Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

For Ty:

Here's a glimpse into the sort of dimly lit skull that thinks cancel culture/call out culture is positive: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/o...l-culture.html This person is taking issue with Obama dismissing cancel culture as unproductive. Highlights:

Right. Like the local baker whose idiot daughter wrote something terrible over half a decade ago. Rage against that machine!

May he never bake another pita!

Translation: If you don't agree with us, if you don't want our progress, you are enemy we have the right to ruin.

No. We'll all keep behaving exactly as we feel like behaving, just exclusively in private. You'll simply ruin the internet. Which mostly hurts people without real friends, like you.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Um, what? What did I say that you disagree with?

The bakery owner fired his daughter. The story says, "Majdi Wadi is trying to save the business and his family's reputation. He says he's also determined to make amends for his daughter's posts and learn to be an ally fighting anti-Blackness going forward."

If he wants to make amends (hey, he fired his daughter and seems genuinely think she did something wrong), then he thinks he has something to make amends for. He is holding himself to account. Are you second-guessing him?

The person he turned to for help was upset, but also sees a path to redemption. Do you have a problem with that?

But El-Amin, along with other Black customers, was still upset. "My family had supported his business for many, many years. He had a relationship with my mother as well, who also called me amidst this and was like 'What's going on with this?'" he said. "It's interesting that dynamic of how those who have suffered from oppression at whatever level have always been called on to be the ones to be forgiving, always been asked to be understanding, always the one to be called onto to provide the cover."

But he decided to hear Wadi out. Redemption — accompanied by accountability and justice — are cornerstones of his belief system, El-Amin said.

"God says, if He were to give all of us what's coming ... based on our activities, he wouldn't leave a single soul. That's sobering," he said. "It's through His mercy that he gives us the opportunity to give this chance. I believe if you want mercy, you've got to give mercy, too. But there's also accountability. That's also part of it."

It's an interesting article. Good luck to all of them. If your take-away is that bakery owner should not have to apologize for anything, you are the one who seems to be disagreeing with everyone quoted in that article, not me. Reading comprehension much?

Not sure what that article has to do with cancel culture in your mind, unless "cancel culture" means there should be no consequences for saying racist stuff.

Yes, I was pretty sure you would defend what Taibbi did without reading what I linked. Let me help:

I can't believe that you would read this and say, "people engage in humor that offends others. People say things that are insensitive. Get over it. These hall monitors who make a life out of finding grievance with anything that can be portrayed as even slightly offensive are miserable bores who are ruining art." Yes, I think Taibbi should repent, and I don't think he should be heard complaining about cancel culture until he owns what he did. It is beyond obvious that many of the people complaining about "cancel culture" have done things that are indefensible and would rather talk about "cancel culture" to avoid answering for them.

Those are your bedfellows and they are shitting the bed. If you want to stay in bed with them, that's certainly your right.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

The baker doesn't seem to think he is a victim. He is looking for redemption. Do you understand the difference?

And you think that story says something about cancel culture, but it doesn't talk about anyone trying to cancel anyone, let alone a culture of anything.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

so this board was offensive as to gay people, say 10 years ago. I wrote "jokes" as did others. Then ncs and RT just said stop, and we did. But several of us made those "jokes." If I get tapped to host the Oscars can I not do it once that comes out?

And so you think Taibbi, whoever he is, apologizing means anything? Did you believe the football guy who said he didn't realize complimenting Hitler would be offensive? Those apologies are nonsense.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

If it were up to me, I wouldn't categorically exclude you. eta: But why should it be up to me?

Some apologies are heartfelt and some are nonsense, and sometimes it's hard to tell which are which. Since Taibbi hasn't apologized, not even to the person who he mistreated so egregiously, Politico really shouldn't be asking him to opine on "cancel culture" as if his history is irrelevant.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

My thing is this, back in the early me too days I’d read FB friends takedowns of different people for doing different things. And some of them were so extreme that I could only be glad I was no longer dating. You say why does your opinion matter, but the louder voices don’t ask that question. If something bugs them, there is not the next step of “is my opinion mainstream enough to insist on it.”

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

But Wadi’s American dream came crashing down to Earth on June 4, when his 24-year-old daughter admitted to him that she had written a series of deeply racist and anti-Semitic posts on Twitter and Instagram starting when she was 14 years old until she was 18. An activist had drawn public attention to these posts after stumbling across an especially noxious one. That same day, Wadi did what he describes as “one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do in my life”: he fired his daughter from her position as the company’s catering director.

