The magazine article of the day—on Twitter, anyway—is Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic about "mob justice" in America. It's a worthy enough subject, but unfortunately the piece itself just isn't very good.
The proximate issue is "cancel culture," and the fact that one false move in lefty America—something you say, something dug up from your distant past, sometimes simply holding unpopular opinions—can get you fired and/or banned from polite company forever. Partly this is due to kangaroo court "investigations" and partly due to fear of Twitter mobs and all they represent.
And sure, fine enough. This is hardly the first treatment this subject has gotten, but a fresh look is always welcome. The problem is that Applebaum's look is tooth-crunchingly stale. It's basically what I think of as a Google piece: round up all the cancel culture stories of the past year or two and then devote a few thousand words to summarizing them. All the greatest hits are here: Amy Chua, Donald McNeil, Ian Buruma, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas Christakis, Howard Bauchner, and the usual cast of anonymous victims who didn't want to be quoted publicly.
And that's it. The problem here should be obvious: This represents only about a dozen cases over two years—plus the alleged thousands of others who are now afraid to speak their minds because of the toxic PC atmosphere that young people have brought to contemporary discourse.
If this were the first piece ever written on the subject, that would be fine. But it's more like the hundredth. To make it worthwhile we need to learn something new. And in this case the something new is obvious: Aside from the usual roll call, just how widespread is cancel culture? Does it pop up here and there on occasion, or are there hundreds of lower-profile cases that have genuinely created a climate of fear all across the country?
You won't learn this from Applebaum. You won't learn this from anyone. But it's the nut of the whole thing. I'm sympathetic to the argument that lefty PC has become harmful and faintly ridiculous in recent years, but I'd still like to see a broader look that's a little more convincing on that score. I understand that I'm asking for something pretty difficult to measure, but someone ought to be giving it a try. Otherwise it's just the same dozen or so cases swirling around forever with no real broader conclusion aside from the personal views of the people writing about it.
The biggest example that so-called cancel culture is a human phenomenon, not lefty, is Joseph McCarthy and the red scare.
Social media bullying is neither left nor right. Shunning people for violating norms is also a human phenomenon, not left or right.
It might make more sense to consider which norms are being violated and whether those norms make sense. But all groups have norms and enforce them using social means. The left has no special policy or viewpoint on canceling people and the term itself seems to have come from the right as an attack on the left.
Ah yes, Joe Mac, the Kennedy boys good buddy.
Also Donald J. Trump, the king of cancel culture.
"Alicia Machado was fat, ok? Like, she put on fifty pounds of blubber & expected no consequences..."
Weren’t the bat shit crazy right wing Republicans just trying to cancel the Biden presidency over the recent bombing?
I'd say it is arguable that the discrimination minorities and women have and still face is the number 1 example of cancel culture in America. What is an example of being canceled more than being hanged for the color of your skin? Or being thrown in jail for being gay?
What is ironic is that the people most concerned about cancel culture now are actually concerned that the people who appear to support canceling minorities will be canceled instead.
"Lefty", no. When talking about dialectics, "understanding" begins by removing it.
are you perpetually drunk, or just perpetually incoherent?
Or are you a retard????
Perpetually incoherent and blitheringly dunderheaded it is.
I think the "simply holding unpopular opinions" is key--and hard to measure. Here's a fairly good way to guess, though: do you think having a Pride flag on your desk, or a Pride pin, would have different effects on your career than having a Confederate flag or pin?
If yes, holding unpopular opinions is risky to your career.
And just to clarify: "unpopular" really means "unpopular with people with elite educations (either from a highly selective college, or a graduate degree)" - not "unpopular with the overall population."
This is idiotic. Why do we only care about what's unpopular with people who have elite educations? There are lots of places where that pride flag would get you a world of trouble and a BLM flag would get you even more.
Yup.
I wouldn't go into the State of Greater Idaho waving a bisexual pride flag or iron cross of ANTIFA, but I would feel perfectly comfortable in a swastika armband & waving the flag of pre-1980 Zimbabwe.
Iron Cross of Antifa?? This I gotta see!
Idaho is probably the wrong state.
No. In the example you give, "unpopular" means, relevantly, unpopular with the people whose approval or disapproval may affect you. For example, in the case of the Pride flag or pin, the relevant group might well be group of bigoted high-school dropout thugs who think gay bashing is a really fun sport.
