4 ms·

> eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss

by wredcoll 11mo ago

> eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss any allusion to cancel culture as made up or partisan Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept. The proof is as trivial as noticing the people who complained about being cancelled were doing so to audiences of literally millions of people and there's no viable way to reconcile the idea of someone's ideas being somehow hidden when they had some of the highest cultural recognition of anything at the time. Also, for the last time, stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them.

buu700 11mo ago
> Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept. No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship. > stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them Non sequitur. The factuality of cancel culture's non-existence is immaterial here. If a piece of writing includes a tangent that serves no other purpose than to signal to a subset of the audience that the author is "one of them", that's virtue signaling.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  > No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship. There's a wikipedia article about the earth being flat and moon landing hoaxes and so on and so forth. People wanting something to be true does not make it so. You literally prove my point by saying censorship as if that was possibly related. The people who talked about "being cancelled" were wealthy celebrities who could spread their message as far as they wanted. Equating being disinvited from a conference with censorship is incredibly disengenous. So is referring to it as "antisocial behavior". There are, quite frankly, very things that are more deeply a part of human socializing than telling someone else that they're wrong and should shut up. Cancel culture being a thing is one of those memes that people spread, and much like the meme of republicans being good for the federal government, it causes real problems when people start to believe it via repetition.
  - buu700 11mo ago
    This is an odd response. Wikipedia does not in any way claim that the moon landing was faked or that flat Earth theory is legitimate. The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist? I'd prefer that it not. I'd be thrilled if everyone were nice to each other, social media were a thriving hub of only productive good faith discourse, and reddit mods had no interest in censoring everyone and everything they personally disagree with. It sounds like you find cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge, for whatever reason, and want to project that cognitive dissonance onto others.
    - wredcoll 11mo ago
      > The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist People want cancel culture to be real in the same way they want jews to be spreading the black plague. It lets you take reactionary measures based on false premises. Everytime people bring up "cancel culture" they're using it as a justification for silencing an opposing viewpoint. Thats why they want it to exist, so they can justify a reaction to it. What happens is that someone says something, then someone else criticizes them, and they try to shutdown that criticism by invoking the concept of cancel culture. That's the part I object to. Criticism is just as valid as the initial speech and we need to protect it, doubly so when so frequently the ideas people are trying to protect are so objectively abhorrent. I don't find the "cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge"; I find talking about it as if it's real gives cover and justification for other antisocial and otherwise negative actions. I cannot stress enough that telling some asshole to get out of your house and stop saying racist slurs is a perfectly norma and good social interaction that's healthy for society.
      - buu700 11mo ago
        Social media is full of politically motivated bullying, harassment, and censorship. That should be readily apparent to anyone who's ever used the internet. That's what cancel culture is, not a dispute with rude houseguests. I'm not sure why you're so insistent on denying this that you'd compare Wikipedia — and everyone quoted on the subject therein, including presidents from both parties and the former pope — with antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Who are you implying I intend to silence? I'm commenting on it because I oppose cancel culture, which is the opposite of wanting to silence opposing viewpoints.
roenxi 11mo ago
> The proof is as trivial as ... That proof doesn't hold as an argument. You're arguing that if people got a message out then it isn't cancel culture, but if people didn't get a message out because they were cancelled then people just wouldn't talk about it. It is setting up a rhetorical position where taboos can't exist and we know that they do. Cancel culture might not exist depending on what people think it mean. The term is a bit vague. But arguing that some people managed to push past the cancellation attempts doesn't mean that there isn't anything there. We'd expect cancel culture to have some cancellation attempts that ended in failure, the authoritarians are fallible humans too. And although they tend to be good at wielding government power the extreme authoritarians do tend to be ideologically isolated and so struggle to act when people pay attention to them.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  Look, "cancel culture" is almost as vague a term as "communism" and tends to be used in the same way: as a thought terminating pejorative description for anything someone doesn't like. If we want to have an actual conversation about it we'd have to come up with some kind of working definition of the term that was actually useful enough to discuss existing examples with. The wikipedia article on cancel culture uses an example of people disassociating from harvey weinstein and ultimately charging him with crimes related to sexual abuse. Is this cancel culture? If a university employee invites a celebrity to come give a lecture one evening and then a bunch of students ask the university to cancel the invitation, is this cancel culture? Is it morally wrong? Is the person who makes the original statement deserving of some kind of extra protection for this speech over the responding person who is trying to criticize this speech? A cursory look at the real world, actual examples, of how people attempted to use the term "cancel culture" it was invariably part of an attempt to prevent criticism of (mostly) right wing ideas. What actually happened was some number of right wingers tried to give speeches and got yelled at and then started complaining about cancel culture and trying to prevent future criticisms. Like, at the level we're discussing we're talking about things like ethics/morality/social standards, right? What is good and virtuous for society to permit and encourage. Trying to "cancel" people who are "bad" by using speech to criticize or contradict or even ask people to stop associating with them is a good thing.

