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You completely missed my point. I'm not saying that aren't people out there saying stupid things that one can disagree with. I'm saying, why don't you actually engage with what those people are saying?
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Because that's impossible. In its most frequent form, an attempted "cancellation" involves a group of pundits, reporters, or bloggers piling on to a target at once. Shall I address each criticism? I don't have to. That's all free speech. They can say what they like. They can gang up as they like. They only offend in one regard, and that's when they ask that the speaker of whatever heresy has them exercised be made a pariah.
I needn't engage their critiques on substance at all, for there is never a credible or defensible basis for the following argument to be made against moderates, conservatives, or even fellow liberals who critique things like wokeness or #metoo:
Your opinion is so awful you should be made a pariah, publicly shamed to the extent that your voice will be considered deviant and inappropriate for the public space.
A person saying anything close to that is a person who should not be engaged. They should be ignored. They are a form of troll.
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True to form, you have posted a bunch of links to other people complaining about "cancel culture," none of whom appear to engaging with actual people with whom they disagree. For example, your first link leads to a list of academics apparently under fire, the first for telling a Vietnamese to change her name, which sounded to him like an expletive. But who is criticizing him for what? (Presumably that's the person you disagree with, and you think it's ducky for the professor to have said what he said, but who knows?)
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Like I said, it's systemic, like sexism and racism. If that hoists you on your own petard, that's your problem, not mine.
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The second link takes you to a Kevin Williamson piece in the New York Post, enough said. Earlier today I saw that the New York Post had used "surfboards" as a verb to describe what Mark Zuckerberg was up to off a beach in Hawaii, so I've read enough of the New York Post for the day. After the first two, I didn't click on your third link. Should I have?
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It speaks to broad trends in cancel culture. I don't know who Williamson is or anything about Zuckerberg and surfboards.
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When I said, "If there is someone out there saying things you disagree with, why not (quote and cite and) respond to them specifically?", what I meant is, instead of complaining about cancel culture in the abstract, and risk sounding like a parody of it, why don't you quote, cite, and respond to one of the people you disagree with. Can you see how linking to Kevin Williamson is not that?
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It's impossible to cite single instances of cancel culture. We don't have the bandwidth. It is systemic, a permanent feature of internet communication and social media. Never before has the crowd been so enabled. When it occurs, it almost always involves a few officious complainers posting something somewhere asking fellow travelers to pummel a target, often on Twitter, often in comment sections, and to demand the target's employer fire him or her, or his or her platform remove the person, or that advertisers punish the employer or platform for refusing to do so. In the university setting, it demands that a professor be fired or removed from teaching a class. In some cases, it involves demands that speakers be disinivited.
The argument you are making, which other defenders of cancel culture are making in other forums, seeks to burden the people complaining about cancel culture with an impossible task - to examine each instance uniquely. It's obviously a dishonest argument to the extent it taks an opponent with the impossible, but it needn't be disposed of on that basis. It also illuminates nothing, as examining any single instance does not shed light on the enormous number of others. It can be dismantled much more easily using the "systemic" paradigm. That which is systemic is not examined on a case by case basis. We do not need to look at each attempted or successful cancellation and decide if the cancelers actually intended to cancel the target or not, or if their complaints were valid. Intent does not matter. Outcome is all that matters. Right now, cancel culture is creating perverse outcomes. It's ruining our public discourse and empowering low minds, giving them voice where they should be ignored. And the cancel culture of the left, in its extreme intolerance and urgency, is helping to create and empower a much more dangerous reactive cancel culture of the right, which you see on the streets in Portland.
