I thought cancel culture meant trying to get people demonetized and deplatformed, which I am fine with, tbh, but this article has me confused:
A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.
Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”
Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”
She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.
That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.
Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.
“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”
Isn’t this just ignoring someone who is a total dick and not subjecting yourself to deal with their bullshit? How is this any different from the number of people I have just written out of my life because they are useless trash, or any different from me avoiding NASCAR races like the plague?
Jay Noble
Good old Amish shunning without all the hoopla
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jay Noble: exactly the word I thought of: Shunning
another good Catholic boy, his parents and his school should be proud. I wonder if he wears his MAGAt hat to ‘pro-life’ rallies
Is somebody else gonna do the “what are they doing playing music in class? In my day…” thing, so I don’t feel like such an old fart?
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Sounds like a good plan to me, whatever you want to call it. I’m all for giving people chances, but at some point, there just is no point any longer.
J R in WV
A little different because it’s a formal situation in a Catholic school, perhaps? I can’t imagine the school management would approve, but maybe as long as you are polite on the surface it would ok. qq
Mnemosyne
It’s not really anything new. I think that Kids These Days have heard the right-wing whining about “cancel culture” and come up with their own definition of it, as they should.
Yes, this is just shunning or ignoring an asshole with a new slang term: “I’ve canceled that dude.” But kids are going to come up with new slang terms for old ideas regardless of what us olds think about it. ?♀️
Martin
Yeah, but it’s also saying ‘I don’t care what good things this person might do, or how they might change for the better, this overrides all of that.’ I’m pretty thankful that a lof of people allowed me to redeem my stupid deeds.
FlyingToaster
There’s clearly a “trying to change the definition” thang going on here.
She’s not in a position to de-platform or de-fund him. She’s doing the right thing, even if she’s using the wrong term for it.
[Just having to do this myself: left my volunteer gig at WarriorGirl’s school because a new “policy” is basically book-banning with a thin veneer of democracy and “wokeness” added. Their arguments were the SAME FUCKING ONES as the arguments against Huck Finn when I was in fifth grade, in a majority-minority school district. Told them they were wrong, referred them to the ALA’s OIF guidelines. And Quit. I just got asked to train my replacements; heh, Nope. Complete waste of time to talk to these idiots any longer.]
NotMax
Quasi-obligatory, from 1934.
;)
Gvg
Generations always rename things.
I don’t recall much shunning when I was school age.
trollhattan
Yay, Donny.
Fire’s gonna get you, Donny.
Martin
@Jay Noble: No, shunning is a bit different. I mean, I’m not suggesting the people shouldn’t be removed from society for doing egregious acts – and Amish shunning requires a pretty serious act.
Cancel culture is about taking trivial acts and raising them to that level.
In particular, that shouldn’t happen in school. That should be a place where people can make mistakes and grow from them. What’s unfortunate is that there was seemingly no mechanism to do that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: RAKE THE FORESTS GABIN!
Martin
@FlyingToaster: When my son had his 7th grade open house, I asked his english teacher what books they were reading. She proudly said ‘We’re starting with banned books.” and handed me the list. I was so happy. It was a district wide agreement among the teachers. Every 7th grade was doing it.
NotMax
@Martin
“Class, please come to order. Thank you, that’s better. Now, we’ll pick up where we left off yesterday. All turn to page 57 in The Story of O.”
:)
Martin
@Mnemosyne: It’s more than that. Everything is virtue signaling now. We have a little game in our house to remind ourselves of it where anyone who says they like a given color of something, no matter how innocent and obtuse, gets accused of being racist. Don’t like your toast dark? You’re racist. Think the blue hat looks better than the green one? Racist.
We don’t constantly virtue signal. We can’t take everything that could be misconstrued as a statement of moral policy. But Twitter and lots of other venues don’t allow us to explore what the intent was, but increasingly we take the worst possible interpretation of it. Ilyan Omar wasn’t pro-Turkey, pro-genocide in her vote or statement, but holy shit did a lot of people even here interpret it that way, and they weren’t 17. Most of them were older than me.
Martin
@NotMax: That’s how they do it in the UK, right?
NotMax
@Martin
Heathen cancelist.
;)
Procopius
@Martin: That does a little to raise my opinion of human beings. I had great teachers in my junior high and high school, and that was during the McCarthy years. At the time, I couldn’t blame the librarians for excluding every single book that described communism (but we had two copies of Mein Kampf in the library), but the other teachers made up for it by passing on tidbits of the oral history of Detroit and the labor movement generally. I’ve been glad to see there are still great teachers out there quietly working against the American Taliban and The Oligarchy.
janesays
Even when referring to the act of demonetizing and deplatforming someone, is there any particular reason it had to be given a whole new name like “cancelling”? Pretty sure this phenomena has existed since long before 2017. For more than a century, we just called it “boycotting”.
