I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept.
My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital?
Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...
My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital?
Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...
And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.
[0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.
>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.
I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.
And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.
>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.
The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.
And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.
You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority.
You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms.
> the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender
There are about as many people with intersex conditions as there are transpeople. The world is weirder than you think. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-vill...
This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.
Is that what critical theorists really think? That's as mad as a box of frogs. The world is full of languages that actually label every single noun as either male or female. They date back far further than the British empire. You have gods that are clearly male or female dating from thousands of years ago in any ancient culture. The concept of male and female being clearly distinct and without a third category has nothing to do with colonialism.
I mean, I get that my "crowd", such that it is, may seem offensive when confronted with these beliefs. And yeah, sure, not ideal. But this stuff sounds like what flat earthers believe. They have all kinds of weird arguments about why the world isn't really spherical that can sort of pass muster if you don't think about it much and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, but most people just say, eh, that's really mad and ignore it. I mean what you're arguing here contradicts a lifetime of 'lived experience', to use their terms.
The article you're pointing to - and let's generously assume the story is 100% factually accurate - says pretty specifically that this is a very, very rare medical disorder. It's not some sort of thing that needs to be taken into account in daily life.
But the notion of binary gender being the default state is supported by vast amounts of other evidence, so much that people don't even see the need to spell it out because that's kind of like how you end up trying to prove that NASA images of the Earth from space aren't Photoshops.
Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"
For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example).
I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.
In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.
Unfortunately, this type of record keeping is typical exactly of the cancel culture I'm so opposed to.