...On 'Cancel' Culture

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...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 15, 2020 10:56 am

.


Nick Cave.

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/what-is-mercy-for-you/


What do you think of cancel culture?



Mercy is a value that should be at the heart of any functioning and tolerant society. Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe — to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility. Without mercy a society loses its soul, and devours itself.

Mercy allows us the ability to engage openly in free-ranging conversation — an expansion of collective discovery toward a common good. If mercy is our guide we have a safety net of mutual consideration, and we can, to quote Oscar Wilde, “play gracefully with ideas.”

Yet mercy is not a given. It is a value we must nurture and aspire to. Tolerance allows the spirit of enquiry the confidence to roam freely, to make mistakes, to self-correct, to be bold, to dare to doubt and in the process to chance upon new and more advanced ideas. Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humourless.

Frances, you’ve asked about cancel culture. As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck.

Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society. Compassion is the primary experience — the heart event — out of which emerges the genius and generosity of the imagination. Creativity is an act of love that can knock up against our most foundational beliefs, and in doing so brings forth fresh ways of seeing the world. This is both the function and glory of art and ideas. A force that finds its meaning in the cancellation of these difficult ideas hampers the creative spirit of a society and strikes at the complex and diverse nature of its culture.

But this is where we are. We are a culture in transition, and it may be that we are heading toward a more equal society — I don’t know — but what essential values will we forfeit in the process?


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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Harvey » Sat Aug 15, 2020 5:50 pm

Much as I enjoy his music, he lost me when he decided to play in Israel, against the honest and reasonably expressed wishes of those on the receiving end of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In any case:

and it may be that we are heading toward a more equal society


Who is he kidding?
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:48 pm

.

Was not aware of his event in Israel; echo your sentiments there.


"A more equal society."

- why is there any hint that we'd arrive there, if we've yet to do so as a species?

Certain native tribes, historical or contemporary, may be exceptions. Welcome thoughts otherwise.


Back to the core point, though - i'd like to fast forward to the time when the thought-stopping refrains of cancel culture lead to the inevitable counter.

The cycle of culture.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Harvey » Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:55 pm

Belligerent Savant » Sun Aug 16, 2020 12:48 am wrote:.

Was not aware of his event in Israel; echo your sentiments there.


"A more equal society."

- why is there any hint that we'd arrive there, if we've yet to do so as a species?

Certain native tribes, historical or contemporary, may be exceptions. Welcome thoughts otherwise.


Back to the core point, though - i'd like to fast forward to the time when the thought-stopping refrains of cancel culture lead to the inevitable counter.

The cycle of culture.


For my money, 'cancel culture' only exists as 'identity politics' labeling by the usual establishment suspects. The only people 'calling' it are already well platformed.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 15, 2020 8:47 pm

.

I'd throw my pesos into that wager as well.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Cordelia » Sun Aug 16, 2020 4:55 pm

'Cancel' Culture: another annoying term I’d never heard of (until this thread) with millions of Google search results. (Thanks for starting this thread. :thumbsup )


Much as I enjoy his music, he lost me when he decided to play in Israel...


Was not aware of his event in Israel; echo your sentiments there.


I don't see it that way. May as well shun those who perform for the Washington regime region. Besides, there must be Israeli residents who are vehemently opposed to their country’s policies against Palestine. Why deprive them an opportunity to see a great performer?

But Cave best speaks for himself...

“I do not support the current government in Israel, yet do not accept that my decision to play in the country is any kind of tacit support for that government’s policies,” Cave wrote, adding that he supported the Palestinian cause and that Palestinian suffering “is ended via a comprehensive and just solution, one that involves enormous political will on both sides”. He also highlighted his own charity work that raised £150,000 for the pro-Palestine Hoping Foundation.

He also said the boycott “is partly the reason I am playing Israel – not as support for any particular political entity but as a principled stand against those who wish to bully, shame and silence musicians”, and that the boycott “risks further entrenching positions in Israel in opposition to those you support”.

Artists opposing him should “go to Israel and tell the press and the Israeli people how you feel about their current regime,” he said, “then do a concert on the understanding that the purpose of your music was to speak to the Israeli people’s better angels … Perhaps the Israelis would respond in a wholly different way than they would to just yet more age-old rejectionism.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/ ... -brian-eno


I'm not objective, I love Nick Cave, because of his talent, his unusual looks, his deep baritone, emotional intensity, but mostly for his weirdness and an almost insatiable willingness to stay weird. So I just can’t hold him to the usual correctness in standards of behavior. (And, JJ&M, his 15 year-old son fell off a cliff and died after experimenting with LSD. :shock: )

A favorite music video I re-visit (probably because it recalls some fond-ish childhood memories of drunken men in suits singing, dancing, lamenting and pretending to be sailors).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhOVY58zIo

Plus, he’s equal to Leonard Cohen and Bryan Ferry as one of the best lounge lizards.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlhxBAhYnS8
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Aug 16, 2020 7:14 pm

.

Appreciate the added context and direct quote from Cave, Cordelia. I rescind my prior comment!


Nick Cave:
“I do not support the current government in Israel, yet do not accept that my decision to play in the country is any kind of tacit support for that government’s policies,” Cave wrote, adding that he supported the Palestinian cause and that Palestinian suffering “is ended via a comprehensive and just solution, one that involves enormous political will on both sides”. He also highlighted his own charity work that raised £150,000 for the pro-Palestine Hoping Foundation.


Back to 'cancel culture': "BEE" commented on it a number of times, including in his non-fiction book, White.

There's a thread here from a few years ago dedicated to Bret Easton Ellis. Worth revisiting.

