The world has been hard up for terminology to describe what’s bad about the forces that have dragged down SSC and driven Weiss away from NYT. “Cancel culture” was a good start, as evidenced by those who have been rankled by the suggestion of its existence. My fave part of this essay is that it offers a shiny new tool, “orthodox privilege,” that allows us to enumerate the case for a countervailing force against this age of outrage.
It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.
The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc.
Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change.
It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth.
I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people.
I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe.
> It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.
Legitimate outrage is "I think an opinion you currently hold or thing you currently do is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society until you walk back the opinion or stop doing the thing."
Cancel culture is "I think an opinion you once held or thing you once did is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society forever, even if it wasn't considered bad at the time, and even if you've since walked it back/stopped/apologized."
In a nutshell, cancel culture is refusing to forgive.
So why not be mad at "kneejerk bosses" who are actually doing the cancelling? People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that. And the right to free speech (including outrage) seems important.
> SDG&E said in a statement: “We hold all SDG&E employees to a high standard and expect them to live up to our values every day. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took appropriate action.”
If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue. It's not ideal, but he's not powerless either. The Covington kid was a good example of that.
> People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that.
Yeah, no. I think internet outrage mobs intended to attack people’s livelihoods are actually a problem, and not the type of thing we should placidly accept as part of the world.
> If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue.
One person's mob is another person's protest movement. It just seems less a problem with the number of people or the methods and more an issue with a difference of opinion about the content.
I haven't seen folks on the right vigorously defending those on the left or visa versa. They brutally denounce the other side and actively seek to remove them from positions of power or limit their voice. "Cancel cancel culture" feels more like "don't come after folks like me" rather than "don't go after anyone", which is fine, but I just don't see a consistent application across the political spectrum.
Some people are hypocrites. But I don’t see all of them that way. I don’t even see this as a left vs. right issue unless you go out of your way to define it that way. For instance, two of the more outspoken opponents of cancel culture, Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan, both publicly support Bernie Sanders. Alternatively, consider the TERF wars where trans activists try to cancel “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”. Radical feminists are on the right now? One of the signatories of the Harpers letter was Noam Chomsky.
If you go according to how we would have classified these people before the controversy of cancel culture itself, we would have to say that it was between two different factions of the left, with the right piling on later.
If all you see is hypocrisy I don’t disagree with you because people are that way a lot of the time. But maybe it’s because consistently opposing cancel culture seems like a deliberate partisan choice by itself these days. Joe Rogan has guests from the entire political spectrum and interacts with all of them in charity and good faith to the point of borderline naivety. And if you want to see an example the other way around, let me share this: https://reason.com/2018/08/02/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-rac...
