The “left” cancels everywhere. The “right” cancels in their own community. Big difference IMO. Pros and cons to both of those approaches but that’s how I see it.
The point is not who's currently relevant, it's that people on the cultural Right complaining about cancel culture are on par with a schoolyard bully complaining about someone else bullying them. They are happy to do it when their opinions hold sway; when they can't, they whine about other people doing it.
And to be clear, I'm not taking a "both sides are equally bad" stance, I'm just describing the hypocrisy of this particular line of complaining.
This selective application of values (e.g. being in favor of free speech, as long as you like what is being said) has been going on forever. We have had a system set up to account for this in the U.S., when the perceived threat to free speech was the government. That threat has become faceless mobs and private companies.
People choosing to no longer listen to you because you have ideas that are currently considered reprehensible to the larger society is not being cancelled. That's called consequences for my actions. You are not entitled to consequence free speech & actions. This has never been a principle of free speech.
Also, there is a massive difference between using government entities to ban books, and a bunch of people on Twitter saying we don't like you and what you said.
There are a lot of people that think this is cancel culture. Bobby Kotick is likely going to be "cancelled"/fired from Activision if their board has any sense in the next few days. Was he cancelled, or did his past behavior finally catch up to him?
You are not entitled to a job or a platform and the people who have control over those positions are well within their right to remove you for the views and actions you take. Removing you from a position is a form of speech. And this isn't new, we've been doing this forever. Was Nixon cancelled? Were the Dixie Chicks cancelled?
Maybe you think they were, maybe you don't, but this idea that somehow someone is cancelled because society says "we don't like your bullshit anymore" is new or dangerous is just preposterous to me.
I find the influence that right/conservatives have in infecting our school curriculum (even if not always successfully) far more dangerous. "The war of norther aggression" is an actual thing taught to actual children in the south. I find that far more damaging to our society.
> There are a lot of people that think this is cancel culture. Bobby Kotick is likely going to be "cancelled"/fired from Activision if their board has any sense in the next few days. Was he cancelled, or did his past behavior finally catch up to him?
He's being fired because of his actions, not his beliefs or speech. Nixon resigned because he broke the law.
There were two things that happened with Dixie Chicks, people calling into their radio stations requesting they be blacklisted, this is most definitely cancel culture.
They also offended their core audience who just stopped buying their records which isn't cancel culture. Maybe in 2003 you were excited they had to face consequences for sharing their beliefs, but I wasn't enthused about it then, and I'm not now.
Would it be healthy to live in a culture where Walmart fired every worker who pro-BLM?
Where Amazon asks anyone they hire how they feel about unions before hiring them?
>The war of northern aggression
I grew up in the south. I've heard this term before but I've never seen it in a single textbook or ever heard a teacher use it.
Speech is an action. Saying someone got fired for their actions (which were primarily speech, not physical actions) is the same thing as firing someone for their speech.
And I don't really care about the Dixie Chicks, they were right, but people don't have to listen to them either. The same way I feel about all these people that are claiming that they have been cancelled. They might be right, I don't think most of them are, but none of us have to listen to them, they are not entitled to anything.
Walmart and Amazon could certainly try to do those things, but both of those specifics do at least have some legal questions that I am not qualified to answer.
And I'm going to go out on a limb that you haven't seen every textbook in the South. And while I will fully admit here that it may not be pervasive, it certainly was taught in some schools in the South. Another term more frequently used is the "war for southern independence". While not as objectionable, it certainly was not the intent of the Civil War.
You're trying to conflate speech with actions in a way that would make laws against sexual harassment unconstitutional.
Walmart and Amazon could do those things, but I want to live in a world where they don't because we have a culture that values freedom of expression.
There are over a million teachers in the south I'm sure at least one used that term. But it hasn't been anywhere close to common for a generation or two.
No, Nixon resigned because he (or, rather, his party) had done a whip count and knew he would be removed from office.
(Now, sure, that was because other people were not prepared to accept the manner in which he had broken the law, but Nixon absolutely did not resign because he broke the law.)
That's exactly one of the benefits of free speech. A kind of inverse of the "remain silent and be thought a fool, or speak up and remove all doubt" saying.
Free and open discussion lets me know who's worthwhile listening to and who should be ignored.
You can say "no more" as much as you want. You can point out their foolishness. You can block their content from your life. It's all part of the same dance.
Without some kind of legal exemption, however, you cannot prevent them from saying more (unless you own the platform, but that level of control is limited only to the platform that you own).
Our UK students unions are repeatedly preventing people speaking on campuses because they object to their views [1]. This IS 'cancel culture' and it is not healthy for our democracy.
Whatever happend to "I disprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" ?
You are not entitled to a platform. The student body choosing who they want to listen to is, in and of itself, a form of speech. Why is this such a difficult concept for people to understand?
The difficulty with rights is where they start and where they end.
The saying goes that my right to swing my arms ends where your face begins.
Equally the student unions right to decide what they personally listen too ends when they prevent others that want to hear the speaker from listening.
At that point they are infringing on another's right to free speech.
In the case of the student unions it is an inherently political organisation using their power to restrict the rights of what I can only assume is a minority of the student body.
If the student body doesn't approve of the student union, do something about it. The student body refusing do something about it is implicit speech that they approve. If most of the student body isn't changing the student union, that tells me that perhaps your identification of who is in the minority here might not be accurate, or is at least incomplete.
> your identification of who is in the minority here might not be accurate
Are you seriously suggesting a students speech should be curtailed because they are in a minority! (Or a majority for that matter). You are either trolling, or you are part of the problem.