Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

Hey Ty, recall when I warned about what cancel culture would look like when perpetrated by the right? That it would be a lot worse than what we’ve seen from the left? That if the left didn’t stop using this silly argument that it doesn’t exist, and actually deal with it, we’d get some really bad use of it by the right?

Well, it appears that when the right wing decides to engage in it, they go to full on censorship: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-w...clude-critical

I have been critical of critical race theory, but censoring it from curricula is flatly ridiculous. And probably unconstitutional.

This is exactly the loathsome response I predicted, and now you’re going to see every governor of a red state pull the same shit.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

This is not new, and was happening well before anyone was using the phrase “cancel culture”:

http://philosorapters.blogspot.com/2...ons-about.html

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

DeSantis, a governor, is holding a news conference to take a victory lap about doing it.

Can you dig thru Google to find a situation in which a governor, about 20 levels higher than a local school board, decided to not only directly fiddle with curricula but also tout having done so to the media?

And this guy is also emerging as a national political force. He’s not dumb, and he he’s attracting serious handlers. Some consultant is telling him this is a big vote winning position. And that consultant is right.

Who loses in this dog fight? As usual, people who think freedom of expression is our most important and nearest to absolute right.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

If you think I am anything but horrified by this, you are wrong. And I agree that this is far more egregious. But the right has been engaging in attempts to censor viewpoints they disagree with, including censorship on this very issue, for a long time. It is wrong to suggest that this is primarily a reaction to woke-ist social media cancel culture mobs. It’s just more of the same.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

It's not a response. It's how they've been operating for decades. The Alabama board of education banned teaching yoga and meditation in schools in 1993.

Their House just passed a bill to lift the ban so long as no one uses Sanskrit, ESPECIALLY Namaste. Because Alabama school children will all immediately renounce Jesus if they hear "uttanasana" instead of "chair pose."

We'll see if it passes their Senate.

Banning and boycotting things they don't like is in their DNA. They've just rebranded to "cancel culture" efforts to call out their own bad behavior.

Re: Objectively idiotic?
 

I heard a clip from the judge on NPR and he didn't sound thrilled about it. Really dumb.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

As I've agreed, Cancel Culture started with Focus on the Family in the 70s.

But the the liberal (classical definition) argument against banning free expression always succeeded because the left and center were defenders of free speech. Now, the tables are flipped. When DeSantis bans critical race theory, and real liberals like me would call him out as violating free speech principles, he's immune to the critique. He can criticize progressives for seeking to squelch or preclude speech in various other forms.

Nevermind that his is govt action, whereas what the left is doing is using free speech to ban other speech it doesn't like. That argument will go nowhere with the broader public.

Additionally, in the past, the right wingers involved in cancellation were private individuals setting up boycotts (Brent Bozell) or govt actors of limited power and public stature (school boards). Now, because cancellation has become fun for everyone and is by its very nature a public act (getting mobs of people to shame others), politicians like DeSantis can cleverly get in on the game with zero risk. It's a can't lose posture for him and every other politician who'll plagiarize this political move.

This doesn't end well, and the blame lies with the millions of people out there who look at cancellation - done by either the right or left - and think it's acceptable, or worse, lie about it not existing.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

Right, except now it's far worse, and there's no side with the gravitas to challenge those who seek to preclude free expression.

For the past four years, the people who would typically criticize those who seek to shame voices they do not like and compel employers of such voices to fire them sat silently. In many cases the people who would in the past defend all speech, however unpopular, instead decided the following:

It's okay to ban/limit some speech because "disinformation" (which we get to define ourselves) is really bad. We should limit free speech because Trump has marginalized our ability to criticize him by lying incessantly and telling people the media is fake news.

Yes, that cynicism has not only persisted, but grown. The NYTimes ran an oped recently suggesting we need a govt "Reality Czar" to police media. Let me translate that: We need a Reality Czar to police media to punish voices that we, the traditional gatekeepers, think should not be allowed into the debate.

So now, when a guy like DeSantis cagily decides to use full on state censorship to ban expression, no one has the political or moral gravitas to challenge him. Anyone decrying what he's done from the left will be hit with this:

Ohhhh, so it's okay for you hypocrites cancel what you don't like by Twitter mob, but it's not okay for the guy who represents the will of the voters of the State of Florida to do so?

Politically, that's gold. And it'll be copied.

