Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

I don't think that's unique to left. The right constantly reduces normal policy debates to questions of religious faith even where their was never really a clear religious teaching about it. Probably the most infamous example is the oft repeated idea that supporting a social safety net means that you are an atheist who wants people to "rely on government" instead of God. Rather than, you know, just having a slightly different concept of how much the national government should do to help poor people. Especially when the literal Mosaic Law had multiple provisions about stuff people were supposed to do for poor people in the community. Arguing that someone is going to go Hell for their position on gun regulations, the marginal income tax rate, or the healthcare system is no less an argument from a position of self-righteousness than what that left does.

The issue for both is that there's a huge difference between an individual being motivated by their moral beliefs and just assuming that everyone who disagrees does so because they are opposed to said beliefs. That doesn't logically follow at all, but it is the common argumentative posture.

 

No, it's not unique to woke Twitter. But the discussion is specifically about cancelling, which is something woke Twitter does.

 

Is it, though? In any sense.

1. From the one side, we've also used this thread to complain when British fiction authors get revised editions of their work released (And in the other, comparatively undiscussed phenomenon--even though this whole line of discussion about revise, works was supposed to be justified by concerns about state censorship--a Florida school district has pulled the Disney film Ruby Bridges, because in depicting the desegregation of schools, it implies that there was a time when Blacks were not treated fairly in the US)
2. Several posters have pointed out how conservatives also target people for retaliation/backlash who voice unpopular opinions or behave in ways that are disapproved.

What is your actual point, then? You have idiosyncratically defined "cancelling" as something that it is only possible for "woke Twitter" to do. Having developed this very narrow definition, you then proceed to declare that this is exclusively a problem of woke Twitter. Which, again, is the only group in which it could ever conceivably happen, by your own definition which does not seem to correspond to reality in that it ignores all the highly similar things done by all kinds of other groups. What do you want us to say about that?

 

Time to bring back a topic from early COVID: Cleopatra casting! Everyone favorite topic!

https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/queen-cleopatra-black-netflix-egypt-1235590708/

Did you know there are only two options? Either someone is white or someone is black. That's it. That's the two races of actors. If someone isn't white you cast them as black.

> but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that. I am okay with this.

Haha this director is a ****ing idiot

 

I'm all in favour of telling more stories about Black African Queens as JPS is trying to do.
But there are lots of interesting African historical figures out there who have had little to no exposure to a mainstream western audience, so why not start with them instead of Cleopatra who has been done multiple times and wasn't black anyway?

 

That director is very special. She's woke and tone deaf at the same time.

 

I don't quite understand why people are so eager to claim Cleopatra VII as "one of us." She's best known for failing spectacularly, losing all traces of her country's independence, and committing suicide.

 

Well here's what the director has to say

I am proud to stand with “Queen Cleopatra” — a re-imagined Cleopatra — and with the team that made this. We re-imagined a world over 2,000 years ago where once there was an exceptional woman who ruled

 

She also had the appropriate look in Rome.
Egyptian royalty wore wigs. So Cleopatra, like Imhotep in the Mummy movies, should be bald/have very short hair

 

It's re-imagined

 

If it’s re-imagined do the Ptolemy’s win this one?

 

I'm not against new interpretations.
But don't whine about previous depictions not being accurate if you then do the same thing

Gal Gadot is named in that article as if she's a bad choice, but she's a more appropriate choice than the actress they chose

 

I was always sad you didn't get to kill Cleopatra in AC: Origins

 

Oh and one more thing: this is a documentary.

 

In all fairness, I think many of you are overlooking that the rights to the likeness of the historical Cleopatra are still owned by the British Museum

 

Here's my thoughts on this, and I know wocky is going to find this, take one sentence out of context and write a wall of text in response but whatever. I think Darth Guy hit the nail on the head another this whole thing: this is a "one of us" situation. A lot of this is absolutely a need for people to feel like their ancestors did something awesome because for too many people that's the only way they feel like they have value. That's why you get moron white nationalists going about how "my ancestors built civilization/went to the moon" nonsense. Sorry what have you done though? You haven't done anything. But that's not how we get self worth. How we get self worth is from what our ancestors did. And that's why it so important to hoteps that ancient Egypt was black (it wasn't). Ancient Egypt is one of the most famous and intriguing ancient civilizations.

 

It's fundamentally the idea that being proximate to Europeans legitimizes stuff. She is the ruler they knew so that makes her the most important ruler of Egypt to talk about. Never mind that many of the native dynasties were proportionately much more powerful on the world stage. Or that even many of the other foreign dynasties (eg Taharqa and Nubian rulers) were as well. The one where a Greek woman marries a Roman man, because both have been conventionally imagined as white* has to dominate the conversation.

Anyway, I'm a little confused about why this keeps coming up. Every time this is discussed, we all agree that factually, Cleopatra was not Black and that this is a dumb debate. But sure, I'm happy to do this season's iteration of the same discussion.

*It goes without saying that they would not have recognized the concept themselves. It bears a little more pointing out that the current inhabitants of Italy aren't really of the same genetic ancestral mix of the people that important in classical Rome, the former having a greater infusion of Northern Europeans.

 

Mods, can you please change Vivec's title to the above? Tx

 

I'm getting really, really tired of American liberals telling other cultures how they think and what their history is...

 

Oh we're not going to take all the blame on this one

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Gharavi

 

Yeah this is not strictly an American thing.

 

If they really want to pay homage to an awesome African, why not make a big budget historical epic about Hannibal Barca?

There hasn't been one since the 50s that I know of, though there was the drama-documentary with Alexander Siddig

 

Doesn't really solve the "make everyone black" thing as Hannibal was also not black. Not everyone in Africa is.