For now, i'll share this:

https://spectator.us/come-cancel-bret-easton-ellis/


‘Come on, cancel me’: An interview with Bret Easton Ellis


‘I haven’t published anything in 10 years. I haven’t tried to write that novel that’s going to give critical acclaim or a prize or two — which I’ve never won. And I seem to be continually controversial and rub people the wrong way. And this has been for 35 years now and I can’t tell you why: I don’t know. I mean the big joke is: cancel me. Come on, cancel me if you can’t stand it so much.’

Yet here he is in The Spectator’s offices to record our books podcast: a famous writer. Also one who gets more famous the less he writes and the more people try to ‘cancel’ him. There’s a good bit of the latter going on at the moment. The meandering autobiographical essays in his new book, White, have had some corkingly savage reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in response to passages where he inveighs against millennial culture and liberal hysteria about the Trump administration.

...


On Edit, a hot take on Mr. Ellis from an older thread:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39398&hilit=Bret+Easton+Ellis

guruilla » Fri Dec 11, 2015 3:57 pm wrote:
I've listened to about half of BEE's total podcasts & even tried, halfheartedly, to get him on mine. I eventually lost interest, primarily because BEE, while focusing on some relevant issues (such as neo-liberal totalitarianism) is clearly an Empire (or "post-Empire," whatever, dude) advocate and apologist who never, ever, goes anywhere near the sexual abuse which underlies the culture he and his podcast are celebrating, or any kind of remotely parapolitical awareness.

Since BEE is I think a very savvy and insightful guy, my tentative deduction is he must be aware of, and hence complicit with (to whatever degree), the systems of abuse. So this is interesting to me as a possible pointer towards exactly that.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Aug 17, 2020 12:32 am

.

Back to the OP:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-no ... t-kind-46a



If it’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture is it?
Another long week in the all-stick, no-carrot revolution

Matt Taibbi
Jul 10

This is an excerpt of a longer article about the Harper’s letter, the attempted cancelation of Steven Pinker, and other events of the last week:

The intellectuals whose ouster is being called for by the new revolution were themselves products of the last cultural revolution. People like Chomsky, Steinem, and even Pinker came of age during the sixties liberation movements, which shaped academia and popular culture for generations. These were people raised on beat poetry, antiwar marches, Jimi Hendrix and movies like The Graduate, whose one-word summary of the aspirations of their parents’ generation – “Plastics” – represented everything these new educators didn’t want for their students.

This new intellectual class had grown up in a time of empowerment for women, for gays and lesbians, and for black and brown people, but also of the human spirit generally. Long before the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, post-sixties liberals understood the interlocking nature of political and intellectual repression.

The tumult of the sixties revealed the clear relationship between the ignorant conventions that kept women at home and gays in the closet, and the academic orthodoxies suppressing the research of people like Alfred Kinsey, whose work would lift everything from the female orgasm to bisexuality out of the dungeon. Dr. Benjamin Spock became famous for telling “good mothers and fathers” that what they “instinctively feel like doing for their children” was better than a century of ignorant child-rearing books (written by highly-credentialed men, mainly) that told them not to kiss or hold their kids.

So many things that were banned, from Where the Wild Things Are to The Catcher in the Rye to Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit, turned out to be revelatory. The animating principle of the revolution that swept through America back then was that once ignorance was conquered, we would be free to celebrate our common humanity.

It’s no accident this message made great art. The power of everything from jazz and rock to abstract painting and Gonzo journalism derived from exploding conventions. There was symbolism in the way people of all backgrounds felt like dancing to the new music or laughing at Richard Pryor’s forbidden comedy (similarly, cracks formed in the Soviet state when dissidents overseas chuckled over samizdat copies of The Master and Margarita). There was a universal urge toward peace, love, forgiveness and humor that brought people together. No one needed to be driven by whip toward this message. People were born with a hunger for it, which is why it became culturally hegemonic for half a century after Vietnam and Woodstock.

Contrast that with today. If sixties liberals were able to sell their message to the rest of the country by making music even squares and reactionaries couldn’t resist, the woke revolution does the opposite. It spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it.

Its other chief characteristics seem to be a total lack of humor, an endless, crotch-sniffing enthusiasm for hunting skeletons in closets, a love of snitching and decency committees, a fear of metaphor (woke culture is 100% literal), a mania for collectivist scolding (“Read the room” is this week’s “Destroy the four olds!”), and a puritanical mistrust of humping in the apolitical context. The woke version of erotica is writing an article for the Guardian about how “ejaculating” skyscrapers are symbols of cisnormative dominance. They make the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin.

The question isn’t whether or not “cancel culture” exists. The question is, without canceling, what would this culture be?

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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Harvey » Mon Aug 17, 2020 10:48 am

I read his response at the time, it sublimely missed the point. Which is that the people being ethnically cleansed (none of whom had the oportunity to attend his show) asked him not to do it. There goes any professed concern for Israeli state behaviour. To add insult to injury, he didn't offer to do a show in Palestine. His excuses ring hollow. I think his attitude over playing in Israel was only the last straw for me. Nothing's changed in my appreciation of his work, I just don't give a moment of my time to his views.

Roger Water's reposte is compelling:



My objection to so called 'cancel culture' is that 90% of the cancelation arises from mainstream corporate culture. If MSM, for example, embodies anything, it is 'cancel culture.' Sure the other 10% are a pain in the ass too, but that's hardly the point.

Jonathan Cook has a more interesting take:


https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/cancel-culture-letter-is-about-stifling-free-speech-not-protecting-it/

‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it

An open letter published by Harper’s magazine, and signed by 150 prominent writers and public figures, has focused attention on the apparent dangers of what has been termed a new “cancel culture”.

The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.

Although the letter doesn’t explicitly use the term “cancel culture”, it is clearly what is meant in the complaint about a “stifling” cultural climate that is imposing “ideological conformity” and weakening “norms of open debate and toleration of differences”.

