This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.
My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.
To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.
relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174
Obviously cancel culture works both ways now. Not new. When Trump was first almost assassinated, you may remember a video of a Home Depot worker which always struck me. Lady is middle aged and working the front desk - actually already one of the most thankless positions, as a former employee there - and is confronted by a guy filming who looked up her social media on his own time before. She basically just asks him to leave. But still, fired. That one stuck in my memory because it felt like an especially low blow, not like someone more professional with more job security, but a true near-minimum wage worker.
But it was recently pointed out to me that the beginnings of what might be termed cancel culture (less individualized but still targeted pressure campaigns) were way earlier. Remember Christian groups trying to cancel different movies because of inappropriate content? Certain songs, company actions too. Actually plenty of moral crusades going back even farther. And the left of course had the apartheid boycott, Vietnam era protest against officials and companies supporting the war, or certain college speakers, stuff like that.
This makes me think that in some fashion it’s more about social media itself than any deliberate action by the left or right in particular. Somewhat supporting this is how when Twitter was left dominated? Lots of leftist cancelling. Now that X is right dominated? Lots of rightist cancelling.
So to me I really don’t think it makes sense to adopt a paradigm of “they did it first”, on neither side. I used to think otherwise, but the longer I see it go on all over, the more I suspect it’s a human nature meets new technology problem. It could be that social media becomes the new workplace in terms of banal corporate-speak and circumspection.
"Cancel culture" does not mean "moral crusade".
Wanting to ban a movie because the movie itself contains inappropriate content isn't cancel culture. It would have to be something like "wanting to ban an innocuous movie because it was produced by someone who used inappropriate content in a different movie".
This definition would exclude many, if not most, prominent examples of cancellation.
Such as?
Off the top of my head: Gina Carano (or Chuck Wendig :V), Louis CK, Bret Weinstein, and James Damore were all censured for things they said/did, not for tangential association with someone else.
The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.
Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)
More options
Context Copy link
Wanting to censor a movie because of the contents of the movie, wanting to get someone fired because of something he said, and wanting to get someone fired for association with someone else are three different things. The first is censorship but not really what people refer to with "canceling".
If your book publisher says "censor the racial slurs or we don't publish the book, I don't care how historically accurate they are", that's censorship. If it says "a viral Twitter thread has brought to our attention that you wrote racial slurs in a previous book, we will not publish anything you write" that's cancellation. Cancellations for speech are a kind of attempted censorship by intimidation, and censorship or self-censorship can be motivated by cancel culture even without an actual campaign, but they're not the same thing. Something like the Comics Code wasn't cancellation because (as far as I know) they didn't care if you had made comics that violated it before. On the other hand the Hollywood blacklist of communists was more similar to cancellation. When episodes of It's Always Sunny get taken down for blackface, or episodes of South Park get taken down for depicting Muhammad, that's censorship but it's not a (successful) cancellation unless the people responsible for those episodes get blacklisted or similar.
More options
Context Copy link
If you find these examples applicable, that seems to suggest an underlying picture of these individuals along the lines of "lead star in the movie that is their life", whence banning a movie from public screening ~ removing the person from positions in which others can get exposed to their life-movie.
Flipping your modus ponens into a modus tollens, are you saying we should see those people in that way? To do so and draw the appropriate consequences may feel like poetic justice when applied to influencers and other attention whores, but it also feels like a setup for dystopian sci-fi. The face you present to society gets judged on age-appropriateness, moral wholesomeness and non-offensiveness in the same way a movie release would. Always act like the children are watching.
I am not sure I follow. My comment was not meant to suggest these people deserved to be shitcanned; it was meant to provide well-known examples of people being cancelled for their actions. That in turn was meant to substantiate my point that Jiro's proposed definition of being cancelled would exclude many cases we'd intuitive consider to be central examples.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link