Now get off my lawn.
Ruckus
I actually can understand this.
I was an outsider at my first HS, a catholic all boys technical HS. Had to ride a bus 25 miles each way to get there. I’m not catholic and even then was pretty much an atheist. Getting on the bus to leave school, where everyone was really careful with their language, the moment the bus door shut the language was 90% swear words, yelled back and forth with the nice lady my moms age driving. Nothing I hadn’t heard before but it was the contrast, of acceptable and anything goes that bothered me. The entire thing was a scam, the belief system, the strict rules – no one could bring a girl to a basketball game for example, in theory we couldn’t date. The very concept of the entire thing was disgusting. They weren’t creating young men they were creating young monsters who would grow up to be totally disrespectful of others, primarily because they were being totally disrespected as people. I was 12 and I knew it.
This is similar as I see it. The behavior of the boy was disrespectful towards others. It’s bad behavior that needs people to speak up or act and she did. Call it whatever you want, the concept is good. Accepting shit gets you continuing shit. I checked out because while I understood it to be bad I didn’t think I could do anything.
Another situation, in my first week there we had an entire school event in the auditorium where they made the smallest kid in each new class go up on stage to be made fun of. My class “elected” me. I literally told them to fuck off, that if I stood up I was walking out the door with two fingers held high. Yeah I liked this school…….Yeah I’ve seen discrimination up close. Not like being born the “wrong” color or whatever that you can’t outgrow but still…..
Jay Noble
@Martin: I know what shunning is and Cancel Culture is hardly about “Trivial acts”. ‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’ This is where we are today. If we just let them “shrug it off” nothing changes. There must be consequences or no one learns from the mistakes. This Blog is a testament to recognizing an ill, ceasing support of it and doing your best to rectify the mistakes that were made.
billcinsd
@Martin: Cancel culture is about taking trivial acts and raising them to that level.
What gives you the right to decide what other people find not to be trivial?
JWR
I had a problem like this at work during, of all things, the Von’s grocery store strike. (This came at the end of my anti-invasion of Iraq stand, where I’d already begun to be seen as the “other” around our small department.) But that Von’s strike was the last straw for one of these guys, all because I’d once, years before, made my pro-union stance known. Hence, the strikers in front of “his” store were somehow all my fault, and eventually I had no choice other than to simply “cancel” him out. The next several months were uncomfortable, to say the least.
SFBayAreaGal
@Jay Noble:
This
Frankensteinbeck
Alright. I understand the idea and its issues pretty well, and I’ll try to explain comprehensively:
At its base, cancel culture is shunning. Someone is exposed as having done something bad, and is publicly shamed and attempts are made to remove them from the public arena. It is social vigilante justice. Given the way the internet is exposing more and more of what were dirty secrets of famous people getting away with horrible things, and the refusal of most systems and authorities to punish the most horrible offenders, you can see why it has become popular. The ‘culture’ part refers to how widespread it is becoming, and how emphatic and involved the people who take part in the shunning tend to be. It can be campaigns to remove someone from a public platform, cost them their job, or merely make sure everyone who contacts the person knows what horrible thing they did and can shun them.
This has gotten problematical in the same way all vigilante justice gets problematical. Who decides what’s bad? What’s an appropriate level of punishment? ‘Cancel culture’ goes straight to trying to turn the person into a jobless pariah. Is there such a thing as a valid change of ways, and if so, who defines it? This process allows truly vile people like Nazis to be punished who would otherwise have gotten away with it, and gets people who did something asshole twenty years ago and feel bad about it exposed to nonstop harassment. And of course, conservatives whine about it like they do everything that punishes them.
Chetan Murthy
@Frankensteinbeck: Well-put. Something you made me remember: In _Discipline and Punish_, Foucault talks about how “uncertain justice” is by its very nature excessive. Its capricious nature means that when it -does- hit, it hits really hard. Whereas, as the state bureaucratized justice in the 19th century, it became less and less capricious (more certain) and hence gentler. Where in an earlier time the penalty for theft could be death, it became a term of years instead.
“Cancel culture”Public shunning seems like maybe it’s that way, too: as long as so many of these offenders get away with not even slaps-on-the-wrist, the urge for campaigners to up the ante and attempt to get somebody, -anybody- actually punished, just increases.I’m not saying that they’re wrong, btw: far, far from it. Just noting that as long as the Weinsteins of the world get away with it, people are gonna be goddamn angry. And the same, btw, applies to Shitler and his entire feculent horde of kleptocrats.
