Why I’m Leaving Mumford and Sons
mrwinstonmarshall.medium.com
mrwinstonmarshall.medium.com
I’m not exactly a fan of M&S but jeewiz, why can’t someone say hey “I liked your book” which doesn’t advocate for violence or harm, and be attacked and canceled for it?
Cancel culture is a sickness on society with no end until it consumes everyone. I just hope it turns back and starts consuming the arm chair radicals that support it.
*Edited for grammar and I made a small mistake in clarity.
So writing those two sentences, one after the other, didn't give you a moment's pause?
As a group of people, a company is entitled to free speech just like an individual. By restricting their ability to terminate someone for their poor representation of the company, you're effectively forcing them to accept speech that could jeopardize their ability to conduct future business.
A free democracy means speech is free from restriction by the government, but doesn't mean the person speaking is free of consequences from their peers.
M&S went to shit - well, at least being average - pretty fast.
After "Sigh no more" and "Babel", for some reasone they thought changing their signature style significantly (an alliteration, neat) was going to work.
It did not.
And they know it - whenever you're going to a concert, they pretty much avoid as much as possible playing anything from "Wilder Mind" (i like to call that one "Milder Wind") or "Delta" because the crowd will be unfazed.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes, why-so-fucking-ever.
Also, if you have heard anything of the last 2 albums - do you really think they still have a spot open for someone playing a banjo?
As i said, my gut feeling is that his career with M&S was over anyways - you'd be hard pressed hearing him playing the banjo on any of the recent 2 albums.
Yet, it's sad seeing him throwing the towel, for whatever reason.
I understand it's tough to stand up against an internet mob, but in my opinion this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding reasons for him to quit.
It does sound like a hassle to be famous enough to get cancelled. I like the idea of niche fame, where you’re some huge fish in a tiny pond - just enough to make a living but not enough to get cancelled by the horde
Twitter is absolutely the worst place to discuss politics (or anything?) and the twitter-way of communication has ruined the way we discuss politics in general, even in real life.
Regardless of your personal political orientation, if you don’t like the way Twitter has changed the way people talk about politics, it’s probably fair to assume you’re not thrilled about reportage that portrays its subjects as radical democracy-destroyers, rather than people with agency and motivations and grievances that may well be legitimate. And whatever your feelings on _that_, the people who are the subjects of that kind of reportage tend to find it a bit of an irritation.
Not wishing to detract from the awfulness of this fellow’s treatment, he’s strayed into the crossfire of culture war BS, that he probably had no idea was there, in a way that appears to stake out a position. But if he’d done the same with some half-baked Pizza- or Russiagate exposé, you might expect something similar, just from different accounts.
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-n...
But when "them bleed'n heart liberals" do it, its called "cancel culture?" Why? Its a tactic that the right has been using for years but suddenly it bad form? This definition of cancel culture is bullshit. Everyone has always been free to choose from whom they wish to purchase goods and services, and boycotts have been weaponized by the right for practically the last century. As much as I've disagreed with many of the motivations for those boycotts, I've never disagreed with the freedom of speech they have to perform a boycott. Why is it suddenly bad just because the "radical antifa left" is doing it?
Neither tactic is exclusive to the left or right certainly.
To many it seems like while bigotry used to be the best way to bully and intimidate people, now performative anti-bigotry is the best way to bully and intimidate people. So what we see is merely an evolving toolset for sociopaths.
This doesn't feel like that though, given just how often Ngo shows up in the right-sociopath column.
Or, as I said in another comment, Winston Marshall has picked a really weird hill to die on.
My mother was "canceled" and actually had her life ruined because of a false confession, and a deranged group of Christian cultists. But you're upset because someone had their social media account banned because they were being an absolutely awful person. Oh no!
A lot of these accounts that are getting banned are from Q-Anon. These people are coming up with bullshit lies that affect the lives of other people. But you don't side with the people that are having their lives turned over because of these idiots spreading falsehoods, you're defending the deranged maniacs who were correctly moderated into oblivion. You're response is, oh no some of these deranged maniacs who ruin the lives of people on the internet by indulging in conspiratorial fetish might drink bleach!
I, for one, have no sympathy.
The second difference is the virality. Once an idea, a meme, of someone being X is out there, nobody cares where it came from and it’s virtually impossible to reverse. One can stop the action that sparked the boycott and it will end. The person being canceled can do absolutely nothing to make it stop. Also, malicious targeting is easy: getting a meme go viral is a fairly well-understood and commercialized endeavor while convincing a significant number of people to join a boycott inevitably involves a lot of legwork and the people actually agreeing with the original premise. The latter is not true with cancelling, you just take “X is Y” for granted after a very short while
The mobbing of someone who (implicitly) endorses the political posture of the author is of course a cause for concern, but you’d think there’d be more desire to understand why that might have happened, beyond just agreeing that Thing Bad.