Meme - abby govindan @abbygov: "THE WOMEN POSTING L'S GUY LOST HIS JOB LMAOOOOO
a few people messaged his work place and they confirmed that his contract was terminated! I'm not sure of the ins and outs of it all I just know they distanced themselves from him as much as possible and are scrubbing all evidence he was ever associated with them."
jillian @Jil_CristinaL "they messaged me and told me that he only worked for them briefly as an independent contractor and hasn't worked for them in a long time. idk what to believeeee"
Cancel culture is girl culture
The Scared Professors - "In 1958, sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens Jr. conducted several studies with academics across the country, questioning them about their behaviors and attitudes toward expression and speech in light of the wave of the Congressional investigations of subversion that was hitting the nation’s collegiate campuses. From this work, they published The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. Lazarsfeld and Thielens found, in aggregate, that nine percent of faculty reported that they “toned down their writing for fear of controversy.” Six decades later, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that more than one-third (35 percent) of faculty report toning down their writing for fear of causing controversy. This is the antithesis of university life and brutally represents the strength of cancel culture hitting far more than just students; intellectual life today on campus is worse than the McCarthy era. After teaching at Sarah Lawrence College for over 15 years, I have witnessed some of the most intense hostility and hatred toward Jewish students and faculty around the country in recent years. While I am fighting back, I am asked why my reasonable colleagues have opted to remain silent and allow an intense collegiate antisemitic environment to explode. While I am certain that many faculty colleagues recognize the problems on our campus and are disgusted by the hatred, they do not want the attention that I have received and do not want to be attacked or canceled. New data from FIRE reveals the true depths of how fearful professors are. One disturbing number is that just over a quarter (27 percent) of faculty think academic freedom is secure on their campus today. This only scratches the surface. Consider this finding: When faculty across the country were asked how often, if at all, they felt that they could not express their opinion on a subject because of how other faculty, students, or the administration would respond, 10 percent reported self-censoring very often or nearly every day. Add into the mix the faculty members who report fairly often and occasionally censoring and that figure climbs to 64 percent. To put it bluntly, almost two-thirds of professors are regularly canceling their thoughts and afraid to share their ideas on our campuses now. Relatedly, 67 percent of faculty are worried about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, and 38 percent of faculty are worried about losing their jobs because someone misunderstands something they have said or done. Thirty-seven percent of professors report feeling some pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes, and another 31 percent report a good or great deal of pressure—close to seven in 10 faculty should never feel pressure to avoid topics in their academic classes. Faculty throughout campus are worried. There are no spaces where they feel they do not have to self-censor. What a sad state of affairs. The data from FIRE show that 54 percent of faculty limit their views among their peers and conversations with other faculty on campus. With administrators—academic or diversity deans—53 percent of faculty report doing the same. This behavior continues and increases when faculty engage with students who could record and circulate words, in or out of context, to the world in a matter of seconds. Faculty are not unaware of this either, and 58 percent report regularly self-censoring in both conversations with students outside of class and in classroom conversations."
What "accountability culture" looks like
Meme - "LOL LUK AT THESE CHUDS MAKING LISTS OF WOKE GAMES TO AVOID.... WEIRD."
"DIDN'T YOU GUYS FREAK OUT AND START MAKING LISTS OF PEOPLE PLAYING HOGWARTS LEGACY?"
Sam Gibbs: "Introducing - havetheystreamedthatwizardgame.com - find out if anyone you follow on twitch has streamed THAT new wizard game"
Left wingers were drawing false equivalences, because they imagine boycotts are the same as cancel culture
Meme - David Pokorny: "Typical leftist defamation tactics... Wokie twisting other peoples words to make it look worse than it actually is and trying to nuke somebodys life with it by snitching. Didnt work out tho Imao..."
Zack Fowler: "@WarhorseStudios just FYI one of your creative directors is currently implying people of color are incompetent"
Daniel Vavra: "Are people on other continents and of other cultures so incompetent that they need me to produce their culture?"
Daniel Vavra: "Thanks for reporting me. I am actually founder of the studio, so not sure it will help"
Jesse Singal on X - "Nicole Cliffe was going to blurb Matt Yglesias's 2020 book. Before it came out, Cliffe privately demanded that Yglesias publicly denounce me. He refused and she withdrew her blurb. There are some really bad and broken people in media, but also standup guys like Yglesias."