The Confederate flag isn’t just ‘unpopular with people with elite educations’, it represents a culture antithetical to a fundamental value in this country, i.e. equal justice under the law.
And democracy itself.
Yeah, well, a Southern Man don't need Neil Young around, anyhow...
Come down to Florida. You can't drive around for 30 minutes without seeing a confederate flag. To most people in the south, the flag just represents their region of the country. Yes, there are racists and racist organizations that utilize the flag but they are a very small minority.
That's just BS. It's thee flag of rebellion against a union that frowned upon slavery. It is, at its core, racist. This whole schtick about it being nothing more than regional pride is - and always has been - hogwash.
The Confederate flag: Celebrating racism, treason and failure since 1861.
One flag represents the attempted overthrow of our country.
The other represents a repressed people getting equality.
I certainly hope one gets more of a negative reaction than the other from coworkers and bosses.
I’m guessing that waving a swastika flag or wearing a swastika pin will really tank your career at most workplaces! When decent hardworking intelligent nazis can’t hold down a job… well that’s cancel culture run amok!!!
Was Rep. Thomas Massie expelled from Congress & I wasn't told about it?
Also plenty of closeted gays who never displayed any pride paraphernalia have been fired in the past by their employers… and it’s still happening today, as we just saw a few weeks ago with the US Catholic Church hunting down one of top administrators Jeffrey Burill who, by all accounts, didn’t have any pride flags on him or his desk when he was fired. So it’s not like cancel culture in the workplace only goes against nazis and neoconfederates/traitors… plenty of gays still get cancelled too.
Well being a conservative a-hole Catholic Cleric by day while hooking up via Tinder at night is sort of asking for trouble. Funny thing is Rev. Burill was cancelled by a pair of wingnut Catholic journalists who want to out all gay priests to cleanse the church.
It wasn't the church that outed him it.
+1
Just a data point. My son just graduated high school. He recounted to me on multiple occasions that if you post anything on youth-oriented social media that could be taken wrongly by those on the Woke side of things, you would be socially slaughtered. He says that he and his buddies have seen it enough that they are very scared and very careful. As reference, I live in am affluent fairly liberal and rather cosmopolitan area.
When I was a kid (in the 80s) if you wore the wrong sort of shoes or had the wrong sort of haircut or listened to the wrong sort of music you'd get ostracized. Certainly if you showed any over signs of being homosexual you were in for a world of hurt. Kids are mean and kids are stupid. Boo hoo.
Cue the Black Flag v. Talking Heads debate from 20th Century Women.
Nah it was Duran Duran versus Bruce Springstein.
Bruce only has one good song.
Duran Duran has at least two.
DD wins.
Nah it was Duran Duran versus Bruce Springstein.
What the smell of cookies was to past generations, popular music is to modern people. Duran Duran inevitably conjures up for me vivid scenes of winter track meets (our high school had an indoor track, unlike most of our competitors, so we almost always had home track advantage) just about the time Reagan was taking office.
"Certainly if you showed any overt signs of being homosexual you were in for a world of hurt"
More likely your life would be in danger due to potential violence, your future prospects would cease to exist, your friendships would come to an end, your sanity would be questioned, and, to top it all off, you would be facing imminent death from a mysterious plague wiping out others of your kind (while religious leaders declared that you deserved it and politicians took no steps to help in any way).
So, "a world of hurt" may be in the ballpark, but it's still way too mild. Just sayin ...
Kids are mean and kids are stupid. Boo hoo.
Replace the word kids with "people."
I am simply reporting a data point in response to Kevin Drum's question about how widespread Cancel Culture is and you chastise me for whining or something? Dude, what is your problem.
"if you post anything on youth-oriented social media that could be taken wrongly by those on the Woke side of things, you would be socially slaughtered."
Simple, don't post it. Keep a journal. Few skills in life more useful than learning to go underground at an early age. "Everyone should know what I think" is the plague of the age.
Yeah, great advice, essentially "opt out of normal social life." I am guessing that you do not have teenage children...
Is cancel culture in any way distinct from shunning or boycotting or blacklisting?
What are the differences?
Or cutting or dropping or ghosting?
