I think the issue is that companies like this pump millions of dollars into "diversity programs" and strictly police any language that could be considered racist. But they often seem completely blind to the fact that many minorities identify strongly with their lower-class communities, and that office culture that mocks and denigrates those communities actively drives away minorities (and all lower-class individuals) from applying for those jobs. Which kind of defeats the purpose of pledging millions toward "diversity".
A lot of American leftists seem to have labeled any political rhetoric about "the elites" as alt-right talking points. But as someone who works frequently with lower class individuals across the political spectrum, this is a deep-seated frustration I hear from people of all races and political parties.
Regardless of race, no one wants to work at a workplace where you know the majority of people think less of you. This is something that I think corporate America needs to understand better, if they genuinely want better diversity numbers.
I don't think this was the intent of the comment you're replying to. Personally, I interpreted their position as exactly the opposite: they're very anti-unnecessary force, and frustrated that we can't implement a compassionate system to deal with the problems at hand.
> when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty.
As a woman, I appreciate the empathy here, but question the logic. I cannot "control" the fact that I have breasts. The multiple times I've been agressively groped by homeless men has been entirely out of my control. The threats of assault I've received when ignoring catcalls were also out of my control (and luckily the homeless man who charged at me and threatened to stab me was held back by a good samaritan, because I assure you, that situation was entirely out of my control.)
Homeless people are harmless 99% of the time. But when you pass 100 homeless people every day, that 1% genuinely does matter.
I had a large, scary looking rescue dog for years. Sweetest cuddle bug ever. But she looked tough as hell, and it was amazing how the reactions of people differed when I walked with her versus without her.
I appreciate that you take the time to teach your daughters those sorts of safety precautions. Personally, I went through an, "Ugh, my parents are SO paranoid and judgemental" phase as a teen. But their wisdom has gotten me out of some tricky situations in the past, and now that I'm older, I will be forever grateful for it.
others had noted a workable "compassionate system": more housing, plus supportive services. no coercion necessary.
about handling unexpected situations, the control aspect is about how you respond (e.g., quelling fear so you can think more quickly and nimbly), not how you directly control others. self-defense classes for women will emphasize this, and improv classes in conjunction can help develop mental agility under pressure. sometimes we can't do much, but it can be surprising how much a handful of techniques can work. i sympathize with your anecdotes, but is this a problem you only face with homeless men?
for context, most assaults (of any type) are perpetrated by non-homeless men (usually someone you know). my own experience aligns with this general trend (catcalls by the homeless but more serious stuff by non-homeless men).
tangentially, homeless folks are at much higher risk of assault than non-homeless folks. this is something i've anecdotally witnessed in my own neighborhood - projectiles thrown, tents burned, even murder. i once had to call 911 for a homeless guy after he was assaulted with a knife by a young, non-homeless couple.
>others had noted a workable "compassionate system": more housing, plus supportive services. no coercion necessary.
I didn't see the commenter you replied to dismiss these options. They just expressed frustration that a working version of this solution seems to be far off, and that in the mean time, the issue at hand can't simply be ignored in day-to-day life.
> about handling unexpected situations, the control aspect is about how you respond (e.g., quelling fear so you can think more quickly and nimbly), not how you directly control others.
This can be a helpful coping mechanism on an individual basis. But this seems like a poor solution to the overall problem. Is the government going to spend billions on sending women to improv and self defense courses? That doesn't seem possible.
I think this advice also falls into the same realm as the advice to "dress more modestly." It's putting the responsibility for action on the women getting assaulted. In my opinion, the problem doesn't lie with women lacking "mental agility." It's with the severely mentally ill men assaulting these women.
>i sympathize with your anecdotes, but is this a problem you only face with homeless men?
Unfortunately not. However, the rate of harassment and aggression I've experienced from homeless men is far higher than the average man. This is backed by statistics on the rate of violent crime and sexual assault among the homeless.
Of course, there are plenty of violent, aggressive men who aren't homeless. But these people aren't generally living in large camps at my local park and intimidating me from using public property.
> tangentially, homeless folks are at much higher risk of assault than non-homeless folks.
This is absolutely right. The rate of sexual assault against homeless women is simply heart-wrenching.
But I think the critical piece of information here is that most of these assaults are committed by other homeless people. Large camps of people with severe mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, and nothing to lose tend to veer toward violence.
Having spent a lot of time volunteering with the homeless, and having close friends who work at shelters, the stories of violence and assault that occur in homeless camps are gut wrenching. When people advocate to just "leave people alone" and "have compassion" in regards to the homeless and their growing camps, I don't think they understand the underbelly of violence that occurs in many of these communities.
i mean, it's pretty difficult to look at the totality of the parent comment and conclude that they were just simply frustrated that we don't have a compassionate solution yet. "aggressive rant against homeless people that concludes with fascism" would be a more cogent description.
given the obvious housing shortage, the responsible solution is ultimately a matter of political and public will, and the powers that be don't want to spend money on the problem when it's been rapaciously isolated to the less affluent parts of cities. i'd be kicking back and not worrying about it too if i could export all the homeless into the various affluent hills of LA and not have to experience it regularly.
so the right people to be angry at are not the homeless themselves but the administrators, politicians, and their wealthy donors who collectively have all the power and money they need to fix the problem, and yet are doing approximately nothing (more) about it. i'd readily sign a petition to impeach mayor garcetti over just this one issue (but sadly not just this one).
> "It's putting the responsibility for action on the women getting assaulted."
no, it's not. it's admitting that there is a range of potential responses, and pointing out one proactive response (not a responsibility). the inverse-converse isn't implied nor can it be derived from that statement.
beyond that, it sounds like your experience is exceptional in that you're somehow exposed to more negative such experiences with homeless men than the average woman (let alone the average person), and perhaps fewer such experiences with non-homeless men, which makes it maybe a greater-than-2-or-3-sigma kind of exceptional.
lastly, housing the homeless can reduce the inter-homeless violence you mention. it's the compassionate solution that also has positive externalities for the public.
My friend's youngest is little miss princess. Everything has to be pink and sparkly, and tiaras are the height of fashion.
My friend was pretty dismayed at first, because she's quite feminist and has been very careful to raise her daughter with gender neutral toys, media, etc. All her family and friends have taken similar precautions, and if anything, this kid has been raised to see "girly girl" things as quite negative.
Ultimately, my friend came to the same conclusion as you--you can only shape your kid so much. For whatever reason, her daughter is just naturally obsessed with being a princess. Genetics probably play a role, plus other far more subtle environmental factors.
My friend has embraced her duaghter's interests--after all, feminism is all about letting women chase whatever interests and life paths they want! But we still chuckle at how unlikely it seems for her, of all people, to have a daughter so obsessed with pink.
Good point – we need not marry careers to color. People always forget "pink" used to be a color reserved for little boys (as a derivative of red) and baby blue for little girls (derivative of indigo).
In reality, the number of astronauts is pretty limited as is the number of princesses so it is just probabilistically unlikely that there is some combination.
In fact, I bet the percentage of princess astronauts vs. non-princess astronauts is pretty close.
Wouldn't surprise me if a princesses are more likely to become astronauts than an average person. If they really want to go to space they have things to offer in return.
Our pediatrician made a quip once about a family that came in and said "Our girl only plays with the dolls and our boy only plays with the trucks" despite the parents doing the whole "gender neutral toys" thing.
And her response was, "Yes, duh, that's what little boys and girls do"
My experience is that it's good not to limit what your children are exposed to or have available, but don't be surprised at all if they fit nearly every stereotype regarding boys vs girls.
So the pediatrician was basically implying that saying that trucks are for boys and dolls for girls is a construct of a part of society trying to reproduce its politically charged gender roles is a construct of a part of society trying to reproduce its politically charged gender roles?
I think the problem here is that some people made the fire burn so bright that it's impossible to even talk about the issue without fanning the flames.
The reason people worry about their daughters' having an affinity for princess stuff is rational.
It is because, however unfair and wrong, as a society we have associated those symbols with disempowerment and subjugation to men, and our culture has echoed and amplified that association, because it sells.
At the end of the day nobody wants their child disempowered, and many would make the terrible choice of suppressing their child's tendencies in order to protect them from that injustice.
I think a handful of ideologues have arbitrarily assigned those symbols negative meanings. There's nothing bad about girls playing with girly toys and to say that a child is subjugating herself to men because she imagines being a princess or a mom is a perverse interpretation of a normal childhood fantasy. It's also illogical - princesses having power over most men.
> I think a handful of ideologues have arbitrarily assigned those symbols negative meanings.
What's more likely, a "handful of ideologues" assigning these symbols, or the combined history of disempowerment of women throughout history assigning the symbols, which only started being disassembled this past century?
> There's nothing bad about girls playing with girly toys
You misunderstood what I wrote. I wholeheartedly agree there is nothing wrong with it at all. But embracing those aesthetic tendencies (which have nothing to do with being a mom) comes with a cost to the individual in society, not the least of which are being slotted as intellectually inferior. You'd have to purposely ignore the historical cultural signaling to deny it.
> It's also illogical - princesses having power over most men.
