Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

Because Ron DeSantis is the Governor of Florida and the Republican Party in the US has decided that acknowledging the existence of racism at any point in American history is inherently bad.

 

Pretty easy... They don't want to discuss anti-racism because they are pro-racism.

 

Agatha Christie novels to be reworked:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...rked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language

From:
“They come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”
to:
“They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

Let outrage ensue!

 

I do hope they remove all those nasty murders, it does upset me so.

 

Again, who specifically is asking for this?
And isn't it odd that the same right-wing paper (Daily Telegraph) is the original source each time?

 

The Torygraph has an interesting relationship with truthful reporting.

 

Also, white liberalism’s* many sins.

Typically, when white liberals start using a black colloquialism, it’s downfall is assured.

 

Yeah, the right loves to frame these sort of stories as "The woke mob is forcing us to censor" but I never see anyone actually asking for these sort of changes.

 

When it does happen, it tends to be done either with in-house or contracted sensitivity readers, which means communication about the changes asked or suggested isn't public by definition.

 

And the usual result, it seems, is for them to publish two editions; the "Trump Wine Effect", where conservative culture warriors will buy **** they don't want and will never use just to "own the libs" is a great way to guarantee a sales boost.

 

I'm aware of the AAVE origins of "woke." The parenthetical is referring to "cancel culture" never having any real meaning.

 

Cancelling as always had meaning. Generally when normal people stand up for something good they get cancelled by society. Occasionally this happens to celebrities (the Dixie Chicks). A centrist and right wing society cancels the left routinely.

Then after the advent of Twitter, things started moving so fast that even if someone has a whiff that you might have made a social wrong, things on Twitter move so fast that you can lose a lot. And real people have been hurt by this. A waitress lost her job because she accused a family of black people of being dine and dashers. Well, they were. Didn't stop thousands of "woke" people on Twitter from saying a lot of very horrible things about her. A trans author wrote a short story called "I identify as an attack helicopter" and woke Twitter bullied her into near suicide.

The problem is that a lot of progressives on Twitter actually do say the most horrible things about people once they think that person is an acceptable target.

 

Most people did not use "cancel" like that until the Trump administration. The term is broadly applied so that it essentially encompasses anyone, living or dead, facing any sort of negative consequences-- to any degree, perceived or real-- for saying or doing anything at all, good or bad, from the beginning of time. Ea-Nasir was canceled by his customers for his crappy copper. And it refers to non-human objects, institutions, works of art being scrutinized, altered, rejected, disbanded for any reason and to any degree.

 

Not to mention the other likely omission - the decades of history behind the building of the social movement that Rosa Parks was a part of before deciding not to move. Collective action that's not warfare is too socialist-y for inclusion. U.S. history is just individuals doing brave things due to divine inspiration or...something.

 

is it me or is the story of Ea-Nasir been spreading around the internet more and more lately.

Anyways, the problem I have with cancelling people is that it's a tool largely used to harm poor people. I'm also not a fan of thousands of people on twitter saying horrible things about some random non-celebrity who went viral because people perceived them to do something wrong. You think someone's wrong? Fine, say it. You think someone's stupid and dumb, fine say it too (god knows I say it all the time). But the tweets by people who think they're the good guys sometimes really really makes me pause.

 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

My point was that I don't see the usefulness of the term itself except for the churn of the right-wing victimization propaganda complex that thrives on oversimplification, obfuscation and limited vocabulary. More specific terminology is better in most cases. Justin Roiland was fired for being indicted on domestic violence charges, Gina Carano was dropped from her contract for being an idiot about COVID, Twitter rando was socially ostracized or dogpiled on the platform for giving their cat baked beans every morning.

 

Well then you do see the usefulness, you just disagree with how it’s used. Merk already said it was co-opted by the right, which you have also demonstrated awareness of.

Cultural terms like “cancel” or “woke” are designed to be simple and therefore easily understood AND misunderstood. I never used woke because I thought it was some dumb **** that black liberal activists had cooked up and I thought it was kind of corny.

 

And sometimes, Twitter rando is stalked, doxxed, harassed and slandered for giving their cat baked beans every morning. That's if we're avoiding to talk about death and rape threats and incitations to suicide, to Twitter rando themself or aimed at one of their more vulnerable charges. The person who does that isn't a solution to any problem. They aren't one of the good guys. They are just another hateful person.

 

This is from the article and isn't true:

"Though this is the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last used in 1977."

It's true that the title was changed, but so was the content. When the novel was called Ten Little *racist term*, the central plot device revolved around a rhyme about, well, you know, ten little *racist term* and people were being murdered in ways related to that rhyme. So, when the title was changed, that rhyme got changed to "Ten Little Soldier Boys." So, the text of the novel was . . . I mean, given how central that rhyme is to everything that happens in that book, I would say that the novel was edited on every page. And as about the biggest Agatha Christie fan on these forums, I have to say that I'm kind of glad those edits happened.