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Tyrone Slothrop · 07-23-2020, 05:06 PM

Sebby, maybe you just missed the post below, but your (lack of a) response leads me to think that complaining about cancel culture is a way to avoid discussing the very real bad things that some people do, and instead to talk in a vague way about free speech. Your commitment to free speech would be more convincing if you tried to deal with what actually happened with Adam Rapoport, instead of using a phony victimization of him. YMMV.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

What is cancel culture? Perhaps it's a rhetorical trick to defend people by avoiding discussion of what they're doing, and turning attention to their attackers.

Kevin Williamson's piece in the New York Post, which Sebby shared, says the following about the defenestration of former Bon Appetite editor Adam Rapoport:

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In the course of a week, three editors went down: James Bennett of the Times was canceled for publishing an opinion on the opinion page, Senator Tom Cotton’s defense of the Insurrection Act, which permits the use of federal troops to quell riots; Claudia Eller was pushed out at Variety (suspended, formally, but not expected to return to her position) after penning a white-privilege mea culpa that was found to be unconvincing; Adam Rapoport of Bon Appétit was canned for much the same reason, his offense aggravated by a turn-of-the-century photograph of him dressed as a stereotypical Puerto Rican at a Halloween party.

Set Bennett and Eller aside, and just look at Rapoport. Read again what Williamson says about his firing, and then read the article that *he* links to, which says much more about "accusations of discrimination and lack of inclusiveness at the magazine." Note, also, that the article doesn't describe Rapoport being fired after an inadequate mea culpa -- it doesn't describe any mea culpa at all. (Rapoport announced he was leaving " "to reflect on the work that I need to do as a human being"). It's pretty clear that Rapoport wasn't getting it done, and that Williamson is not interested in facts that would undercut a horror stories about the excesses of cancel culture. So does anticancel culture necessarily mean ignoring the real reasons why people change jobs (hello, Bari Weiss)? One complaint about the Harper's letter is that it ignored the particular facts of a bunch of situations in favor of a little story about the freedom of speech. One sees a theme.