stickdog99 » Tue Apr 27, 2021 2:26 pm wrote:JackRiddler » 27 Apr 2021 02:41 wrote:... Florida just canceled the right to assembly, made it a felony to create the subjective impression among law enforcement that your protest poses a potential risk of property damage even when there isn't any actual damage, and enshrined the right to mass-murder random protesters with a vehicle. Similar laws are in the pipeline in I don't know how many states.
But let's equate whatever 'cancel culture' is supposed to be with totalitarianism and say it's the biggest threat currently going, why the fuck not.
Why does it need to be either/or? Why does everything need to be hyper-politicized and seen exclusively through the reigning red vs. blue culture war paradigm?
Good question for someone else, maybe you can find them?
Clearly, the panic about "cancel culture" is a point of consensus among many of those leading both the "red"
and the "blue" culture war campaigns. Right-wing "liberals" are in fact at the forefront of the cancel culture panic, as they are at the forefront of the conspiracy panic. Even my beloved 92-year-old Noam Chomsky ('I'll sign it, I'll appear on your podcast, I'm lonely') was among the signatories of the statement published in
Harper's, itself rather the opposite of a "red" outlet (to which I still subscribe, by the way).
The Florida law repeals protection for the right to assembly and envisions incredible penalties for minor acts of protest, in fact for
potential acts of protest not yet committed but considered to be possible in the judgment and whim of law enforcement on the scene. This law can also be applied to an anti-lockdown protest (or your precious harmless Capitol rioters) or anything else LEOs and the state consider dangerous. The same legislation, written by ALEC, is pending in many states, so this isn't just anti-mask Florida.
This is straight totalitarianism. Or, really, that word that sometimes triggers you: fascism, since in Florida it's very much factionally driven and bound to be targeted by race and class. They're barely bothering to disguise this.
Meanwhile, we have an increasingly open and legitimated total surveillance and control state largely run by corporate monopolies, and they target the left first and most effectively. Laws banning speech in favor of BDS are in effect in many states. The first outlets found to be subject to the new Google algorithm censorship, starting a couple of years ago, were communist and leftist groups. The first to discover and reveal Google's policy was the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), ironically also a big supporter of the inflation of "cancel culture" and "identity politics" as horrible threats that merit more attention than the pervasive global surveillance horrorshow real-existing capitalism is actually bringing into the world.
All that, together with the attack on whistleblowers and new restrictions on leaks of state criminality, is done by the state. It's not the fault of random idiots doing "cancel culture," even if some of them may, for example, also be doing #Russiagate or crowing happily about the fate of Assange. It is also being done by state-adjacent outlets owned by the old-media and the Internet conglomerate-mammoths. These are elements of ruling-class, systemic, fully enforceable totalitarianism, already in a middle or late stage of full imposition. This is where we will see some convergence of ideas like "vaccine passports" and constant speech surveillance (which is actually prohibition of discussing given issues and bodies of knowledge, and above all an assertion of state privilege to cancel fucking anything the state deems cancelable).
In this context, the panic about mean spontaneous Twitter mobs (often of uncertain provenance and background) clamoring for career damage to one or another asshole who might have tweeted an asshole thing (or maybe only appeared to run afoul of some puritan speech prohibition) is of some concern. But we need some fucking perspective on this, do you mind? Actual "cancel culture" from below (if that is what it is, which it probably is most of the time) is minor or irrelevant compared to what the corporate-state-system is doing with the full force of law and law enforcement.
The inflated, corporate-media-driven panic about "cancel culture," however, as though it's some giant scary movement (and if it's a movement, it's rather minor in its power compared to the movement fascism you often trivialize yourself), is in my view a far greater concern than the object of the panic itself.
Cancel Culture Panic (CCP, ha ha) plays a triple role:
- first, for the most part, it distracts and diverts from a major "bipartisan" right-wing state-corporate move toward constant extension of control, surveillance and the means of repression, as well as all the financial profit being derived therefrom;
- second, it often serves to provide welcome justification for elements of this emerging leviathan, to make it look "woke" and "anti-racist" and justified.
- third, it gives fodder to right-wing attacks and contempt for actually legitimate defenses against long-running discrimination, racism, homophobia, etc.
[I could have added that it also affords opportunity to right-wing assholes, generally of the non-liberal or "conservative" strain and already enjoying humonguous platforms and reach and incomes, to posture as victims and courageous freedom fighters. In that, it's a redux of the 1990s "Political Correctness" panic. History, as I keep saying, does not repeat, it just goes on and on.]
All this can seem contradictory, since both "red" and "blue" culture-war devices are deployed to whip up the CC panic.
The resulting direction of the development is consistent, however, generally justifying higher levels of repression and increased power to repress on the part of the institutions that hold a near-monopoly on actual power and know how to use it: against dissent across the political spectrum, but generally speaking always striking first at any hint of effectiveness on the side of leftists (such as they are, in the States) or working-class solidarity movements -- a category to which, by the way, BLM and Antifa generally also belong.
(Those who hold this actual political and legal power, I will remind you again, would be states, institutions of law and law enforcement, the national security complexes, the espionage agencies, corporations and capital, etc. -- as opposed to some whipped-up fans of crappy Disney series mocking Gina Carrano's tweets equating herself with German Jews during the Holocaust, or pointing out that Apu on the Simpsons may be a bit of a racist stereotype.)
Republican lawmakers and their cult followers clearly suck and are clearly frightening. But it doesn't follow from this that cancel culture is awesome or that I must secretly sympathize with shitty Republicans and their shitty authoritarian laws by even using the phrase "cancel culture" rather than "cultural sensitivity" or whatever the reigning blue-check excuse is for using cancel culture to bludgeon anyone who does not worship at the altar of classless, neoliberal elitist political identitarian orthodoxy.
This may be a good point you might make in an argument with someone else whose view of the world and actual statements would be completely unrelated to my own. Maybe you can find that someone and deliver it. You are wasting your time with me.
Blue Big Tech authoritarianism is not excused by Red Big Baton authoritarianism.
They're part of the same bubbling ferment, currently wearing different masks.
I do wonder what on earth would make you react the way you have to what I wrote, when I condemn how the STATE of Florida -- incarcerator of currently ca. 86,000 people and mass-disenfranchiser of nearly a million (until that referendum was effectively stymied by new legislation --
literally repeals the Bill of Rights and the rule of law and establishes new legality for the feudal powers of the cops, that you should write a reply to my condemnation that so thoroughly misrepresents what I wrote (as well as the reality of the various "divides") and sorts it into this kind of total-strawman schema.
The official, open, legal, legitimated, state-driven repeal of the Bill of Rights -- you know, the good part of the Constitution? The one that was actually forced on the Federalist framers? -- is not to be trivialized as some kind of cultural unpleasantry, or to be reduced to the same level as concern about "cancel culture." Also, did you notice the part that effectively
incentivizes angry drivers to run random people the fuck over? That's a touch more radical than what's being condemned as "cancel culture," don't you think?
If you respond, read what I fucking wrote. Also, what I wrote before.
ON THREATS TO FREEDOMS OF SPEECH AND THE PRESSThanks.
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