It is easy to agree with the letter’s generalised argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their deeds.

Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech, not protect it.

To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinise the motives, rather than the substance, of the letter.

A new ‘illiberalism’

“Cancel culture” started as the shaming, often on social media, of people who were seen to have said offensive things. But of late, cancel culture has on occasion become more tangible, as the letter notes, with individuals fired or denied the chance to speak at a public venue or to publish their work.

The letter denounces this supposedly new type of “illiberalism”:

“We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. …

“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; … The result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”

Tricky identity politics

The array of signatories is actually more troubling than reassuring. If we lived in a more just world, some of those signing – like Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US State Department official – would be facing a reckoning before a Hague war crimes tribunal for their roles in promoting “interventions” in Iraq and Libya respectively, not being held up as champions of free speech.

That is one clue that these various individuals have signed the letter for very different reasons.

Chomsky signed because he has been a lifelong and consistent defender of the right to free speech, even for those with appalling opinions such as Holocaust denial.

I will never forget watching this video of Noam Chomsky — a Jewish anarchist – defend a Holocaust denier's *right to freedom of speech* against a ravenous mob, and it had such a profound impact on me.

I strive to have this level of integrity.

Fuck clout. pic.twitter.com/xHtFqStBoz

— Field Marshal Anna Slatz (@YesThatAnna) July 5, 2020



Frum, who coined the term “axis of evil” that rationalised the invasion of Iraq, and Weiss, a New York Times columnist, signed because they have found their lives getting tougher. True, it is easy for them to dominate platforms in the corporate media while advocating for criminal wars abroad, and they have paid no career price when their analyses and predictions have turned out to be so much dangerous hokum. But they are now feeling the backlash on university campuses and social media.

Meanwhile, centrists like Buruma and Rowling have discovered that it is getting ever harder to navigate the tricky terrain of identity politics without tripping up. The reputational damage can have serious consequences.

Buruma famously lost his job as editor of the New York Review of Books two years ago after after he published and defended an article that violated the new spirit of the #MeToo movement. And Rowling made the mistake of thinking her followers would be as fascinated by her traditional views on transgender issues as they are by her Harry Potter books.

‘Fake news, Russian trolls’

But the fact that all of these writers and intellectuals agree that there is a price to be paid in the new, more culturally sensitive climate does not mean that they are all equally interested in protecting the right to be controversial or outspoken.

Chomsky, importantly, is defending free speech for all, because he correctly understands that the powerful are only too keen to find justifications to silence those who challenge their power. Elites protect free speech only in so far as it serves their interests in dominating the public space.

If those on the progressive left do not defend the speech rights of everyone, even their political opponents, then any restrictions will soon be turned against them. The establishment will always tolerate the hate speech of a Trump or a Bolsonaro over the justice speech of a Sanders or a Corbyn.

By contrast, most of the rest of those who signed – the rightwingers and the centrists – are interested in free speech for themselves and those like them. They care about protecting free speech only in so far as it allows them to continue dominating the public space with their views – something they were only too used to until a few years ago, before social media started to level the playing field a little.

The centre and the right have been fighting back ever since with claims that anyone who seriously challenges the neoliberal status quo at home and the neoconservative one abroad is promoting “fake news” or is a “Russian troll”. This updating of the charge of being “un-American” embodies cancel culture at its very worst.

Social media accountability

In other words, apart from in the case of a few progressives, the letter is simply special pleading – for a return to the status quo. And for that reason, as we shall see, Chomsky might have been better advised not to have added his name, however much he agrees with the letter’s vague, ostensibly pro-free speech sentiments.

What is striking about a significant proportion of those who signed is their self-identification as ardent supporters of Israel. And as Israel’s critics know only too well, advocates for Israel have been at the forefront of the cancel culture – from long before the term was even coined.

For decades, pro-Israel activists have sought to silence anyone seen to be seriously critiquing this small, highly militarised state, sponsored by the colonial powers, that was implanted in a region rich with a natural resource, oil, needed to lubricate the global economy, and at a terrible cost to its native, Palestinian population.

Nothing should encourage us to believe that zealous defenders of Israel among those signing the letter have now seen the error of their ways. Their newfound concern for free speech is simply evidence that they have begun to suffer from the very same cancel culture they have always promoted in relation to Israel.

They have lost control of the “cancel culture” because of two recent developments: a rapid growth in identity politics among liberals and leftists, and a new popular demand for “accountability” spawned by the rise of social media.

Cancelling Israel’s critics

In fact, despite their professions of concern, the evidence suggests that some of those signing the letter have been intensifying their own contribution to cancel culture in relation to Israel, rather than contesting it.

That is hardly surprising. The need to counter criticism of Israel has grown more pressing as Israel has more obviously become a pariah state. Israel has refused to countenance peace talks with the Palestinians and it has intensified its efforts to realise long-harboured plans to annex swaths of the West Bank in violation of international law.

Rather than allow “robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters” on Israel, Israel’s supporters have preferred the tactics of those identified in the letter as enemies of free speech: “swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”.

Just ask Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party who was reviled, along with his supporters, as an antisemite – one of the worst smears imaginable – by several people on the Harper’s list, including Rowling and Weiss. Such claims were promoted even though his critics could produce no actual evidence of an antisemitism problem in the Labour party.

Similarly, think of the treatment of Palestinian solidarity activists who support a boycott of Israel (BDS), modelled on the one that helped push South Africa’s leaders into renouncing apartheid. BDS activists too have been smeared as antisemites – and Weiss again has been a prime offender.

The incidents highlighted in the Harper’s letter in which individuals have supposedly been cancelled is trivial compared to the cancelling of a major political party and of a movement that stands in solidarity with a people who have been oppressed for decades.