This is wholly irrelevant to the discussion, since we are talking about figurative princesses, not literal princesses who are daughters of aristocrats.
You're right that I am misunderstanding what you wrote. I continue to not understand what you are writing. I'm not even sure if we are in disagreement or not.
My position is that there are a handful of ideologues who have perverse beliefs that typically feminine things are bad or demeaning. These people are left-wing, academic, modern feminist types. They think things like "Wanting to be a princess is synonymous to wanting to subjugate yourself to men" or "Wanting to be a housewife will make people think you aren't intelligent".
The reality is that women and girls are, on average, predisposed towards "girly" stereotypes. More girls are interested in aesthetics, talking, emotions, etc. In the same way boys are more likely interested in things like fighting, guns, dinosaurs, trucks, etc. I think we should be equally fine with anyone interested in any set of subjects, but I also contend that the people I referenced earlier argue that girls doing typically girly things are undesirable and girls should be encouraged to pursue interests that boys typically do.
My argument is that predisposition (AKA nature) is only one aspect of identity, and that nurture plays a very important role. The nurture side (regardless of what direction you nurture in) has strong connections to cultural power structures that are loosely connected to nature, but far more connected to history.
Survival in society requires a lot of adaptation to cultural power structures and symbols, and that can rationally mean nurturing a child in the direction that might run against their natural disposition. Another example less encumbered by the topic of gender: a parent might rationally make a non-athletically predisposed child play sports because the child can learn useful teamwork skills through their participation.
Lots of men and women prefer to be submissive in some or many contexts, whether personal or professional.
Our overculture highly values the drive to dominate, win, take control, but make no mistake - this is not the inherent imperative of all human beings.
In fact, surveys indicate that at least in the sexual arena, about 75% of women prefer to be submissive. Many men do as well. This is the basis for consensual BDSM.
And lots of people do, as adults, more or less consciously prefer to be submissive in their life to bosses or spouses. There are many wise reasons to choose this path.
It may be true that parents don't want their child disempowered. However, it may also true that, at least as much as a child can want anything, the child wants to be disempowered. I find it really interesting that you and others don't even realize this is a possiblity - that's how much submission has been denigrated in our culture.
That means that the parents are pushing their child to do something against her own preferences and away from her own happiness, just because they don't like it. A rather foolish and selfish thing to do. But it's understandable given how little our culture can even acknowledge the value of honorable and confident submission.
> But it's understandable given how little our culture can even acknowledge the value of honorable and confident submission.
That's because outside of very specific contexts, "honorable and confident submission" doesn't exist.
Yes, respectful power differences in otherwise mutually beneficial relationships naturally exist, whether those relationships are platonic, professional, romantic, or very concretely in the context of activities like BDSM. These are, however, characterized by clear limits and boundaries, and a mutual agreement about the benefit of the relationship, including the power difference.
But social subjugation is not the same thing. It's about being disempowered in situations where there is no trust relationship that puts boundaries on the exercise of that power against the disempowered. For example, it's a job interview where someone's abilities are cast in doubt because their interviewer perceives their "princess" appearance or mannerisms.
That people conflate the two very distinct scenarios is baffling. The difference between them is quite simply a huge gulf of trust.
Moreover, by conflating the two, we delegitimize relationships that do involve respectful power differences, and destroy the mutual benefits that they can create. I also agree that the destruction of trust is central to this process.
I think you have something here, but I also think you have accepted the wrong dichotomy.
I would abandon the vocabulary of "domination" and "submission". And I disagree with the association with BDSM, because it is full of coercive symbolism: whips, striking, restraints.
A much better pair of words, in my opinion, is "to lead" and "to follow". The connotations are better.
Leading is understood to take effort, to be a service to the community, even the community of two. The follower chooses to follow, not because they are compelled by force, but because the leader knows the path. The leader is not giving directions merely to extract pleasure for themselves, but as a service; they are organizing the community for its mutual benefit.
Then, when you follow, it is not because you are being whipped, or choked, or physically restrained, but because you want to go where the leader is directing; they don't have to make you do anything. You are happy to let them make the decisions, because you trust their decisions to be good for you -- and they are.
And when you lead, you do not need to worry about maintaining coercive power, because you know that you can trust your followers to work together with you. Their eyes (and yours) are on your shared objective, not on who gets to be in charge.
I think the key difference between these two dichotomies is this: One is held together by coercion, and the focus is on who is in charge; the other is held together by trust, and yes, someone naturally takes charge, but this is for the purpose of achieving a shared objective, which is where the focus is.
I am saying that legitimate consensual authority exists, and that our society should allow it to exist, rather than tearing it down always by viewing it as violent. It does not need to be violent, or attached to violent symbolism. Instead of "master and slave", think "mother and daughter" or "father and son". Both sides of these relations have obligations, and both have dignity.
> At the end of the day nobody wants their child disempowered
Worth considering that this statement being obviously true and unobjectionable even when applied to daughters is the result of difficult work by generations of women, a part of which has been criticism of which portrayals of women are made available to young girls.
You can argue that that criticism has become less relevant today, but ironically that’s in part thanks to the critics’ success.
"Princess" is a great job to have. It's 100% monarchical privilege and zero responsibility. There's nothing disempowering about it. The shiny "baubles" are symbolic gemstones. A little girl drawn to "being a princess" is like a little boy drawn to "being a rich guy" with a monocle and a top-hat.
(We have even met the man that little boy grows into: Donald Trump.)
Behold I have just set up a totally different complex of associations.
It's really staggering how different my job search process is from my male friends, especially since I work in an ultra-male dominated niche. For them, it's like begging in the street for an offer. For me, it's like strolling through the supermarket and selecting which one I want. I have literally only once interviewed and not gotten an offer.
People get upset when I speak about this, because it's taboo to say women have it easier (in some aspects) in the tech world. But I try to be vocal about my experiences, in an effort to encourage more girls to go into tech. After all, what better incentive is there than fantastic pay that's easy to get?
You should definitely be open about it. Lots of girls in school have no exposure and think a field is hard to get into because they don’t know anyone there.
People forget how “far away” something looks to people not in the know.
Promoting universal healthcare and proportional taxes isn't dangerous at all. Neither is promoting freedom of speech and healthy laws for small businesses.
It get dangerous when either side decides that anything standing in the way (in their opinion) of these ideals are "other", and that the "others" are so evil they are simply inhuman, and must be quashed by all means necessary.
This pattern repeats in history many, many times. And lots of people are nervous that the beginning of that pattern is starting to play out in the modern West.
True. Remember all the lynchings of white people in the South by the BBB, for offenses sometimes as minor as drinking from the wrong water fountain?
Or when BLM marched, with torches in hand, chanting "Blood and soil" and "You will not replace us"? There was even a Neonazi woman who was ran over by a BLM activist driving a car.
And what about the day when BLM terrorists invaded the Capitol threatening to kill everyone who wouldn't break the law and vote Obama back into the presidency? That day was wild.
It's noteworthy that these groups were mostly active in the 20th century as opposition to governments while right-wing extremists have been the government of many countries, including the US until recently.
Yes, I agree that it's very noteworthy. These groups generally appear in response to right governments. Which means I suspect we'll see more of them in coming years.
I am all for fighting far-right extremists. I am very against innocent civilians being killed, oppressed, or censored in the process.
> they'd most likely arrive shooting, as they do when there are parties in slums.
Can you please link to the news articles about these slum parties that are broken up by officers who start shooting the moment they arrive? Seems like something that would definitely get reported on.
In all my time living in low-income housing, I never witnessed something like this. And I had plenty of sleepless nights when neighbors would throw ragers. Some got broken up (mostly when a fight would break out among attendees), and I'm sure some of the cops weren't pleasant. But I never witnessed cops jumping out of their cars with their guns blazing.
Although I'm one piece of anecdotal evidence, so I'd like to see the evidence you have of this event.
I see this link happened in Brazil. Definitely a horribly incident.
My comment, and my personal experiences, relate to America. At least here, I don't know of any events where police have opened fire on a pack of teenagers partying without reason. But they could exist, which was why I was asking for evidence.
This happened during the BLM protests this summer in St. Loius. The looters she reported were blocks away from any BLM protest, and other looting bands were setting fires on nearby blocks.
Frederick was a vocal advocate and financial supporter of BLM and had attended protests in the past. Didn't stop the hordes from calling her racist and threatening to ruin the careers of agents who dared to work for her literary agency, and authors represented by her.
Her agency was gutted. All over calling 911 to report people crashing a van into a small business to raid it.
(Edited to add: I worked in publishing for years. I left because of the censorship in the arena. And I'm a proud lefty.
It's gotten really crazy. Authors getting death threats. Books literally ripped off the shelves and destroyed. (No, not rabid white supremacist books. Books by PoC authors.) But industry professionals insist this is NOT censorship, just business decisions. And if you disagree? You're a dirty, filthy -ist.)
Another edit to add links to the incidents I was referring to:
I honestly don't know why people use "post what you're thinking" style social media at all at this point. With employers being so sensitive, how can the cost/benefit analysis ever really result in a determination that it's a good idea to be active on Twitter/Facebook (or Gab, Parler, TheDonald.win, etc.)?
