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Point is, you may not like it, but merely being cancelled rather than straight up executed is why we live in the good times.
(And whatever the merits and demerits of unrestricted free speech, a machine that isn't deemed capable of personhood shouldn't get the same rights to that as a human).
Yes, "literally anything less than execution is OK" is the standard we should uphold for public discourse.
This is like a joke that starts with "be grateful, comrade..."
I think that's quite a bit of a leap my friend.
It is the necessary other side of the same coin as freedom of speech, otherwise you end up with the literal Republican party being legally obligated to let the literal Communist Party of the USA (not a euphemism for the Democrats) lecture them during their Primaries.
Also: what do you think being cancelled is such that you perceive a "vast distance" between it and being heckled?
For me, an audience going "boo, your jokes are bad!" is very close to "we're sorry, Mr Comedian, you're not bringing in a big enough audience to justify booking you as a headline act".
I didn't use that word.
> out of fear of legal or viral repercussions,
Is why places have always refused to host people even way back when.
It's an even stronger reason for the host location to say "no" than for an event organiser.
Cancel culture when a tiny minority can use outrage to cudgel others into complying. You can pretend when people say "cancel culture" they mean "popular opinion", but that's not what they mean, even a little bit.
Until this point, I thought we were talking about literally being cancelled, not whatever the phrase "cancel culture" means in modern political discourse, given that this headline is literally about an endless AI-generated stream being switched off.
Everything I used was intended as an analogy to that end.
> Cancel culture is 500 people out of 50M (0.0001%) complaining, which combined with the power of journalistic headlines to blow things wildly out of proportion, results in the act being removed
Reminds me of what (allegedly) happened in the UK in the 70s and 80s when some Christians were very upset to learn of Pagans appearing on the BBC.
Also what I see happening in some quarters today with regard to trans women, which has very recently mutated into "also furries" (is this a confusion with "transhuman"? Seen a bit of hate towards that recently too).
Also why the TV stations were so concerned about what happened with Shatner and Nichols, and why TNG's "gay rights" episode was so bland you could miss that entire aspect of the story. And, now I think about it, why there were no women captains in TOS.
Not saying any of these things are "good", though I rather suspect you're underestimating the number of people who find $insert_topic_here enraging for whatever reason — people are a mess.
You're hand wringing about someone, somewhere, who is probably upset. You're okay with something being removed that you don't personally find offensive, but instead find offensive on behalf of imaginary people you don't know.
And this is a bad thing how?
The purpose of free speech is to prevent groupthink. Nothing good comes from allowing Republicans and Communists to create echo chambers where people only hear opinions they already agree with and dissent is banned. Wouldn't it be more productive if they were forced to engage directly with their opponents, and made to justify their position to their harshest critics?
It would be better if there were no parties at all, and all political discourse happened in a public space where all viewpoints are represented indiscriminately.
While I think it would be hilarious in a comedy sketch, in practice it's a DDOS attack. Overwhelm the discussion with irrelevant noise and you have de-facto suppressed someone else's speech.
It was Socrates, who was sentenced to death for impiety towards the gods and for corrupting the youth. Socrates was not an atheist.
Page 42, that was his argument. Didn't really help him to prove his accusers were claiming a logical impossibility.
https://archive.org/details/onsocrates00mayh/mode/1up?q=athe...
Being actually right isn't always enough to avoid condemnation by your peers.
Yeah, but we lived in (slightly) better times a decade ago.
This reminds me of the discourse around crime rates. People who want to downplay the soaring crime rates tell us that we have nothing to be upset about--sure, homicides are up 70% on the decade, but if you zoom out to the 90s, homicides are actually DOWN--reversing 20 years of progress is nothing to worry about!
IMHO, these sort of "if you go back far enough, things were worse" arguments are generic arguments against progress.
Unless you literally mean the year 2013 (which was mostly OK IMO), I disagree.
As a broad trend, groups were different, and the responses harsher in the past.
If you were gay a few decades ago, "don't ask don't tell" was a way to keep you safe in the military because of an extraordinarily vicious murder.
I've seen documentaries about polyamory which end with "this person was fired as a direct result of having appeared in this show".
I've read books by Wiccans talking about the times bullets went through their hotel windows.
The world is shockingly different even compared to my childhood; mostly for the better, even despite that I feel there are several things that have become worse.
Or rationalizations for bad policy/cultural values in the present.
You mean… leaders?
“All liberals are gay (bad)”
Yes… nobody is offended by this kind of vile hate speech. Right. Maybe it’s just you who thinks that. Not possibly queer and and trans people and their family and friends could take offense.
Looking back over the past few decades, there has always been a societal thread who’s underlying script is something like “System schistem. We have to take care of our own.”, but it has exploded in the past couple of decades.
As I reflected back on what changed, there’s of course the internet and “virtue signalling” but I don’t think those are the biggest shifts.
I think that underneath “cancel culture” is a desire for justice.
And I also think that desires for justice used to be filled by the legal system: if someone broke the law they would be punished in accordance with those laws (and further: those laws that the public guide through democratic processes). However, if you look at the current state of our legal systems it’s very hard to see any sort of justice happening. From police brutality to court wins going to the one with the most funds I would be surprised if the average person in western culture had any sort of faith in the legal system as it stands.
And so it‘s understandable to me that people would inevitably create a social-media-fuelled “court of public opinion” to “bring justice where there would otherwise be no justice”.
Bringing examples here might sidetrack my point, but I think that if our legal system was at a level where everyone had faith in it’s ability to bring justice then they would not feel the need to bring justice by going outside of it to “cancel” people.