Jay
@Jay Noble:
Jay, ?????????
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
It’s also intolerant (if not bigoted) against mind types that don’t constantly, prissily parse all those faddish social signals. e.g.high functioning ASD types, who often think rather than slavishly track social fads that often don’t make objective sense and are mainly used as in-group/out-group markers. Am reminded of Connie Willis’s story Ado (in “Impossible Things”, 1988), satire about political correctness and censorship.
(I once might have been likened to a “time traveler from both the past and the future”. Even if not, it was to my mind a high compliment.)
Is it Spring Ahead, Fall Back, or Spring Back, Fall Forward? “Spring Up, Fall Down”, I say. :-)
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Yeah, why doesn’t anyone think of those poor, beleaguered white guys who get shunned for using racist slurs? Why can’t the black girl just keep her mouth shut about being offended and then he’ll TOTALLY stop doing it at some point in the future?
You have a really weird notion of how people learn not to do the wrong thing if you think that making sure they never suffer any consequences whatsoever will get them to change their ways.
Juice Box
Cancel culture can often look a lot like bullying culture. Adolescents in particular often express themselves badly and even experiment with transgressive behaviors. Most of the time that shouldn’t necessarily follow them forever.
Here’s a story about someone who was not canceled despite absolutely absolutely repellant beliefs. Hint: happy ending.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill Arnold: “Prissily parse” and “slavishly track?” No judgment there.
different-church-lady
I think Humpty Dumpty had something to say about this.
Mnemosyne
What a shock — a bunch of white dudes are indignant that white dudes might suffer some mild social consequences from their own bad behavior.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin:
I’m probably (55) a lot older than you, and I was troubled by Ilhan Omar’s refusal to support that vote. Because that’s not what an ally does. Armenians have been trying for decades — for *generations* — to get their genocide recognized, and frankly, Rep. Omar should have known better. She expects many other people to stand up for American Muslims (as she SHOULD, and as we SHOULD),, she wants us to support Palestinians, but she can’t stand up for American Armenians and the historical injustice visited on their people and denied ever since?
We could play that same game against Muslims, and that’s what conservatives do, trying to pit LGBTQ folks, feminists, against Muslims. It’s wrong to do that, and it’s just as wrong to argue that because this resolution didn’t mention and condemn every other genocide in recorded history[1], that she can’t support it.
[1] yeah yeah, she didn’t say that. She might as well have. It was “whataboutism”.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Frankensteinbeck:
What would you recommend? How else are you supposed to punish powerful people where mere public criticism without concrete consequences would only result in a slap on the wrist?
I hope I’m not coming across as confrontational. I’m sincerely asking. This part:
-raises good questions, because what is an appropriate level of punishment? And does anybody get redemption? Can people be allowed to change? And how do we know it’s not just some PR BS being done to solely salvage a career? We can’t peer into a person’s soul. Perhaps that’s the wrong question, focusing on the perpetrators instead of the victims. I honestly don’t know.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
It’s so weird how having photographs of a person meeting with the dictator of Turkey makes people think that there may have been a reason that person was the one (1) Democrat to vote against sanctions on Turkey.
But, hey, just chalk it up to “cancel culture” and you don’t actually have to think about anything.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Chetan Murthy:
This
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah. Her justifications for her vote were really tenuous. I didn’t buy it. What’s wrong with recognizing a specific atrocity? It’s not a zero-sum game
Chetan Murthy
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Now now, Goku, I realize you're exercised by police brutality against African-Americans. But really, shouldn't we be talking about black-on-black crime in Chicago?
Bill Arnold
@Omnes Omnibus:
Mirroring the argument. :-)
Though quite serious; it can be very hard for some mind types to fake neurotypical (alien to them) behavior; many spend years constructing masks and live behind them whenever interacting with the rest of humanity.
Omnes Omnibus
I’ll just note that a lot of people who comment on this blog are ready to write off (call for primaries against, etc.) a lot of MoC based on one vote without knowing anything else about the person. Is this cancel culture? I have no idea, but I do think it is dumb.
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh ah. I was gonna add in my previous comment about Ilhan Omar and the Armenian genocide vote @Chetan Murthy that I supported her before, and i still support her. Doesn’t mean that I can’t see she’s wrong on this, and be troubled by her obviously tenuous-to-the-point-of-being-a-sham rationale.
