Ayaan and Julie kick Billy Bragg's arse in this debate

Left and right labels aren't terribly helpful when discussing cancel culture, as it is a symptom of totalitarianism, which can and has existed on both the left and right.

Stalinists are particularly prone to the belief that they alone hold the truth and all those who don't agree to with them deserve to be punished; Nazis likewise burn books and attack political enemies. Both far left and far right believe in purity and censorship. The horseshoe theory in practice.

This is why I'm a moderate, and although more on the left, would say I have more on common with a moderate Tory than a far left extremist.

Billy Bragg is much closer to Trump than he thinks he is; in agreeing with those who would silence JK Rowling for wrongthink, he is no different to those Republicans who wanted to ban her books because they thought they promoted witchcraft.

It's not an accident that a best-selling author whose most famous works teach children to beware totalitarian 'purity' cultures is the same author with the courage to stand up in real life against totalitarian 'purity' cultures, and the sane author attacked by that same totalitarian culture for not being 'pure' enough.

Yes, the preachy tone from some lesser 'Ja Rule' (BB in my mind). Well women, you'd have rights removed if you make use of particular alliances! Busy telling women how the 'right' would take rights away from women. All the while he (who seems to confuse supporting male supremacists with being on the 'left') is batting for a group of men who are busy trying to suppress and make women's sex based rights meaningless.

So, Willie; women will bat for women's rights, mate! No need to point out fuckers from the right, when the left are teaming with similar fuckers who are trying to bury women. Only they try and parade themselves as virtuous misogynists.

I've always regarded myself as left wing. In my opinion BB or her/his/furry ilk are not, irrespective of how they identify. They are simple misogynists. And licking their lips doing it. I'll take no men centred preaching from nasty f*ckers like that!!

I was disappointed Julie was so dogmatic about where feminism should lie on the political spectrum

I haven't listened yet but this is interesting. Makes me think of the Andrea Dworkin quote

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for

Julie Bindel gets that. She didn't check Sally Challen's political views before Justice For Women took up her case. There is a difference between what she says and what she does I think.

This "cancel culture = consequences of speech = free speech" argument is a red herring.

No-one is calling for cancel culture to be illegal. Wokebros will still be allowed to go on Twitter pledging never to buy eat their mums' Tunnocks again. Anguished millennials will still be able to verbalise their pain about whether they can continue to put their Hogwarts house in their Facebook bio (#NotMyGryffindor).

But as a society we can consider whether Twitter pile-ons are the best way to hash out thorny questions. Hopefully we'll decide that they aren't, and people promoting cancel culture will start to find that the consequences of their free speech include being widely ignored and occasionally asked to sit down.

Until that outbreak of common sense, I think most opponents of cancel culture are asking for the existing ban on discrimination on the grounds of belief to be honoured by HR departments (no matter what advice they get from Stonewall); for the current laws on making threats to be enforced (by platforms and the police); and for the police to stop misusing hate crimes legislation and NCHIs to suppress legal speech they don't like. If cancel culture's defenders are opposed to any of that, they should say so openly.

It's the same where he is talking about Trump saying things on Twitter and there is no right to comeback. Well, actually there is. People can and did respond to the things Trump said all the time.

He seems to think canceling someone is a substantive criticism, and now that I think of it, that seems to be a common misunderstanding of a lot of the people who say this stuff. They think telling them they shouldn't cancel people is limiting their freedom to be critical.

KA basically saying – he gets cancelled all the time, get used to it. BB saying it is a youth movement towards accountability. He is entirely ignoring the one-sided story that the youth movement has been sold and the pressure on any other youth who would like to make a counter argument. Intelligent young people will look for 2 sides of a story, but in the world of the echo chamber they won’t be permitted to hear it. This IS the point.

Julie and Ayaan clear and articulate as always. Neither had their points addressed at all by the two men who have no counter argument and no compassion. No wonder they lost the vote. But it is disgusting, that they can hear the backgrounds of what the women are dealing with and ignore what they say entirely.

BB is not the good guy he likes to think he is.

These men on the left

For me that's it though. They're men. In my honest experience there really are very few men to truly see things from women's POV. 4 men debating cancel culture with one woman.

I've just listened to that whilst doing the ironing (I know, I know... The man is at the pub but will be cooking shortly) and I was struck by the intellectual heft of AHA compared to both the blokes added together.

I remember watching this at the time and it was clear that Ayaan and Julie hadn't consulted each other beforehand because the stances they took were very different. From memory, Freedland struggled with framing the parameters in a coherent way too - because it is a complicated debate.

When you look at Bragg's argument in particular, the idea that speech has consequences seems initially seductive. After all, if you're a teacher, you can't expect to go round making, for example, offensively racist comments and expect to keep your job. Is that cancel culture? Not really. It's the limit we reluctantly put on free speech in a democratic society.

Of course what Bragg refuses to engage with - either because he is stupid or dishonest - is the fact that women with perfectly ordinary views are losing their jobs for expressing, very politely, opinions that don't hurt anyone and that the vast majority of people agree with. The idea that there should be "consequences" for expressing an unremarkable political opinion is deeply sinister and is much more reminiscent of Mao's China or Stalin's Russia than it is of the way we function in a liberal democracy.