Neither Wadi’s long standing in the community nor his quick action to sever his company’s ties with his daughter are likely to salvage his company. Nearly all of his business partners have canceled their contracts. His landlord terminated the bakery’s lease.

After he saw his life’s work evaporate in a few days, Wadi reluctantly told me, he has struggled to sustain his belief in the American dream. “All that I’m asking is that everyone who canceled our lease, who threw out our products, who is calling for a boycott of our produce give us a chance to prove that this is not who we are.”

Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...nocent/613615/

The baker doesn't need to ask for redemption. That's preposterous. His daughter needs to ask for it. He did nothing wrong. He did exactly what he was supposed to do - fire his racist daughter.

The story should end there. But no... The social justice warriors, and let's be clear about this - most of these people have nothing else much going on in their lives, which is why they join these mobs - won't have that. They want to tear him down. Ruin the guy.

Why? It is inescapable that they do this in significant part for the same reason rural losers in trailer parks cheer along with Trump when he "owns the libs": They have no success of their own. The only currency they have is moral judgment and the exhilaration of for the first time in their lives being part of a group that can exercise some power (through online shaming and boycotting). They can't make successes of themselves, so their only way of evening the playing field is to try to ruin the success of this businessman.

You won't see many smart, successful people engaged in these mob behaviors. They've got jobs and hobbies. They have lives.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

That was decades ago, and the rest of his canon is amazing work. So here I am repeating myself: Get over it. To paraphrase Mick Jagger from "Stray Cat Blues," a supremely offensive song that has never left my running mix, "this ain't no hanging matter... this ain't no capital crime."

The only word that fits this absurd demand is "daft."

Oh, yes... We must have a giant recrimination party. Let's all apologize for everything. Cancel Eddie Murphy as a homophobe. Throw Chapelle in the same boat. And Kevin Hart needs to suffer more! How dare Louis CK even try to resume a career!

Lord of the Rings needs to be taken out of circulation. Author held racist views. Hemingway? Gone. Total sexist. Faulkner? He lived on a plantation and celebrated the antebellum South. Burn his books. And burn Farenheit 451 as well, for mocking the idea of banning books. We must ban certain art in service to social justice. Bradbury's work could be used as an argument against this sort of thing!

Have you been a womanizer in your life? Been a member of a frat? A golf club? Did you make a Christopher Reeves joke? A dead baby joke? Ever comment to a co-worker about a new female hire's awesome ass? Wear a "No Fat Chix" t-shirt in the 80s?

Is the Animal House scene where the pledge considers taking liberties with a drunk underage girl still funny to you? Is NWA's sexist "I Ain't Tha One" still in your iMusic? Still watching Blazin' Saddles?

You didn't care about Kavanaugh. Didn't even watch the hearings, let alone live blog about how terrible they were on FB.

Have you called up all the girls at the less attractive sororities your house didn't have mixers with in college and apologized for objectification? Do you feel bad that you daydreamed during those workshops on inclusivity?

Are you still checking out women's asses like they're pieces of meat? Shame on you. And stop using "cocksucker" as an insult! It's offensive to people who suck cocks!

You still have the Geto Boys' first record, don't you? How can you be so disgusting?

I'm not even going near your porn consumption. I don't care that it's rather vanilla. All of it - all of it - is wrong. You should be reading Andrea Dworkin! But you don't even know about second or third wave feminism, do you? Never took those courses, did you? Because you don't care. You're oblivious, a dinosaur. Your privilege lets you get away with that.

Well, you need to start apologizing. Atoning. Because social justice!

But I won't be exercising it. If the lunacy you and most other people in this new social justice religion that silly white maleducated people have developed (hijacking and obscuring the very real and urgent cause of justice reform started by BLM) has taught me anything, it's that you are nuts. You are caught in a moral panic and have lost your mind. There is no sane conversation to be had with you. You're a fundamentalist.

So I'll quietly continue to support justice reform, but as to you and every other upper middle class frivolous person who seeks to demand every Taibbi (or generally "privileged" person) wear a hairshirt for the rest of his or her days, I'll say this: "I need to refresh my drink. Carry on without me." I'll be in the corner, telling filthy jokes with the oblivious and unrepentant.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

The thing about the internet is you can always find enough wingnuts holding the same extreme views as you to give the appearance, thru sheer numbers, that your insane view is actually mainstream.