Butter Emails
@Martin:
Out of curiosity, do you play this game every day of the week or do you mix it up and joke about every inconvenience and annoyance being the Holocaust on even days?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Chetan Murthy:
LOL. That’s pretty spot on. It’s like saying that museums like the Holocaust Museum or the National Museum of African-Americans are bad because they only focus on one or select groups of people/genocides.
I mean, it’s one thing to argue that maybe a certain ethnic group’s history is often ignored. But that’s not an argument to not vote to condemn another group’s genocide
CaseyL
This bugs me, as someone who was bullied in school. I can easily see “cancel culture” becoming another bullying tactic the Popular Kids use against unpopular kids.
If I had any say in the matter (being childless and not a teacher, I don’t) there were would be time limits on shunning, to give the person a chance to change. If there is no such chance, then there’s no motivation to change – in fact, teenagers being teenagers, I bet the shunned kids act out even worse, because one might as well be hung for a wolf as for a lamb.
Major Major Major Major
BruceFromOhio
@Juice Box: Happy for Derek, sad for the rest of us.
Interesting story, thank you for sharing.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Omnes Omnibus:
I can only speak for myself, but I’m not writing Omar off completely. I still support her. I’m just deeply disappointed in her for Armenian genocide vote
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I was not referring to people’s comments about Omar in this thread. I had in mind the call for primaries against the 2 Dems who voted against the impeachment inquiry and other situations like that.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sorry, who said they were writing her off? Not me. I do think that she listens to the wrong people way too often, like Cenk and the other Berniebros, and listening to those people leads her to make bad decisions.
MattF
IMO, some of what’s described as ‘cancel culture’ is just renaming your basic high school lunch table behavior. Some of it is more novel, taking behavior you learn in social media (e.g., how to deal with trolls) into Real Life.
Butter Emails
@Omnes Omnibus:
Peterson given his situation can probably be excused. The New Jersey guy needs to be primaried.
Chetan Murthy
@BruceFromOhio: It is wonderful that some people were able to reach out to him and thereby help him in his redemption. But that doesn’t change, that it should be perfectly alright others to simply refuse to do so, b/c they think what he did was so awful.
For instance, I’ll never entertain social relations with people who voted for Trump, or continued to vote GrOPer, unless they atone by both voting straight-ticket Democratic, and donating decent sums (within their means) to Democratic and progressive causes. And I DGAF whether those people feel hurt by it. The path of atonement and redemption is laid out for them, but if they don’t take it, I have neither sympathy nor mercy. If they get run over by a truck, I won’t help them. If they get robbed, I won’t shed a tear. My sole concern would be for their innocent dependents.
After all, those voters put people in power who don’t think I’m as fully an American as other Americans. And this I will not take quietly. Just like that young woman, who found R. Kelly’s music to be more than she could stand. And I don’t believe for ONE MINUTE that those boys actually thought what R. Kelly did was so bad — they probably dreamed of doing it themselves. It’s how boys roll [I was one once, and I remember] and they need to be trained out of it.
Mnemosyne
@CaseyL:
Funny, I was thinking about all of the times when I was forced to forgive the person who was bullying me because “he didn’t mean it” and “it was just a joke.” It sure would have been nice to be socially allowed to ignore that person rather than being forced into being friendly to an asshole who never stopped tormenting me because there were no consequences to him for doing it.
Bill Arnold
@Chetan Murthy:
Pretty much. Turkey’s precursor was a bad actor (with respect to the Armenians) and Turkey continues to be. That’s one reason why people were so worked up about our withdrawal of support of the Kurds in Syria – concerns about demographic readjustment. (I noticed a Reuters piece about this disappear a few weeks ago – that was disturbing.)
I have not tracked Ilhan Omar’s vote and subsequent comments if any on this so have no opinion on that subject, plus there is a lot of right wing(/zionist/israeli right) framing to wade through re her, some of it pretty dishonest, some legit.
Adam Geffen
@CaseyL:
Ditto. As a queer Jew (and I was the only Jewish kid in my elementary and middle school) I was bullied a lot for being different. And it often felt like I was on the receiving end of what is now called being canceled. Heck, one boy’s mom literally told him not to play with me anymore once she learned I was Jewish. Everything about “cancel culture” reads as bullying to me.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute gives me the creeps.
I saw a video produced by them a while ago and it was all about trying to get the viewer to see themselves as apart of some Western cultural “legacy”, to identify with it instead of merely the career, for example, a person has chosen. Given the alt-right’s apparent hatred of “communism”, it was ironic that the video tried to play down individuality. I definitely got an anti-consumerism vibe from it.