Well that was fascinating.

The most offensive thing was the apparent lack of preparation from the men, so lacking in respect for women they couldn't even be arsed to formulate a coherent argument.

Julie was correct about Billy cherry picking examples of cancel culture. I thought the vast majority of complaints about the Diversity performance were from people who objected to a light entertainment show being used as a platform for making a political statement. His Parler example didn't age well either, presumably he thinks Amazon was just making all those people with an opinion, they weren't allowed to express on Twitter, accountable. No action against Facebook when the events of Jan 6th were found to have been organised there and not on Parler.

Kehinde implying that women couldn't possibly understand relentless oppression and discrimination if they were white was quite a staggering display of male privilege. And to trivialise lynching by equating it to cancel culture... I just don't have words for that.

I thought Ayaan made the most coherent argument, you can't have accountability without free speech. I was disappointed Julie was so dogmatic about where feminism should lie on the political spectrum, it felt like another example of ideological purity and cancel culture and I don't like the "your either with us or against us", its devisive and unnecessary.

Bragg (stupidly) says that therefore there will be a push back from the hard right on otter matters.

My god! What have they got against otters?

BB "you must accept they have every right ro criticise you..is cancel culture such a threat to our fredoms?"

This tells me everything I need to know. He basically is telling us women to shut up, take the shit, them tries to claim our freedoms are safe, like his and our freedoms are somehow the same. These men on the left, their misogyny can finally be brought out into the open. At least now there is no mistaking it. He has literally no skin in this game, yet feels he can lecture women on being nice, being kind? He can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.

^Bragg is a superannuated Wolfie Smith who made a pile through capitalism but is still preaching the socialist mantopia.

Twat.^

Aye

Bragg is a superannuated Wolfie Smith who made a pile through capitalism but is still preaching the socialist mantopia.

Twat.

I was thinking about the idea that the word 'mob' is suddenly a forbidden word and how Dave Chappelle recognised that cancel culture is about those with power controlling the rules in a way that means everyone else is always unsure and unable to keep up. A word that is ok today may get you cancelled tomorrow or even retrospectively if it becomes verboten in the future. Andrew Graham-Dixon getting (briefly) blacklisted for making an anti-Hitler speech was a particularly insane example of this. Now if we want to speak about Hitler we've got to do it in a way that doesn't remind people of how upsetting he was. We've also seen, time and again, the people on the other side of the debate having a history of hateful language or behaviour but somehow evading cancellation. It's an exercise in power: if they dislike you, they will excavate and twist something to make you cancellable; if they like you, they will ignore glaring awfulness.

I think the men were limited (or women or furries, I don't know how they identify in their heads), and are limited in their viewpoint. It is mainly women who are being f*cked about with this 'righteous' movement they are part of. They have to try and pretend it isn't.

Reality is being limited. I see two men. Big on being men. Yet, their reality of being anything they wish in their own heads must trump material reality. Or the discomfort, safety or dignity for any woman.

BB seemed to be disingenuous. Also, the D. Chapelle line of we must check what 'Ja Rule thinks', kept coming to me when he was speaking.

You could see that both him/her/furry, and Kehinde Andrews, shall we say didn't appear to place any importance on how it affects women. Indeed KA little retort at AHA about 'you (a woman) are telling us what to think) was 'small'. How it affects women who literally won't say out loud if they think it is complete bs that any type of male is literally a woman. Self censorship because of fear of losing employment and being vilified for caring about women's rights doesn't count. How it may not matter to many (most?) women how any male in a single sex space where we may be vulnerable, self identifies himself in his own head.

BB couldn't possibly answer the question about male and female (of course not, he'd give away his/her/furry 'faith'), but then proceeds to lob a separate issue to JB. JB certainly missed the addendum that left wing men were adopting this misogyny with the same glee and relish as the right wingers.

The moderator was good.

And since China is busy being consistently awful to minorities—not just Uyghurs in concentration camps, but they've also wholesale kicked feminist and LGB(+) groups off their ringfenced social media sites—I don't think the "woke" types will enjoy the fruits of their labour if they cannot be stopped.

Then again, I suspect many of them would just adopt the new established goodthink and go to town with it. It's the ability to bully with impunity that seems to be the draw.

The other man, ? Andrews, also cited predominantly American examples, such as lynching, when he expressed his dislike of white people using the word 'mob'. Not a word white people should use, it seems. He did mention UK race riots but I can't remember any of those happening in the last 30 or so years. AFAIK the London riot of 10 years ago was not considered to be one.

Both men had their head in the sand.

I don't think the particular area of "trans identity politics" can be properly discussed in regards to cancel culture.

Yes women are cancelled and silenced.

But it can only be discussed with regards to safeguarding.

Bragg (stupidly) says that therefore there will be a push back from the hard right on otter matters.

We can only discuss this stuff wrt safeguarding. And cancelling people for safeguarding is a safeguarding breech.

Well he can't claim he wasn't aware. What bullish arrogance.