And yet how many of these free speech warriors have come forward to denounce the fact that leftists – including many Jewish anti-Zionists – have been pilloried as antisemites to prevent them from engaging in debates about Israel’s behaviour and its abuses of Palestinian rights?

How many of them have decried the imposition of a new definition of antisemitism, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that has been rapidly gaining ground in western countries?

That definition is designed to silence a large section of the left by prioritising the safety of Israel from being criticised before the safety of Jews from being vilified and attacked – something that even the lawyer who authored the definition has come to regret.

Why has none of this “cancel culture” provoked an open letter to Harper’s from these champions of free speech?

Double-edge sword

The truth is that many of those who signed the letter are defending not free speech but their right to continue dominating the public square – and their right to do so without being held accountable.

Bari Weiss, before she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, spent her student years trying to get Muslim professors fired from her university – cancelling them – because of their criticism of Israel. And she explicitly did so under the banner of “academic freedom”, claiming pro-Israel students felt intimidated in the classroom.

The New York Civil Liberties Union concluded that it was Weiss, not the professors, who was the real threat to academic freedom. This was not some youthful indiscretion. In a book last year Weiss cited her efforts to rid Columbia university of these professors as a formative experience on which she still draws.

Weiss and many of the others listed under the letter are angry that the rhetorical tools they used for so long to stifle the free speech of others have now been turned against them. Those who lived for so long by the sword of identity politics – on Israel, for example – are worried that their reputations may die by that very same sword – on issues of race, sex and gender.

Narcissistic concern

To understand how the cancel culture is central to the worldview of many of these writers and intellectuals, and how blind they are to their own complicity in that culture, consider the case of Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with the supposedly liberal-left British newspaper the Guardian. Although Freedland is not among those signing the letter, he is very much aligned with the centrists among them and, of course, supported the letter in an article published in the Guardian.

Freedland, we should note, led the “cancel culture” campaign against the Labour party referenced above. He was one of the key figures in Britain’s Jewish community who breathed life into the antisemitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.

But note the brief clip below. In it, Freedland’s voice can be heard cracking as he explains how he has been a victim of the cancel culture himself: he confesses that he has suffered verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Israel’s most extreme apologists – those who are even more unapologetically pro-Israel than he is.

He reports that he has been called a “kapo”, the term for Jewish collaborators in the Nazi concentration camps, and a “sonderkommando”, the Jews who disposed of the bodies of fellow Jews killed in the gas chambers. He admits such abuse “burrows under your skin” and “hurts tremendously”.

and the antisemitic abuse he gets seems to come from Pro Israel supporterspic.twitter.com/RNUrjkibxF

— Keir Still Not Twenty Points Ahead Starmer (@TheBirmingham6) July 7, 2020




And yet, despite the personal pain he has experienced of being unfairly accused, of being cancelled by a section of his own community, Freedland has been at the forefront of the campaign to tar critics of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews, as antisemites on the flimsiest of evidence.

He is entirely oblivious to the ugly nature of the cancel culture –unless it applies to himself. His concern is purely narcissistic. And so it is with the majority of those who signed the letter.

Conducting a monologue

The letter’s main conceit is the pretence that “illiberalism” is a new phenomenon, that free speech is under threat, and that the cancel culture only arrived at the moment it was given a name.

That is simply nonsense. Anyone over the age of 35 can easily remember a time when newspapers and websites did not have a talkback section, when blogs were few in number and rarely read, and when there was no social media on which to challenge or hold to account “the great and the good”.

Writers and columnists like those who signed the letter were then able to conduct a monologue in which they revealed their opinions to the rest of us as if they were Moses bringing down the tablets from the mountaintop.

In those days, no one noticed the cancel culture – or was allowed to remark on it. And that was because only those who held approved opinions were ever given a media platform from which to present those opinions.

Before the digital revolution, if you dissented from the narrow consensus imposed by the billionaire owners of the corporate media, all you could do was print your own primitive newsletter and send it by post to the handful of people who had heard of you.

That was the real cancel culture. And the proof is in the fact that many of those formerly obscure writers quickly found they could amass tens of thousands of followers – with no help from the traditional corporate media – when they had access to blogs and social media.

Silencing the left

Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of the open letter in Harper’s. Under cover of calls for tolerance, given credibility by Chomsky’s name, a proportion of those signing actually want to restrict the free speech of one section of the population – the part influenced by Chomsky.

They are not against the big cancel culture from which they have benefited for so long. They are against the small cancel culture – the new more chaotic, and more democratic, media environment we currently enjoy – in which they are for the first time being held to account for their views, on a range of issues including Israel.

Just as Weiss tried to get professors fired under the claim of academic freedom, many of these writers and public figures are using the banner of free speech to discredit speech they don’t like, speech that exposes the hollowness of their own positions.

Their criticisms of “cancel culture” are really about prioritising “responsible” speech, defined as speech shared by centrists and the right that shores up the status quo. They want a return to a time when the progressive left – those who seek to disrupt a manufactured consensus, who challenge the presumed verities of neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxy – had no real voice.

The new attacks on “cancel culture” echo the attacks on Bernie Sanders’ supporters, who were framed as “Bernie Bros” – the evidence-free allegation that he attracted a rabble of aggressive, women-hating men who tried to bully others into silence on social media.

Just as this claim was used to discredit Sanders’ policies, so the centre and the right now want to discredit the left more generally by implying that, without curbs, they too will bully everyone else into silence and submission through their “cancel culture”.

If this conclusion sounds unconvincing, consider that President Donald Trump could easily have added his name to the letter alongside Chomsky’s. Trump used his recent Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore to make similar points to the Harper’s letter. He at least was explicit in equating “cancel culture” with what he called “far-left fascism”:

“One of [the left’s] political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’ – driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism … This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly.”