Basically, the video was against the very fabric of how western society has been organized, particularly since the end of WW2; a consumerist, individual driven culture based on civil rights for all
TLDR: the ideology expressed by NPI in the propaganda video gave me the same vibes I might get from reading a HP Lovecraft story. Profound discomfort of the “alienness” of what I was hearing
CaseyL
@Mnemosyne: Everything is a double-edged sword. There isn’t much you can do about bad faith and cowardice, particularly when adults are using both against young people. I’m more concerned with the use of cancel culture by adolescents, for adolescents, against adolescents.
Major Major Major Major
Young Adult literature has a screamingly bad cancel-culture-gone-wild problem right now, if you want an example of everything taken to a bad extreme. Obviously any sort of crowdsourced justice is going to have problems.
Overall, as many have noted, it’s just digital shunning. What new technologies have brought us is speed and scale. Sometimes it is used by bad people to get good people canceled. Sometimes it happens over trivialities. Sometimes good things happen! Sometimes you get whatever went wrong with YA.
On net, a positive development.
Chingona
I think it’s the older white commentariat that have got it ass-backwards, again. Cancel in 21st-century AAVE has a specific meaning; this young lady is using the word as designed. She is not the one confused. White people whinging about “cancel culture,” like crying about “wokeness,” have heard a word, decide they know its permutations and callbacks, and have appropriated it for reactionary purposes. Now Cole seems to think Cancel Culture is a real thing, as opposed to a racist boogeyman trotted out, and thinks it’s young people who don’t understand what cancelling means.
Martin
@Mnemosyne: I’m not defending the persons behavior. I’m saying that school is where you learn. And there’s no learning when you remove people from dialogue. I’m not saying the girl was wrong to be offended. But there’s a lot of ways to respond to being offended.
@janesays: Boycotting is different. Boycotting is saying ‘I won’t buy your product until you do x’ or something like that. It’s a demand for action with a goal expressed. Cancel culture doesn’t do that. It’s just ‘I’m done with you’ regardless of whether or not the behavior changes.
It’s akin to why I don’t use ‘evil’ to describe someone. Once you call someone evil, there’s no reason to discuss their behavior. If you call an act evil, there’s no point in discussing it. You’ve labeled them as irredeemable, or the act unjustworthy. Why talk about it at that point?
I generally don’t care about that kind of stuff in most settings. I mean, I’m pretty willing to write all kinds of things out of my life because I just don’t want to deal with it. But school is different, like therapy is different. It’s where we learn, where it should be safe to confront these things. I’m saying it’s unfortunate that this school setting isn’t allowing for that.
Adam Geffen
@Major Major Major Major: Can you elaborate on what went (is going) wrong with YA lit? I think you are referencing some recent history with which I’m not familiar?
Adam Geffen
@Martin: That was very well put.
JR
You know, this is one of those times where the English language has evolved to a simpler, more direct form of communication. Because we used to call this kind of behavior “ostracizing”, which is an awkward word when you think about it. It’s also not usually used as a verb in the present tense.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam Geffen: content by or about minorities can cause such drama, often within a lefty/woke circular firing squad (including one time where an anonymous instigator of a questionable canceling herself later got canceled), that some in the industry are worried publishers will shy away from such topics. here is a New Yorker piece about it!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture/amp
Adam Geffen
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks for the link. ?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Martin:
What would you say to that girl though?
“No, you’re wrong to shun that guy. Can’t you just give him a mulligan?”
How do you think that would go over? I doubt she’d listen and it would royally piss her off. You can’t stop people from giving someone a cold shoulder if that’s what they want
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Again: you, a white man, want to tell a young black woman that she’s not allowed to stop speaking to someone who has offended her and specifically says that he doesn’t think she has a valid reason to be offended. SHE is the one who’s supposed to take action to get through to him while HE has no responsibility to stop being an asshole.
Way to uphold the white patriarchy there.
@Adam Geffen:
You realize that the point of “cancel culture” would be to shun the homophobes and anti-Semites who were tormenting you, right? That it would have meant that you would have classmates standing up and saying, “Hey, stop calling him those names”?
@CaseyL:
Yes, everything is a two-edged sword. I still think that teaching adolescents to stand up for themselves against bullying and refuse to make nice with their bullies is better than encouraging them to stay quiet and let the bullies run rampant without any opposition. YMMV.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin:
Given the rampant culture of misogyny that all women have to confront every day[1], I have difficulty with this.. Not for one second do I believe that these boys actually thought what R. Kelly did was despicable — not for even one second. Also, sure someone says they’re writing some out of their life. But if that person actually — *actually* — does better, really does repent and make amends, I think many people relent. Maybe this young woman will not. But humans are pretty capable of forgiveness.
