To think 'cancel culture' is going way too far?

[Okeefe]

I've gone on twitter this morning to see #CancelKimmel trending, the reason.. he sang the N word when rapping a Snoop Dogg song in 1996.

Jenna Marbles being 'cancelled' due to doing blackface in a Nicki Minaj impression is 2011.

I swear every time I go on the internet, someone else is being 'cancelled'

People are digging up ancient tweets belonging to celebrities and normal people alike, searching for racist/problematic key words and contacting their employers, losing them their jobs and more often that not this content that they are 'cancelling' them for is historic

Are people not allowed to grow up? I'm pretty sure when I was in my early teens if I was singing along to a rap song, I would say the word like any other lyric. Would I now? No. Because I understand that it is offensive. Because I'm an adult now. Because times have changed.

I've had to quit twitter, it depresses me so much. You can't disagree with a word this woke generation say, or you too will be 'cancelled'.

ChloeCrocodile it’s fairly clear that some posters believe any form of public protest/public “outing” or criticism is wrongthink and should be banned.

There are dozens of threads calling the BLM protestors “thugs”, “selfish idiots” “should go to prison” “baying mob” “virtue signalling morons” etc etc etc. Yet the threads on the Nazi riots were full of posters defending them and claiming they had every right to protest because it’s free speech.

Plenty of posts using whataboutery and special pleading to imply that rape victims should shut up and rely on an unfit criminal justice system.

Plenty of posts trying to conflate those who stand up to racism with TRA activists, with the agenda either of defending racism or discrediting GC feminists.

It’s all very worrying and Orwellian.

those cases still required a standard of evidence to be met

The evidence was always there. Some women had even gone to the police about Weinstein earlier, it was never pursued. Most women never said anything because he was so powerful and their lives would have been ruined.

The only reason that 'evidence' (i.e., women's testimony) was finally able to be put to use was because the climate shifted.

I was under the impression that it was this New York Times article that took down Weinstein - old fashioned investigative journalism, not twitter ‘justice’:

www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey:

www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/books/review/she-said-jodi-kantor-megan-twohey.html

I’ve been googling but I can’t find anything that credits his downfall to Twitter or cancel culture in general.

Thank you, astrogirl99

I’m not uncritically supporting cancel culture. The nature of any anonymous Internet forum is that groupthink and pileons can happen quickly. We see it here on MN all the time, OPs become subject to horrendous pileons over really innocuous things.

Do I think cancel culture sometimes goes too far? Yes.

Do I think it’s appalling and abusive that TRA thugs have weaponised Woke Twitter as a weapon to attack GC feminists? Yes.

Does that mean all Twitter criticism/cancelling is bad? No.

Context matters. Nuance matters. Lumping anti-racists and rape victims who turn to the Internet after being failed by the CJS with TRA, ignoring all context and nuance and reducing everyone who ever expressed an opinion on Twitter to a “baying mob” benefits no one.

We are lucky to have the UK criminal justice system which is one of the best ones on the planet.

Glad to hear you're happy with a system that only prosecutes 5% of all reported rapes.

There is lots wrong with the criminal justice system (again, everyone should read Secret Barrister book), but we should be campaigning for improvement. Cancel culture is not an alternative.

Glad to hear you're happy with a system that only prosecutes 5% of all reported rapes.

Ouch! But true!

What we are seeing is civil society rising up to enforce standards of morality and common decency where the law fails us.

That could have been written by anyone claiming they need to guard Churchill’s statue.

Cancel culture works both ways.

@dreamingbohemian

Ninkanink I can see why you would object to all that. For me, that is not the same thing as 'cancelling' famous people for being racist or sexist. I agree with Cathy that we shouldn't conflate them.

For me, 'no platforming' is a very extensive way of limiting whose views are shared in certain spaces

'Cancelling' is saying that certain things that are really indefensible (not just different political views, but racist speech or sexual abuse) are not acceptable.

I don't agree with your viewpoint, but I think you have a right to be heard. Whereas racist speech does not enjoy the same rights and I think it's okay for people to say they don't want to hear it.

Your view is too simplistic.

Always bear in mind that any rule that exists for one set of people and their views also by extension exists for all other people and their views. That is how the beast works.

I have a real problem with the n word in popular culture. I fully comprehend the argument of reclaiming it but you can’t ring fence a word for use by only one group of people. That’s just not how language works, it either changes context and meaning or it doesn’t. I feel that people who have used it when repeating lyrics or on quoting someone verbatim are unfairly attacked. I take the stance no one should be using it at all casually.

No. You have absolutely no right to say it at all no matter what your justification is.

Funny how when a white person is excluded from using that word that was used to dehumanise and subjugate people then they want to dictate that noone else can use it. Do you see how that works? Making yourself that arbiter of what is racist and what isn't when you are not the victim, then proceeding to want to say who can or cannot use it because you can't.

