Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

Perhaps this is because m on my phone, but I can literally only see this as a picture. Do you have a link to his original post?

 

That's because it was actually a picture



Here's the tweet that got liberals super upset. Trying to cancel a very poor grad student because he disagreed with one of the most powerful people in the country (a Senator and potential VP candidate) is mega yikes.

 

Cancel Culture (which is ambiguously defined) seems to be a neoliberal program for shifting discourse away from critique of structural inequities, and towards critique of political fashions/aesthetics. This not a new phenomena, it is an evolution of info-tainment or celebrity politics where only correctly cast persons can participate in politics. As with most neoliberal programs, it wasn't cooked up in a think tank, but elite gatekeepers choose to allow its passage because it represents no threat to capitalism and actually helps to diffuse anti-establishment politics by "purifying" the ruling class.

Notice how the national discourse a few weeks ago was focused on defunding or even abolishing police, which would endanger the ruling class. Now the discourse is focused on which statues to tear down or which academics/executives to replace. This is not a coincidence, it's how neoliberalism demobilizes the body politic. They create a consumer product that provides the sensation of political activity without actually threatening institutions.

 

@Glitterstimm
The term is too vague to have any meaningful discussion about it, so I'm not sure what definition you have in mind, but when they fire a professor because they shared some controversial article, it's not really about "shifting the discourse" and it's not a practice that is intimately connected with capitalism alone.
Besides, I could easily make an example in which an attitude that can be considered related to cancel culture was actually used by the elites against the socialists: when they went after Cenk Uygur for some controversial stuff he said in the past, just to be sure that he could not hope to succeed in his attempt to win one of the districts in your state.

 

... are you trying to say that Cenk is not gross and didn't deserve to try and be cancelled?

 

He had long repudiated his past views and statements as a young man and other things, like him sarcastically mocking David Duke, were taken out of context and used as smears. I'm not a big fan of his, but the campaign against him in favor of a corporate shill was "gross."

 

I'm not a fan of him but Yes, I don't think he deserved the level of fake outrage he received.

 

Should @dp4m be cancelled for the Elevator thread joke from 6 years ago?

 

There's lots of things he should be cancelled for.

 

Probably.

This too.

But Cenk continued to be gross, well after his "disavowed" comments.

https://theslot.jezebel.com/why-did-bernie-sanders-endorse-the-extremely-gross-sexi-1840412887

 

That elevator thread would get a lot of people cancelled. Including me.

 

I'm guilty. I really don't give a **** about most of the things mentioned in the article, and honestly -full disclosure- with my friends I rank actresses according to how hot they are all the time. Yes, I do that, No, I'm not ashamed for it. It's quite interesting that the person who wrote the article didn't even feel like mentioning that if we're really looking for it, Uygur has WAY bigger issues when we consider his past opinions about Kurds' genocides.

 

Also, it should be noted, that "cancel culture" is really only for people in position of authority, power, or commerce... we get nothing from canceling most of the people in the 2020 election thread.

 

#cancelEsmir

 

Nobody will be able to "cancel" the Mormon Prophet once he speaks.

 

I didn't know Esmir was a Mormon prophet.

 

How "cancel culture" really works: a Twitter thread:

 

Yes, yes... Tell me more about these “cancel vultures,” Tina...

 

That was just the auto-correct

 

Frankly, feasting on the dead flesh and bones of the cancelled may be useful...

 

Are you talking about Wajahat Ali? He seems like a decent person the Republicans went after just out of spite.

 

He's just the elite being punished, so this is totally acceptable. If he wasn't the elite, he wouldn't be getting targeted as clearly that's how it works. He's just being shown the door.

He wasn't going to win that seat anyway, as a significant enough portion of the district wanted to see the winner be someone actually from the district.

 

That's beside the point

 

I do think it's somewhat relevant that the bigger focus was about him not being from the district, to the point that his past statements were much less of what I'd heard about than simply him not being from the district yet running to represent it and so it was that outsider status that was the bigger focus.