Thing is, usually what happens is, the offender pretends to repent, pretends to be sorry, but really isn’t. That’s why repentance needs to be fulsome and replete with amends. And that’s not just “Oh, I’m sorry if you were offended, I didn’t mean any offense”.
[1] When I hear the music of my youth today, I am shocked by the open misogyny. Not just ZZ Top (ugh) but even bands that one might think weren’t so bad, like Foreigner. It’s *everywhere*. Everywhere.
Redshift
My understanding was that deplatforming and de-monetization were real tactics idea against fascists, and “cancel culture” was a term made up by conservatives to paint themselves as victims and demand that “free speech” means they shouldn’t be shut out of any platform. I could be wrong, though.
The analogy to shunning is off-base in this instance. Shunning is ostracization by a whole community. This “cancel” is one person choosing to shut out one other person who refuses to take her feelings into account. There is no way in which it is anywhere close to being as severe as shunning. Why should she not be able to do that?
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Okay, I’ll put this another way:
You say that you disapprove of a young black woman being allowed to shun a white guy for being racist and sexist because it’s a learning environment. She should be forced to interact with him socially no matter what he says.
What is your plan to teach the white guy to stop being racist and sexist to his classmates if you think he should experience no social consequences for the things he says? Be specific.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
Hey, Mnem, are we good?
Mnemosyne
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
We’re good. I just haven’t been around as much lately and can’t stay as long, so sometimes my conversations have been getting cut short.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I don’t disagree with you, but.
What do you do if the school is part of the bullying or won’t stop it in any way? I was able to do something and wasn’t all that scared about being hassled. But the school was zero help, hell they staged the entire event to shame the short kids.
In a perfect world the school would help, in a perfect world people wouldn’t be assholes in the first place. But the world isn’t perfect and not everyone can push back, defend themselves. And even if they can not everyone knows that they can. Being something out of the ordinary, the norm, being able to address that is important. But the best way isn’t always available. It just isn’t.
What do the outsiders do then?
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: what did you do this time, young man?
Redshift
@Martin: you seem to be reading a hell of a lot into her statement. Was there really no one in school where you said “they’re an asshole, I’m not going to deal with them”?
Yeah, sometimes people improve. That doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s obligation to be their redemption coach and engage with them. Students are dealing their own lives, and they’re not required to take on everyone else’s issues.
Lyrebird
@Adam Geffen: Googling “YA twitter toxic” will point you toward some different takes.
What is super strange for me is the hugely different standards for media markedted to girls (like YA novels) versus media marketed to boys, like Super Mario.
Adam Geffen
@Major Major Major Major: having read the New Yorker piece now, that is tragic. YA lit (and sci-fi/fantasy more broadly) was a major lifeline for me when I was a kid. I hope the drama settles down.
Adam Geffen
@Lyrebird: Thanks for the pointer to further info.
smike
@CaseyL:
Seems to me that it has been this way for-maybe-ever?
guachi
@Mnemosyne: Omar didn’t vote against the Armenian genocide measure. She also wasn’t the only Dem who voted the same way.
But don’t let facts and reality get in the way of your argument. I guess you can just say that because I’m a white man I’m just mansplaining to you.
Mnemosyne
@Lyrebird:
I think that at least part of the problem with YA is Twitter itself (yes, I see you, different-church-lady). It’s very, very easy to end up in an echo chamber that becomes its own kind of bullying.
One of the more infamous examples I remember seeing was a black gay male author who attacked a Chinese American woman author for having slavery in her book that had some problematic aspects (like slave status dependent on skin color) who then had his own scandal when his book came out because it included some anti-Muslim stereotypes and a gay wartime romance that some people found offensive.
I also have major problems with people on social media forming mobs but, really, one girl in one high school deciding that she’s going to “cancel” a classmate by not speaking to him anymore is the same thing as leading a Twitter mob against him, so she shouldn’t be allowed to do it? Really?
Mnemosyne
@guachi:
She was the only Democrat to vote against sanctions on Turkey. Look it up. The other Democrat who voted “present” for the genocide declaration voted FOR the sanctions.
I’m giving Omar side eye because of the combination of her two votes, not just her single “present” vote.
Adam Geffen
@Mnemosyne:
Intellectually I’m with you. Really I am. But emotionally, when I read about the piling on (as it were) even when it is righteous, so to speak, it triggers something in me. (Probably some kinda f’ed up ptsd reaction. ?)