Speaking for myself only, I don't say anything against the domination of sports in public schools any more. I'm just viewed as a crank for thinking that extracurricular sports should get more money than the math department. So I've effectively been canceled.
Heh. If you think sports should get more money than math, maybe you'd be happy in Texas. Heck, probably anywhere in the south.
Did you mean to say "shouldn't?" Because what you did say is pretty much the prevailing attitude everywhere in the United States, so I don't see why you'd be "canceled" for it.
Shouldn't is correct. A typo.
If you really want to get canceled by everyone, try mentioning in public that you don't think every pimply faced 18-year-old who puts on a military uniform is necessarily a "hero."
How very un-PC of you.
It's the age. Back when everybody was a vet in the 40's and 50's, that hero crap got knocked down fast. Especially the "professional heroes" trying to coast on their veteran status in public life.
I don't have a problem with that. My dad did his time in WWII and didn't think of himself or his fellows as heroes. Even the ones that genuinely were heroes, with medals to prove it, didn't think of themselves as heroes. They were just guys who had a nasty job to do, and did it. When it was done, they all happily turned in their uniforms and went back to being civilians.
Or that 80% of them are gummint workers, like at the DMV. Putting in time till that sweet gummint pension money starts flowing. You will be lucky to keep your head.
If you really want to get canceled by everyone, try mentioning in public that you don't think every pimply faced 18-year-old who puts on a military uniform is necessarily a "hero."
Here's something I want to get off my chest: I absolutely hate the phrase "greatest generation" as it's used to describe the WW2 generation. (I associate the words with the hugely pompousTom Brokaw, who, incidentally, thankfully was canceled, IIRC).
I know this likely comes across as petty an uncharitable. The men who fought (and the thousands who died) at places like Normandy and Okinawa were, of course, heroes. And nearly all Americans who lived in that era did their part: the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, the giant numbers of women who volunteered for the services, the workers who rolled up their sleeves and built tanks and aircraft, the kids who collected rubber and scrap metal. All of them.
BUT, calling them "greatest" puts them on a perch over earlier generations. I'm pretty sure proportionally a much higher price was paid both by the generation that fought to save the country during the Civil War and the one that won our independence from the British Crown.
Also, the phrase itself strikes me as gratuitous flattery that was neither asked for nor is welcomed by the members of the generation in question. (Along similar lines, I've repeatedly heard that members of the military generally don't want you to come up to them and say "thank you for your service." — they find it awkward and unnecessary).
Rant over.
Similarly, the way the word 'hero' has been devalued to describe anyone who walks a dog voluntarily.
Somewhat apropos of this, I noticed yesterday that Bret Weinstein -- an anti-cancel-culture crusader known for losing his job at Evergreen State College for criticizing the annual day off for oppressed minorities (I'm paraphrasing from memory; don't knock me if I have the details wrong, please) is now an all-out Fox News guest questioning vaccines and promoting the horse paste (as Krugman calls it).
Wha happen?
A few months back, Weinstein was a guest on reputable shows like Robert Wright's podcast. I thought he sounded reasonable then. "Hey I'm for Bernie. I just think everybody should be able to say whatever they want to say" was his basic pitch. Milquetoast enough.
Has he gone full Alex Berenson?
Evergreen was known as a progressive college. Now it’s known for a demoralized faculty, an ineffectual administration, and a intolerant (and occasionally bat shit crazy) student body. Not a good outcome for anyone involved.
Antioch for poor people.
Cool story bro, do you know anything about Evergreen other than what you see on Fox News?
He is a jew. What else needs to be said. It's all dialectical illusion.
He wasn't fired, he resigned from Evergreen.
John McWhorter claims he gets multiple emails a week and has become some sort of clearinghouse for complaints. He periodically says (on podcasts) he should create a database or so something.
He would be a good place for a reporter to start. I agree with Kevin, this might be a real problem, or it might just be some scattered cases, we won't know for sure until someone puts in the effort to report it out.
I have found the reaction to saying that transwomen are transwomen, and maybe shouldn't be put in the same cells as women in prison given that this has already led to assaults, rapes and pregnancies, to be a little divorced from reality.
Most good lefties will chant "trans women are women!" and call you a Nazi TERF is you disagree.