buu700 11mo ago

> Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept. No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship. > stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them Non sequitur. The factuality of cancel culture's non-existence is immaterial here. If a piece of writing includes a tangent that serves no other purpose than to signal to a subset of the audience that the author is "one of them", that's virtue signaling.

wredcoll 11mo ago
> No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship. There's a wikipedia article about the earth being flat and moon landing hoaxes and so on and so forth. People wanting something to be true does not make it so. You literally prove my point by saying censorship as if that was possibly related. The people who talked about "being cancelled" were wealthy celebrities who could spread their message as far as they wanted. Equating being disinvited from a conference with censorship is incredibly disengenous. So is referring to it as "antisocial behavior". There are, quite frankly, very things that are more deeply a part of human socializing than telling someone else that they're wrong and should shut up. Cancel culture being a thing is one of those memes that people spread, and much like the meme of republicans being good for the federal government, it causes real problems when people start to believe it via repetition.
- buu700 11mo ago
  This is an odd response. Wikipedia does not in any way claim that the moon landing was faked or that flat Earth theory is legitimate. The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist? I'd prefer that it not. I'd be thrilled if everyone were nice to each other, social media were a thriving hub of only productive good faith discourse, and reddit mods had no interest in censoring everyone and everything they personally disagree with. It sounds like you find cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge, for whatever reason, and want to project that cognitive dissonance onto others.
  - wredcoll 11mo ago
    > The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist People want cancel culture to be real in the same way they want jews to be spreading the black plague. It lets you take reactionary measures based on false premises. Everytime people bring up "cancel culture" they're using it as a justification for silencing an opposing viewpoint. Thats why they want it to exist, so they can justify a reaction to it. What happens is that someone says something, then someone else criticizes them, and they try to shutdown that criticism by invoking the concept of cancel culture. That's the part I object to. Criticism is just as valid as the initial speech and we need to protect it, doubly so when so frequently the ideas people are trying to protect are so objectively abhorrent. I don't find the "cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge"; I find talking about it as if it's real gives cover and justification for other antisocial and otherwise negative actions. I cannot stress enough that telling some asshole to get out of your house and stop saying racist slurs is a perfectly norma and good social interaction that's healthy for society.
    - buu700 11mo ago
      Social media is full of politically motivated bullying, harassment, and censorship. That should be readily apparent to anyone who's ever used the internet. That's what cancel culture is, not a dispute with rude houseguests. I'm not sure why you're so insistent on denying this that you'd compare Wikipedia — and everyone quoted on the subject therein, including presidents from both parties and the former pope — with antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Who are you implying I intend to silence? I'm commenting on it because I oppose cancel culture, which is the opposite of wanting to silence opposing viewpoints.

roenxi 11mo ago

> The proof is as trivial as ... That proof doesn't hold as an argument. You're arguing that if people got a message out then it isn't cancel culture, but if people didn't get a message out because they were cancelled then people just wouldn't talk about it. It is setting up a rhetorical position where taboos can't exist and we know that they do. Cancel culture might not exist depending on what people think it mean. The term is a bit vague. But arguing that some people managed to push past the cancellation attempts doesn't mean that there isn't anything there. We'd expect cancel culture to have some cancellation attempts that ended in failure, the authoritarians are fallible humans too. And although they tend to be good at wielding government power the extreme authoritarians do tend to be ideologically isolated and so struggle to act when people pay attention to them.

wredcoll 11mo ago
Look, "cancel culture" is almost as vague a term as "communism" and tends to be used in the same way: as a thought terminating pejorative description for anything someone doesn't like. If we want to have an actual conversation about it we'd have to come up with some kind of working definition of the term that was actually useful enough to discuss existing examples with. The wikipedia article on cancel culture uses an example of people disassociating from harvey weinstein and ultimately charging him with crimes related to sexual abuse. Is this cancel culture? If a university employee invites a celebrity to come give a lecture one evening and then a bunch of students ask the university to cancel the invitation, is this cancel culture? Is it morally wrong? Is the person who makes the original statement deserving of some kind of extra protection for this speech over the responding person who is trying to criticize this speech? A cursory look at the real world, actual examples, of how people attempted to use the term "cancel culture" it was invariably part of an attempt to prevent criticism of (mostly) right wing ideas. What actually happened was some number of right wingers tried to give speeches and got yelled at and then started complaining about cancel culture and trying to prevent future criticisms. Like, at the level we're discussing we're talking about things like ethics/morality/social standards, right? What is good and virtuous for society to permit and encourage. Trying to "cancel" people who are "bad" by using speech to criticize or contradict or even ask people to stop associating with them is a good thing.