Chetan Murthy
@guachi:
Sure, let’s have some facts. She voted “present”. So did Rep. Eddie Johnson of TX: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ilhan-omar-votes-present-on-bill-recognizing-armenian-genocide
Now -that- is some primo idiocy there. It’s like GrOPers who said they couldn’t comment on whether Obama was born in Hawaii or not. BTW, Omar’s statement wasn’t idiotic: it was “whataboutism”. She tried to have her cake and eat it too.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
Not as far as I’m aware
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: And I’m being -generous- to Rep. Johnson: IIRC, some Holocaust-deniers also base their position on not having been there to see for themselves.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
I understand. Thanks for letting me know
Omnes Omnibus
Is canceling someone any different from pieing them?
jl
I thought cancel culture was for public figures who did or said something a certain group finds unacceptable So, start a public campaign to boycott the person’s performances or books, or recordings, or whatever. What’s described in this post has been going on forever, right? She finds this person disagreeable and callus and offensive so doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.
From brief look at the part of the story that Cole highlighted, sounds like it is a purely personal decision on her part. Now, if she said she wouldn’t participate in any class activities that he was involved in, then I guess that would get into genuine ‘cancel culture’ issues. But what I saw in the link has been going for many thousands years of human history.
Adam Geffen
@Mnemosyne: I guess what I’m trying to say (maybe?) is that I don’t have an argument against canceling. Nor do I care to make one. But nonetheless reading about it makes me really uncomfortable.
Mnemosyne
@Adam Geffen:
Just to be clear, I really hate the piling on with social media and it’s pretty triggering for me, too.
What’s bothering here is that the story conflates one young woman’s decision to avoid interacting with one specific asshole with online “cancel culture” groups that easily turn toxic.
Individuals should be allowed to decide how and how much they want to interact with other individuals in person without being scolded about how “canceling” that person from their social life will prevent the other person from having the growth experience of continuing to bully them.
Adam Geffen
@Mnemosyne: Agree completely with you on all your points there.
jl
OK, OTOH, I just noticed this is a NYT link. They pull crap like this. Writing an article about people shunning other people out of offense, which, as I noted, must be as old as the history of modern humans, just wasn’t fancy enough for those meretricious and pretentious jackasses. Had to gussy it up with some portentous BS.
Mystery solved for Cole. You are welcome, Mr. Cole.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@jl:
Exactly. This isn’t new. You can’t, and shouldn’t, force someone to interact on a personal level with someone if they don’t have to.
The guy in the article should’ve respected the girl’s wishes and stopped playing the song since it bothered her so much.
mrmoshpotato
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, you clumsy oaf.
Adam Geffen
I really need to go to sleep, my phone is about to die, and my charger is far away in another room. G’night all.
Mnemosyne
@Adam Geffen:
I realized after posting a few times that, because this young woman used the shorthand of saying she decided to “cancel” this classmate from her social life, it was getting conflated with online “cancel culture,” which really is toxic.
I blame the article’s writer for taking a new slang term WAY too literally.
Chetan Murthy
@jl:
Gosh, one wonders if this is part of some concerted campaign on behalf of Weinstein, Louis CK, Charlie Rose, and all the other rapists and sexual harassers. Make as many things as possible sound like what these men are going thru (they sure aren’t goin’ to fuckin’ -jail-), and esp. if those things are trivial in comparison to what these men did, so hey, maybe people will start to feel sorry for ’em.
After all, isn’t what Matt Lauer did with behind automatic door-locks in his rape-sanctum-cum-office just like this young man playing an R. Kelly song?
Jay Noble
@Adam Geffen: You were being bullied not cancelled. Cancelling is about turning the tables on the bullies. You don’t retaliate, you don’t interact with them unless you have to, you ignore them. You do take one extra step – you tell others why you have canceled this bully. And treat those you tell accordingly.
Poor kid, wrong side of the tracks, smart geeky glasses wearing short uncoordinated band nerd. I know bullying. You don’t play their game, they go away because eventually other people see the bullies for what they are and fall in behind you.
jl
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I looked through the article some more and the more I saw the less I liked it. Several different, seems to me completely different situations are described, and i guess because the phrase ‘cancel culture’ has been used by somebody or other to describe all of them, they deserve and article about… about.. what exactly? I see a girl who found a classmate bigoted, inconsiderate and offensive so she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him (so….?), another about a girl who appears to be ostracized for petty school kid reasons, might be a victim of a kind of passive aggressive group bullying, and some social media business squabble that is so vaguely described I’m not sure what it is.