Terry Gilliam's Into the Woods cancelled by Old Vic after reports of staff unease - "some staff expressed concern about Gilliam's views on issues such as the Me-too movement, diversity and trans rights. Gilliam has previously described the MeToo movement as a "witch hunt", adding there were many "decent people" who were "getting hammered" as the industry grappled with sexual abuse. Several allegations were made against the Old Vic's former artistic director Kevin Spacey as part of the MeToo movement, which began in late 2017. Last year, Gilliam told The Independent he was "tired of white men being blamed for everything wrong with the world". In the same interview he said: "When I announce that I'm a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?" He also recently defended the comedian Dave Chappelle, whose most recent comedy special included comments deemed by some to be transphobic."
From 2021
Ironic. The left used to claim that if you couldn't do your job, you should be fired. But they were only thinking of clerks refusing to officiate gay marriage
Perma Banned | Facebook - "Would you look at that... The oppressed "freedom fighters" netflix employees who organised the "walkout" beat up somebody (Vito Gesualdi no less) for supporting Dave on the day. What happens next? The media lied about him (saying he pushed and shoved the 'activists') for a whole day...not realising that the entire thing was caught on video. Vito released his video, and people dug.... And realised that the guy who attacked Vito...was a Netflix Executive. Wow very moral and very virtuous Netflix employee "activists" fighting the evil Comedian Dave. I'm sure attacking somebody unprovoked for mistake of having a different opinion - and then proceeding to get your media nepotists to gaslight the whole situation to make it as if the victim is the perpetrator...will really get you sympathy from regular people. Yeah, they really are the "good guys" alright"
From 2021
Thread by @sfmcguire79 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵Harvard asked its students, faculty, and teaching staff about their comfort discussing controversial issues on campus. The results show that faculty/staff are more fearful than students. 68% of faculty/staff said they would be reluctant to speak up outside the classroom. Only 38% of students said the same — that they would be reluctant to speak up during a discussion of a controversial issue outside the classroom.
Alarmingly, just over half (51%) of Harvard faculty and teaching staff said they would be reluctant to lead a class discussion on a controversial topic. Meanwhile, 45% of students said they would be reluctant to speak up during a classroom discussion on a controversial topic.
Recognizing that these conditions are not conducive to education, the committee recommends several actions:"
Report of Harvard University’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group
"Accountability culture" at work!
Puerto Rican Chef Who Tried To “Cancel” Australian Woman For “Colonizing” Sushi Now Facing Domestic Violence Charges - "A Raleigh, North Carolina, chef who rose to prominence after attempting to have a white woman “cancelled” for “culturally appropriating” Japanese cuisine is now facing charges of domestic violence. Eric Rivera, who waged a digital war against an Aussie sushi restauranteur he labeled a “colonizer,” has been arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence, assault on a female, and assault by strangulation. Rivera’s legal troubles come on the heels of his history of online controversies. Most notably, he sparked outrage in October of 2023 when he targeted an Australian-owned sushi startup in New York City. In a lengthy X tirade, Rivera labelled Sushi Counter’s owner, Alex, a “colonizer” for preparing Japanese-inspired food as a white woman. Rivera’s campaign against Alex ignited a firestorm of negativity against the establishment, and her restaurant was briefly “review bombed” on Google as social justice warriors flocked to give the Sushi Counter a 1-star review. Inspired by Rivera, one reviewer, who left the restaurant a negative review, wrote: “Enough of the gentrification! The last thing anyone needs are blonde hair, Australian white women appropriating Japanese cuisine … We’re sick of the disrespect inflicted upon our cultures by white people, enough is enough.” Many other negative reviews described the food at Sushi Counter as “gentrified,” with some pointing out that because a white woman owns the restaurant, it cannot be considered “authentic” Japanese cuisine. “There are plenty of good AUTHENTIC sushi spots in this city and prices aren’t crazy,” said one reviewer. “I suggest going to one of those. This is a colonizer sushi spot ran by a woman who thinks she can do better than actual Japanese people.” But the tables quickly turned against Rivera after it was learned that he was preparing Japanese food as a Puerto Rican man at his Japanese-inspired bar... “Eric’s a total dirt bag who abused his first wife, who also left him, too,” user Mammoth-Dot-7803 wrote. “I worked with him for a short stint and he is truly the only person I’ve ever known that I have hoped bad things happened to.”"