Maybe that's part of what makes things get so extreme on those sites. The most reasonable people know enough not to risk their livelihoods by jumping in and posting, and that leaves the less reasonable people to just sit there and escalate.
I have literally seen NYT bestselling authors talk about how they're super excited to publicly heckle an author at his next book signing. And join in on conversations promoting burning his book.
His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight.
This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist.
The authors involved in these threats and book-burning talk had literally no punishment. None. Just a bunch of new followers who gushed about what "strong women" they were. (As a woman, I can't think of anything weaker than threatening to burn a book and harass someone, all for internet points.)
The thing is, Publishing Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left. You can talk about harassing people, burning books, and purposely destroying careers. Zero consequences at all.
But if you're so much as a hair right of center left? Forget it. Your career is gone.
Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.
Linking to someone's public posts isn't "doxing". Publicly sharing their personal details (private email address, home address, phone number, etc.) or other private information as a form if direct or indirect harassment is.
Correct. I know at least one of the authors who was behaving horribly has severe depression. I don't care how horrible their behavior was, I'm not going to potentially sick an unknown internet mob on a person with suicidal tendencies.
I am 100% fine with telling them this is wrong. I'm quite vocal about this being wrong.
But I am not okay with unleashing random internet people on a mentally ill person, which could easily spiral into a mob that involves death threats, doxing of personal info, etc. Hell, I'm not okay doing that to a mentally healthy person.
I think large parts of the right has now come to the conclusion that it can not hold itself to so much higher moral standards than the opposite team, or it will continue losing and moving down leagues until there is no right team left.
People basically found out a new way to be an asshole. They would have been an asshole in another way if this current lane was closed and socially challenged. It just happens to be that virtue signaling and sticking some BS cause in front of your behavior lets you get away with it at this point in time.
I’m not sure that I’d call the reaction to Bergstrom a debacle. Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt that made everyone angry:
“It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.”
“They love this—the school uniform, the flash of seventeen-year-old legs.”
The first quote is a pretty direct attack at the Hunger Games. HG has a rabid following so that was risky. The second is just godawful writing. He still would have been okay but he went a little too far mocking the amount of talent needed to write YA.
Scooter Braun recently learned a lesson about screwing with media that rabid young adults identify with. It’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, bring better prose. Or at least accept that the genre’s bestsellers are way better at the internet than you are.
Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre.
The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism.
And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously.
And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.
It's beyond my comprehension that anyone can believe that it was a reasonable response to some anodyne literary criticism. Hunger Games is rubbish. It's OK to say so. It's not OK to behave like a vicious lunatic because someone said the books and genre you like are rubbish. If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill. The reaction might be predictable, but it's not defensible.
>If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill.
The very sad, unfortunate thing is that a lot of these authors are indeed mentally ill. A lot of the ring-leaders of these mobs openly embrace their mental illness as a personality trait (ie: listing it in their Twitter bios).
It leads to this bizarre environment where their reactions are, medically speaking, insane (ie: the reaction of someone in bipolar mania, the reaction of someone suffering from paranoia or extreme anxiety.) But there are so many insane reactions, that it becomes normalized.
And then people who don't struggle with mental illness start to mimic the insane behavior, because hey, everyone else is doing it! And it's now the best way to get internet points, collect followers, and get some profitable attention to your own books.
>And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash?
I believe you're having some selective memory issues. This was back in 2015, when "Hunger Games" was starting to lose steam. And many feminists on twitter were lampooning it for focusing on romance, and having a flimsy love triangle, when the life-or-death situation of the book wouldn't realistically allow for that.
Mocking the "Hunger Games" and any book with a love triangle was totally in vogue.
>He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences.
It's funny, because I've seen dozens of YA authors sneer at "Fifty Shades of Grey." Call it toxic, poorly written, laugh at it, mock it, insist it was dangerous to even publish it.
Yet I've never seen the Fifty Shades of Grey fanbase, or any Romance genre authors, talk about threatening, stalking, and publicly heckling those authors who criticize the work.
You call it "predictable consequences." I call it "hateful, disturbing, potentially dangerous behavior that reeks of censorship."
You should maybe start off with his interview with Publisher’s Weekly. He said a couple of things about the YA genre that just aren’t true. The biggest one was that he seems to think it doesn’t take a lot of brains to write YA whereas his book is somehow special.
That interview was the first time that anyone had taken any notice of Bergstrom. So then, everyone read his excerpt.
(Incidentally, that’s a bad flow in writing. If your press insults an entire genre, your excerpt better be damned flawless. This goes 100x if you’re talking YA.)
The first paragraph delivers a really traditional out of touch old dude description of the Hunger Games. That’s treading on dangerous territory because you’re dealing with a universe that young people have become deeply invested in.
The second quote violates one of the genre’s rules about writing women.
So, you’ve got a writer who signed a big contract and a film deal. His introduction to his genre’s fans was an absolute disaster. So, the genre’s fans did what they always do and made a huge mess.
Some might call it disproportionate but then they don’t understand the genre either. YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.
All of that should make everyone seriously question whether this is a Paramount growth hack. Heaven knows Paramount wouldn’t be the first company to try to create controversy when they own rights to a book.
>YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.
I think you are entirely missing the point of these comments, which is: the "disproportionate reactions" of the YA community are hateful, bizarre, mob-like, and often dip into censorship.
You're also stating that the "genre's fans" are to blame. As the comments above clearly state, the criticism in this thread is toward the professional authors who take part in these mobs. Not the "young people."
Ah, reminds me of the difference of treatment between Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings:
>> Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked at him thoughtfully.
> Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits as being of very much the same proportions. Oddly enough, the movie shows Sam as more or less the same build when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mordor, even though he had some weeks of semi-starvation.
FWIW, in Lord of the Rings, it was implied that the change in Frodo was due to carrying the One Ring, and that it was due to it that he couldn't rejoin normal life while the other Hobbits could (and in Shire, ultimately became much more famous)
Ah. Well, he was the lazy stay-at-home guy of the four hobbits before the adventure :)
Samwise did hard physical work regularly, and Meriadock and Pippin while also somewhat pampered (remember, of the four hobbit, only Sam wasn't nobility!) were somewhat known for their adventures.
If you go with the horseshoe theory then the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right. The only thing that changes really is the framing of the issue and the motivation.
If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything.
But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.
I don't think the horseshoe theory works. The critical factor is authoritarianism. Which is a grown-up word for bullying and narcissism.
Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better.
Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital.
Same issues, same dynamic, different context.
The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on.
The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.
Horseshoe theory implies (if not explies, if that's a word) that going far left or far right automatically entails becoming authoritarian, and that they converge as you go farther "left" or "right". That's pretty demonstrably false, and even a two-dimensional political compass (let alone one with more axes) does a much better job of describing actual political stances than a horseshoe can. Authoritarianism v. libertarianism and socialism v. capitalism are separate and independent axes, and societies have existed across the whole gamut, corner-to-corner-to-corner-to-corner and everything in between.
I always viewed it as descriptive and not prescriptive, so I wouldn't say it implies movement across the authoritarian axis just by moving more right or left.
Bob Altemeyer would disagree. He formulated the idea of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as a psychological condition. His research discovered that there is no corresponding left-wing authoritarianism -- that even the authoritarianism exhibited by followers of Stalin or Mao was right-wing.
Kinda hard to be authoritarian if one of your central beliefs is in the fraternity and equality of all. It's more useful to describe Stalinist USSR or Maoist China as right-wing regimes cloaked in leftist rhetoric.
This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)
All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.
Have to agree. If Mao and Stalin can be disqualified as being left-wing due to the contradiction between their actions and the leftist values of equality and universal solidarity, then, by the same token, Hitler and Mussolini must be disqualified as being right-wing because of the contradiction between their actions and the values of limited government and rule of law.
Critical race theory has more in common with National Socialism than with the leftist values of equality and solidarity, because when you get past the verbal subterfuge which ostensibly denies that race exists, you find a deeply racist ideology of racial collectives locked in a struggle for supremacy, with one particular collective singled out as evil beyond redemption and in need of destruction. We have seen that before, and it is undeniable where it must lead. Critical Race Theory is Nazism barely disguised by a light sprinkling of leftist pixie-dust.
The common factor between the extremes of left and right is collectivism. Totalitarian demagogues, left or right, favor collectivism as a tool of control because it detaches people from their moral obligations to other individual human beings and transfers their loyalties wholly to an abstraction controlled by that demagogue.
I completely agree. Honestly, I'm pretty sure those people have no friends in real life, the way they jump down peoples' throats for every minor thing, so they gravitate online to find echo chambers. Their cohorts online are only "allies", not real friends. They will turn on each other as soon as one of them challenges their ideology.
I agree that it isn't really about 'left' or 'right', as both leanings are held by plenty of rational non-extreme people. Extremism itself seems to be growing in our culture, and as long as we're focused on putting a political label on it I think it will continue to grow. It is very tempting to believe that everyone you disagree with is part of the most extreme representation of that disagreement, because that makes it easy to dismiss them, and ultimately I think that just pushes people more to the extreme ends.