I remember reading a memoir by someone traveling through the early US. Traveler was sitting on bench on the porch of an inn reading a book. And the feller staring into space next to him asks “So, you can read them there letters and such’. and the traveler says ‘Yes’, and the feller says ‘Ah… I should have learned to read… It sure helps pass the time…’
Most of the NYT except the hard reporting tends to being that scene to mine. Most of it, except the hard reporting, is mediocre pretentious preening nonsense.
Mary-Harris-Jones
@Mnemosyne:
Shhhhhhh…. errrybody quiet now. We got us a middle aged white corporate drone telling us what it all be like.
joel hanes
@mrmoshpotato:
[pieing from Three Stooges]
Obligatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJQ7zn3-2g
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
What exactly is online “cancel culture”?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@jl:
A lot like the Cletus Safari articles they write too. I half think it’s just to fill space and meet deadlines to turn in something and other times I think this is part of some editorial/higher-up reactionary strategy or a monoculture problem where people from the same backgrounds who went to the same handful of universities have unexamined biases
mrmoshpotato
@joel hanes: [The great pie fight from The Great Race] “Cut! You threw that pie the wrong way. We need to start all over again!”
Jay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_recognition_of_the_Armenian_Genocide
Mandalay
@Chetan Murthy:
You wouldn’t help someone who had been run over if you knew that they had voted for Trump?
Seriously?
cain
I dig the young woman’s name. I thought it she was a Indian at first. Neelam means sapphire in Sanskrit and generally brings good fortune. eg interacting with this young woman would bring good fortune. Perhaps, it will.. in time to this other young man.
patrick II
@Chetan Murthy:
Speaking about whataboutism, I have been hearing some republicans say that rather than impeachment, shouldn’t congress be spending time on gun laws? As if.
Chetan Murthy
@Mandalay: Fuckem.
Martin
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I’m not blaming the girl. And I’d say to her what I say to my daughter that has been there. Been there enough I put her in a private school her last 2 years of HS because she couldn’t find a way to cope with the offenses. It wasn’t about choosing to not be offended or questioning why she was offended, but focusing on how to move ahead as a person when she’s offended like that, because sometimes her dad says stupid shit, and her grandparents say insensitive shit because they don’t know better, and sometimes it’ll be a coworker, or other people she can’t cancel out.
I think because it’s easy to block on Twitter or other online venues, it becomes a go-to strategy, but real life is quite a bit messier than that and sometimes you need to find a way to cope with these things. You have to practice that.
Chris Johnson
@Chetan Murthy: I understand the feeling. We’re at fucking war, effectively. That’s not supposed to mean anything? How many of us have to die In Real Life before the consequences of all this sink in?
I’m reading this article because I’ve got a situation in my life that is like that. It’s a younger kid who’s part of a social circle I’m in, a SMALL social circle. Kid is relatively friendless, survivor of some nasty religious indoctrination that he’s had to reject, and became a really intense free-thinker type, very prickly about any social pressure to conform in any way. Also ended up hanging with channers and sometimes spouts alt-rightisms and has been going through nasty personal family stuff. It’s this tangled mess of sympathy and appalling, and there are times I just cannot deal with seeing that name because I think ‘oh, there’s that person who attacked my country in 2016 and may well STILL be actively taking part in all that stuff.
And the heartbreaking part is, the kid isn’t as smart as he needs himself to be and has fallen for a bunch of really goofy stuff (Pepe on the moon grade: the ones who get convinced that the literal fabric of reality is being shaped by ‘meme magic’ and there are Pepe the frog faces on the Moon outlined by lunar craters). In other words gullible. And yet I was freaking convinced that Russia had placed a largely-ungovernable asset in the White House in the form of Trump, some years before that’s become supported by good evidence and the hard work of Democrats and investigative committees. I became convinced of all that well before I could decently justify it. It makes me wonder where the line is between me and the kid.
To some extent all this is just documenting the ugly outskirts of the human condition. We cancel when we just can’t even, anymore. And we ‘cancel culture’ when we turn to using social behavior, formally or informally, to establish in-group/out-group boundaries. And if we fail to do any of that, shit will end up going off the hook (black people really don’t have to reach far to get to places like ‘the community here can murder someone of my skin color for no reason and it’s considered okay’, which is definitively an unacceptable place for ‘culture’ to be)
WhatsMyNym
As a white male, I think she made the right decision. Hopefully, she doesn’t care what I think anyway.
wvng
@Frankensteinbeck: I agree. Also, deplatforming can be used to isolate people who are just vile liars, it can also be used to ruin people who are asking legitimate questions that are uncomfortable to some people.
JDM
Sure, it’s the same thing we always did, but if we label it with something cute like “Cancel Culture” we can all wring our hands over it while singing “What’s the matter with kids today”.