The fact that I'm concerned about the recent rise in medicalization of children/teens with gender issues has made me politically homeless. It's impossible to get left-leaning journalists to take a look at the issue, other than Jesse Singal.
And what has happened to Singal? Defenestrated from mainline liberal publications.
I think those concerns are widespread even if most in the left media won't take them up right now.
I repeatedly comment that for purposes of identification by sex physique should take primacy over psyche. Not only do I not get cancelled, I don't even get arguments. The silence is deafening.
Well, I usually like Applebaum but the problem here is I guess I am not liberal enough to be familiar with the incidents discussed in the article. I was ready for more detail, but I guess that was left for further reading.
I think it would have been helpful to the discussion to point out, a bit more, that this is hardly new (it is touched on here and there in the article), what is new about it is that historically it was minorities or women or LGBTQ people who were so routinely cancelled -- well, can you "cancel" somebody if they aren't even allowed to formally exist in the first place, like, for example, being a gay male pro football player?
People have always been fired over something they did or said separate from their job. It just that now the firings are more even handed - there is a certain symmetry to paying a price for not being liberal enough in 2021 when historically entire swaths of civilization was so conservative that being any sort of liberal was a life-risking move.
I think social media is very poor on due process though.
But I also think regardless of process there will come a point where everyone will get a certain number of do-overs. Too much of what used to be private, one-time mistakes, are now public and permanent.
Someone needs to look at the impact of right-wing cancel culture crusades as well. The right is cancelling someone or something just about every week but somehow it's only the lefty cancel stuff that seems to count in most people's minds.
Also two points about this whole thing:
1) People on Twitter (or where ever) who want to "cancel" someone (whether left, right, or center) have every right to say whatever they want and advocate for their position.
2) No one needs to listen to them.
Remember when Bill O'Reilly got Tiller the Babykiller cancelled?
I agree on the right-wing stuff. And it's not new. Michelle Malkin was using her fans to harass people before Twitter even existed.
There have been boycotts and letter writing campaigns for ages. Mostly they didn't work that well. But now social media has made them a lot harder to ignore. Sometimes that's great -- some people really do deserve to be fired (see #MeToo), but other times, it's just someone who said something dumb online that political enemies are making hay with (James Gunn.)
Is it a real problem? I don't know. It doesn't seem to happen that often. Maybe this will get worse, or maybe companies will get wise to the game and learn to ignore it.
In any event, addressing the issue as a "lefty" problem without looking at right wing examples and the history of it really ignores the nature of the whole problem.
If you read the whole article (granted, it's quite long), you will see that Applebaum does address 'canceling' from the right as well.
Malcolm Bradbury's "The History Man" had all this back in the 70's. Then it was jockeying for position in a competitive field (a university) where the wrong article could get you placards and petitions demanding your removal. Exploited by the novel's antihero.
There's an article now about a romance novel whose hero is a guilt-ridden soldier trying to atone for his role in the Wounded Knee massacre. Which puts a big bullseye on the author, and lost her an award. You can bet the prime movers are her competition or their fans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/books/diversity-literary-rwa-scbwi.html?searchResultPosition=2
I appreciate Kevin's call for more evidence and it is something that he has raised repeatedly whenever the topic comes up on the blog, Twitter, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of evidence would be satisfactory. We already know that survey data is subject to social desirability bias, so any survey that asks if the respondent holds socially undesirable beliefs is likely to be biased. So if we can't ask directly then we would need to find some type of indirect measure and those, too, can be quite confounding. So surveys seem an unreliable measure.
What would be next to show something was widespread? Availability in public discourse or culture - that seems questionable and not very dispositive. Presence on the internet (via Google search terms or some other metric) - again you could question that data quite directly. The main fear behind the panic about cancel culture seems to be around losing a job. Do we have a survey that tracks how or why people are fired? Is there a survey that is tracking the number of people who are filing wrongful termination suits? Kevin is usually a guru when it comes to finding economic data. Is that data out there somewhere?
I appreciate that argument by anecdote is frustrating and repetition of the same anecdotes is disappointing. I think the anecdotes raise interesting questions, although I don't think they prove the case.
To try to move this forward I found the following - http://www.canceledpeople.com/cancelations - I can't say anything about the data but it may show a few more cases.