@Cadent
implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

This test takes ages, so to save everyone some time, here's why you can ignore it.

I tried the women/men prejudice one -- the structure of the test primes you show a 'bias'.

First, it asks you to sort four categories into two classes: Arts and females are to be sorted by keypress E; Science and Male to be sorted by keypress I.

As you answer the many questions, you get faster because you learn to associate two of the categories with one key, the other two categories with the other key.

After this, it swaps things around group Female/Science with E and Male/Arts with I. As during the previous question you have been primed to associate both Female and Arts with I, this task, especially performed rapidly as they ask you to -- is cognitively more difficult. You're having to overwrite and unlearn the habits you formed in the earlier test. Of course you're slower at first and make mistakes. And so you perform less well in the test where women and science are sorted into the same box.

Based solely on the disparity of your scores with the first and last test, they claim you have a bias and associate men with science and females with the arts.

We're heading into Minority Report territory. It's scary.

It’s a beautiful day and I’m going to take myself off to enjoy it! 🌻

What we are seeing is civil society rising up to enforce standards of morality and common decency where the law fails us.

This really worries me. In a democracy the standards of society should be set through proper process. It’s a painfully slow process (we were talking about protest outside abortion clinics needing to be banned when I was a teenager!) but I don’t think anyone should be allowed to enforce their standards of morality on me, provided I am acting in accordance with the law. The whole point of the law is that it sets an agreed framework of morality.

There are plenty of people who support protests such as BLM and the #MeToo movement, but don’t support society level consequences (such as authors being banned or people being sacked from jobs) until conviction. I’m one of them.

I’m in a profession where you don’t actually have to be convicted of a crime to be sacked and banned. And that is necessary to protect children, but I don’t think it is a model which should be implemented in wider society.

@CathyComesHome

you can’t ring fence a word for use by only one group of people.

You absolutely can.

Yep, I think you can too. However, I think you get onto shaky ground when you add it to song lyrics and then sell those songs.

e.g. the white woman invited on stage by Kendrick Lamar to sing his songs but then faced backlashed for singing the lyrics that included the n word.

twitter.com/Paulcrofts/status/1276210242364280832?s=20
Just make a public confession like this and you'll be fine.

A certain type of person wants a bandwagon to jump on. They are mostly devoid of independent thinking skills.

Always bear in mind that any rule that exists for one set of people and their views also by extension exists for all other people and their views.

I have no idea how you can say this with a straight face but as my views are so 'simplistic' I'll leave you to it.

@CathyComesHome.
I condemn all of them because they shouldn't be out putting all our lives at risk. It's amusing to watch the same people who are all praising BLM and saying they were wearing masks and "socially distancing" going into complete meltdown over Cummings driving to Durham.

I don’t see what disconnection you’re illustrating between my two quotes @MinervaSaidThar?

From my point of view both words are highly offensive and shouldn’t be accepted in the U.K. in any form if the goal is to stop it being used as an insult. We’re fairly simple creatures and hearing words used by the groups who are most stigmatised by them implies that either the meaning has changed universally or it has become less offensive. Because that’s how language works - blanket rules.

The p word especially is unique to the U.K. and there are many other countries who would equate its use to calling someone from Sweden a swede but there is a bigger backstory here that makes it unacceptable.

So true! God I hate people who are offended on the behalf of others.

yossell yes there's the same problem with the racial bias test

The people who created the test say they take this into account but their explanation for it is not very convincing, I think.

It doesn't mean the idea of implicit bias doesn't exist though (there is plenty of research to support this).

The n word has always been offensive you muppet

@merrymouse thank you for your feedback. But that's a false dichotomy.

It's a bit like other posters comparing cancel culture to McCarthyism.

McCarthyism, like Tory economic conservatism, is/was fuelled by the wealthy white patriarchal ruling class.

Defenders of statues and 1950s American anti-communists alike have their interests represented by the state at every level - the law, the economic system, the political system, gender arrangements, racial hierarchies etc. This is that white privilege thing which (white) people like me keep bleating on about.

On the other hand, cancel culture in the US, for example, has largely been led by women, particularly Black women, who are - on evidence - some of the most politically under-represented, economically deprived, and legally disempowered people in the United States, if not the western world.

So the statues/McCarthy comparison is a false dichotomy.

One is a crusade-style terrorising of groups who challenge centres of a violent ruling class; the other is a non-violent pushback agains this exercise of power, enacted by victims of the violent ruling class.

Messy, scary, but understandable.

I generally agree with you BUT

Blackface was widely known as unacceptable for decades before Jenna Marbles did it in 2011... We're not talking about a video someone made in the 80's here, it was only 9 years ago!! She wasnt a sheltered child, she was a grown adult who knew it was wrong who also got 'cancelled' AT THE TIME for it. Multiple people called her out on it and a LOT of people stopped watching her - her career has taken a nosedive and started climbing back up in the intervening years because new viewers weren't aware of what had gone on previously.