Trump, in all his vulgarity, makes plain what the Harper’s letter, in all its cultural finery, obscures. That attacks on the new “cancel culture” are simply another front – alongside supposed concerns about “fake news” and “Russian trolls” – in the establishment’s efforts to limit speech by the left.

Attention redirected

This is not to deny that there is fake news on social media or that there are trolls, some of them even Russian. Rather, it is to point out that our attention is being redirected, and our concerns manipulated by a political agenda.

Despite the way it has been presented in the corporate media, fake news on social media has been mostly a problem of the right. And the worst examples of fake news – and the most influential – are found not on social media at all, but on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

What genuinely fake news on Facebook has ever rivalled the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that were knowingly peddled by a political elite and their stenographers in the corporate media. Those lies led directly to more than a million Iraqi deaths, turned millions more into refugees, destroyed an entire country, and fuelled a new type of nihilistic Islamic extremism whose effects we are still feeling.

Most of the worst lies from the current period – those that have obscured or justified US interference in Syria and Venezuela, or rationalised war crimes against Iran, or approved the continuing imprisonment of Julian Assange for exposing war crimes – can only be understood by turning our backs on the corporate media and looking to experts who can rarely find a platform outside of social media.

On 31.5.2019 I exposed the sustained & concerted abuse inflicted on #Assange by 4 States & demanded his #persecution must end here & now!
But his persecutors seem to consider #DueProcess & #Torture ban optional, #PressFreedom disposable & truth a nuisance.https://t.co/yRFu38K1hU pic.twitter.com/Hu7XFymSkg

— Nils Melzer (@NilsMelzer) May 31, 2020


Algorithms changed

I say this as someone who has concerns about the fashionable focus on identity politics rather than class politics. I say it also as someone who rejects all forms of cancel culture – whether it is the old-style, “liberal” cancel culture that imposes on us a narrow “consensus” politics (the Overton window), or the new “leftwing” cancel culture that too often prefers to focus on easy cultural targets like Rowling than the structural corruption of western political systems.

But those who are impressed by the letter simply because Chomsky’s name is attached should beware. Just as “fake news” has provided the pretext for Google and social media platforms to change their algorithms to vanish leftwingers from searches and threads, just as “antisemitism” has been redefined to demonise the left, so too the supposed threat of “cancel culture” will be exploited to silence the left.

Protecting Bari Weiss and J K Rowling from a baying leftwing “mob” – a mob that that claims a right to challenge their views on Israel or trans issues – will become the new rallying cry from the establishment for action against “irresponsible” or “intimidating” speech.

Progressive leftists who join these calls out of irritation with the current focus on identity politics, or because they fear being labelled an antisemite, or because they mistakenly assume that the issue really is about free speech, will quickly find that they are the main targets.

In defending free speech, they will end up being the very ones who are silenced.

UPDATE:

You don’t criticise Chomsky however tangentially and respectfully – at least not from a left perspective – without expecting a whirlwind of opposition. But one issue that keeps being raised on my social media feeds in his defence is just plain wrong-headed, so I want to quickly address it. Here’s one my followers expressing the point succinctly:

“The sentiments in the letter stand or fall on their own merits, not on the characters or histories of some of the signatories, nor their future plans.”

The problem, as I’m sure Chomsky would explain in any other context, is that this letter fails not just because of the other people who signed it but on its merit too. And that’s because, as I explain above, it ignores the most oppressive and most established forms of cancel culture, as Chomsky should have been the first to notice.

Highlighting the small cancel culture, while ignoring the much larger, establishment-backed cancel culture, distorts our understanding of what is at stake and who wields power.

Chomsky unwittingly just helped a group of mostly establishment stooges skew our perceptions of free speech problems so that we side with them against ourselves. There is no way that can be a good thing.

UPDATE 2:

There are still people holding out against the idea that it harmed the left to have Chomsky sign this letter. And rather than address their points individually, let me try another way of explaining my argument:

Why has Chomsky not signed a letter backing the furore over “fake news”, even though there is some fake news on social media? Why has he not endorsed the “Bernie Bros” narrative, even though doubtless there are some bullying Sanders supporters on social media? Why has he not supported the campaign claiming the Labour party has an antisemitism problem, even though there are some antisemites in the Labour party (as there are everywhere)?

He hasn’t joined any of those campaigns for a very obvious reason – because he understands how power works, and that on the left you hit up, not down. You certainly don’t cheerlead those who are up as they hit down.

Chomsky understands this principle only too well because here he is setting it out in relation to Iran:

“Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.”

For exactly the same reason he has not joined those pillorying Iran – because his support would be used for nefarious ends – he shouldn’t have joined this campaign. He made a mistake. He’s fallible.

Also, this isn’t about the left eating itself. Really, Chomsky shouldn’t be the issue. The issue should be that a bunch of centrists and right-wingers used this letter to try to reinforce a narrative designed to harm the left, and lay the groundwork for further curbs on its access to social media. But because Chomsky signed the letter, many more leftists are now buying into that narrative – a narrative intended to harm them. That’s why Chomsky’s role cannot be ignored, nor his mistake glossed over.

UPDATE 3:

I had not anticipated how many ways people on the left might find to justify this letter.

Here’s the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech by the left when we are threatened with being “cancelled” – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.

I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won’t help the left because “cancel culture” is being framed – by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a “loony left” problem. It is a new iteration of the “politically correct gone mad” discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.

It won’t help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party’s record on being anti-racist.

If you support (or signed) the Harper's letter, don't invoke me as an example of somebody who was "cancelled." My academic career was systematically destroyed by the same institutional forces the vast majority of signatories uphold (and from which they benefit).

— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 9, 2020




The “cancel culture” furore isn’t interested in the fact that they were “cancelled”. Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling Israel and Jews.

Israel’s supporters will continue to win this battle by claiming that criticism of Israel “cancels” that country (“wipes it off the map”), “cancels” Israel’s Jewish population (“drives them into the sea”), and “cancels” Jews more generally (“denies a central component of modern Jewish identity”).

Greater awareness of “cancel culture” would not have saved Corbyn from the antisemitism smears because the kind of cancel culture that smeared Corbyn is never going to be defined as “cancelling”.

For anyone who wishes to see how this works in practice, watch Guardian columnist Owen Jones cave in – as he has done so often – to the power dynamics of the “cancel culture” discourse in this interview with Sky News. I actually agree with almost everything Jones says in this clip, apart from his joining yet again in the witch-hunt against Labour’s anti-Zionists. He doesn’t see that witch-hunt as “cancel culture”, and neither will anyone else with a large platform like his to protect:
"Cancel culture" is being used to describe everything from people disapproving of pedophiles to celebrities being criticised on social media.

It's become a means to protect the powerful and wealthy from being scrutinised for things they say or do. pic.twitter.com/lL7iClrHXE

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) July 11, 2020
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Cordelia » Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:21 pm

Harvey » Mon Aug 17, 2020 9:48 am wrote:

To add insult to injury, he didn't offer to do a show in Palestine.



If performing before a Palestinian audience was an option for him (or for any musicians playing venues in Israel), he should have.
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:27 pm

.

Thanks Harvey for the on-point commentary and piece from Cook.

I agree with corporate mgmt/appropriation of 'cancel culture' for their own ends (and the larger historical perspective as to how the Israeli govt's thought-stopping, dishonest, criminal usage of 'anti-semitism' as a means to stamp out legit condemnation of their policies Re: Palestine are spot-on).

I'd only add that there remain plenty of Twitter handles self-proclaiming as 'leftists' applying the 'russia bots' tag as a catch-all to explain any result or development that doesn't conveniently fall within their curated/State-managed view of American Politics. Or perhaps more accurately, they parroted such proclamations as presented to them from corporate channels.
Happened right here in RI as well, as the regulars here surely recall.

This is all done in what they perceive to be self-righteous agency, as it is with most Americans caught in the divisive rabble that passes for mainstream political discourse.

Same goes for many of the other buzz phrases conjured up and swallowed whole over the last few years. Yes, the ability to comment online has ostensibly allowed for more open discourse, but ironically, it also allows for more white noise, limited hangouts and perception mgmt.
Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby DrEvil » Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:42 pm

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/18/pol ... g-america/

Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think.)

The vast, vast majority of political correctness in America is conservative, and it‘s extremely dangerous.

Jon Schwarz July 18 2020, 1:00 p.m

America today faces a terrifying danger: political correctness. It is an existential threat not just to the United States, but all of human civilization.

By this, obviously, I mean right-wing political correctness.

Maybe you’re surprised to hear this. In the U.S. media, there’s no shortage of lamentations about political correctness and how it chills debate — but they’re almost always about the threat of left-wing PC.

In reality, political correctness, or cancel culture, or whatever it’s called, is not a phenomenon of the left, right, or center. It’s a phenomenon of human nature. All humanity’s infinite tribes are prone to groupthink and punishing heretics. That’s why the principle of free thought has to be defended: It is, unfortunately, a weird and unnatural fit for humans.

There absolutely are examples of ugly political correctness from the U.S. “left,” whatever that means in a country that, by historical standards, doesn’t have a left. But the vast, vast majority of political correctness in America is conservative. Conservative PC is so powerful in the U.S. that much of it is adopted by both political parties and all of the corporate media. Indeed, right-wing political correctness is so dominant that it’s politically incorrect to refer to it as political correctness. Instead, we call it things like “patriotism,” or simply don’t notice its existence.

A full examination of America’s conservative PC culture would take the rest of your life to read. So let’s limit this to four areas where the right’s PC causes some of the most harm: religion, foreign policy, the Republican Party, and police.

Religion

It probably doesn’t surprise you that exactly zero U.S. presidents have been open atheists. But since Congress first convened in 1789, it’s only had one openly atheist member: Pete Stark of California. Stark retired in 2013, so there are currently none.

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 23 percent of Americans identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” This means, Pew says, that “by far the largest difference between the U.S. public and Congress is in the share who are unaffiliated with a religious group.”

So there are likely many members of Congress right now who are “in the closet” when it comes to not believing in God. The only explanation? They’re all too cowed by PC to come out.

This isn’t surprising, since the U.S. still demonstrates informal and formal discrimination against atheists. A recent poll found that 96 percent of Americans said they’d vote for a Black candidate for president; 95 percent for a Catholic; and 66 percent for a Muslim. Only 60 percent said they’d vote for an atheist. While it’s unenforceable, the constitutions of eight states actually prohibit atheists from holding office. This includes Maryland, one of the most liberal states, whose constitution also declares that “it is the duty of every man to worship God.” (Maryland women are seemingly free to putter around ignoring the Almighty.)

Pro-religion PC is practiced on both sides of the aisle. In one of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, the DNC chief financial officer suggested forcing Bernie Sanders to go on the record about whether he believes in God. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage,” the CFO argued. “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

Even if, someday, a few national politicians screw up enough courage to admit that they’re atheists, it’s impossible to imagine any announcing that they’re actively anti-theistic. No member of the House is going to go on the CBS morning show and say, “I think all religion is pernicious, it’s a gross form of brainwashing children, and every religious leader is a con artist, including the Pope.”