It's no surprise that hate (real hatred, not what left wingers call hatred) comes in a package
In defence of Julie Burchill - "the reaction to Burchill’s cutting tweets is unquestionably mad. First she was hounded off Twitter. Some genuine scumbags made fun of the fact that her son committed suicide (there’s nowt so vile as the ‘kinder, gentler politics’ crew). And then Hachette ditched the book. All over a couple of tweets that mainly just took the piss out of Islam. This is nuts. If anyone ever again tries to say cancel culture doesn’t exist, remind them of this: a book on cancel culture was cancelled because the author made fun of Islam. This orgy of censorious fury ironically proves the point of Burchill’s book – that the unwoke are being tried and found guilty and cast out of polite society. That it can happen to one of Britain’s best and best-known journalists, at the hands of a mob of middle-class mummy’s boys and girls whose achievements wouldn’t cover a Rizla sheet, is just depressing."
In defence of Julie Burchill – again - "I’ve heard some disingenuous guff in my life. But the idea that Julie Burchill’s tweet about Meghan Markle’s newborn kid was racist really does take the biscuit. The vile monstering of Burchill by the woke neo-royalists of the Meghan fanclub confirms that cancel culture isn’t only vicious and censorious – it is deeply dishonest, too. This is the comment for which Burchill has been dragged into the metaphorical stocks and pelted with rotten tweets: ‘What a missed opportunity! They could have called it Georgina Floydina!’ She was referring to Harry and Meghan’s newborn daughter, Lilibet Diana. Why didn’t the painfully right-on Duke and Duchess of Woke name their sprog after George Floyd rather than Queen Elizabeth and the Princess of Wales? That was Burchill’s sinful jibe. Cue hysteria. Actual hysteria. Twitter, as is its wont, went mental. ‘That’s racist!’, it cried. Isn’t everything. Burchill was demonised relentlessly. Vile, racist, old bag, the ‘Be Kind’ blob yelled in unison. Some mocked her over the death of her son by suicide, nicely reminding us that there are none so scummy as pissed-off SJWs. Now Burchill has been ditched by the Telegraph, where she wrote a weekly column, reportedly over that tweet. The entire thing is insane, even by the standards of today’s fuming, finger-pointing culture of denunciation. Burchill’s tweet wasn’t racist. She wasn’t racially mocking a two-day-old child of mixed heritage, as the mad mob claimed. She was mocking Harry and Meghan’s wokeness. She was having a pop at the radical pretensions of these two ridiculously privileged royals. She was taking the mick out of the manufactured virtue of the aristocrats, posh politicos and droning commentariat who think their taking of the knee to George Floyd makes them the reincarnation of Martin Luther King. Her target wasn’t Lilibet Diana. It was Harry and Meghan and their slavish cheerleaders in the media elite. She was criticising adults, which, last time I checked, is absolutely fine. And here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure her furious haters know this. But they lie – or at least embellish – because… well, because they’re bored, and it’s been a few days since they had a thrilling big witch-hunt, and they want another scalp to add to their tottering pile of scalps torn from people who made off-colour jokes or tweeted something stupid when they were a teenager or said ‘If you have a penis, you’re a man’. You know, the usual speechcrimes... Under the cover of standing up for Lilibet, the woke mob is actually persecuting someone for having had the temerity to criticise the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of two of the most privileged people on earth. That’s the most disturbing thing in this bizarre affair – not Burchill’s tweet, which was actually quite funny, but the censorious precedent that has been set. You can’t criticise these woke royals anymore. You’ll be punished if you even try. The PC set poses as edgy and forward-thinking but it is in effect enforcing an informal law of treason against anyone who dares to insult St Meghan and her husband and ally, Prince Harry."
Melissa Chen on X - "Andrew Gold, former investigative BBC journalist, current host of a podcast called Heretics, and author of a new book on the psychology of secrets, has his book events canceled for… being a heretic. We’re talking about prestigious venues such as the Tate. The reason? For talking to the “wrong people” on Heretics. For cultivating the “wrong audience” on YouTube. For “wrongthink” and “not being enough of an ally.” You know what to do guys: subscribe to Heretics on YouTube. These types of institutions think they matter but they just don’t anymore. It’s not where the cool kids are. They shall be left behind in the dust."
