Cancel culture? Young people aren’t intolerant, we’re progressive

Person with zero insight into themselves gets to write for The Times

how the heck does that happen? I suspect the commissioning editor may have been setting her up to look like a twat

worked beautifully didn’t it?

I mean every point she makes simply illustrates why young illiberal progressives is an accurate description.

‘Of course we aren’t tolerant of those people; they’re just wrong.’

Ugh, the casual ageism of MN.
I occasionally post to object but more often demur as I am weary of the stereotypical lazy thinking & comfort myself that they will sag soon enough.

This week had a feisty diatribe about elderly volunteers in charity shops underpricing designer labelled gear. Such indignation yet the notion that a seasoned eye might see the item for what it is does not register.

I shall now relish this thread.

It's amazing isn't it, so much knowledge available at the click of a mouse but so much ignorance.

That article was insufferable but I guess that's the point. It honestly read a bit like any troll post on any given day on mn. Faux wide eyed innocence with a pinch of goadiness thrown in.

That’s Maoism with a plant-based latte!

...I believe it’s the older generation that needs to become more tolerant of us...

Ha!

We are the ones growing up in the modern world, don’t we have a greater sense of the issues that define it?

Not really, we all live in the modern world, too.

The casual ageism is so mind-numbingly stupid. If this young woman and her peers are lucky enough to avoid illness, accident and violence they too will become "the older generation". And based on my experience, that will happen sooner than their young minds can possibly imagine.

There’s a lot of young people are going to be very surprised in the next 25 years when the generation after them points out they didn’t quite have everything nailed as they thought they have.

She’s ‘in awe’ whenever she hears her fifteen year old sister pontificate to her father on an issue? Yes, because we all know fifteen year olds are bastions of wisdom and rationality with all that life experience to draw on.

I ’d at that too.

The quote was :

”Whenever I hear Juliet pontificate on an issue, I’m in awe. No, she isn’t tolerant of transphobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia, or climate change denial. And thank goodness for that — because it shows my dad that he shouldn’t be either.”

What is missing from this is:

“Whenever I hear Juliet pontificate on an issue, I’m in awe [of her supreme over confidence]. No, she isn’t tolerant of transphobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia, or climate change denial [just any person’s well considered alternative point of view]. And thank goodness for that — because it shows my dad that he shouldn’t be either [tolerant of any pontificating or any views being ‘pontificated’ by a supremely overconfident 15 year old that cannot see past their phone!]

Can you imagine sitting through Christmas dinner with those two! I'm getting heartburn just thinking of it. Having said that, she's clearly a Poly Filla in training. www.janklowandnesbit.co.uk/olivia-petter

She appears to be an extremely well off young woman, judging by this Daily Mail article. www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11178953/OLIVIA-PETTER-Soho-Houses-sex-columnist-having-men-winter.html

As so often, my mind turns to the depressing account of what happened to the Deptford Project when Goldsmiths students got involved. www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/ Here's a taster.

^Gentrification brought a sudden increase in “very posh, white, ‘social justice’ groups and movements.” Now, the local groups who claimed to support the most marginalized seemed, to Mcdonagh, to be little more than “a social gathering for privileged students, using the community as a trendy trademark.”
“They used weird pronouns and called themselves ‘they,'” Mcdonagh said. She didn’t think this “rich kid’s trend” would affect her work so didn’t concern herself too much. “We were too busy trying to keep people fed, off the street, and out of prison.”^

After participating in a debate about housing with these students, Mcdonagh’s group was featured in a radical anarchist publication called STRIKE! Magazine. Looking through the publication, Mcdonagh was shocked to find an article promoting pornography and various sex industry-related “sex tips,” instructing women on how to “deep throat,” for example.

“How could I share this with the women in our community project?!” she asked. Mcdonagh explained that many of the women and girls she worked with were being pimped out daily. “One young girl — only 17 — had recently had her face smashed in by a punter and had 16 metal pins put in to hold her face together.” Mcdonagh got angry.

I thought that article was hilarious. It's just what most teenagers go through before they grow up and realise they don't know everything. Most don't given an article in the Times though.

The problem with being judge, jury and executioner and cancelling people with is that you can be wrong.