No one on this plane of existence can say whether or not atheism is correct. What we can be sure of is right-wing PC has sharply limited free political speech in this area, and that’s made us less skeptical and more prone to authoritarianism.

Foreign Policy

America’s ironclad political correctness on religion plays into another aspect of our PC: The ferocious conservative restrictions on discussions of U.S. foreign policy. Since 9/11, many powerful Americans have demonstrated openness, perhaps even eagerness, for war between Christianity and Islam. Before the invasion of Iraq, then-President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac that he saw “Gog and Magog at work” in the Middle East. President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon has spoken about “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam.” When the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether God sent Trump “just like Queen Esther to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace,” Pompeo responded, “I certainly believe that’s possible.” The right’s yearning to mix religion and violence is incredibly dangerous, yet is a staple of our daily political diet. Few politicians or powerful figures notice, much less attack this.

But our conservative PC on foreign policy goes much further. Everyone in the foreign policy establishment is aware that 9/11 and almost all Islamist terrorism is direct blowback from U.S. actions overseas. As a Defense Department report explained, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’” — i.e., what Bush claimed in front of Congress on September 20, 2001 — “but rather, they hate our policies.” The problem from the establishment’s perspective is that they like those policies, and don’t want to change them just because they get Americans killed. Top members of the military apparently say in private that our deaths are “a small price to pay for being a superpower.”

Yet perhaps the only national-level politician who’s spoken clearly and openly about this is former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. In 2004, a senior Bush administration official was willing to say that without U.S. actions in the Middle East, “bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass” — but without his or her name attached. The 9/11 Commission’s report makes glancing reference to reality, but as one member later wrote, “The commissioners believed that American foreign policy was too controversial to be discussed except in recommendations written in the future tense. Here we compromised our commitment to set forth the full story.”

As with the conservative PC about God, Democrats also obey the conservative political correctness about foreign policy. For instance, in then-President Barack Obama’s famous 2009 speech in Cairo, he was too PC to tell the truth. Instead, he mumbled that “tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims,” whatever that means exactly. In 2010, when Obama’s then-counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was asked why Al Qaeda was so determined to attack the U.S., he responded, “I think this is a, uh, long issue.” He did not elaborate.

The PC line on foreign policy extends far beyond terrorism. Israel is one of the most powerful examples. Every American politician who cares to know is aware that of Israel’s dozen or so wars, it was clearly the aggressor in all but two — the 1948 War of Independence and the 1973 Yom Kippur War — and even those are arguable. They also understand that Israel has rejected numerous offers to create a just, two-state solution with the Palestinians. In private, U.S. officials say that Israel has constructed “apartheid” in the West Bank. While a minor glasnost on this subject is currently in progress, this clear reality remains inexpressible by U.S. politicians.

And what about the media, that hotbed of freethinking radicalism? Even rich, famous TV hosts who deviate from the right’s PC line must issue groveling apologies or get canceled, literally. Sometimes they issue groveling apologies and get canceled. After Bush called the 9/11 hijackers “cowards,” Bill Maher took issue on his old ABC show “Politically Incorrect.” “We have been the cowards,” Maher said, “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Maher immediately said he was sorry, but it was too late: His show lost big advertisers and was taken off the air the next year. In other words, the moment “Politically Incorrect” was genuinely politically incorrect, Maher was yanked off-stage.

Next, in February 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq, Phil Donohue’s MSNBC show got the ax. It had the highest ratings on the network, but as executives fretted in an internal memo, it could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” In other words, since all of the rest of American TV was ultra-PC, and they had to be too. The same channel soon signed Jesse Ventura to a three-year contract for a new show but then found out he was anti-war and so paid him to do nothing.

Other TV figures made sure not to suffer similar fates. “I remember,” Katie Couric later said, “this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this? And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? … Anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.” At the time, when it actually mattered, Couric chirped on “The Today Show” that “Navy SEALs rock!”

Then there’s Chris Hayes, another MSNBC host. In a broadcast just before Memorial Day 2012, Hayes expressed exactly the kind of sentiment you’d expect to hear in an honest debate on war: “It is, I think, very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor. … I feel uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’ because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. And I obviously don’t want to desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that’s fallen. … But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic.” The freakout from the right was so intense that Hayes immediately said he was “deeply sorry” because “it’s very easy for me, a TV host, to opine about people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots.”

Even opinions on events from a lifetime ago must be politically correct. After Jon Stewart said on “The Daily Show” that he believed Harry Truman was a “war criminal” for using atomic weapons on Japan, he came under immediate attack, and quickly came crawling for forgiveness. “I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say,” Stewart pleaded in a tone recognizable from any of history’s struggle sessions. “You ever do that, where you’re saying something, and as it’s coming out you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, ‘No, no, [Truman] wasn’t, and you should really say that out loud on the show.’”

With no critiques about specifics permissible, a broad discussion about U.S. foreign policy is light years away. There won’t be any politicians or TV hosts anytime soon who’ll consistently emphasize Martin Luther King Jr.’s position that America is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

No one knows what foreign policy Americans would choose after an open debate. But it’s manifestly true that the current one, shaped overwhelmingly by right-wing PC, has caused gigantic damage to the U.S. and the world.

The Republican Party

Today’s GOP often enforces internal ideological purity more strictly than the Chinese Communist Party. This matters because the U.S. political system is so sclerotic it requires some buy-in from the opposition party for almost anything to change. So as long as Republicans stay in lockstep with each other, nothing will happen.

