So comedy cannot be offensive anymore?
When did that happen?
When did that happen?
It's also a bit nonsensical to whine about people getting offended by comedy while simultaneously saying comedy should be allowed to be offensive. If you do offensive comedy then some people are going to get offended by it. If they didn't then it wouldn't be offensive!
Sounds like trying to prove a negative. If people want to convince me that cancellation is a real thing for comedians, I'd want to see...examples of comedians who actually got cancelled. CK and Chappelle ain't it.
I have an inkling of how this would go. I'd do a quick google search and offer up a handful of names. The counter argument would probably be along the lines of 'that wasn't really cancellation, it was actually...' and then we'd go back and forth debating the meaning of words.
The point I was specifically trying to make was that because Chapelle defied expectations and was successful, that does not mean cancellation isn't a real thing that can happen to other comedians.
Fun.
He won a grammy. I don't know what more you can want. It seems like cancelled has come to mean "everyone doesn't immediately fellate me"
You're not entitled to have anyone listen to you, or like you, or give you any money for it, but you can totally do it.
Getting cancelled means you sell out Madison Square Garden.
Getting cancelled is being called names.
Boohoo.
I don't see any comedians getting arrested lately (for their comedy, that is).
> I think “a culture where social norms are enforced with repeated and vociferous public shaming” is the most useful way to define the term.
That might be the most useful way for the author to make their point, but as far as I am aware, for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. If you keep doing what you're doing while being insulted on Twitter, that's not being cancelled, that's just ... well, Twitter.
> What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing.
In no way does the tweet embedded at the top of the article imply that it's a bad thing that Louis CK is playing MSG. It's saying that if we define being cancelled not in the way the author of the article did but the way I outlined above, someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. From there it makes the pretty big leap to say that cancel culture in general is not real.
I'm not even that invested in the whole debate but this article seems completely misguided or in bad faith.
Who's counting? It's trivial to find examples of people who've lost their jobs for innocuous reasons. See: David Shor. It's bad faith to pretend this doesn't happen. Usually for proponents or those denying the phenomenon exists the goalpost shifts to effectively shrugging it off as minor. Speech that begets consequences isn't strictly limited to bigotry, as we are told.
> someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG.
He couldn't, until he could. It's not necessarily the case that public shunning lasts forever. Disingenuous to construe what happened to that man as something entirely different to what "cancellation" colloquially refers to.
How can you tell where down is though? If the group you're punching has enough clout to get you in trouble, it probably wasn't down.
There was a tongue in cheek post on here a couple weeks ago where a user suggested in the future we'll prove we're human by peppering racial sluts into all of our communications.
It seems to have accelerated since then though
* Can We Take a Joke? - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4324916/
We've been sensitized to so many more words than in, say, the year 2000, that even for one who doesn't have a dog in this fight, watching early '00s media (let alone earlier) can be distracting because it's hard not to notice the now-red-flag words or topics that are thrown around casually—especially in standup, or on comedy TV shows. It's been a pretty fast shift, and I'd put the start at the tail end of the '00s or early '10s.
I mean, hell, just look at where mainstream Democrats stood on gay rights in the early '00s, for that matter. We've gone from, "gay marriage? I dunno, that might be a tad too far" to "we must protect trans rights" in a remarkably short span. I dunno, maybe the OG civil rights era had a similar feel of The Discourse shifting a ton in only a decade or two—I wasn't there for it.
It's probably also worth noting that this shift looks rather more total from a very-online perspective than it does IRL, which is probably a source of some of the ongoing friction. Online, it's done, the shift has happened, you're a cave-man if you're lagging behind on it at all—offline, much less so.
Here's the part where I rhetorically taunt with my weaponization of the virtue of free enterprise:
"You have a right to free speech, but I have a right to decide what I allow on my platform!"
Yeah, I don't entirely believe that either. I see the weasel here and so do you.
So I have a right to disregard the value of free speech. But is that really what we want?
Don't like it? Feel free to make your own platform that allows absolutely everything up to the line of legality! Just remember, nobody owes you financial success or a large user-base.
Curation and censorship are strange cousins, don’t you think?
It seems like it’s only censorship if it’s done with big furnaces and a gun barrel by a man with tiny glasses and creased pants. Governments censor. Corporations curate. Right?
I’m not sure if I even want to dignify the following state of affairs by calling it an open secret, but the US is governed by corporations. I won’t insult you by expounding on this line of reasoning. You see what I’m getting at.
And, yeah, we've let corporations take control again. But let's be clear, I'm much more concerned about the likes of Halliburton than twitch. Some in government have expressed some interest in breaking up big tech and undermine big oil, so it's not a perfect equivalence, thankfully.
I'm with Ken White[1] on "cancel culture." Sometimes, it goes too far. But by and large, "cancel culture" is better framed as "speech that is critical of other speech." And, yeah, the people at the helm of big platforms have bigger thumbs than the rest of us. But nobody stopped anti-woke Musk from taking over Twitter, did they?
[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
Amazon's capacity to affect the world, through both its enormous market share in retail and its control of large portions of the internet's infrastructure has the potential to extend their influence far further than Halliburton's ever did.
There's real potential that the diplomacy that Amazon encourages to avoid any serious roadblocks in the China->US disposable crap pipeline will make the Iraq War look like a game of Capture the Flag.