“The comic sucks now” would have been an editorial decision about the content. “Here’s a terrible thing the author said somewhere else” is cancel culture. It’s not as if all the readers know or care who draws this.
Where does the “grievance” come into play? Opponents of cancel culture are just saying that people shouldn’t be fired for wrongthink.
Adams will continue being a multimillionaire who gets to speak his mind to his followers. Everyone is exercising their first amendment rights. So what’s the problem?
But he's syndicated. The Plain Dealer doesn't "work with" him any more than I "work with" Mitchell Hashimoto, for example. Nearly all of these newspapers work through a syndication middleman that operates professionally and neither represents, nor transmits, their cartoonists personal opinions on other platforms.
Firing someone for being an asshole in the office is perfectly legitimate. Firing someone for being an asshole somewhere else that your employees have no reasonable chance of even knowing about other than through the tweets of people they don't even know is absolutely ridiculous.
This whole thing reminds me of the Yarvin / Strange Loop fiasco.
We've, as a society, decided long ago that private and professional lives are generally distinct. We accept that the alcoholic who gets shitfaced every night after work is a perfectly acceptable coworker as long as he doesn't come to work drunk. We accept that whatever crazy shit you might get up to in your bedroom has no bearing on how you comport yourself at work. But recently we've somehow made a bizarre exception for personal opinions.
Also, go look up anything he has done outside of Dilbert in the last ten years. He went off the deep end long ago.
I think this is a primary source of disconnect in our society today. Because to me, no, to the extent this as been decided in the past, it's now a societal-level question if this still holds. The logic is: I spend a good chunk of my life at work, my employer donates to political campaigns and lobbies the government to make changes that impact my life, so therefore my work and my life are not separable. If you want to get politics out of work, get work out of politics.
The other thing that has changed is that it's no longer about your coworker getting smashed at home. It's about your coworker going home and ranting online about how you as a person are less than a human being, and how they'd love to legislate your personhood away. If I find out that my coworkers feel that way about me, then my employer can either fire them or I'm quitting, because I'm not spending a good chunk of my waking hours every day with someone who questions my personhood. Even Scott Adams will agree with that.
The choice most employers make is to fire the person who is being abusive rather than losing the person who is being abused. That doesn't work out well for the abusive types, which maybe is why they're so angry at this new societal arrangement. I'm sure they'd love to live in a world where they can rant the way they choose about their coworkers and not face any societal or employment consequences.
A public person who broadcasts public statements to the world (as part of an audience engagement strategy, no less) is very different from a private alcoholic. Adams's blog is part of his professional life.
If Richard Spencer (noted white supremacist) started a comic that had nothing to do with his white supremacy beliefs, I still wouldn't want to support a newspaper that was paying him.
Not if you're gay
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/in-mich...
The discussion of being cancelled has been cancelled.