QAnon is a good example of this. Plandemic is another. These are both clearly crackpot conspiracy theories, but thru sheer numbers of people supporting them, they almost appear kind of legitimate to a person who isn't savvy about the pervasiveness of "fake news" on the internet. (More Plandemic, which is packaged to look real, rather than QAnon, which is on its face ridiculous.) Most social justice warriors are loons. They say absurd things. But a lot of them say it all at once, and so a clearly counterproductive phrase like "defund the police" sounds like a serious mainstream policy consideration (rather than a policy plank mayors are pretending to treat as serious to simultaneously discredit and placate the cuckoo-pants left).

These social justice mob folk are simply borrowing Trump's playbook, which he borrowed from Goebbels, who borrowed it from Edward Bernays: Just repeat a thing enough and eventually it becomes a fact, or a serious policy consideration (whichever you need it it to be). "Lots of people are saying..." They don't care whether what they're saying is mainstream. They detest the mainstream and want to change the mainstream so that their non-mainstream ideas become mainstream.

You suggest that a notion, idea, or rule be vetted to determine if it is mainstream before it can be accepted as a baseline the violation of which should be punished. The internet has no such laddering of views.* There is no significant elitism of ideas online. And most of the social justice crowd rejects the idea of elitism of ideas in the same way the Trumpkins reject expertise. Both groups seek a leveling in which everyone's voice is as worthy as everyone else's. It's a true democratization. But with that leveling, the fools get as much airtime as the serious thinkers. Often more.

You can see the wages of this leveling in our current moment. On one side, we have the preposterous notion that journalists must apologize for long ago sins, the frivolous binary idea that one can only be sexist or racist or antisexist or antiracist, and endless purity tests in which those who challenge or in some cases merely fail to adhere to most orthodox tenets of wokeism are to be publicly scorned and made pariahs - have their economic lives ruined. On the other side, you have a different breed of know nothing, believing in outrageous conspiracy theories, envious and distrustful of any expert offering knowledge or insight, paranoid in the belief their way of life (largely fictionalized) is under attack from "coastal elites."

The internet had and still has so much promise. So much great shit comes from it. So many life enhancements. But alas, with that also comes the congealing of idiots, acceleration of moral panics, and delusional class warfare. Your attempt to apply rational thought would only work in regard to a small sliver of those online. The overwhelming majority are credulous imbeciles who probably ought not to be allowed to have any voice of any kind.

_______
* ETA: You also assume, I think, that we would use logic and rationality to determine what is mainstream. Social justice does not observe those rules. Nor does it observe science. When logic or rationality challenge social justice, social justice argues that empathy and victimization allow for its illogical or unwise demands or assertions to nevertheless persist. That one has been a victim or has a grievance inoculates one's words from logical or rational criticism. When science stands in its way, such as studies showing differences between male and female brains (a clinically irrefutable observation), science must stand down. Why? Because women have been historically oppressed, and this fact could be used by dishonest brokers to oppress them further. So to the extent you'd base "mainstream" on science or logical reasoning, your definition would be rejected, rendering your effort to determine a baseline for behavior pointless. (Your definition only works in the corner of the room, where moderate, normal people are having conversations outside earshot of extremists. It's the baseline applied before one rolls his eyes when hearing the latest nonsense offered by the priests the right or left religions of the day. Before one says, "Christ... They're all fucking nuts. I don't even bother with news anymore.")

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

The NPR story -- you know, the one you posted -- quoted him as asking for redemption. Hell, the whole story is about him looking for redemption. So you should argue with him.

And, yes, it sounds like he does need to ask for redemption, both because he says he does, and because it sounds like the bakery's catering director, his daughter, said some things about the community in which he does business that upset people a lot.

Since you have posted articles that neither explain what she said, nor explain how people in the community responded, it's hard for me to say how I'd react to the former, or whether the latter was over the top. As to the latter, there are a lot of bakeries out there. Why would you go to one that seems bigoted when you can go to another that isn't?

I don't know how you would know that, since you don't seem to have read anything that identifies who these anti-bakery "social justice warriors" are or what they said. It's just another example of your preferring to tilt at a windmill, a caricature of your own making, rather than actual things actual people are saying.

You're quite inventive.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I didn't say it was a hanging matter. I was pointing out that Taibbi was a jackass who acted in a heinous way towards this woman, not for laughs, as you originally suggested, and has never apologized. When he complains about "cancel culture," he is one of the people who are transparently jumping on that bandwagon because they have acted badly and don't want to be held accountable.

I didn't say that. I was talking about Taibbi.

What did I say that makes you think this? Was it pointing out all of the people who are exploiting complaints about "cancel culture" in bad faith? Saying that Taibbi has treated other people poorly and has a history that is relevant and shouldn't be ignored in a story about this subject?

