Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

Il faut qu'on fasse a thread ou on essaye de parler seulement francais

 

You start it, I will bring the croissants

 

Ça plane pour moi

 

Freaking hick farmer French is what it is...

 

So où est le thread pour parler français, then?

 

Je ne sais pas...

 

"Ton truck é ti en pretty good shape?"
"Oui. Ej vas tanker mon truck de soir pis ej va le driver. Ça va être right d'la fun."

 

I didn't expect this thread to turn around a debate of "French vs English". Maybe I shouldn't have told this small anecdote...

 

C'est la vie....

 

Pour mémoire, nous avon un thread pour les langues.

Voici cet thread:

https://boards.theforce.net/threads/let’s-learn-languages.50054192/

 

^ non, ce n'est pas assez

 

Actually surprised that after a decade of not using French I can read and understand this last page.

 

It's nearly three decades in my case!

 

J'avais une copine française. C'est la seule raison pour laquelle je connais un français, sans aucun doute.

 

Eh, the discussion *before* that didn't have much to do with the Harper's letter anyway, so as far as I see it the french tangent has been just as relevant as most comments before it.

 

Depends. Five years is quite a chunk of time, is the apology for the actions or that he got caught?

 

I was going to say it's their society and they should decide, but since the guy is supposed to be a "children's entertainer", they should decide to never let him entertain children ever again.

 

I watched the unpixilated video and found it very unpleasant viewing. The fact that this man is a children’s entertainer made his actions even more unpalatable. The whole thing reeked of racism and class privilege. What is most worrying is that he was conditioning his own children to see these other kids as beneath them. He was conditioning them to see these children as objects for their amusement who would happily eat any morsel that they were willing to dispense from the safety of their expensive automobile.

 

I know almost nothing about this situation, but just “Who wants to feed a pigeon—I mean—Bedouin?” strongly suggests some pervasive awfulness.

Sometimes folks who complain about “cancel culture” say things like, “Why should one incidence of misspeaking lose someone their job?” The answer is that there’s misspeaking, and then there’s showing your ass. For instance, if a trans person changed their name and pronouns quite recently, I can see people making mistakes at first. (Of course, this is what editors and the 7-second delay on live broadcasts are for.). On the other hand, under what circumstances does someone “accidentally” say “Black Lives Matter is racism against white people!” Were they just so used to saying that that it just “popped out” when it “wasn’t supposed to?” Why were they even in situations where they felt saying that was remotely okay, and why the hell were they saying it so often that it became a reflex?

So yeah, even one instance of saying certain things can be grounds for “cancellation.” Is the “feeding a Bedouin” comment bad enough? Well, teaching your children to view human beings as some form of begging animal is pretty horrible. Since this was 5 years ago, maybe the guy had some kind of big epiphany since. (You’d think he might have mentioned that before he got caught being a ****, though.). Still, if I or my kids were somewhere in his sphere of influence, I’d be willing to listen to what he had to say. He’d better make it damn good, though.

Also—really the one issue I have with “cancel culture” is that it only affects public figures whose audience/constituents have a shred of human decency. If J. Random Media Influencer says something horribly racist, then that person will be shut down in days, if not hours. If some Trumper personality (can we call them Trump-thumpers? I want to call them Trump-thumpers) says something horribly racist, then their whole fan base will be like, “Yayyyy! This person is horribly racist! Let’s cause them to actually benefit for being such an appalling excuse for a human being!”

Likewise, God help anyone with a moral compass who somehow relies on the goodwill of Trump-thumpers in any way. For example, Michigan’s not-inconsiderable Randian wingnut population has been desperately trying to “cancel” Governor Whitmer since at least April, due to her insistence that they do not have the right to rampantly spread diseases, even if they want to really, really bad. “Cancel” in this case means not only “berate on Twitter,” but also “attempt to terrorize with loaded guns in front of her home.” Whitmer probably won’t literally be assassinated, but there are decent odds she will be a one-term Governor due to her stance that coronavirus is real, germ theory is real, reality is real, etc.

Does it mean that we should somehow prohibit people from boycotting bigots (how?), just because bigots know how boycotts work too? Of course not. It’s just maddening that the worst people among us are nearly immune to being “cancelled,” while also being able to damage others through “cancel culture.”

 

Here's a more fun cancelling incident to discuss: Warren supporters vs minority feminist studies instructor. He's not been cancelled yet, but people are trying!