The GOP’s PC has been particularly disastrous with the climate crisis. The Republican president of the United States constantly calls it a “hoax.” For a decade, GOP politicians and the party’s apparat have almost all refused to acknowledge that it even exists. Newt Gingrich said in 2008 that “our country must take action to address climate change” — but when GOP PC changed, so did he. When Gingrich ran for president in 2012, Rush Limbaugh horrified listeners by telling them of a rumored chapter in a forthcoming Gingrich book that addressed global warming honestly. Gingrich obediently cut it. Then he began posting pictures on Instagram with captions like “More evidence of global warming, the Potomac iced over last night.”

Things are slowly shifting now as younger Republicans begin to understand the frightening future staring them in the face. Currently the party’s split between a faction that wants to continue denying reality, and one which wants to stop denying reality while doing nothing effective about it.

The GOP’s political correctness on climate change flows from a broader rejection of Enlightenment methods of figuring out reality. Limbaugh, whom Trump recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has famously proclaimed that science is one of the “corners of deceit” used by liberals to create “The Universe of Lies.” No prominent Republican politician has ever disavowed Limbaugh’s view.

Beyond this is further rigid GOP political correctness on almost all issues. A Republican politician must publicly profess belief in American exceptionalism. Cutting taxes causes government revenue to go up. Any increase in taxes on the rich and corporations will cause economic devastation. Evolution is a lie. Abortion is a titanic moral evil. Trump is a super-duper president. They have a great idea for bringing low-cost, high-quality health care to every citizen but don’t want to mention it right now and ruin the secret.

But facts don’t care about conservatives’ feelings. Our Republican-led coronavirus carnage is a preview of what’s coming with the climate crisis.

Police

With millions of people turning out in demonstrations against police brutality, there are some obvious questions we should be asking ourselves: Why are cops acting this way? Why are the so-called bad apples never removed? No politicians or TV hosts are providing the simple answer: political correctness.

Police officers will almost never report another officer mistreating a civilian. This is understandable, since the best case for these “snitches” is usually having their careers destroyed. Some, such as the NYPD’s Adrian Schoolcraft, fare even worse. In 2009, after Schoolcraft found that his supervisors were manipulating crime statistics, his fellow cops broke into his apartment, abducted him, and committed him to a psychiatric hospital. Whatever you want to say about Oberlin’s student council, they’re not doing that.

Police department PC has been enabled by another layer of conservative political correctness on top of it. Until recently, the idea that police routinely engage in unjustifiable violence, and then lie about it, was generally unutterable for an American politician. Then there was even higher-level layer of PC on top of that in U.S. culture: Reality shows have continually glorified cops engaging in barbarity, and in scripted shows, there’s no greater cliché than hero cops.

For 100 years, various commissions charged with police reform have come and gone. Most often any gains are minor and prone to backsliding. The only way to change reality is to face reality, not live in a comfortable fantasy concocted by right-wing PC.

And So Much More

All of that is just a few waves in America’s never-ending flood of right-wing political correctness. Can the surgeon general suggest that drug legalization should be studied, and perhaps children should be taught about masturbation? Nope. Can you work for the Department of Agriculture and deliver an honest speech about your life without the right misrepresenting it and getting you fired? No. Can CBS broadcast a miniseries about Ronald Reagan that lightly fictionalizes the grotesque response of his administration to AIDS? Sorry; that has to be moved to a much smaller audience on Showtime. Can you tell the truth as you see it? No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

But even the endless concrete examples of conservative PC are not the end of the problem. Right-wing political correctness so hobbles our political imagination that we don’t even dream of having debates on the deepest, most important problems of our lives. Imagine politicians or New York Times op-ed columnists or corporate TV hosts asking simple questions like:


* If we followed the law, would the most powerful people in America, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and most Wall Street CEOs be in jail?

* Is advertising all lies that are warping our humanity? If so, should we get rid of it?

* Is there any way to heal the wounds of 500 years of European colonialism?

* Can we wind down the American empire without destroying the whole world in the process?

* Even if we slow down the effects of the climate crisis, will capitalism still destroy the biosphere on which all human civilization depends?

There aren’t any easy answers here, but let’s at least be honest about the problem. If we’re going to talk about political correctness, let’s start with the truth about the kind of PC that matters most: the political correctness that is literally killing us.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Aug 17, 2020 10:57 pm

Harvey » 16 Aug 2020 07:50 wrote:Much as I enjoy his music, he lost me when he decided to play in Israel, against the honest and reasonably expressed wishes of those on the receiving end of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In any case:

and it may be that we are heading toward a more equal society


Who is he kidding?


Belligerent Savant wrote:.

Was not aware of his event in Israel; echo your sentiments there.


"A more equal society."

- why is there any hint that we'd arrive there, if we've yet to do so as a species?

Certain native tribes, historical or contemporary, may be exceptions. Welcome thoughts otherwise.


Back to the core point, though - i'd like to fast forward to the time when the thought-stopping refrains of cancel culture lead to the inevitable counter.

The cycle of culture.


So is this cancel culture in action?
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Aug 17, 2020 11:06 pm

Btw I'm not just having a go at you (and the go I am having isn't malicious, its in the "if your mates can't tell you this stuff who can" category) and I'd be an ignorant, unself aware arsehole if I thought:

A/. I've never exactly the same thing.

B/. Despite my best intentions I am not still just as capable of doing it again in five minutes time without realising.


It's a fair point being made about Palestine (iirc Micheal Franti played in Israel and Palestine when he toured the ME but that was a decade and a half ago,) and an old mate of mine hated Nick Cave because he reckoned Cave had ordered the beating of a woman over drug debt (3K iirc) and as a result she miscarried. We're talking thirty years ago tho. We all did some stuff we aren't proud if when we were young. Maybe that is why he now values mercy. Maybe he regrets not showing it.

I dunno.
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Re: ...On 'Cancel' Culture

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Aug 17, 2020 11:22 pm

I hear stories from the chamber
How Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
Died upon the cross
And might I say it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that's what I'm told

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