I don't know how we get out of this. I can't think of a good way to encourage empathy over outrage, as the former is often too painful and the latter often too enjoyable. In the information age it is far too easy to find the hedonistic outrage-dens, and there's a lot of money to be had running such places.
Speaking of likening echo chambers to opium dens, the Rat Park[0] experiments suggest that environment does play a significant role in drug-seeking behavior, and it does seem that a lot of this extremism can be traced back to things like the increasing wealth-gap, the hollowing out of rural America, systemic racism, rampant political corruption, and other societal ills. Therefore, maybe it isn't necessary to address the symptom of extremism directly --by, say, trying to teach people empathy-- but instead focus on treating the underlying illnesses. Of course, since our politicians are elected by the people they represent, and it would seem far easier to manipulate people's outrage for votes than to focus on actually fixing things, that might not be possible either.
It's interesting you're being downvoted - because from the way I'm reading this you're not advocating that this theory is true but merely pointing out that it exists, describing it's attributes, and showing a couple of examples that seem to overlap with the theory. Which only seems to shore up your last statement.
Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do.
This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, there are clear distinctions between various left-wing ideologies and mainstream liberalism (radical or not). Finger pointing and blaming individuals, the type of behavior your describing, is classic dominant capitalist ideology, something that all flavors of the left are deeply skeptical of.
Both "radical" liberalism and rising right-wing extremism are different varieties of nihilism, stemming from the same root cause of a degradation in our overall material conditions and the breakdown of late capitalist society. Both are essentially empty systems of rhetoric with no underlying values that ultimately lead to a totalitarian way of thinking.
To reiterate, the thinking your describing is absolutely not "far left".
Political trials, formal and informal, against "class enemies" are typical of extremist left wing movements. See for example Maoist "struggle sessions", which seem nothing else than an in-person version of a twitter mob:
Note that the targets of cancel culture are in the most proper sense "class enemies" since their sins are not directed against specific individuals but entire classes of people: blacks, women, transsexuals, etc.- and can be as vague as dismissive attitudes or generic antagonism.
For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.
The right just tried to burn down the House in the US, murder the government, and install a dictator because it didn't accept that it lost a fair election.
Many on the right still can't, even now.
If you want your philosophy to remain legal, acting like this is a very bad thing and not something that can really be excused - for any reason - might be a good start.
I think another post hit the mark here but generalizing people into extreme groups is a real problem. I know many people on the “right” and “left” that basically only agree with half of what their chosen party says, or maybe they only agree with one issue that is very important to them. On the left it is usually abortion and the right it is usually economy. My point is that saying things like “many” is not all or even a majority. Taking the capitol building riots, even the people present there were incredibly diverse in their mindset. There was a group of a couple hundred that had bad intents and there were several thousand that were actively stopping others from causing damage or fighting the police. There are many videos of people pulling rioters away from breaking windows and shouting at them to stop. The big problem is that the peaceful group didn’t mix with the rioting group soon enough. Trump was having a rally not even close to the capitol building meanwhile this other group started storming the capital. I find it similar when people get angry at like a “Google” employee for saying some obviously idiotic things. Sure an employee represents the company in some capacity but for companies that have tens of thousands of employees, there is almost certainty that some will behave badly. Now take mentality that to the over 70 million Trump voters. Each has their own individual reason for voting for him and lumping them together is no different than saying all men or all women are the same, the ratio is about the equal to genders. This gets exacerbated by media companies who will take one example and call that out as if it is the rule. I can’t tell you how many articles and new shows that say “some say” and use one tweet saying that as evidence as if it is a majority held opinion or representative of a whole. In the BLM protests it was reasonable was assume a lot of the rioters were not protesters or not there for the protest but that same standard was dropped for those at the capital.
You're not going to convince many that symbolically property damage across the nation is of the same offense as storming the capitol and beating one of your own to death. The group that stormed the capital was also not ideologically diverse. They were running on a common emotion of hate. Sure, you had hundreds of useful idiots giving the bad actors cover but that's the whole point of being a useful idiot for the left/right/center. It provides an excuse for like minded to dismiss the extreme position but they still sat down with Fascists to eat a meal.
Property damage? I mean literally police stations and city halls were attacked across the US and many people did die in the protests, and cops were even killed at random in the name of BLM. Don’t try to stand on the grave of one individual officer in the case who volunteered to protect the building and reports still read his “injuries were unknown” and report it as if it was a murder. Officers die every day around the country from a traffic stop and somehow it is an “insurrection” when one dies in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. And to you that fault is all of those hundreds of thousands of people? Did anyone at your high school ever murder someone, does that make you a murderer because you all were not ideologically diverse and had the same education. It is prejudice to assign others blame by virtue of association. There was no hate by many people they simply wanted election integrity to be verified and allow investigation to occur.
You've lumped about 3 months worth of time into a single response as some kind of single metaphor to a single incident incited by a rally held by several political figures. You want to sit with Fascists and that's okay with me but don't tell me you don't stink mate. Every single person who went to that shit show knew what it was going to be about and anyone so blinded to not see it devolving into violence falls into the useful idiot camp.
Sure that was 3 months of very similar riots. Take any single one of them and it was as violent as the capitol protest. I guess you know exactly what everyone was thinking that went there? Even though the “leader” of the whole thing, Trump, said “be peaceful, don’t give them what they want, be peaceful.” Please tell me how fascism even relates to this conversation? Isn’t asking for election integrity the exact opposite of fascism?
We're not even existing in the same general reality of truth at this point so it doesn't make sense to continue talking past each other. Have a good evening and maybe buy some GME stock.
I always suspected there's a little bit of survivorship bias (? not sure of the best term here) going on. If you haven't suffered the hoards, or had someone you know suffer them, you're likely to think some combination of "it only happens when it's justified" and "no one will care about little old me"
I've witnessed it happen to a colleague early on in my career. He posted how trivial it was to cause an IoT device to reset because they had a reset password only protected by hashing an English word that they changed every update. There are multiple security lapses there, and he didn't even mention the really scary ones, this one was almost silly.
Turns out the parent company of the IoT device and his parent company were the same, and calls got made, his post misunderstood by management, and he got told to find a new job somewhere else.
Still makes my blood boil, and I'd name names, but neither company exists anymore. It did teach me to be _very_ careful what I post online, even when I'm anonymous.
To be fair, sometimes things happen, and it can be good (I think JP said something like that). something like "never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake" - if people demonstrate their shittiness, help them.
It would just be your friend that got an (admittedly mandatory) wake-up call - other employees would too. The best remedy is just a totally neutral post/tweet detailing what happened, with no judgement at all - 3rd parties will get angry on your behalf, and a lack of initial anger will only motivate that moreso.
Yeah, that sounds mostly really unlucky :(. I mean, anyone can understand that a company fires an employee that publicises a security weakness in a product instead of clearing it internally. However, when the employee doesn't understand that he is an "employee" of that company... Sounds like an unfortunate mistake.. you can be fired for those.
A bit of a tangent but, this is all the result of having people use their real names on the internet. I remember when there was a big push for people to create profiles tied to their real identities with the argument being that everyone would behave themselves if their real lives were connected to the things they did online. That argument is dead as discourse is now. Instead of well mannered discussion between opposing views we got media fuelled echo chambers that now extends right to the top offices of government along with political persecution by online mobs that high five each other as they destroy lives and careers. I don’t know what a good solution is.
The argument may be dead, but the powers that be are pushing hard to make online anonymity illegal and a thing of the past, precisely because they want the kind of mob mentality that happened to the literary agent mentioned in TGGF.
Haha I remember that argument. The thought was anonymity made people horrible to each other online. Turns out people are horrible to each other online regardless.
I’m not saying cancellation should be illegal or whatever, but that isn’t healthy. You can’t let a minority of extremists (and it is a minority) muzzle everyone. It turns over control of the culture to them and that’s extremely dangerous.
Never could see any positives from the "stream of consciousness" type of particpation in social media. I myself have gone farther and have never participated at all on Facebook, Twiter, et. al.
Closest thing I've ever had to a social media presence is here on HN, where I deliberately remain anonymous.
I actually like Reddit as well. You can remain pseudonymous there if you so choose and still have meaningful interactions with people. And (depending on the sub) people don't form mobs as easily as on Twitter/Facebook.
Social media without moderators was a really bad idea, as we learn now.
Blame the victims? If the majority are scared to publicly state their opinions, it's somehow normal that the ones that still do it get punished. They should just be more cautious what they post, right?
I was lucky I became "self aware" in that sense. Granted I never posted anything that attacked people but I did clean up my FB that I haven't used for years to post/browse. Deleting stuff, hiding images, etc...
Also try not to be doxable in general but sucks like when YT forces you to use your actual name in comments otherwise changing it would change it in email. Can make another account too. At least the comments I don't think are indexed publicly.
That's always fun finding dumb things you posted online as a kid.
> That's always fun finding dumb things you posted online as a kid.