New York Times Donald McNeil Apology: Fear Underlies Woke Confessions - "The reason for his abject self-abasement is a bit of a mystery. He didn’t grovel to save his job — he was getting fired regardless. Perhaps he felt he needed to make a fulsome apology with an eye to future job prospects, or maybe he believed every word. Regardless, this sort of self-accusation is not normal . . . except for in totalitarian states and in contemporary America. The McNeil note to Times staff follows the pattern of other such apologies over the last year. We are a long way from the rote “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” apologies of yore, and a long way from “I wish in retrospect I had put that differently” apologies that might make sense, if warranted. A routine feature of over-the-top apologies is the vast gap between the alleged offense and the depths of the confessions of wrongdoing. The tone and content of many contemporary apologies might be appropriate if, say, Aaron Burr were expressing regret for shooting Alexander Hamilton, or if Andrew Jackson were coming to terms with the enormity of the Trail of Tears. Instead, we are talking about peccadilloes or non-offenses like McNeil’s using an offensive racial term in a conversation with students after one of them asked whether he thought it was right for a classmate to be punished for using the term as a twelve-year-old. There is definitely an art to humiliating woke apologies, common patterns that appear across these attempts to appease the gods of taking offense.
Extreme Self-Accusation
A Sweeping Statement of Harm
A Dawning Awareness of the Level of Offense
A Confession (Of Course) of Privilege
Gratitude for Being Tutored by the More Enlightened
There is one factor that undergirds every aspect of these apologies — it is fear, fear of the cultural power of the accusers, of their ability to ruin careers, reputations, and lives. These kinds of confessions aren’t wrung from the accused under threat of torture or exile. But they are in some real sense coerced, which is why they ring so false and are so alarming in a free society."
From 2021
With a Star Science Reporter's Purging, Mob Culture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase - "The Times management had initially concluded that McNeil showed “poor judgment” by uttering these two forbidden syllables, but also that he hadn’t harbored any “hateful or malicious” intent. That last part certainly seems sensible, given that McNeil wasn’t actually directing the N-word at another human being or using it to describe a third party. But since these same Times managers had already shown staff they can be bullied by office mobs, it was predictable that McNeil eventually would be thrown beneath the Times bus (an increasingly crowded place), which is why he now finds himself unemployed and begging for forgiveness. Consistent with the pattern set by similar controversies, it is vaguely claimed that this incident was indicative of a broader pattern of insensitive behaviour on McNeil’s part. But apart from the allegation that McNeil once announced himself skeptical of the concept of “white privilege,” no damning particulars have been offered publicly outside of his non-hateful, non-malicious use of the N-word. So what we’re left with is the spectacle of an acclaimed reporter being purged not for malevolent actions, nor even malevolent intent, but rather for making a certain kind of sound. This is an important departure from ordinary mobbings because, even in their most dogmatic form, theories of social justice generally are at least nominally concerned with the improvement of human morality, which, crucially, is inseparable from the question of intent. McNeil, on the other hand, is being judged according to a theory of wrongdoing that presents certain words or phrases as evil by their mere utterance, as with a Harry Potter spell. In discussing the threat to rationalism from progressive mystics, the difference between religion and magic may seem an obscure fine point. But it gets at an important category distinction. Until the Protestant Reformation, it was common for Christians to promote (or at least tolerate) the idea that certain rituals or words could act as blessings or curses in their own right, regardless of a person’s underlying piety or state of mind. As historian Keith Thomas wrote in his classic text, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, many of the reforms that began during the Tudor period were aimed at taking “the magical elements out of religion, to eliminate the idea that the rituals of the Church had about them a mechanical efficacy, and to abandon the effort to endow physical objects with supernatural qualities by special formulae of consecration and exorcism.” (Even criminals, Thomas noted, often would say special prayers to assure themselves of God’s blessing as they set out for an evening of burglary.) Seen by these lights, the decision to punish McNeil for mere sounds, as opposed to moral intent, isn’t just (as with social-justice ideology more generally) a woke adaptation of Victorian moralism: It goes all the way back to folk superstitions that were regarded as backwards even by many Elizabethan Christians. Were these 16th-century English villagers among us, even they would know that Times reporters don’t live at Hogwarts, and so saying Voldemort’s name won’t make him appear. As Thomas noted, the distinction between magic and