Cancel Culture

Joseph Conrad seems to have been an anti-Belgian-imperialismist but had much less of a problem with the old "get it done" British Imperialism. A text for our times indeed.
 
A big problem here is that the trans 'debate', like every debate, has a history, and during that history an array of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology has emerged which people not familiar with trans issues won't recognise or read into. Bigots use this to their advantage, couching their prejudice in language that is very obvious to people who have seen transphobes employing these bad faith arguments before, but which seems quite innocuous to those who aren't well-versed in the debate.

Imagine your friend is banging on about a politician they don't like, making grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about them manipulating world events, alleged shady business dealings, allegations of corruption, bribery, theft and insinuating they're looking after the interests of a shadowy cabal to the detriment of the country. You later find out that the politician is Jewish and you immediately realise your friend's opinion of this person appears to be rooted in all classic tropes of antisemitism. If you said to your friend, 'hey, all that stuff you said was pretty antisemitic' they might turn around and say 'when did I ever mention his race?'. The reason you are able to identify that your friend's judgement reflects more on his bigotry than the character of the person he's railing against is because you have knowledge of the tropes of antisemitism and the innuendo and subtext in which antisemites couch their bigotry. The fact that he never said 'I don't like this guy because I don't trust Jewish people' doesn't make him any less bigoted, it just makes him better at marketing it (or perhaps ignorant of his own bigotry).

J K Rowling will likely never come out point-blank and say she hates trans women, but she's broadcasting it pretty openly through the words she has chosen and by employing every bad faith anti-trans dog-whistle in the book. The reason you can't recognise it isn't because it isn't there, it's that you (understandably) haven't got the same knowledge of the tropes and innuendos surrounding anti-trans bigotry as those who have it thrown at them every day.

I guess I'm just not quite convinced that she's anti-trans. Seems more to me that she has views around the trans debate that are not accepted by some and therefore she is labelled anti-trans.

Going through the responses to her tweets trying to find trans responses it's a mixed bag, some supporting her, some hating her...such is life I guess!
 
A big problem here is that the trans 'debate', like every debate, has a history, and during that history an array of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology has emerged which people not familiar with trans issues won't recognise or read into. Bigots use this to their advantage, couching their prejudice in language that is very obvious to people who have seen transphobes employing these bad faith arguments before, but which seems quite innocuous to those who aren't well-versed in the debate.

Imagine your friend is banging on about a politician they don't like, making grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about them manipulating world events, alleged shady business dealings, allegations of corruption, bribery, theft and insinuating they're looking after the interests of a shadowy cabal to the detriment of the country. You later find out that the politician is Jewish and you immediately realise your friend's opinion of this person appears to be rooted in all classic tropes of antisemitism. If you said to your friend, 'hey, all that stuff you said was pretty antisemitic' they might turn around and say 'when did I ever mention his race?'. The reason you are able to identify that your friend's judgement reflects more on his bigotry than the character of the person he's railing against is because you have knowledge of the tropes of antisemitism and the innuendo and subtext in which antisemites couch their bigotry. The fact that he never said 'I don't like this guy because I don't trust Jewish people' doesn't make him any less bigoted, it just makes him better at marketing it (or perhaps ignorant of his own bigotry).

J K Rowling will likely never come out point-blank and say she hates trans women, but she's broadcasting it pretty openly through the words she has chosen and by employing every bad faith anti-trans dog-whistle in the book. The reason you can't recognise it isn't because it isn't there, it's that you (understandably) haven't got the same knowledge of the tropes and innuendos surrounding anti-trans bigotry as those who have it thrown at them every day.

One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...
 
One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...

Yeah this would be one of those transphobic dog whistles I mentioned. To a casual observer, 'trans women aren't women' can look like a pretty uncontroversial statement about the fact that trans women are biologically and anatomically different to cis women. But, as you note, it goes beyond sex into gender, and to someone who has seen this debate play out time and again, it's a pretty solid marker of a bigot.

