions” against her. Other students would come forward to allege that she had made similar “microaggressive comments” to them. It wasn’t one week before the Cronkite School revoked its offer and pledged to be more “inclusive” moving forward. Things have only gotten worse — and, now that administrators have gotten used to the sweet taste of cancel culture, it appears that student journalists themselves are on the dinner plate. When Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS, published a poll following a May looting spree in Scottsdale, progressive students complained that the poll’s language was too friendly toward police officers — so Cronkite News folded to the pressure. It deleted the poll and apologized for causing “divisiveness”: “It was not our intention to downplay the actions of law enforcement.” When a second young journalist published a Q&A with a former police officer in June, students complained that this exchange also was too friendly. Once again, Cronkite News folded to the pressure. It wiped the Q&A offline and replaced it with an apologetic note pledging to “better serve and represent our communities, especially the black community and other communities of color.” The list goes on. The most recent “cancel” target is Rae’Lee Klein, a young journalist at the Cronkite School’s Blaze Radio. After the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., Klein, on her personal Twitter account, linked to a New York Post investigation and wrote: “Please read this article to get the background of Jacob Blake’s warrant. You’ll be quite disgusted.” Progressive students were apoplectic... Luckily, Klein has refused to resign or succumb to this cancel culture flare-up, explaining on-air her decision to push back against “a situation where our opinions and our beliefs are held against us or [are] characteristic of our ability to lead.” While she plants her feet, other young journalists at ASU understandably are reaching for the escape hatch. In August, two such undergraduates founded The Western Tribune, an “independent student journalism” website, as a home to “the oft unheard voices of our generation.” They won’t be the last. These campus newsrooms are a means for tomorrow’s leaders to write down, or say out loud, the opinions they’ve been keeping in their minds and to see if those ideas stand up to the scrutiny of the real world. These young ideas rarely do — and the invaluable lesson that students glean from that realization will be lost forever if administrators cut them off at the knees by continuing to appease oversensitive cry-bullies whose antics threaten these vital sandboxes. If things continue as they do, soon there will be no conservatives left to cancel, and progressive journalists will only be left to cancel themselves like a scorpion stinging itself to death. And that’s the way it will be."
AP's Emily Wilder fired over 'biased' pro-Palestinian tweets - "An Associated Press reporter has been fired over pro-Palestinian tweets she posted while in college – and now she insists she’s a victim of “cancel culture.”... An AP spokesperson told the newspaper Wilder was fired for violating its media policy “during her time at AP” – an apparent reference to posts in which she veered from its apolitical stance for reporters as recently as Sunday... Wilder, who is Jewish, told the Washington Post she was a member of the pro-Palestinian groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine while at Stanford University... She acknowledged possibly violating AP’s social media guidelines that bar employees from sharing political opinions, but claimed the policies are “selectively enforced” by design."
Guess she's not for "accountability culture"
Yet another example of an anti-Israel liberal Jew. So much for (((them)))
Perma Banned - Posts | Facebook - "-Be "Muh Private Platform" 白左 Youtuber
-Over the past months and longer, cheering and shitting on people being censored
-Fast forward today, gets banned from Youtube; exactly the same way the others he shat on were.
-Gets shocked and upset, "how could this happen" says he
-Cooks up a big fuss with other 白左 Youtubers, suddenly they're all for free speech when they're the ones being on the receiving end of censorship
-Manages to reverse it the same way as other now silenced accounts by getting a bunch of his friends (how many times can that happen I wonder, the purged accounts had 'mistaken takedowns' before YT stopped pretending), but still doubles down on saying "muh private company, you should be censored but not me because I didn't violate TOS"
-Conveniently forgetting massive number of accounts getting unpersoned even though they never violated TOS
Oh so its "private company they don't have to justify banning you" when its someone you don't like, but suddenly its "unfair and unacceptable" when they come for you huh?
Did I ever tell you that lotsa Muricans are making it harder for everyone else to care about what they say?"