religion can be a blurry one. And there are mixed elements of both in the campaign of vilification whipped up against McNeil by Times staff (not to mention the more general trend to medicalize speech by branding certain words as inherently “unsafe”). As we know from similar social panics, these mob attacks exhibit dynamics associated with inquisitions and religious manias: Signing a petition denouncing a heretic such as McNeil marks a signatory as virtuous, and thus helps protect him or her from future mob attacks. So there is a built-in incentive to join in, regardless of whether one actually believes (or even understands) the underlying claims... American composer Mary Jane Leach, who was publicly humiliated by the organizers of the (aptly named) OBEY music convention in Halifax, because her appreciative talk on the legacy of groundbreaking black minimalist composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990) contained a reference to his albums Evil Nigger and Crazy Nigger. Eastman suffered racism all of his life and knew better than most how shocking and wounding that word could be. It was his choice as an artist to choose those album names, and he likely would be surprised to know that Leach—who has done more than anyone to keep his legacy alive as biographer and archivist over the last 30 years—would be attacked for speaking them out loud... a similar controversy erupted at the University of Ottawa when a professor used the word. This was just after the CBC went out of its way to shame veteran newscaster Wendy Mesley after she’d used the N-word in directly quoting one of her black TV guests during a private editorial meeting... the University of Southern California replaced a professor of business communication because he had used Chinese words that, when uttered in a certain order, sounded roughly like the N-word. And while it once was the case that black people were able to use the N-word with relative impunity, that no longer seems to be the case. At a high school in Wisconsin, a black security guard was fired after using the N-word in the course of telling black students not to call him the N-word... A theory of evil that rejects any analysis of “context or circumstances” has the benefit of being easy to enforce. One could easily imagine a speech-recognition software system deployed by the government, and operating with no human intercession whatsoever, whose purpose would be to fire workers or expel students based entirely on whether their recorded speech yielded the forbidden sounds—even if they were speaking Chinese, talking in their sleep, lost in the throes of psychosis, or (as with McNeil himself) discussing why it was wrong to weaponize such sounds in the first place. This scenario is (literally) Orwellian, of course. But it’s not clear how it would depart (except insofar as being unusually systematic) from the real “zero tolerance” approach that institutions such as the New York Times are channeling. The problem here isn’t just that policing speech on the basis of magical thinking serves to vilify false-positive cases such as McNeil; but also that it will serve to excuse false-negative cases, in which someone acts with genuine ill intent but without intoning forbidden words... For generations, Times reporters were looked up to as the hard-headed adults in the room, enforcing norms of reason and evidence-gathering within our broader marketplace of ideas. McNeil—a science reporter known for his work on COVID-19, the defining science story of our time—was representative of this old-school Times archetype. And so perhaps it’s symbolically apt that he’d be purged on the order of all the little Rons and Hermiones who now call the shots at his former newspaper. In time, McNeil may even come to be glad that he’s left the place."
The word is treated as a Harry Potter spell, so
Now the mob has come for the Booker Prize - "The identitarian mob has claimed another scalp. Tory peer Emma Nicholson has been removed from her post as vice president of the Booker Prize Foundation. Baroness Nicholson had an online row with transgender activist and model Munroe Bergdorf. She stands accused of ‘bullying’ Bergdorf after calling her a ‘weird creature’. She has also been accused of ‘misgendering’, which she says was unintentional. The Booker Prize Foundation faced further pressure to remove Nicholson due to her past opposition to same-sex marriage, which has led to accusations of homophobia. Many writers, led by Damian Barr, called for her to be sacked, with previous Booker Prize winner Marlon James calling her a ‘hate monger’. The outrage mob also reported her to the Lords’ Commissioner for Standards. In the wake of the Nicholson furore, the Booker Prize Foundation has axed all its honorary roles, meaning two other vice presidents and the president also lost their positions despite having no involvement in the Twitter furore. The organisation distanced itself from Nicholson’s views, saying it ‘deplore[s] racism, homophobia and transphobia’. It even had the gall to add that ‘integrity is central to both Booker Prizes, whose judging process is conducted at all times in keeping with these values’. But it is hard to see how the foundation can claim to value integrity when it sacks someone for speaking their mind... This cowardly move by the Man Booker Foundation suggests that people who go against the grain on identitarian issues are no longer welcome in public life."
From 2020
