Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This author is clever. Most of the social justice movements of the day fit the definition of moral panics. So he applies the term to the Harper’s Letter.
But that’s cheap, and this editorial is childish.
The Harper’s Letter argues for more dialogue, and less shaming and punitive reaction. It argues that adults can disagree with one another, and that cancel mobs are, well, mobs. Idiots, I’d argue. Naive, angry cranks. Unserious people who are high on righteousness.
But their “counter speech,” to borrow Kara Swisher’s definition of it (in which she badly attempted to defend it against Scott Galloway in their most recent podcast, and in which dispute Galloway crushed her), is also speech. These silly overheated nuts, these low rent Robespierres, have a right to scream for the deplatforming of those they don’t like.
An as they’re going to soon learn, the majority of us have a right to ignore them.
Twitter isn’t reality. The shame mob isn’t in your yard. The best thing about their speech, like the speech they object to, is one can simply choose not to tune into it.
|
You seem to be under the impression that cancel culture, whatever that is, is peculiar to the left. So when a lot of people are protesting in the streets, exercising their First Amendment rights about police brutality, and a right-wing Senator ignores what they are protesting about and calls for the military to suppress the protests, that's not cancel culture, even though you have someone literally calling for the government to use military force to prevent people from expressing themselves. But if other people object to the Senator getting to air his views, unedited, in the New York Times, that is cancel culture apparently. In your world, the military suppression of protests in the street is not a free-speech problem to even be noticed, but it's very important that Senator Cotton get to have his say in the New York Times as opposed to Breitbart or FOX News or his own websites, etc. People are marching in the street because they don't have a way to be heard. Senator Cotton has his own press secretary, and there is no conceivable world in which he will be silenced or cancelled.
Quote:
|
I see no reason to entertain the arguments of people who argue against tolerance for all reasonable free speech.
|
Strangely, this standard applies only to people on the left. What you seem to call
cancel culture is rife on the right, but it doesn't bother you at all -- you just define it out of existence. Senator Cotton calls for suppressing speech he doesn't like -- "arguing against tolerance for reasonable free speech," it can hardly be denied -- and you are not only willing to entertain his views, you think it's a problem that anyone disagrees.