I also found this article at FIRE - https://www.thefire.org/13-important-points-in-the-campus-k-12-critical-race-theory-debate/.
Correction: Amy Chua & her husband need to be in prison, NOT cancelled.
At least they'd have a trial for that and that's kind of the point.
How widespread is cancel culture? Comments have been removed from almost all mainstream media. The Atlantic stopped allowing comments about 3 years ago. NYT reduced comments to a few editorials and then they ended.
NYT still features comments, though not on all pieces (probably just a minority, though I've never tried to quantify it).
FIRE finds 400-odd incidents involving faculty at universities in the past six years. That's a start on a quantitative analysis. It's less than the number of unarmed black men killed by police over the same period, if that's relevant. Then again, Kevin has kind of indicated that he doesn't think police killings of black men are really a serious problem. https://www.thefire.org/report-3-in-4-smear-campaigns-against-college-faculty-for-their-expression-result-in-punishment/
Well, it's not a serious problem. Understanding why it happens explains black toxic culture. It's the same thing with people getting mad over the 3 dykes of "blm". Trotskyist cons, as they have been exposed.
For what it's worth, and few attempts at the statement of facts are worth much of anything at this point:
The WP "Fatal Force" site says that twelve (12) unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police officers over that time span. That's only those who were shot and killed, and the WP's count may not be perfectly accurate.
I don't think it's the best thing I've ever read, but I don't think that starting a review by grading it as an English essay really contributes anything either.
The fact is that not you Kevin, but a lot of Very Serious Liberals told us this was just college kids behaving badly five years ago, just like how the Very Serious Conservatives told us the Trump people were just neckbeards behaving badly, and then they stormed the Capitol.
At least we're past the phase of publications like The Atlantic publishing pieces that basically deny cancel culture exists when it is clearly a part of both right and left politics in America right now. Don't agree with everything Trump says? You're cancelled no matter how conservative. Ask the Georgia Secretary of State. Liberal but don't think America is irredeemably racist and think that employee trainings with race-based groups are, well, racist? Left cancelled.
Why anyone defends this status quo is a blend of head in the sand denial, cowardice, and illiberalism just as described in Applebaum's piece.
And weren't all of us saying that Trump was putting democracy in jeopardy along with our liberal institutions? That might have sounded hyperbolic to many. It wasn't. Same here.
Why anyone defends this status quo is a blend of head in the sand denial, cowardice, and illiberalism just as described in Applebaum's piece.
Questioning elements of the anti-cancel culture critique, or expressing skepticism as to some of its claims, or possessing suspicions that in many cases they're exaggerated — these things hardly equate to a robust, non-critical embrace of the "status quo."
I think the issue is: we simply don't all agree on what's a genuine example of cancel culture. One person's egregious act of censorship or cancellation is another person's prudent rebuke of right wing extremism.
I think taking Abraham Lincoln's name off middle schools in San Fransisco is batshit, lunatic woke-ism. I think removing Tom Cotton's opinion piece nakedly calling for fascist use of the military to stifle dissent was justified.
Your mileage may vary. Which is my point.
I agree with those who point out Cancel Culture is not something exclusively on the left, many on the right are the kings of cancel culture, including cancelling science.
Aside from that, if someone has previously made slurs, and has apologized for them, that should be enough, no need to cancel them, it doesn't even make sense because many over 40 grew up in a culture where slurs were a mainstream thing, what we want is for people to acknowledge it's no longer acceptable and change their behavior, not punish them.
Aside from that, if someone has previously made slurs, and has apologized for them, that should be enough, no need to cancel them...
But often there is a commercial "need" to fire (when did firing become "canceling" by the way?) people. It's simple reaction to market forces. A good example is the recent brouhaha concerning ESPN reporter Rachel Nichols. She was recorded as expressing the opinion that: A) ESPN has a poor record on the hiring of non-white males and that B) because of this, she was passed over for an assignment in favor of a Black, female colleague.
The particular language she used pretty clearly indicated she thought she was better qualified than her colleague. It's obviously her right to offer such an opinion. But in doing so publicly, she created commercial problems for her profit-seeking employer. Which soon fired her.
Firms generally prefer to employ people who help, not hinder, their efforts to make money. This has been going on since Ancient Egypt.