What I haven't done is defend all of the people (fictional or otherwise) you're complaining about. You wish I would, but I haven't.

And I didn't do that, either. You can't read very well, can you?

What I did say is that if Taibbi is going to be quoted on this subject, the reporter writing the story should give more context. Inform the reader. Facts are facts -- why hide them?

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

He's been accused of acting badly. Are we back in that kangaroo court where an accusation is proof? My bad - he's been "credibly accused." That's the new equivalent of proof.

Maybe he thinks she's nuts. Maybe she's a disgruntled crank. He doesn't have to apologize to everyone who asserts they're owed one anymore than anyone else does.

When you say Taibbi has to atone, the rule holds that all like him must similarly atone. That's a defining facet of this moral panic. Everybody has sins and must ask the victims for forgiveness.

When you say his history should be mentioned, I agree with you entirely. It's relevant. When you suggest that he should be held accountable, or atone, you lose me. South African had truth and reconciliation panels for the horrors of Apartheid. Nuremberg served a similar purpose following WWII. A gonzo reporter being accused of being a dick doesn't merit such attention or concern. It's narcissistic and borders on extreme victim festishization to even suggest he must atone.

That's what struck me so strange about your "he should repent" line. You were rational, and then suddenly, you were arguing for moral judgment. The first camp is where we ought to be. The second is a camp of people who do not deserve respect.

These are your words: "Yes, I think Taibbi should repent, and I don't think he should be heard complaining about cancel culture until he owns what he did."

Ok, you're not asking him to wear a hairshirt for the rest of his life. But you're being a moral scold and demanding he submit to some form of justice for accusations of bad acts decades ago. That's moralizing. That's on the same spectrum with fundamentalists who used to argue that one should face judgment for being gay, having premarital sex, or watching porn. That's a provincial Catholic/Evangelical view, and I'm kind of shocked one as smart as you would hold that view. One cannot be enlightened without realizing that moral judgment is a cheap and useless currency. It's also a currency of people who have no real currency. Failures in life love to traffic in moral judgment. They can mint it faster than the Fed is currently minting dollars.

I don't have an issue with that. If he wants to own this space, he's got to take it with the baggage of those accusations. But does he have a duty to repent? Fuck no.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

The Midtown Global Market cancelled his lease while the neighborhood around it was a fire over racist policing and while residents of the apartments above it and tenants were spending their nights trying to prevent people from burning it down (he also has another retail location, where, I think, the actual baking takes place). It's open again, but still largely boarded up. Much of the rest of its block burned to the ground. Without that context, he probably would have faced fewer consequences.

I also vaguely recall that there was more than just the old social media posts, but I don't recall what. Maybe it was just other racist stuff from other family/employees.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

You can keep telling yourself this lie, but no, the accountability you're complaining about comes out of the work of black women.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Did you read The Washington Post article? You're like a defense lawyer who walks into the courtroom without having learned anything about the case.

Either could be true, but I'm not clear how that would justify what he did.

He doesn't have to apologize at all. The apology doesn't mean anything if it's coerced.

I didn't say he has to atone. Why can't you read? Reading is fundamental.

I don't know who is "like" him, and you have invented a moral panic without being able to name a single person involved on the pro-panic side. My view is that each of these cases that are being lumped together as "cancel culture" has different facts, which are important, and that one should look at the actual facts.

OK, great.

I, as a person posting on the internet, think that Taibbi treated someone poorly and should try to make it right. But if he doesn't want to, that's on him. I haven't tweeted at him about it, or done anything else to "hold him accountable," other than sharing my opinion on a chat board that no one reads. He can say whatever he wants, but the Guardian should be treating him as a bad actor with a history, not as a dispassionate expert. He can talk all he wants, but I don't think people should be listening.

The reason I'm posting about him is less about him, and more about what he reveals about "cancel culture." No one is willing to come out and say, "I'm an asshole, I have mistreated people because of their gender/race/ethnicity/etc., and I'm not sorry -- I'd do it again for kicks if I could get away with it and may even if I couldn't but had been drinking." That's how many people feel, I'd bet, but they can't say that so instead they complain about "cancel culture", like Taibbi to the Guardian.

I've never said that nothing about the complaints about "cancel culture" is true. What I keep saying is that many of the complaints are bogus, and that a lot of people are your bedfellows for the wrong reasons, not out of any kind of principled ideological commitment to free speech. Which destroys the credibility of the whole project.