The older I get, the more I understand the push for a right to be forgotten. I wish that (most?) public sites had some kind of filter where things disappeared. There is no reason why comments made as a kid should follow you forever. Or, if not entirely removed, then maybe the authorship masked.
I mean, if bad decisions fall off your credit report after 7 years, why shouldn’t the stupid tweet you posted 7 years ago? This is especially true for accounts where the person was under 18 at the time.
Well, people can delete ill-advised tweets, but it doesn't matter - if somebody else screen-shotted it, they can hang on to the screenshot for as long as they like and use it against you when you run for congress some day.
I'm very, very thankful that the internet didn't exist when I was a kid. And am very worried for my own children because it did when they were - I've been counseling them since they were old enough to use a computer that whatever they write will be there forever.
I post about music on my Twitter. Tech stuff here. Instagram for my hobby photography. Facebook itself is long gone. And all for the reasons you’ve stated. I use none of them particularly often.
I’m as left as they come, but I don’t trust that the winds won’t change or I will make a stupid decision, and my future is too important to risk that. And honestly I’m not missing much. If I want to talk politics, I do it with my friends over a beer.
> If I want to talk politics, I do it with my friends over a beer.
As a former Soviet citizen, this is particularly funny to me. Where the safest place for political discussion was at home, in the kitchen, with vodka and couple of good friends. It was part of Soviet culture back then.
Even then you could still end up in the gulag. My wife's great grandfather spent years in work camps because his drinking "friends" turned him in for expressing "unfavourable opinions about Stalin".
While not anywhere nearly that extreme, it makes me nervous that we're moving in that direction culturally (where it's socially acceptable and encouraged to turn someone in for having the "wrong" thoughts).
This is in no way an endorsement of the Soviet Union but it does need to be noted that the Soviet Union was in most parts of it's history, far more moderate than the Soviet Union under Stalin, Stalin has a higher body count than Hitler. Now in saying that, the Soviet Union was never a bastion of enlightenment era liberalism, free thought or personal freedoms. I agree it's not a end goal we should be striving for.
It's worth noting that Frederick's employees quit -- her statements on twitter angered her staff so much they no longer wished to associate with her.
That's not cancel culture. That's common sense. Don't make your coworkers so angry that they'd rather be jobless than spend time in your presence.
The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences. Frederick spoke her mind in a public square, and signed her name to those statements, and other people freely chose not to associate themselves with her. That's bound to happen from time to time. It's a free country.
This line of reasoning breaks down whenever a population is experiencing any form of mass hysteria, and I think there's a reasonable argument that the US is very much in the midst of such a phenomenon right now. Indeed, that was the point of the example being provided by the poster you replied to: her staff quit because they acted based on a hysterical rather than rational analysis of the situation. They didn't break a law by quitting, but that doesn't mean this is something to take lightly or ignore. Mass hysteria is a very, very dangerous path to go down -- it's not something to brush off.
I don't really see where the mass or the hysteria is. It's an individual business parting with an employee because the views shared in public are likely going to harm the business.
Happens probably every day somewhere, why has this even become noteworthy?
I downvoted you because I am very confident you are acting in bad faith. Why is it notable? Because “Some rioters crashed a van through a gas station and I called the police” being a “view” that will “harm the business” is a novel take. I understand the logic behind it. I also know that the most fervent believers in that logic understand it is provocative and radical relative to the mainstream.
It's not a novel take at all, people have been fired for random takes that blew into shitstorms countless of times. You seem to be confused about my post, I'm not passing any judgement here in the sense of approving with the firing, I'm saying, if you make a post on some political event and you create some sort of backlash, even if you didn't do anything wrong, but you're being perceived that way, your place of work may let you go.
That's unfair but it's not a sign of hysteria, other than for the general shittiness of viral internet communication.
The person in question wasn't fired for "random takes" but rather being seen in the vicinity of services that have been seen in the vicinity of people making decidedly non-random takes on political matters. And now she, perhaps correctly, believes she is the victim of religious and political persecution.
As for not being mass hysteria, from the outside looking in it's clearly exactly that. Firing someone because of a mobile app they have installed, when that app was briefly at the top of the app store, is ludicrous and wrong.
The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria. This is exceptionally dangerous because when the left has taken power in the past with that kind of mentality it ended up in bloodshed on massive scales. That must not happen to America.
> The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria. This is exceptionally dangerous because when the left has taken power in the past with that kind of mentality it ended up in bloodshed on massive scales. That must not happen to America.
I wouldn't single out any particular faction on this to be honest. The Obama birther movement purportedly started in 2004 and Trump himself peddled the narrative that Obama wasn't a US Citizen. There was also the general narrative that Obama was the "Anti-Christ" and a secret Muslim.
Now you have a portion of the GOP who believe Democrats and "Hollywood elite" are harvesting children's adrenochromes in a massive paedophile ring.
Any argument that hysteria is the domain of one party is not based in fact.
Obama birtherism was dumb but never took over swathes of institutions like this. Even Trump abandoned it before he became President.
What we're seeing now is not merely a set of hysterical beliefs, but widespread pulling on the levers of power on the basis of them. That seems pretty new.
> The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria.
The corporate actors involved here are nowhere near the left, they are closer to the center-right; the problem the Trumpist faction is facing isn’t that the Left doesn’t like them, its that they’ve earned the firm enmity of the centrist factions that, even when they opposed conservatives them on certain issues, kept good relations with them because they knew the next day they might need them as allies against the Left. And, beyond that, they’ve also lost a substantial minority of the Right; the various long-time and recent Republican figures that have come out in opposition to the Trumpist faction – and not just in the usual intraparty opposition sense but to the extent of either making a dramatic exit from the Party and/or advocating for the defeat of not only its Presidential candidate but of its downballot candidates as long as the Party adheres to Trumpism is telling.
Shouting about the Left is, I’m sure, cathartic, but it is also very much irrelevant to what is going on here. That’s not where the change that is driving outcomes comes from.
No it’s not just the “the Trumpists” versus everyone else. Almost all of these incidents involve conduct which nobody except a small fraction of the progressive left finds problematic. The mainstream left goes along because they’re afraid of being lumped in with “Trumpists.”
I expect this to change once Trump is gone and mainstream liberals aren’t so terrified of being compared to him.
As a centrist myself I disagree with the premise that centrists take issue with Trump.
I personally take issue with his heavy-handed approach to the George Floyd protests, but I consider George Bush Jr to be by far the worse president between the two. He's mostly just an arrogant asshole.
The left's response to him however... And I've spoken with many many other centrists online who agree with me so it's not clear to me why you think the centrists are anything but just silent so they don't get swept up in the hysteria (which is where I've been at for years now, which is why I've never been on Twitter, instagram, etc. Was on FB briefly and promptly left it long before it got popular to do so).
There is no chance they would have quit were there no hubub about it. Zero.
They quit likely because they are in a rep-based business and their boss is stained.
The 'mass outrage' is to some extent, outrage on them by virtue of trickle down or association.
The public outrage adds emotional momentum to it.
That the woman did something slightly questionable makes it one of the better examples of cancel culture, because were she to have done truly noting remotely wrong, then none of the actions would have any justification at all. Because there's a shade of possibly bad acting, we see the disproportional response.
You know, there are people who think HN is one of those websites. Like, squarely in the left-wing (I'm not saying mainstream liberals think that), but it's definitely a thing.
The hysteria is literally facing HARM from opinions.
Why is death threats and intolerance noteworthy? Maybe because intolerance, hate, bigotry and threats of violence should always be noteworthy? especially when concerned with those who claim to be tolerant?
There seems to be mass hysteria about the claimed "mass hysteria", at least when it relates to private business or individuals cutting ties with someone over their actions and statements as opposed to online harassment.
>Over the perception of their actions, not their actual actions.
Trying to discuss in good faith here so hopefully this doesn't garner venom: it doesn't feel novel to be fired or quit over public perception of actions or statements - all my corporate employers since the onset of social media have had disclaimers to not enter the public discourse in such a way that might cause negative publicity for them.
>Nobody anywhere would care a single bit were there not mass hysteria.
This is what my original comment was getting at: claims of 'mass hysteria' come off as something like a conspiracy against a specific group or unfairly targeted wrong-think, which feels like a much more exciting answer than the mundane reality. It seems hysterical in itself to not just assume we're in a politically polarized climate and certain topics of discourse easily earn you close friends and/or committed enemies - something that can make any group dynamic fall apart.
>Also it's not necessarily harassment to call out people if they are not doing their jobs. It's just very (almost pathetically) petty.
Entirely agree! I do think social media has had a tendency to allow people to indulge in their worst sides without much consequence in the case of doxxing and, well, harassment by mass-reaching out to personal lines of contact. That's really distinct in my eyes from filing a complaint to their public employer for the public perception of their public statements.
So this is a good comment - however the term 'hysteria' may not be correct, I suggest that the reaction is ultimately hysterical to the point of overreaction.
I think frankly it's driven a small group of unimportant people, causing more serious forces to act out of fear or opportunity, which snowballs into overreaction.
A 'fear' moves over a group of people causing weird effects.