So, whether she's truly "canceled" or not depends on where she lands (will she eventually get a decent gig?). But, yeah, if you screw up and hurt your employer's bottom line, you may lose your job. It's just that now the kind of thing that hurts them is different from 40 years ago. Expressing racist opinion is more dangerous in 2021 than in 1981. Boo hoo.
This does not involve a past slur, or a slur at all, and Rachel said nothing racist.
At bare minimum, Nichols’s words could be very plausibly interpreted as expressing the idea that her colleague got the position not because she’s qualified, but because of her race. Expressing such a viewpoint isn’t automatically racist, I would agree. Plenty of white folks, too, have gotten good jobs or gigs because of reasons unrelated to ability (such as connections). Nonetheless, it takes more than a little disingenuousness not to comprehend why such a claim would be viewed by many as racist in the sense of “highly offensive and racially charged.” Which is why it’s easy to understand why ESPN decided to part ways with her, or, similarly, why Jeopardy decided to fire their producer.
For what it's worth:
Nichols thought she was engaged in a private telephone call. Without her knowledge, the conversation was taped, then spread around by an ESPN employee.
Nichols appeared to believe that Maria Taylor had been given a prime assignment which she, Nichols, was contractually guaranteed. She also appeared to believe that ESPN had done this because Taylor is black.
Obviously, this could be true, especially since the incident happened in the immediate aftermath of killing of George Floyd, a time when every major media entity was looking for ways to pretend that they care about such matters. No faux display left behind!
Also this:
Nichols is a long-time ESPN insider. As such, she may have had reasons to believe what she said, although there's no way to know one way or the other. (I know of no news org which has tried to report these matters out.)
Other than dumbness and correctness, I have no idea why orgs like the NYT insist on saying that Nichols' comments were "demeaning" to Taylor. She praised Taylor's work in that same (private) phone call, and she was talking about the behavior of ESPN honchos, not the behavior of Taylor.
Still and all, she had to go, based on the way her statements "would be viewed by many." This is the business they, and increasingly we, have chosen.
Nichols thought she was engaged in a private telephone call.
I'm well aware of that. It sucks when the offensive things you think you're saying in private aren't actually private.
Here's an exact quote of the offending words:
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/07/1013898738/espn-reporter-rachel-nichols-has-been-removed-after-her-phone-conversation-leak?t=1630516923738
Nichols appeared to believe that Maria Taylor had been given a prime assignment which she, Nichols, was contractually guaranteed. She also appeared to believe that ESPN had done this because Taylor is black
Right. It couldn't possibly be because Taylor is talented, or better at her job, or in ESPN's view might be capable of generating higher ratings, or is a rising talent the network wants to cultivate, right?. No, gosh darn-it, she's a token!
Heck, Nichols could be correct about Taylor, for all I know (although these kinds of things are inherently subjective). But her words were tantamount to claiming this particular Black woman doesn't deserve this particular gig (because it belongs to a more deserving white employee, namely Nichols herself). So it hardly seems the outrage of outrages for a TV network whose audience includes millions of Americans of color to be squeamish about having such a person on its payroll. Moral of the story: don't voice your racist suspicions and paranoia out loud.
Yeah cancel culture is outta control:
Just another example.
While it is true that both left and right engage in trying to cancel apostates in their ranks I think it misses the point. I don't expect Sean Hannity to behave any differently but liberals are not supposed to behave illiberally, right ?
So when supposed liberals engage in this it is very important that we speak out against it forcefully. I have no problem with Anne Applebaum taking a crack at it.
As to how common this is I agree with Kevin, it is hard to tell and it would be worthwhile trying to examine that question. That said, anecdotally, I have two good friends in academia at pretty elite institutions and they think this sort of illiberality is rampant there.
Post "Why Can't We All Just Get Along" on Facebook and you will get death threats.
It seems to me that lots of the complaining about cancel culture is in fact deeply dishonest. The names of many of those victims are known to many more people than before BECAUSE they complained about being victims. Not only were they not canceled; they ended "uncanceled".
Erika Christakis was not uncanceled.
I'd like to hear points of view on this from moderately right-of-center students at Ivy League schools. If they aren't feeling the effects of cancel culture, like getting shunned socially, then who is? Seriously, hasn't someone done a study of this?