Anyone could find out about the long history of feminism and radicalism on the web in 10 minutes, even if they haven’t been taught it. I think the reason they’re like this about it - acting as if they’re the first to think of it - is that like so much about modern middle class social justice movements, including gender ideology, they need to construct a false enemy with terrible right-wing (the horror!) views. Hence any concern or questions being “transphobia” and “bigotry”. It’s not, but when you don’t have a logical leg to stand on, you need to shut down counter-arguments. Anyone older than you is clueless and has nothing useful to opine - handy, not because it helps anyone get closer to the truth or a useful way forward, but because thinking that helps you to cling to your perceived self-identity of being on the moral high ground, and identity is everything. It’s extend solipsism.

They're just teenagers, I was probably the same. Pontificating is fine with friends and close family but in the real world we learn to be tolerant of others views and that others may have a point. It's called experience and maturity.

Also how to develop a thick skin and not react to others conflicting views so hard. Cancel culture is going to go out of fashion.

Quite fascinating really. Imagine thinking that the older generations of women and lgbt people who actually lived through those periods would somehow be less knowledgeable about how lack of rights impacts people than someone who didn't.
It's just all so shallow, isn't it? There's so little thinking going on.
But she got one thing right. Pontificating is the perfect word.

She’s ‘in awe’ whenever she hears her fifteen year old sister pontificate to her father on an issue? Yes, because we all know fifteen year olds are bastions of wisdom and rationality with all that life experience to draw on.

They're just mumsnetters in training. If they want real intolerance they should come here.😆

It is genuinely concerning though if they think that feminism, anti racism & movements to fight for LGB rights are 21st century inventions.

do they have no concept of anything before 2000 and/or things that happened before they were alive?

I get so annoyed by the section 28 analogies and the assumption that because I question gender ideology (not “trans rights’) I was therefore of course also a bigot and on the anti gay rights side re section 28. I didn’t march to say gay men should be allowed in women’s spaces or that children should get health-destroying treatments on their say-so, but for gay people to have the same rights as everyone else. And that’s what I think trans people should have. That doesn’t include the right to bully people into saying something you’re not, or the right to take away others’ rights to same-sex spaces.

I was a tomboy who wondered if I “should have been a boy” but thank fuck grew up in a time when coming to terms with being female was the way through instead of being channelled towards dangerous and ineffective “treatment”, so I grew up to be a feminist, thinking woman. And the feminism of women who understand you cannot identify out of you sex is the feminism that stands for all women, globally.

The "older" generation remember when being homosexual was a crime and when there was no equal pay legislation. Things that are no longer the case in the UK - things that are taken for granted by younger people nowadays.

When I was at Uni in the 90s, people were allowed a platform and if you didn't like their views, you went along and debated they did not get cancelled.

I will be interested to see this research by Channel 4.

I have looked and they don’t seem to have released it. Just the press releases.

Hmmm…. I forgot to take my post through to the logical conclusion, which is that if you’re going to flex your youthful muscles to the point where you’re censoring others and failing absolutely to listen to what they have to say, you’d better be 100% sure you actually have your facts right. She even acknowledges the fact that this is not a situation where 100% certainly is in place. Thus stopping others from even speaking to give their experience and perspective is indeed a sign of intolerance. Progressive or otherwise, the intolerance is undeniable.

@ISaySteadyOn I must tip my hat to @RambamThankyouMam who rightly describes this as Maoist.
I grew up (1960s born) thinking Maoism could never happen here. And thinking 1984 and Animal Farm were both fantasy versions of extreme thinking that we could never have. How fucking wrong I was.

I feel it's more the nature of the threat that gets misjudged at a younger age. I'm old enough to see significant threats in online communities and less so in parents raising objections to the untrammelled influence of those communities. And lovely attentive men who would be delighted to tell young women that the oldsters aren't hip to the fun of OnlyFans, breath play and BDSM.

covering everything from LGBT+ rights and sustainability to violence against women and feminism — issues that older generations might not be as well versed in.

ha ha ha! Given that I teach this stuff, and took part in various feminist activism throughout the 1970s and 80s as did millions of women and gay men, I think there are many of us rather better informed than many young Tiktokkers.

I wonder if she’s read the great classic texts of feminism and gay liberation, or just watched YouTube vids?