Imagine if public policy was set based on Rowling's 'trans women are men' argument. It would mean that, despite being a group that disproportionately experiences sexual violence and domestic abuse from men as well as transphobic abuse and violence (again largely from men), trans women would have no choice but to use men's toilets and changing rooms in public spaces. They would have to make a choice between 'out'-ing themselves at work by using men's facilities or not using bathroom facilities for 8 hours straight every day. They would have no recourse to women's support services in the aftermath of a sexual assault, rape or having fled domestic abuse.

Rowling and her ilk believe a lot of falsehoods about trans women despite evidence to the contrary, and they let these falsehoods dictate their views on whether trans women deserve to access basic amenities and to live their lives with dignity. To me that's a pretty cut and dry definition of bigotry.
 
One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...

I don't know if she has, but one thing I think is interesting. She tweeted out some really high praise for Stephen King. When he later tweeted that "Trans women are women", she then deleted her praise.

It seems like she not only thinks that trans women aren't women, but that this position is so repugnant to her that she can't be seen praising someone who holds it. I have a hard time seeing how one can both behave like this and not be anti trans.
 
Cancel culture going on at the beeb as they've been bullied by the right wing snowflakes to cancel Andrew Neil's show before he says something upsetting about their blonde overlord again.
 
It's ridiculous. Neil will be sipping Pimms at a Johnson garden party this summer; hardly 'welcome to the resistance' material, is he?
 
Is this even a thing? I’ve never met anyone in my life that bangs on about cancelling x y and z, and I’ve met well over 100 people.
 
I either don't understand what the word culture means or don't understand what cancel culture is.

I hate how there has to be a stupid slogan for everything that happens now.
 
Is this even a thing? I’ve never met anyone in my life that bangs on about cancelling x y and z, and I’ve met well over 100 people.

I think it’s a thing in limited situations...college campuses and with the regressive left there’s definitely been instances of people being cancelled or pressure for people to be cancelled. Seems a big problem with comedians being told not to make certain jokes.

However in real life...nobody gives a shit. The internet just amplifies people that moan about things that don’t matter. I’ve never met a real person that has experienced being cancelled...
 
Statue pulled down in Bristol... History being destroyed in front of our eyes... How will the children learn about BLM?? :(
 
It's amazing how influential Marxist cancel culture is. Just look at the lefty media and establishment it has reduced us to: Sun, Sky, Torygraph, BBC sans testes, anti-trans centrist Graun, Brexit, huge Tory majority. Is there anything these socialist vampires don't have their claws dug deep into.
 
Even someone as blithely ignorant as me noticed years ago how the U.S. right-wing endlessly complained about the 'leftist media'. This astonishingly ridiculous and transparent tactic somehow succeeded over there, and now it's over here. Similar to the apparently successful illusion of a wealthy blowhard like Limbaugh (or Trump) who, just because he wears his shirt-sleeves rolled up, passes for a regular Joe who's standing up for the little guy. Incredible that such tactics actually work.
 


I have a feeling about this tweet, so screenshotting here.

Let's look at the vital research being curbed.

EdA_sBeU0AAa6BE



Oh. Oh no. How embarrasing. Not even high schoolers would fall for this. Big oof.




Aaaaaah. Hand-drawn. The highest form of graph authenticity. What will academia do without Noah Carl. Thank god he has Epstein's friend, THE Harvard legend, THE high priest of capitalism, Steven Pinker himself, to bat for him and his ability to tell the truth about those Bangaldeshis succumbing to their genes and doing fraud. I find it funny and not at all tragic that my academic career is going to end before it began while Noah will join Quilette, the Ark for grievance study martyrs, backed by someone far more powerful than my boss' boss. I am actually laughing and not at all crying.
 
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Interesting thread in the comments about Pinker btw.
This was around 2010 and I was about 18 at the time. I remember reading a small blurb-type article that the Harvard president was in trouble for saying that women generally don't have the temperament for science, and I wondered why people weren't allowed to speak the truth anymore.
 
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I have a feeling about this tweet, so screenshotting here.

Let's look at the vital research being curbed.

