Cancel Culture

Didn't see this elsewhere - apologies if I have missed it.

Barrister Sacked For Branding Mixed Race Teenager 'Stroppy' After Equalities Case

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...r-holbrook-sacked_uk_6016c12cc5b622df90f4510c

A barrister who branded a schoolgirl a “stroppy teenager of colour” for pursuing an equalities case after suffering hair discrimination at school has been sacked from his law firm.
Cornerstone Barristers “expelled” Jon Holbrook following his Twitter attack on Ruby Williams, who was repeatedly sent home from school because of her afro hair.

Holbrook shared a video from the Equality and Human Rights Commission about Ruby’s case which cited the Equality Act, and claimed the law “undermines school discipline by empowering the stroppy teenager of colour”.
Cornerstone said the “particularly offensive” tweet was “irreconcilable” with his continued membership of the chambers, which “unequivocally condemn discrimination in all its forms”.
Ruby’s mother, Kate Williams, told HuffPost UK she was “very upset” about the comments, which made her “uncomfortable” in terms of her daughter’s “race, gender and age”.
Williams has reported Holbrook to the Bar Standards Board, which regulates barristers, as she does not “believe he should be in a position of power over people’s lives”.
The school teacher in October told HuffPost UK of the “ridiculous” stress and anxiety Ruby faced when she was repeatedly sent home from the Urswick school in Hackney, east London, because of her afro hair.
Her natural hair was judged to breach school policy which stated that “afro style hair must be of reasonable size and length”.

But she received an £8,500 out-of-court settlement after her family took legal action against the school.
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Here was the original tweet:



Mr Holbrook is not happy:

https://thecritic.co.uk/cancelled-by-my-barristers-chambers-over-a-tweet/

The woke mob on Twitter have not succeeded with their attempted cancellation. Four days before my expulsion I resigned, having concluded that I no longer wanted to practice as a full-time barrister. The attempted cancellation prompted the manner and timing of my resignation, but it was not the underlying cause. The only reason that Chambers proceeded to expel me, despite my resignation, was because the salivating attack dogs wanted some red meat to chew. Chambers was compliant enough to jump to their barking but it made no difference to me – save to enhance my reputation as a free speech advocate.


I will now have more time to polemicise against the woke whose contempt for reasoned debate becomes clearer with each attempted cancellation. I intend to act via the Free Speech Union for the “little guy” who is cancelled in his workplace. Thirty years ago, I began my legal career doing pro bono unfair dismissal cases for women sacked for being pregnant. I will now finish my legal career with pro bono unfair dismissal cases for women sacked for saying that a woman does not have a penis. The attempt to cancel me has not and will not work. It merely fortifies me in the fight against cancel culture.
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He seems to have form though:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/19/turning-the-uk-into-an-eu-colony/







 
This thread has inexorably been heading to this glorious moment, all culture wars issue merge into one

 
Wibble said:
Can we cancel this waste of DNA from existence? Build a time machine to prevent conception if necessary.
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I should really stop giving him the attention he craves. It's fun watching him get mocked though.
 
holdsteady said:
This in tandem with the Ken Loach stuff is disgusting
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The Ken Loach one seems to happen once a year. One of the most insane takes of all time.



Personally I'd take any film made by the only British director to win the Palme d'Or twice over people comic book guy(Loach made the greatest film about United imo).

berbatrick said:


For a guy on the left (which means he knows about Finkelstein) and especially for one who wrote in support of Corbyn, i don't know how he didn't see this one coming.
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Hoping that the shock and outrage he is putting forward is just the usual twitter schtick, I get his argument in those tweets but you're right whats happened to him shouldn't be a surprise.
 
@Sweet Square
journalist fired over joke - 3 posts
actor fired over bad tweets - 10 pages

this is a totally losing battle. no amount of examples of left-wing people getting cancelled makes any difference when one from the other side takes all the attention. there's no principles, no morals, on either side of this nonsense, but there is a successful media operation by one side that gets distilled into people's "common sense". amazon close down an entire warehouse which happened to have some union organisers (fired for political views!!!!), it doesn't register one bit. it's the SJW corporations, it's not corporations looking after their bottom line.
another example of this nonsensical hypocrisy, for what its worth :



i think the only lesson i've got from all these cases is to generally not say much, and especially to stop criticising israel. employers rule, that's what fundamentally matters, and everybody else is trying to use that to their advantage, instead of undermining that.
 