Maybe we need a term for this - but how do we have 'serious consequences' out of essentially 'inconsequential acts'?
It's leveraged consistently by those that want to use 'every little interaction' as 'proof' of their particular ideology.
It's just too much, it's wearing on my otherwise sympathetic view of people.
The reason for hysteria isn't polarization alone, but also the left has a mission and is compelled to use everything to complete it, including such hysteric campaigns. Maybe it's not truly hysteria, but it looks, walk and talks like one.
Those quitting people themselves describe their quitting as punishment of bad people to make the world better, not to save business. Quit for business harm happens the other way around: when management fires an employee who started a controversy.
> The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences
People in East Germany were free to speak, they just got consequences.
Freedom of speech in the US means that the government can't punish you for saying something, except in situations where they can (incitement, copyright, libel, contempt of court, etc)
Freedom of Speech in the US is a tenet and a philosophy.
What you're referring to is called a constitutional amendment, which also gets pulled under the umbrella term 'Freedom of Speech' because it's a practical implementation of the ideal.
This idea that it's defensible to actively work against the ideals of Freedom of Speech because of a constitutional amendment just doesn't fly. It would be akin to me claiming it isn't immoral to cheat on my spouse because there are laws requiring lawyers to avoid breaching the trust of their clients and therefore trust isn't anything people should consider unless they're lawyers.
"It's a free country" doesn't really add much to the discussion. No-one is saying her employees should be legally forced to stay with the company.
What is being said, however, is that we should reverse this spiralling cultural trend of thinking it's OK to rail-road/strong-arm those not on your "side".
It's a base, mob instinct that has caused riots, factionalism, witch hunts and genocide all throughout human history. It's arguably responsible for a lot of the damage in US society in recent years
I mean, her employees quit because she posted on Twitter that a business was being looted and someone should call the police (I believe, the original tweet seems to have been deleted). Resigning over something so innocuous surely points to a disturbingly reductionist world view, and that path leads only to violence.
The situation has escalated because normal, rational, calm politics has completely failed to deliver.
Police shoot someone dead. There should, at the very least, be a reliable public inquiry into each one of these incidents. We could treat it as an air accident or a murder inquiry, either would work; but instead, there is nothing. Over the years, the anger about being exposed to the risk of being shot dead without consequences boils over, and suddenly there is fighting in the streets and on Twitter. The way to "reverse the trend" is for justice to be seen to be done within the system, so people don't go outside the system. After all, there's no way to end calls for people to be fired without infringing free speech.
Is calling the police on somebody making a death threat? That's how SWATting came to be a problem, after all.
Completely different. Calling police with a false report of an extremely violent crime is hugely different from calling police on an actually crime.
And declaring war on policing is a horrific response to the (huge) problem of under 0.1% of interactions having inexcusably terrible outcomes. Lack of policing causes far more problems than policing. And if you disagree with that, do you deserve to lose your job for your good faith belief? The anti-policing extremists hurt the people they intend to help. The vast majority of Black communities don't want to cancel the current police as a whole, they want better police.
> It's a base, mob instinct that has caused riots, factionalism, witch hunts and genocide all throughout human history
This is it. In the last 10 years or so mob instinct has shown up in many ways - in looting stores, in doxing people and cancelling people who say the wrong things, in trying to overthrow governments, or just simple pile-ons. In part this has been fanned by big tech, but not entirely
The trick is tackling the causes of the creation of the mobs. "You're either with us or against us" is not new - Clinton and Bush were using it 20 years ago, but Cicero used it in Rome and it's in the bible. Big Tech is certainly a key part of the creation and expanse as it connects people, and people are encouraged to "pick a side". In traditional discourse what you'd say to your sportsmates up the pub could be a very different conversation to what you say to your collegues at an awayday. With social media, what you say to one, you say to all -- walking between worlds is difficult.
You might agree with group A on one thing (say housing), and group B on another thing (say BLM), and group C on another thing (say economy), but if those don't all align with your side, you won't fit in.
I think trying to stop what causes mobs can be noble but will be done in vain, validate people’s ideas since they are now being blocked and it also has the ability to be abused. Media sites spent months blocking, banning, demonetizing, and posting disputes about election fraud but none the less there were still riots at the capital building. I like to think of all these websites as a search engine and so will use Google as an example. If Google blocks searches for illegal activity does it stop that illegal activity? No. Does it even lessen that activity? No. In my opinion is hides it which is actually what those committing illegal acts want. They may not know they want it, but it literally protects them from being found by the ones who can stand up to them, sometimes the police. Let’s say you have a person who makes a threat towards another person and that is blocked before it’s posted. Now, the person who was threatened has no idea they were ever threatened. That person is unable to report to the police the treat and has no evidence of the threat. Not only can they not prepare to protect themselves or defend themselves but their evidence is gone and the person making the threats has no consequences. Google and others do turn over threats to the FBI but let’s be honest they don’t have the time or man power to investigate every threat on the internet. So who does? Websites don’t, but the people who are being threatened do. They need to know. This example obviously doesn’t apply as well to mob attacks, but I think the solution is the same. You need transparency and more visibility to these things not less. You literally need police for the internet, not just moderators. Stop the activity where it becomes illegal but not with hiding it, find a way to enforce that through the government with real world consequences, not through moderation of a narrative.
I'm thinking more tackling the causes that feeds people into mobs, the need of people to effectively wear gang shirts because of the lack of compartmentalisation of communication caused by non-anonymous online conversations
Another for your list: Jordanian-American woman gets her publishing deal canceled for tweeting about a rude DC Metro employee, because the Metro employee was black.
I’m very much against people being fired for their social media posts (unless we’re crossing way over a line that delves into calls for violence or is doing something illegal), but that situation was a bit more complicated. That author, who was PR professional and verified on Twitter, was using her account and her blue-checkmark to shame a worker on a train for eating on her break. She literally tried to get that employee fired and put their face all over the internet. So forgive me if I don’t weep for someone being snitched on on social media when they were snitching themselves and using their position (brands and places like the transit authority take complaints from people with blue checks much more seriously and blue checks absolutely know this) to try to get someone fired for daring to break a rule of eating on a train. Come on now. Her losing her book contract with a publisher no one has ever heard of seems almost fitting.
ETA: Since then, she’s also been able to leverage that experience into redemption/victimhood profiles on Good Morning America and an article in Elle UK. Both opportunities I guarantee she never would have had with her debut novel, so she’s fine.
You’ve gone and assumed the worst. “Trying to get that employee fired?” I just don’t see it. Anyway, the Metro employees union would never go for it.
The no-eating rule is a fairly big deal on Metro. A twelve-year-old girl was famously arrested for eating a single French fry [0], in a case (Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the arrest was upheld. A teenager was arrested in 2016 for carrying chips and snacks into a Metro station [1]. If I saw an employee flouting this rule, I’d be indignant too. I wouldn’t have posted a photo of the person, but the kind of vitriol, racism, and naked hate this novelist faced in response to her tweet was totally unwarranted. The potential for negative consequences on the part of the Metro employee was greatly exaggerated.
As someone who's never been on the DC metro, my first reaction to this story was that it's pretty unreasonable to post an employee's photo to Twitter just because they ate on the train. While we can't say for sure that they wanted to get the employee fired, their intent was clearly for them to be held accountable in some way by their employer for this infraction.
That said, if it's true that metro passengers have effectively been harassed and abused and arrested for years over this no-eating rule, then I can see how it would be more offensive to see an employee breaking it publicly, and this person's reaction makes more sense to me.
I've seen this interesting behavior in other contexts. There is a stupid rule that nobody likes. People make an effort to follow it despite hating it. When they see someone breaking the rule they feel that it's very unfair because of the effort they are making, so they report it to make it fairer. Either everyone should follow the rule or it shouldn't exist.
But in doing so they have become what they hated. They are now actively helping maintain and rooting for the stupid rule instead of fighting against it.
We all follow rules we don't agree with; that is part of the social contract. Selective enforcement of rules is one of the biggest threats to those who behave lawfully.
I see no compromise of principle in people who maintain and enforce stupid rules they disagree with. The most honest response is to argue for and support sensible rules, not to turn a blind eye.
I'm not saying that I think it is a good idea to follow bad rules - but people who disagree with rules and follow them anyway on solid moral footing and should reasonably expect others to do the same.
>We all follow rules we don't agree with; that is part of the social contract
it's been my experience that people generally don't follow rules they disagree with, unless they are afraid of the consequences. As such, seeing someone breaking the rule who is also someone in power over them with ability to enforce the rule can be especially galling.
Narcing on your neighbor for building an unpermitted shed because you feel like a chump for pulling permits when the reality is you both could have gotten away without permits is very different from narcing on somebody who is only getting away with it because they have some special status with the organization responsible for the rule.
I’m not defending the vitriol or racist and toxic remarks she received; I’m saying she was using her position as a blue checkmark to publicly shame someone and to try to get them fired. And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences. She could have reported it privately, but she chose to use her platform that included her social status (most brands and orgs like the metro use CRMs to filter/prioritize responses from verified users, something someone who claims to be a social media strategist would know) to be a narc instead.