EdA_sBeU0AAa6BE



Oh. Oh no. How embarrasing. Not even high schoolers would fall for this. Big oof.




Aaaaaah. Hand-drawn. The highest form of graph authenticity. What will academia do without Noah Carl. Thank god he has Epstein's friend, THE Harvard legend, THE high priest of capitalism, Steven Pinker himself, to bat for him and his ability to tell the truth about those Bangaldeshis succumbing to their genes and doing fraud. I find it funny and not at all tragic that my academic career is going to end before it began while Noah will join Quilette, the Ark for grievance study martyrs, backed by someone far more powerful than my boss' boss. I am actually laughing and not at all crying.

feck me, there's no way those graphs can be real. That's insane
 
feck me, there's no way those graphs can be real. That's insane

Full paper is behind a paywall, here's the abstract

Several reports have highlighted that, within Britain, allegations of electoral fraud tend to be more common in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. However, the extent of this association has not yet been quantified. Using data at the local authority level, this paper shows that percentage Pakistani and Bangladeshi (logged) is a robust predictor of two measures of electoral fraud allegations: one based on designations by the Electoral Commission, and one based on police enquiries. Indeed, the association persists after controlling for other minority shares, demographic characteristics, socio-economic deprivation, and anti-immigration attitudes. I interpret this finding with reference to the growing literature on consanguinity (cousin marriage) and corruption. Rates of cousin marriage tend to be high in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, which may have fostered norms of nepotism and in-group favoritism that persist over time. To bolster my interpretation, I use individual level survey data to show that, within Europe, migrants from countries with high rates of cousin marriage are more likely to say that family should be one's main priority in life, and are less likely to say it is wrong for a public official to request a bribe.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379417300811

Here's figure 2 btw. Especially for the left-hand-side one, I'd love to see any measure of fit.


1-s2.0-S0261379417300811-gr2.jpg
 


There were others apparently who wished to sign it whose personal views led the leading signatories to ‘cancel’ them from signing it. How ironic and what a fitting expose of the farcical myth of some ultra-woke all powerful cancel culture.
 


There were others apparently who wished to sign it whose personal views led the leading signatories to ‘cancel’ them from signing it. How ironic and what a fitting expose of the farcical myth of some ultra-woke all powerful cancel culture.

:lol:
 
A big problem here is that the trans 'debate', like every debate, has a history, and during that history an array of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology has emerged which people not familiar with trans issues won't recognise or read into. Bigots use this to their advantage, couching their prejudice in language that is very obvious to people who have seen transphobes employing these bad faith arguments before, but which seems quite innocuous to those who aren't well-versed in the debate.

Imagine your friend is banging on about a politician they don't like, making grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about them manipulating world events, alleged shady business dealings, allegations of corruption, bribery, theft and insinuating they're looking after the interests of a shadowy cabal to the detriment of the country. You later find out that the politician is Jewish and you immediately realise your friend's opinion of this person appears to be rooted in all classic tropes of antisemitism. If you said to your friend, 'hey, all that stuff you said was pretty antisemitic' they might turn around and say 'when did I ever mention his race?'. The reason you are able to identify that your friend's judgement reflects more on his bigotry than the character of the person he's railing against is because you have knowledge of the tropes of antisemitism and the innuendo and subtext in which antisemites couch their bigotry. The fact that he never said 'I don't like this guy because I don't trust Jewish people' doesn't make him any less bigoted, it just makes him better at marketing it (or perhaps ignorant of his own bigotry).