There is a line here of course. If there was a vocal, diehard Trump supporter at Harvard, shouldn't he or she be shunned by other students? Personally, I can tolerate a few Trump supporters in my circle of family and friends, but I'm sure not looking for new friends who are Trump fans.
I revere both Anne Applebaum and Kevin Drum for their thoughtful analysis. I agree with Kevin that the Applebaum article is somewhat rambling, but I disagree that it is some kind of -- in his favorite idiom -- a nothingburger.
I've never worked in academia, but some of the examples Applebaum presents are horrifying -- people fired without explanation for things they said in a classroom which merely questioned views informed by the news cycle without considered all the implications. Read the example of a professor who was fired because she defended a statement, made by someone else, that "police are heroes." She didn't even agree with the statement, but simply stated that it was worthy of consideration! I wonder how the same exchange might be seen by the same social media assassins now following the attacks on police at the Capitol on January 6.
Cancel culture?
Another thing for this old guy to look up and study (somewhat)
I'm a boomer - I had no say in when I was to be born - OK?
But I have watched as my group became such a bunch of butt hurt, ignorant old people. We are pathetic !!
I drove a 71 Ford Pinto for awhile. Yes - THAT Ford Pinto. The one with the exploding gas tanks. Why? Well, at the time I was a poor soldier, couldn't afford much and the car was cheap. My Sgt asked why I still drove it after NHTSB recalled the car. I said "cause I'm not gonna get hit in a rear end collision by someone doing MODERATE speeds". I said to him "Do you slow down when you see a Pinto? Do you NOT follow as closely?"
He said I had a death wish - I laughed and said yeah thats why I joined the Army during Vietnam. Then I got serious and said no, the number of accidents is very low, I drive primarily on base and when I'm off base I'm extra careful. At that point I had NEVER been in an accident, never got a speeding ticket and I was sure as HELL not going to drink and drive. My fiance did get rid of it during my next deployment and bought something else which was a nicer car anyway, but you get my point
Republicans and democrats have changed way too much
OSHA? EPA? decidedly republican ideas. Their regulations (especially OSHA's) were not written with outcomes in mind they were written in peoples blood. Same for EPA. Somewhere along the line cancel culture didn't happen but we changed
Boomers got older and pissier. Republicans now WANT more government to control local school mask mandates and local elections. Both parties want nothing to do with accountability and haven't for decades.
When it comes to public safety there should be no accounting for republican or democrat, it 's either good for the country or bad.
COVID is bad - the reporting should be consistent and honest. We should do EVERYTHING And ANYTHING to protect our kids
ANYTHING less than that should be cancelled. We cancelled the Pinto, we can't leave exposed live electrical wiring anywhere and we darned sure should not be EXPOSING anyone to disease!
Could it possibly be that the topic is stale because there's nothing really to talk about there?
It is in large part wingers playing culture war games, rebranding the same old behavior as new and scary, 'cause the kids these days. Almost all the rest of it is the same old, faintly ridiculous leftier-than-thou posturing people have always got up to.
Finally, you have a handful of people losing jobs or friends for good reasons, and genuine miscarriages of justice, which do sometimes happen.
I'm not going to bother with the first bucket, other than to say the standards for social behavior change over time, that reality always pisses people off, this time it is *always* different, and the sun sets at night.
And the second bucket is occupied by David Shor, the only person in recent memory I can think of who fits the bill.
On balance, I still think the right burns more witches than the left.
David Shor wasn't canceled. He's still a big deal and as far as I know is very gainfully employed. He was fired.
(And yes, his firing was utterly idiotic).
All these years I've been working under a misapprehension. It turns out the plural of "anecdote" was "data" all along.
See also: how CRT has taken over America's 13,800 school districts, in three compelling dramas.
Given all the nonsense in the twatter, the fakebook, and the instantgramps, I'd say cancel culture is not working.
Without the ability to follow conversations this comments is probably going down the memory hole (bring back Disqus!). But my general anecdote is that at my wife's company, a large health-focused nonprofit with a very progressive culture, the olds are very much afraid of the young. A day doesn't go by without some 20-something going to HR with some overly dramatic description of a very minor issue.
I don't blame left or right. I blame the overly-entitled and thin-skinned kids.