Moreover, the Metro had been ordered to cease citing people for jumping fares or eating on the train in 2019. I appreciate the author may not have known that. She still had no reason to use her clout to publish a photo of the employee and call her her to be punished. She was literally snitching someone and then cried tears of sorrow when she was snitched on back. I’m really struggling to garner sympathy in this particular case, although again, I don’t defend or condone the hate she received in return.
She also sued the publisher (an extremely small outfit with two employees) over canceling her book and they wound up publishing it anyway out of fear of litigation. She also tried to sue the distributor (Rare Bird, which is also small), who she didn’t have a contract with (these were the people that commented publicly they wouldn’t distribute it), but wound up dropping the case. I’m not trying to drag her for having a book deal with a boutique imprint, I just think it’s important to realize that this wasn’t Hachette or Simon & Schuster, this was an imprint with two employees.
And she then leveraged her experience to get positive international coverage/redemption arc. And you know what, if GMA and Elle UK want to buy into her narrative, kudos to her for selling it. But it really goes against the idea that her life was ruined, when again, she was able to place sympathetic stories about herself with Hearst (Elle UK) and ABC News (GMA).
> She could have reported it privately, but she chose to use her platform that included her social status ... to be a narc instead.
Reporting it privately is still "narcing", isn't it? You're saying she'd have been ok if she kept her anonymity while doing the snitching that the twitter mob seeks to "cancel" people for? Well sure.
There's a very substantial different between privately reporting someone, and publicly shaming someone for a behaviour, which has potentially far more extensive consequences, including putting additional pressure on the employer to act harshly.
It's perfectly reasonable to think one or both is wrong while still thinking one is far worse than the other.
Attempting to rile a Twitter mob is quite a bit different to reporting something to the authorities who should be the ones to act on something.
The adoption of “no snitching” culture well outside of its original contexts confuses me somewhat, but also in this case, how is this a situation someone should even concern themselves with? The entire thing is baffling to me: the original tweet, the Twitter mob against herself and firing afterward. Just seems out of this world.
> And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences.
Exactly. She knew better and was sophisticated enough to discern what was proportionate to the situation.
To be fair, the DC metro is among the cleanest in the NE USA. It's not North Korea clean, but it's far better than NYC and Philly. The reason it's clean is because the system does a decent job of policing the trains and hires enough people to keep it clean.
I've seen people eat entire large pizzas on NY subways, I've seen people eat massive wet smelly hoagies in Philly and deliberately plop a handful of the onions on the floor of the train like it was nothing. I can at least understand her outrage, but she could have handled it differently.
Maybe she took the "if you see something, say something" directive a bit too seriously?
As a regular user of the DC metro for about five years, I can say that rule is often enough ignored. Overall the system is impressively clean and people generally do not eat or drink on the trains, but hop on after like 9pm and it’s a very different story.
As for “vitriol, racism, and naked hate”, is that not just standard stuff on social media? Any tweet that goes viral for better or worse will get it.
Thanks for this, it's this reason why I find it hard to believe people's summaries as they rarely tell the complete picture, and that itself is dangerous.
In this case, the original post didn't pass the sniff test to me. If I tweeted:
"Hey $operator, the person manning the gate at the station at James Street this morning was really rude, yelling at people and telling them to f-off"
I can't see any situation where the skin color of that person would come into it, so how would it be possible to get someone fired "because they're black" when that information isn't even made available.
While I agree with your logic, I am open to the point of view that some people would preferentially report someone’s behavior depending on the race of the person involved.
Perhaps a black employee is more likely to get a complaint about rudeness. If so, the race wasn’t made available but still changed the interaction.
I'm sure that's the case, and it will be up to the managers to be aware of unconcious bias on these types of reports and judge them respectively, but that's not going to raise a storm on twitter about a single person complaining about bad behaviour, or link that single complaint to an evidenced based dismissal later down the line.
The author and her family received death threats over this. She briefly left the US for her own safety, and was harassed and bullied “to the brink of suicide.” Flippant dismissal of the Internet hate mob is all well and good until it comes for you.
I don't want to dismiss what she experienced and how upsetting it must have been, but "she received death threats" covers a lot of ground.
Apparently lots of people make internet death threats all the time. Every single case like this mentions death threats. I don't think these death threats are in general credible. Clearly at least some of them are made by people who just join in with and escalate online arguments for amusement. I assume at least some of them are made by people hoping to 'discredit the other side'.
For the record, I’m not saying she should have been harassed. I’m not even arguing she should have lost work or had her book distributor who didn’t have a contract with her say they didn’t want to distribute her book. I find the outcome fitting given the circumstances, but I’m not rallying for that outcome. What I am arguing is that framing her as a victim of cancel ignores a much bigger part of the story and as dguaragalia says, dismissing the facts and eschewing the nuance for optimum outrage is extremely unhelpful.
The entire point of the situation is that the nuances are not hugely relevant in the big picture.
Moreover, the nuances are never catered to in cancel culture anyhow.
Nothing remotely significant happened in this situation that should have involved anything other than maybe some stern retorts on the medium she started on i.e. Twitter.
The commenter thinking that 'this was a good outcome' gives us a great example of the vindictive pettiness and overreaction of cancel culture.
You don't lose your job and livelihood for a possibly distasteful public remark, probably taken out of context.
It's actually a pretty great example of the stupidity of cancel culture.
> Nothing remotely significant happened in this situation that should have involved anything other than maybe some stern retorts on the medium she started on i.e. Twitter.
Somehow you miss the other side of this: her interaction on her train ride didn't deserve to be more significant than the average unpleasant experienced 10 times a week by anyone living in a city. She actively tried to make it bigger, then it got blown out of proportion by people like her, who blow shit out of proportion.
Maybe we should all start taking responsibility for our actions, instead of screaming 'cancel culture' whenever they catch up to us.
I had no idea what it meant and actually guessed it was some kind of slur (in line with PoS) until I learnt recently.
Weird term. Doesn't work unabbreviated as an adjective, an adjectival formation ('coloured') is long out of politically-correct favour (at least it is in the UK), and why, is 'of colour' different/better/at all a good description of someone anyway?
I'm, er, 'without colour', so it's hardly for me to object, but I couldn't comfortably use it. Fortunately (or I suppose that's why it 'feels' off to me) nobody ('of colour' or not) here seems to.
Or maybe it's just a lesson in tone etc. being harder to convey on the internet - for ages I thought 'MeToo' was against the alleged victims, as in 'oh yeah yeah me too, I'm Brian and so's my wife'.
It’s a socially constructed term that was popularized in 2010 or so to figure out a way to lump Black, Latino, and Asian people together. It almost never makes any sense talk about all of those different groups as one (“Latino” and “Asian” are by themselves over-broad categories) but that’s where we are.
I get that there is a need to differentiate, for the purpose of discussion, traditionally privileged white people from, well, literally everyone else. Any label using a negative prefix like "non-white" or "un-privileged" is not desirable because it suggests a lack of something. But it seems to me like we should be able to do a lot better than a rephrasing of a term associated with the Jim Crow era.
> I get that there is a need to differentiate, for the purpose of discussion, traditionally privileged white people from, well, literally everyone else.
Is there? Asians are wealthier, more educated, more upwardly mobile, less likely to be shot by the police, and live longer, than whites. As an Asian-American man, I can expect to live as long as my Irish-American wife. Latinos, meanwhile, have various disparities resulting from the character and recency of immigration, but have similar economic mobility to whites, and within 1-3 generations achieve economic parity with whites. Cubans, who came to the US as refugees with no money, achieved parity in just one generation. 60% of multiracial people, mostly white-asian and white-hispanic, identify as white, and not multiracial.
Black and Native American people, meanwhile, face persistent economic disparities that are both large and are completely unchanged since the segregation era. Almost all black-white multiracial people identify as Black or multiracial, not as white.
The constructed term "people of color" actually obscures the fundamental dynamics of American society:
1) America is incredibly successful at assimilating immigrants, white or non-white, both socially and economically. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are basically experiencing the same economic and social trajectory that Germans, Irish, Polish, Italians, etc., experienced over American history.
2) America has been unable to make any progress at eliminating economic disparities for two groups that face unique historical circumstances: Black people, and Native Americans. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are facing American experiences that are sui generis in American history.
"People of color" is strictly less useful of a term than what preceded it, "underrepresented minority." And it appears that people realize that impracticality, because you've seen the emergence of phrases like "assimilation into whiteness" or "white-adjacent" to describe Asians and economically assimilated Latinos. These are phrases (which are offensive, by the way) coined to remedy a self-inflicted problem: defining who is "privileged" in the country in terms of "whiteness" and not something that actually reflects society.
When I was in primary school, handicapped was going out of fashion in favour of disabled (wikipedia tells me we were 10-15 years later than the US on that one, culture wasn't so instantly global then). A large part of this was that handicapped had been repurposed as an insult so there was a need for disabled (as happened for the previous terminology for mental disability, also). Of course even "disabled [person/people]" is heading into the "maybe don't use that" territory these days
It's clear why this happens, having difficulties is viewed as undesirable, most people would choose not to have them if they could (I'm aware some people with disabilities have felt it made them who they are and wouldn't change it, but they aren't the people to start using terms in a pejorative manner). As long as there are real negative attitudes against black people and real negative effects on black people, this is likely to be the same for terms used there also.