J K Rowling will likely never come out point-blank and say she hates trans women, but she's broadcasting it pretty openly through the words she has chosen and by employing every bad faith anti-trans dog-whistle in the book. The reason you can't recognise it isn't because it isn't there, it's that you (understandably) haven't got the same knowledge of the tropes and innuendos surrounding anti-trans bigotry as those who have it thrown at them every day.
What if in all previous conversations with this "friend", he/she/gender non-specific has never shown the slightest inclination to views antisemitic? What if your friend has even expressed views couched in that well known guise for deep seated antisemitism, philosemitism -yet meant them in good faith? What if they didn't even know the politician was Jewish? What if they are Jewish and never told you? Why are you even choosing a Jewish individual as an example? Do Jews leap to the front of the benighted stereotype queue in your head because they are always there, somewhere in your head? Are you mentioning them -consciously or unconsciously- to reignite the idea of linkage between Jews and a "shadowy cabal", even as you eschew it? How do I know what's going on in your head? And how the feck do you know what's going on in your friend's head? You don't. Understand that, and you might get more friends, with or without a knowledge of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology..
 
@Needham - You've entirely missed the point of that example, I suspect purposefully. In any case I'm not sure if "We should give people using anti-semitic tropes a pass because we can't be 100% sure what their thought processes are" is the gotcha you think it is. Obviously context is important in judging any action, but if you were to follow your argument to its logical conclusion, no-one should judge anyone for anything they say or do because, hey, for all we know they might have had a very good reason for doing it, or might have been ignorant of the fact they were doing it. I'm sorry if my unwillingness to put in the time to craft a suitably comprehensive backstory for my imaginary character has upset you.

The example is there to demonstrate that every form of hate speech has a vocabulary which extends beyond obvious slurs, and that some of these vocabularies are widely understand and others aren't. Many of us will recognise the shorthands, euphemisms, tropes or whatever you want to call them antisemites have historically used to stir up fear and hatred against Jews because, at least in the UK, the rise of Nazi Germany and the role of antisemitism in that rise is a major topic of study in history lessons, and because it's been in the British news a lot recently. That's why it's a good example to use on an English-speaking forum for fans of an English team.
 
@Needham - You've entirely missed the point of that example, I suspect purposefully. In any case I'm not sure if "We should give people using anti-semitic tropes a pass because we can't be 100% sure what their thought processes are" is the gotcha you think it is. Obviously context is important in judging any action, but if you were to follow your argument to its logical conclusion, no-one should judge anyone for anything they say or do because, hey, for all we know they might have had a very good reason for doing it, or might have been ignorant of the fact they were doing it. I'm sorry if my unwillingness to put in the time to craft a suitably comprehensive backstory for my imaginary character has upset you.

The example is there to demonstrate that every form of hate speech has a vocabulary which extends beyond obvious slurs, and that some of these vocabularies are widely understand and others aren't. Many of us will recognise the shorthands, euphemisms, tropes or whatever you want to call them antisemites have historically used to stir up fear and hatred against Jews because, at least in the UK, the rise of Nazi Germany and the role of antisemitism in that rise is a major topic of study in history lessons, and because it's been in the British news a lot recently. That's why it's a good example to use on an English-speaking forum for fans of an English team.
Not about giving anyone a pass. It's about you and others going straight to bigotry as an explanation for viewpoints that don't coincide with the new orthodoxy. It's a kind of higher level reactionaryism based on your reputed superior education (tropes, euphemisms and whatnot). And of course I don't think you're antisemtic. But you get a sense of how tediously unarguable it might be to be reflexively accused of any form of bigotry in this way.
 
People don't bother to get involved in a debate like this until it affects things they use or care about. Opening up a society to accepting trans gender people doesn't bother most (yes it does does bother some) but when you start messing with who can and can't use the toilets then you have driven your gender ideological tanks straight onto their safe space lawn.

Those who achieved the policy change can't stand the idea of it being questioned as an unreasonable imposition. So they attack the questioner rather than the question and if they can find a way to damn the individual with an ism then they close down the debate. No one knows whether JKR is trans-phobic but it certainly helps the Trans rights movement's objectives if a rich and famous and up until now popular counter advocate can be shut up. Also if at the same time an example can be made of her which cows others who might start to question the basis in science for all of this, well all well and good, that is just how it works these days.

Does it really matter who makes the argument if it is a reasonable one?

Not all change is good. Even change which is good can be implemented badly or better. If change moves the weighting of contradictory rights from one group to another why wouldn't the group who feels they are losing out question its validity?