We real liberals had done a great job of shutting down rogue school boards, Brent Bozells, and Tipper Gores (recall the PMRC cancel shitshow?) in the past under the noble banner All Speech Should Be Protected and the Only Way to Deal With Problematic Speech is to Ignore or Refute It.

That system worked brilliantly, and it protected everyone. But it relied on liberals observing the sanctity of free expression. The right wing thugs sought to squelch speech in the marketplace and via govt and lost, time after time. Increasing tolerance for more previously taboo speech became the rule. And that was a good thing. That led to enlightenment in every form of art and communication.

But then Trump came along, and the liberals were bulldozed by progressives, who like their right wing analogues don't really care much for free expression. What both groups care about is dominating the narrative, manufacturing consent to their ideals. These extreme progressives didn't counter or ignore speech they didn't like but instead sought to silence it. And in doing so, they woke up the right wing, which was more than happy to use the levers of govt to do it in their favor.

And now free expression is in peril. People are afraid to speak with candor. The media outlets are silos of idiots parroting boring narratives (Fox/Breitbart v. MSNBC/NYT). And who is to blame? I'd say those who looked at cancel culture, both right and left, and made the cynical calculation that messages with which they agreed, mob attacks on or boycotts of voices they didn't like, were more important than protecting free speech.

The worst are those who shrugged and said, "Oh, I know it's illiberal to say nothing of cancel culture, or pretend it isn't bad or doesn't exist, but free expression will survive... and I kinda like [Left: Seeing people like Andrew Sullivan suffer] [Right: Seeing critical race theory banned from classrooms]." Those people suck all the dicks.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

The admins cancelled Paigow here for speech. That was years ago.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

The stupidest fucking thing in the world is people who point to bad behavior by the right and pretend that it was somehow caused by someone on the left. Ron DeSantis not give a single shit that a bunch of people got upset about a letter in Harper's magazine, or that Matt Yglesias left Vox to get a Substack, or whatever other travesties of left-wing what's-the-new-term-for-PC about which you have bitched and moaned. Trump conservatives have absolutely zero commitment to the principle of free speech, and their opportunistic desire in censoring lefty speech was not caused or enabled in any way by the left's reaction to anything. The way you implicitly excuse right-wing bullshit by pretending that it was somehow caused by left-wing bullshit is conservative-curious, if not full-on conservative (hating the game here, not the player), and if you wanted to show that you had a neutral commitment to free speech as a principle in itself, you would just bitch and moan about what DeSantis wants to do instead of using that as a pretext to score a cheap and stupid point about the left.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Florida, as anti-mask and anti-lockdown as they come, only has 3% more Covid-19 cases per capita than the US overall, and 8% fewer deaths per capita. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/polit...ida/index.html

This ties in to Ty's question why conservatives are more anti-mask. I think it is because they are generally more anti-science, anti-elist, and anti-government telling them what to do (except for abortion, of course). It doesn't help when the government consistently lies or is wrong.

Re: Objectively idiotic?
 

Well, I got my answer. Local news reports that the Minneapolis city attorney, apparently without elaboration, denies that the timing of the settlement has had a negative impact on jury selection. Despite the fact two previously seated jurors had to be excused because of their reactions to the settlement, and multiple other prospective jurors have been struck for the same reason. I guess that resolves that issue. I was wrong to have doubted the wisdom of announcing the record civil settlement in the middle of jury selection.

Re: Objectively idiotic?
 

I was going to say she's never been wrong before, but then I realized that it is no longer her.

Re: Objectively idiotic?
 

Right. I don’t know him, and as far as I know, he is just following orders and saying what he was told to say. But it seems like a ridiculous statement to make.

Re: Cancel Culture, Right Wing Style
 

This is pretty much a tacit admission that my last line about the worst people in this mess hit a little to close to home for you.

But I have no interest in fighting with you about whether you're fine with illiberal behavior that suits ends you like, or whether I'm fine with conservative behavior. My only cheap point was to say "I told you so" to you. And as more on the right copy DeSantis, I'll say it more often.

But unlike you, who'll remain dormant when voices you don't like are targeted, I am close to absolutist. I've defended the left when they're cancelled. And I'm calling what DeSantis is doing what it is: Cancel Culture. You prefer to dissemble and change the focus, pretending it doesn't exist. If what DeSantis did isn't cancellation of a sort, what is?

Or are you now going to make the argument that what DeSantis is doing is cancel culture, but what's been done by the left wasn't?

It's your own knot in which you're tied. You figure it out.