Sweet Square said:
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The Guardian never struck me as being high on the free speech list. Same as NYT and Washingtonpost. Not to say either of those papers are without their merits. Most major publications come out with some good stuff of substance and some utter crap at times.
 
berbatrick said:
i think the only lesson i've got from all these cases is to generally not say much, and especially to stop criticising israel. employers rule, that's what fundamentally matters, and everybody else is trying to use that to their advantage, instead of undermining that.
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Pretty much. There's no really upside unless you're in need of a new career move. If Carano just kept her mouth shut then she would still have a role on one of the most popular television shows in the US. The end result of her comments was to reproduce the same talking points and arguments that have going on for years and to feed into the mini economies these franchises create(It's amazing how many wages are dependent on further this culture war shtick). It's something similar with Robinson as well. He lost what was most likely a decent side job at the guardian and the result was showing people like myself that the Guardian is a pile of shite(But I don't need to be convinced of that). It clearly isn't worth the risk when as you said there's no principles, no morals, on either side of this nonsense.

At least when the Soviet Union collapsed it left pretty quickly and produced the best era of punk music. We are doing down in flames while arguing about baby yoda.
 
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Shamana said:
The Guardian never struck me as being high on the free speech list. Same as NYT and Washingtonpost. Not to say either of those papers are without their merits. Most major publications come out with some good stuff of substance and some utter crap at times.
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They published/worked on the Snowden stuff which really pissed off the US and UK governments. The UK government actual went into their offices and demanded they destroy the evidence Snowden had given them but since then they've been very close with Mi5 and British state in general.
 
Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html


Related (older) article about diversity trainings:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/workplace-anti-racism-trainings-trump-corporate-america

Workplace “Anti-Racism Trainings” Aren’t Helping
BYJ. C. PAN
Donald Trump hysterically considers it a Marxist plot, but corporate "anti-racism training" isn't a practice that anyone should defend. It doesn't actually combat racism and it helps bosses consolidate their power over employees under a veneer of social justice.



An aside about litigious students, who were mentioned in the NYT piece - as TAs we were told to never be alone with a student especially of the opposite sex, and to discreetly record audio if it ever happened so that we're always in the clear. I didn't bother the few times it happened, but when you're teaching rich, lawyered-up students, and have grading power over them, everything is apparently a risk.
 
Prof fired for tweets, after state legislators demanded her firing for negative tweets about Pence.

 
Pogue Mahone said:
Where are the tweets that got her fired?
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she posted just the notice, not sure if there's specific examples cited by the college.

she's suing, i don't know on what grounds

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Cancelled! For his speech! But does it count? Does cancel culture apply to actual workers or only the culture industry/academia?
 
berbatrick said:
she posted just the notice, not sure if there's specific examples cited by the college.

she's suing, i don't know on what grounds

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Cancelled! For his speech! But does it count? Does cancel culture apply to actual workers or only the culture industry/academia?
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Breaching your employer’s social media policy and being punished accordingly is definitely part of cancel culture. It’s the end game. Although the process that gets to that point that would also matter if we’re going to be pedantic about it.

Did that person tweet something (or do something) that a load of randomers took offence too, amplifying what they said/did, attempting to destroy their reputation and demanding their employers take action? If so, then yes, that’s classic cancel culture in action.

EDIT: Actually that guy wasn’t punished for posting anything online. He was fired first. Then complained online about it. How is that cancel culture?! Trader Joes are being cnuts, obviously, but nobody has been cancelled here. Sounds like he has grounds for unfair dismissal. He should get his union involved.
 
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Pogue Mahone said:
EDIT: Actually that guy wasn’t punished for posting anything online. He was fired first. Then complained online about it. How is that cancel culture?! Trader Joes are being cnuts, obviously, but nobody has been cancelled here. Sounds like he has grounds for unfair dismissal. He should get his union involved.
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fired for writing something to management. that's what my question was. does the writing have to be a product of a rarefied intellectual/artist/journalist, or can a set of demands from a normal person also qualify for these debates?

i think the underlying fact in all cases, this or the more famous academic ones, is employer power over things not strictly related to your job. the online mobs would be much less scary if they couldn't do real-world things, and the most common real-world thing they can do now is make you lose your job.


also, no union, i think.
 
berbatrick said:
fired for writing something to management. that's what my question was. does the writing have to be a product of a rarefied intellectual/artist/journalist, or can a set of demands from a normal person also qualify for these debates?

i think the underlying fact in all cases, this or the more famous academic ones, is employer power over things not strictly related to your job. the online mobs would be much less scary if they couldn't do real-world things, and the most common real-world thing they can do now is make you lose your job.


also, no union, i think.
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This is true.

Although my definition of cancel culture would be someone expressing an opinion that isn’t necessarily related to their job - and certainly isn’t addressed to their employer - which is amplified and escalated by strangers on the internet until there are real world consequences. Either in terms of their job or other relationships they have.

This seems like a straightforward employer-employee disagreement. Where the employer comes out of it looking badly but we’re only hearing one side of the story.
 
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