I don't think it is fair to complain about language and ascribe an alternative narratives to people who use certain words, if the people who are complaining are the ones changing their meaning in the first place.
 
Nobody knows anything ladada, implication and insinuation are no, the problem of induction, we live on a flat earth in the Matrix. Bloody woke, postmodern marxists with their certianties and stuff.

Prove that this image isn't merely a malicious projection from the Cartesian demon, sat on the jar that contains my brain:
u5eu24ndb9n01.jpg
 
Nobody knows anything ladada, implication and insinuation are no, the problem of induction, we live on a flat earth in the Matrix. Bloody woke, postmodern marxists with their certianties and stuff.

Prove that this image isn't merely a malicious projection from the Cartesian demon, sat on the jar that contains my brain:
u5eu24ndb9n01.jpg
I’ve met that woman before! She used to work at MMU.
 
Not about giving anyone a pass. It's about you and others going straight to bigotry as an explanation for viewpoints that don't coincide with the new orthodoxy. It's a kind of higher level reactionaryism based on your reputed superior education (tropes, euphemisms and whatnot). And of course I don't think you're antisemtic. But you get a sense of how tediously unarguable it might be to be reflexively accused of any form of bigotry in this way.

If you want to paint me, a low-level public sector worker living in a pit village council estate, as part of an aloof metropolitan elite because I know the word 'euphemism', I guess go ahead.

But it's pretty clear from your posts in this thread that your issue isn't with the argument as to whether J K Rowling is transphobic, it's more of a generic 'anti-woke' thing you have going on. Although, fair play to you, employing an epistemological argument as to whether anything is truly knowable as a way to deflect criticism of thinly-veiled bigotry is a new one on me.
 
Although, fair play to you, employing an epistemological argument as to whether anything is truly knowable as a way to deflect criticism of thinly-veiled bigotry is a new one on me.

This is actually an ancient topic. Pyrrhonist skepticts have held for almost 2500 years that bigotry is impossible. The academic skeptics didn't go quite as far, arguing that while bigotry might exist, it's just impossible for people to identify it. According to Carneades, even though knowledge of bigotry is fundamentally impossible and we should always suspend judgement, we have to live in the real world and it's therefore permissible to follow one's sensations about bigotry as a form of approximation to what real bigotry might conceivably look like.

Also, I don't know why this isn't more known, but Aristotle was one of the first to point out that anti-racists are in fact the real racists.
 


Day 1: Cancel Culture is bad :( plz help i signed a letter us millionaires are dying here
Day 2: You said you won’t buy my books cos you don’t like me? You’re cancelled :cool:
 


Day 1: Cancel Culture is bad :( plz help i signed a letter us millionaires are dying here
Day 2: You said you won’t buy my books cos you don’t like me? You’re cancelled :cool:


Jesus christ that apology is ridiculous.
 
Fighting cancellation with big balls :cool:



Previous hits the SJWs couldn't deal with:



Forgot to add, not just is he thanfully immune from cancellation, he was one of the architects of the welfare reform carried out by the Clintons and the Republicans in the 90s.
 
Fighting cancellation with big balls :cool:



Previous hits the SJWs couldn't deal with:



Forgot to add, not just is he thanfully immune from cancellation, he was one of the architects of the welfare reform carried out by the Clintons and the Republicans in the 90s.


Murray’s pseudo-science racist trash is the perfect example of why cancel culture is confected nonsense. If you say things that are serviceable to those in power, no matter how controversial or how much it antagonises the big bad left, you are often richly rewarded - the exact opposite of the mythical cancelling.
 
Murray’s pseudo-science racist trash is the perfect example of why cancel culture is confected nonsense. If you say things that are serviceable to those in power, no matter how controversial or how much it antagonises the big bad left, you are often richly rewarded - the exact opposite of the mythical cancelling.

Can't be pseudoscience when you create pretty graphs!



