Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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.
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. |
1. I did not agree with Cotton or support his form of cancel culture. I think he has a right to say what he likes, and we have a right to ignore it. I said the same thing about left wing cancel culture. If you read my post, you read me stating that cancel culture freaks have a right to ask for people to be cancelled, and like Cotton, we have a right to ignore them.
2. People marching are trying to be heard. People demanding that those who disagree with them be canceled are trying to prevent others from being heard. People who ask the military to shut down peaceful protests are trying to prevent others from being heard.
3. The right is absolutely engaged in cancel culture. Trump is right now attempting to ban Tik Tok under some guise of national security. But the thing with the right is, they never succeed at canceling anyone. Everybody ignores them when they cry for firing of a pundit they dislike, or when they attempt a boycott. Focus on the Family and Brent Bozell boycotted all sorts of media and products advertised on shows they disliked for years, and it was almost always futile. The left, OTOH, is quite effective in scaring corporate lackeys who’ll happily jump into the latest virtue signaling orgy. I’m advocating we take the power away from the left exactly the same way we denied it to Bozell — ignore the cancellers.
It’s happening already. The very use of words like cancel culture and deplatforming is perniciously delegitimizing the extreme left and its cancel culture. If people keep mocking it, continue calling its adherents loony, and ignore it, it will fade.
