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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
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?
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So pick one.
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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.
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Who says that? Again, you manufacture your own caricature to fight with.
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It's impossible to cite single instances of cancel culture. We don't have the bandwidth.
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So cancel culture is like the wind, everywhere and nowhere at once? That makes you a guy yelling at the wind.
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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.
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I'm not trying to "burden" you with anything, unless you think it's a burden to respond to actual things that actual people are saying, instead of making stuff up. And I didn't suggest you examine "each instance" of cancel culture -- you could start with one.
You are playing the same game that Taibbi does with the media, which is to make a bunch of broad pronouncements about a lot of things that a lot of people are saying, without every referring to any one person with enough specificity to figure out what you are talking about. It's rhetorically slick, in that you stick to claims that are impossible to refute. But if you only say things that can't be disproved, you say only things that can't be proved.
It's "really quite daft and not very helpful."