I feel the only reason person centered language like "people of color" and "person with disabilities" has lasted so long as the acceptable phrasing is simply because the more wordy phrases are harder to turn into a playground insult/drunk jeering/etc.
That one was used pejoratively pretty much instantly, so never had much momentum, so my understanding is "person with disabilities" is the currently correct term.
I honestly find it tiring to have to always check what I'm saying just in case one of the words I'm using is on a WRL (Word Revocation List) - this basic assumption that if you use one of these words you're using it in a derogatory way...
I don't really have any suggestions about how this could be handled differently, just pointing out this aspect that does end up making me talk less, certainly about touchy subjects, because I'm afraid of being misinterpreted and seen in a bad light.
Edit: It's also especially bad because English isn't my native language so I might use some construct that seems "natural" to me but insulting to a native speaker
Nope! "Person with" was almost instantly rejected because it is insulting to an unremovable aspect of someone's existence, condemning someone as broken and lesser.
Here we have a too-common case of virtue chasers on the "same side" attacking each other because they have slightly different useless solutions to a problem. (The way you to show more respect to different people with differences is to show more respect in actions, not to play word games that the vast majority of affected people with effects don't care about.)
> The way you to show more respect to different people with differences is to show more respect in actions, not to play word games that the vast majority of affected people with effects don't care about.
If anyone cared what the group being described thought about the terminology, no one would ever have tried to say "Latinx".
Huh, I was basing that on someone I know who recently completed a relevant college degree and is now working in the field of intellectual disabilities - the advice they received, both academic and professional is that "people with disabilities"/person centered language is the approach.
I had a look, the wikipedia page[1] indicates at least in the US that the American Medical Association, United Spinal Association and various federal and state bodies recommend it as best practice, but also points out various groups for deaf and blind people disagree.
What's coming into vogue now is "diversability"[1], I guess to take the negative connotation out of "dis-ability", precisely as "differently abled" tried to do. To my mind, they're basically the same but I guess "differently abled" was derided as overly P.C. and became a comical term.
Not always, for example, Native American on reservations use the term Indian to refer to themselves, but outside this is becoming impolite in favour of Native American (including among some but not all Native Americans)[1][2]
See also the "Spastics Society", "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People", modern use of the n-word among black people, the use of "Negro" in "I have a Dream". Plenty of cases where a word in use by the group themselves becomes considered the impolite word.
"colored people" is a wonderful illustration of this farce because NAACP kept the name so long that it went from preferred to offensive and almost back to preferred, with "people of color" being the PC term in US (and "people with Foo" becoming dispreferred to "Fooed people" or "Fooed"/"Foo", and "racialized" being the PC term in Canada (which would be horrifically offensive in the US).
I really like the term purity spiral. It captures it quite well.
Alas, it seems this thread was flagged. Ironic given the content. But I'll continue to share that article about the purity spiral with others, it captures a lot of the things I've seen quite well.
There's no winning in these situations. Sooner or later they will implode into smaller groups and won't have much power. Look at the different Christian sects that came to be over minor theological differences.
I very vividly experienced this in a communist society, and later in a religious society. It is always a safe bet to praise G-d or Dear Leader a little more than customary. No one will dare to challenge you. And after a short while this becomes a new average and a minimum requirement.
For a humorous example of this, there's the movie Office Space, and the fight over the number of pieces of flair that Joanna is wearing. She wears 15 pieces of flair, the company required minimum, compared to the boss' favourite, Brian, who wears 37 pieces of flair.
Something I don't understand is, why don't people simply ignore such harassment and forcibly proceed towards whatever they were doing anyway? Such as publishing those books for example.
Another PoC author got her book dropped and brigaded by abusive harassers on goodreads, for the crime of tweeting a gripe that a subway employee illegally ate food on a subway train.
Elsewhere in the thread it appears this author actually attempted to get this person fired. (Also, is has apparently been legal since 2019.)
It’s more complicated than this. I don’t condone any harassment but not accurately disseminating the information is the same non-nuanced mob behavior that causes the harassment in the first place.
I don't understand this, how did angry activists know that she was the one who phoned 911? Are identities of 911 callers part of some public records disclosure?
This post is misleading and outright false in some respects. From the first article posted:
"By Claire Kirch | May 31, 2020
The civil unrest in the Twin Cities continues to take its toll on Minnesota's literary community—sometimes in unexpected ways. Thursday evening, the night before protesters set fire to two adjoining Minneapolis indie bookstores and destroying them both, the reaction to a St. Paul–based literary agent’s tweet ended up gutting the boutique agency she owns.
Three agents affiliated with Red Sofa Literary tweeted this past weekend that they have resigned in response to owner Dawn Frederick’s tweet, leaving one subsidiary rights executive besides Frederick still employed there. Frederick's official Red Sofa account on Twitter has been removed."
"Frederick, who founded Red Sofa in 2008, is a well-known fixture in Minnesota’s vibrant literary community, serving on the board of directors of the Loft Literary Center and having launched the MN Publishing Tweet Up social group. She also supervises the team of volunteers working in the galley room during the Heartland Fall Forum regional booksellers trade show each year."
So no, this was not during the BLM protests in St. Louis as the date of the article precedes when those began. Furthermore she is a "well-known fixture in Minnesota's vibrant literary community", and has been since 2008, which is something I would have expected someone who "worked in publishing for years" to be aware of.
Throwing her name combined with BLM into search engines like google only returns results after this event, so your assertion of her advocacy is unfounded and not to be believed by the above and what follows.
"Minneapolis attorney Marshall Tanick of the Meyer, Njus, Tanick law firm emailed cease-and-desist letters on Monday to two literary agents and an author on behalf of his client, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary. The two agents are Beth Phelan of Gallt and Zacker (the email was cc’ed to that agency’s two principals) and Kelly Van Sant, who until two weeks ago worked for Red Sofa. The author is Isabel Sterling, who writes YA novels. SFF author Foz Meadows also received an email, she tweeted, but it contained multiple factual errors and was recalled by its sender."
"UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, Laura Zats, a principal of Headwater Literary Management in Minneapolis announced that she received a letter from Frederick's lawyer, threatening legal action against the agent for re-tweeting tweets by others alleging that Frederick is racist. Zats is a former employee of Red Sofa Literary, who left it last year ago to found her own agency. She has joined Phelan, Van Sant, and Sterling in their GoFundMe campaign soliciting funds in case of a lawsuit. The campaign has raised almost $15,000 to date.
Several authors have announced that they are severing their relationships with Red Sofa Literary, including Margot Atwell, the head of publishing for Kickstarter. She tweeted Thursday afternoon that she has terminated her relationship with Frederick "due to the choice she made to call the police during the protests against George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, and her subsequent decision to threaten legal action against her critics."
So Frederick decides to start suing people, which results in agents/authors not targeted in lawsuits to cut ties with her in part due to her legal efforts.
Had she stuck with the apology she released a few days after the tweet, instead of doubling down and even throwing lawsuits around, things would have likely been far better for her. Or even not publicly announcing she was calling the police during protests against police behavior.
In other words she's not the blameless martyr you make her out to be.
And finally cancelling is just a propaganda term on the political right to escape the negative consequences of their actions. This is evidenced by it not being applied when, say the (Dixie) Chicks criticized President Bush and had their careers largely ended. It's also not applied when the 'cancelling' is apolitical, such as a restaurateur who alienates their customers/community (think Cafe Hon from Kitchen Nightmares).
EDIT: Less than 2 minutes after this was posted it was down voted and flagged.
"On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire."
The term "cancel culture" is extremely ironic. The implication of the term is that people should not be "cancelled" for expressing their views. And yet, backing out of a book deal, for example, is an expression of a view.
In practice, the term is used to de-legitimize some opinions, while upholding others.
This is a bad take, the wrong side of "paradox of tolerance".
Firing/boycotting someone for doing nothing wrong, not even for something "offensive", but just for appearing to have some observable qualities vaguely similar to people who do offensive things, is unjustifiable.
That's unfortunate, I know it had consequences for atleast 1 person who didn't understand the implications (I'm thinking of the driver who got recorded making the symbol).
>Firing/boycotting someone for doing nothing wrong, not even for something "offensive"
Just an observation: You are "cancelling" the opinions of those who do the "cancelling." In terms of the OP, you may or may not agree with the opinion of the person who did the firing, but it was based on someone being offended. Whether or not that offense was justified, or a good enough reason to fire someone, is a different question.
A lot of American leftists seem to have labeled any political rhetoric about "the elites" as alt-right talking points. But as someone who works frequently with lower class individuals across the political spectrum, this is a deep-seated frustration I hear from people of all races and political parties.
Regardless of race, no one wants to work at a workplace where you know the majority of people think less of you. This is something that I think corporate America needs to understand better, if they genuinely want better diversity numbers.