Human Accomplishment is probably the worst book ever written, any genre.
 
https://asadhaider.substack.com/p/critical-confusion

Parts that I liked, some I already agreed with and some were stuff I didn't know about:

(this part i definitely agree with)
Furthermore, Marx’s economic theory can’t be understood in terms of a moralistic binary between oppressor and oppressed. He presents an analysis of capitalism as a contradictory system, which is prone to crises and ultimately undermines its own capacity to deliver economic growth as the result of its relations of production.

Marcuse gave his own peculiar interpretation, building on the idea that the industrial working class of the advanced capitalist countries had been integrated into the system, and proposing that revolution would come from those who were “outside” the society. His framework was certainly cultural, but his willingness to relinquish the working class as the agent of revolution puts him totally at odds with Gramsci. Furthermore, the reaction of colleagues of his like Adorno, despite also building on similar theoretical foundations, was that the New Left was completely vacuous and even reactionary
(no surprise that i've seen gramsci quoted a few times in random leftist articles, and not marcuse)

In the American academy, “postmodernism” would come to be conflated with any kind of skepticism towards universal truth. This relativism was itself then conflated with the emergence and growth of programs in ethnic studies, feminist studies, and so on. Scholarship in these rising disciplines often had to criticize existing methodologies, which, for example, had based knowledge about South Asia on the archives of the colonists, or wrote labor history without explaining how women formed a part of the working class. These were serious methodological and conceptual questions which were consistent with basic goals of intellectual life: to expand knowledge beyond existing boundaries, to question received wisdom, to interrogate the structure of society.

But the conflation of these questions, which were a matter of scholarly rigor, with the ill-defined category of “postmodernism” resulted in a somewhat cartoonish academic politics, which is what the pundits really have in mind when they’re referring to postmodernism. This is the zone where the oppressor/oppressed binary, identity, and lived experience became the foundations of politics, and they often resurface in contemporary discourses of social justice. It was often based on a grab-bag of references that were tenuously tied to ad hoc positions within university politics.

However, this “postmodernism” was not only an independent development from the thinking of figures like Foucault and Derrida, it was totally incompatible with their insights.

(stuff i know nothing about)
As Foucault traces in his 1978 lecture “What is Critique,” in Europe the critical attitude arises in the context of societies in which people and their thoughts are governed by religion, and it reflects the desire not to be governed — or at least, not to be governed quite like that. Critique is “the art of not being governed quite so much.” Hence the critical attitude of the Enlightenment is to not simply accept what an authority tells you is true, but to independently determine its validity; not to follow laws because they are dictated by power, but because you have determined them to be just. Critique, contrary to Sullivan’s paranoia, is an Enlightenment attitude.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that some unmodified conception of the Enlightenment could just be reasserted as a contemporary vantage of critique. Indicating some affinity with the Frankfurt School, Foucault noted that the forms of rationality that emerged along with the Enlightenment were also implicated in new forms of power, operating within rather than in spite of scientific knowledge, political freedom, and individual subjectivity. But understanding these developments was itself part of the complex operation of the critical attitude, which was not afraid to put its own standpoint into question.

It’s the critique of power that worries the likes of Sullivan, who says that it amounts to the view that “we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you.”

It’s either amusing or painful to read this since Foucault’s analysis of power was specifically directed against the zero-sum view, for which power is something that one holds and wields over another. Foucault conceived power as productive and relational. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, a short and clear book which Sullivan could read, Foucault dispels these interpretations completely. Consider this straightforward sentence: “Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away.” Or: “Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations.”


What Foucault is arguing is that power isn’t repressive, as in someone prohibiting you from doing something, but productive, in the sense that it produces particular ways of living, moving, working, and acting. Crucially, it produces identities: identities aren’t pre-existing categories which are then the basis of oppression by a more powerful identity. Power actually constitutes these identity categories, which is why part of the critical attitude involves putting our own identities into question, rather than asserting that they reflect our inner essence.
 
As usual the leftist nazis that dominate the academy cancel another moderate conservative for wrongthink

 


:lol:

It’s shocking the amount of shite that can make it into the mainstream media. I too have been punished for not commenting on the pictures in my manager’s office :(