From another thread:.
First, it's womyn and wymyn, last I recall, but that's an old standard in a discussion that belongs to Sisterhood, and if it becomes necessary in the course of human events to officially change the spelling, Sister will tell me. Meanwhile, the Sisterhood is divided when it comes to this particular question, and the last solid answer I had from anyone taking part was Indigo Girls on the Womyn's Festival. Just like I couldn't tell you who it was that finally clicked on changing my vocabulary about transgender, sometimes the memo really is as simple as someone saying it a particular way in a tweet that crosses my feed. It's not that I wasn't aware of the issue; it's just that someone finally went and said it in that way that left me saying, "Oh. Well, duh."
The "womyn" question will be resolved when it is resolved, and then it's just a question of how long before who delivers me the memo.
Cancel culture, meanwhile, is largely a canard. The general idea it plays to exists in society, but the complaint about "cancel culture" start with the same sort of libertarian-rightist "thought police" attitude driving decades of complaints about political correctness.
Barry Deutsch, 1 August 2018
My problem with the proposition of cancel culture is that the term has been introduced in a way that overlooks functional distinctions; there are any number of ways. A blatant example is the right to exclude. Argue what one will about gay marriage, or a book in a library, for example, but one argument that doesn't work is that being refused empowerment to suppress another person's equal rights violates one's own equal rights. An appeal against marriage equality, for instance, argued that the Christian's right to religious freedom was violated by the fact of gay marriage itself, that equal rights to religious freedom were violated when Christians were not allowed to prevent gay marriage. The book burning argument ran that one's right to free religion was violated unless some other person's right to free speech was refused. Cancel culture is a downstream iteration of an old, bogus complaint.
Compared to being blacklisted for suspected communism, or disqualified from parenthood for being a lesbian, the idea that a newspaper refused someone a regular column for, say, their support of supremacism, does not mean that person has been silenced. Given the lecture circuit, fawning newspaper articles, website catering to that person's celebrity peer group°, the commission to write the introduction for the fiftieth anniversary edition of a landmark book on freedom and oppression, and a network of online joint multimedia presentations with ideological fellows, it might actually be the drugs that finally silence someone, and even those who find him loathsome might hope he gets better.
But that one is not at all silenced.
Part of this came across my twitfeed recently when a reporter who happens to be white challenged a columnist who happens to be black, and decided to make it about Kapernick. The point in question was cancel culture, and the columnist reminded that a private company is not bound to keep an employee who behaves in a manner contrary to company values and policies. The reporter cut in to accuse a black man of siding with the NFL against a black man, which was weird enough, but what the columnist said was values and policies; the problem isn't necessarily whether the NFL can, but that it would—the policies, as such, reflect the values. The reporter is not a slouch, and most readers would consider him progressively oriented; on this occasion, it is, at best, an ugly-looking whoopsie. But he couldn't tell the difference, and accused the black columnist of siding with the NFL's values in their treatment of Kapernick, effectively accusing him of being a black man siding with the NFL's supremacist values.
Meanwhile, as dust fails to settle around the controversial Harper's Letter, the debacle only goes downhill, with the latest revelation being that the statement against cancellation decided to exclude some potential signatories; when Rowling and Lindsay are both in, but Greenwald needs to be excluded, something went really, really wrong.
Questions of platform access will always persist, but the proposition of cancel culture is counterrevolutionary, which ought to tell us something.
It really is as straightforward as reminding that equality does not mean supremacy. As it comes to us, cancel culture asserts on behalf of anti-egalitarianism and radical exclusionism. This is the counterrevolutionary implication: Cancel culture is a complaint against the disruption of empowerment to cancel.
____________________
Notes:
° Now including chatter about two recently self-cancellation celebrity volunteers denouncing cancel culture.
First, it's womyn and wymyn, last I recall, but that's an old standard in a discussion that belongs to Sisterhood, and if it becomes necessary in the course of human events to officially change the spelling, Sister will tell me. Meanwhile, the Sisterhood is divided when it comes to this particular question, and the last solid answer I had from anyone taking part was Indigo Girls on the Womyn's Festival. Just like I couldn't tell you who it was that finally clicked on changing my vocabulary about transgender, sometimes the memo really is as simple as someone saying it a particular way in a tweet that crosses my feed. It's not that I wasn't aware of the issue; it's just that someone finally went and said it in that way that left me saying, "Oh. Well, duh."
The "womyn" question will be resolved when it is resolved, and then it's just a question of how long before who delivers me the memo.
Cancel culture, meanwhile, is largely a canard. The general idea it plays to exists in society, but the complaint about "cancel culture" start with the same sort of libertarian-rightist "thought police" attitude driving decades of complaints about political correctness.
Barry Deutsch, 1 August 2018
My problem with the proposition of cancel culture is that the term has been introduced in a way that overlooks functional distinctions; there are any number of ways. A blatant example is the right to exclude. Argue what one will about gay marriage, or a book in a library, for example, but one argument that doesn't work is that being refused empowerment to suppress another person's equal rights violates one's own equal rights. An appeal against marriage equality, for instance, argued that the Christian's right to religious freedom was violated by the fact of gay marriage itself, that equal rights to religious freedom were violated when Christians were not allowed to prevent gay marriage. The book burning argument ran that one's right to free religion was violated unless some other person's right to free speech was refused. Cancel culture is a downstream iteration of an old, bogus complaint.
Compared to being blacklisted for suspected communism, or disqualified from parenthood for being a lesbian, the idea that a newspaper refused someone a regular column for, say, their support of supremacism, does not mean that person has been silenced. Given the lecture circuit, fawning newspaper articles, website catering to that person's celebrity peer group°, the commission to write the introduction for the fiftieth anniversary edition of a landmark book on freedom and oppression, and a network of online joint multimedia presentations with ideological fellows, it might actually be the drugs that finally silence someone, and even those who find him loathsome might hope he gets better.
But that one is not at all silenced.
Part of this came across my twitfeed recently when a reporter who happens to be white challenged a columnist who happens to be black, and decided to make it about Kapernick. The point in question was cancel culture, and the columnist reminded that a private company is not bound to keep an employee who behaves in a manner contrary to company values and policies. The reporter cut in to accuse a black man of siding with the NFL against a black man, which was weird enough, but what the columnist said was values and policies; the problem isn't necessarily whether the NFL can, but that it would—the policies, as such, reflect the values. The reporter is not a slouch, and most readers would consider him progressively oriented; on this occasion, it is, at best, an ugly-looking whoopsie. But he couldn't tell the difference, and accused the black columnist of siding with the NFL's values in their treatment of Kapernick, effectively accusing him of being a black man siding with the NFL's supremacist values.
Meanwhile, as dust fails to settle around the controversial Harper's Letter, the debacle only goes downhill, with the latest revelation being that the statement against cancellation decided to exclude some potential signatories; when Rowling and Lindsay are both in, but Greenwald needs to be excluded, something went really, really wrong.
Questions of platform access will always persist, but the proposition of cancel culture is counterrevolutionary, which ought to tell us something.
It really is as straightforward as reminding that equality does not mean supremacy. As it comes to us, cancel culture asserts on behalf of anti-egalitarianism and radical exclusionism. This is the counterrevolutionary implication: Cancel culture is a complaint against the disruption of empowerment to cancel.
____________________
Notes:
° Now including chatter about two recently self-cancellation celebrity volunteers denouncing cancel culture.
