I don’t think your theory is wrong – misery loves company, as we all know – and “relatability” has really come front and center as a litmus test for public figures. The conventional wisdom says Bush 43 won because people wanted to have a beer with him. I’ve never wanted to even *meet* let alone imbibe with any politician in my life. Just do the fucking job I voted for you to do, and leave me alone. So the whole “relatability” thing leaves me cold.
But while relatability is a piece of it I don’t think it’s all of it. I think many people have become very inward looking, very vaguely dissatisfied with their lives, and very entitled as a result. Most of these people already hold a pretty privileged position, so it’s a quandary. Late capitalism, living so much of our lives atomized and online, and a global pandemic are all isolating factors. But how you persuade a guy living in a McMansion who owns a boat to begin thinking, “I want to say the word “tranny” but I can’t, help, help I’m being repressed” remains a mystery to me.
I think it’s fear of displacement (“you will not replace us”), fear that their status hasn’t really been earned so it can be taken away at any time, fear of the “other,” and just free-floating fear. When you measure your life by the wrong yardsticks – how much money/stuff do I have, who is below me and who is above me on the ladder of society, what do other people think of me – you open yourself up to be prey to every kind of con out there.
Every now and again the Covid mists part and I think I glimpse stuff clearly.
My guess on the CancelCulture thing is that way too many folks have said vile, heinous things, racist, sexist, mean, violent things, and fears someone making them pay for it, some underling they have abused or said crap about, some vengeance crazed ex, some abusive liberal, like in D. Mamet's late oeuvre. They are the ones who's sensibilities are supposed to be considered...and they might be Running Scared...
A lot of 'em should be.
And the rise of tfg gave a certain license to folks who wanted to say anything they damn well pleased and suffer no consequences... Of course, I live where folks can say any damn stupid and vile thing they want: if you never saw Adult Swim's Squidbillies, the main character, a hillbilly squid, says stupid things that are eerily accurate to the discourse in the greasy cafes of Redneckistan...
It's not like they are going to actually hear much pushback, but the Fox/RightMedia/Conspiracysphere had them scared of having to use "the Wrong pronoun" or someone calling out their yelling "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" as a political platform...
I keep coming back to the money. What strikes me about it is how much there is, floating – no, SLOSHING – 'round our homeland. And for any folks it must seem so desperately just outta reach. But it's there, apparently for the taking, if one just has the right amount of godliness/gumption/griftitude.
We're all like Lonnie in the Grapes of Wrath, we've seen that ad in the back of the magazine where you get to be a radio expert in 10 easy lessons, but we find ourselves in the back of a truck headed to a job as a peach-picker, if we're lucky.
And I think that word 'cancel' does not mean what they think it means...I mean, if we/they are STILL reading about it upon every conceivable platform, where's the damn cancellation I was promised?
If you act like an asshole or say something really stupid it's really not a burden when someone says, " Hey. Stop acting like an asshole and saying stupid shit. "Sure, you are certainly free to be an asshole- I am free to tell you to knock it the fuck off.
You have summarized perfectly what gets obscured with editorial boards and all the hifalutin terminology. The complaint with "cancel culture" seems to be a desire to say disturbing or even hateful things and still be treated as if it were charming, charismatic, the apex of wit and brilliance. "Give me all the verbal room to be an ill-mannered child because when I cast aspersions and spout vulgarity and hate it has a different quality. Let the market decide!" When the market responds negatively, the purveyors insist people need to buy?
About half of adult Americans will admit to using Facebook daily. If they've ever had someone unfriend them as a result of an argument, then they've felt (in their minds) the lash of CancelCulture.
What's new, I think, is that we've all had people who've stopped talking to us for one reason or another, but what they didn't do is send us a formal notice that "I am henceforth canceling our friendship."
We filter what we say all the time even when we are alone. That process in our own minds is a mirror of what happens socially. Arguably, the internal process comes from our learned experience, from what we learn from feedback, not just with speech but also broader experientially, what to do, how to do, what to say, how to say, to get what we want, achieve certain results.
We are trying in the context of so-called cancel culture to isolate a segment of that selection process for expressing ourselves. What are we considering? The impulse to say something for a reason, for a rhetorical impact, but also from a feeling, the desire for attention and also for control of how others consider something, a framing, a portrayal. The concept of "being canceled" is itself an example. There are as many ways of understanding what those words mean, what the concept being expressed is, as there are persons with personal experiences that inform their individual understanding of it.
At the heart of the matter is perhaps the set of clichés and well-worn almost meaningless concepts and the feelings behind them. No one listens anyway, and the shock value wears off after the hundredth monkey barks out the same harsh tones, one, more, time. Cue the fat lady.
These days, I meet more and more people for whom there is no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever is rolling around inside their head just comes right out. I have no idea why or when the idea that you should think before you speak went out of fashion.
I was thinking about this the other day. I think mass media outlets like Fox, social media cesspools, and politicians like Trump gave people permission to bellow and whine and spit out whatever was fermenting in their curdled minds at any moment. People always had those thoughts, but it was socially unacceptable to say them, and people grew up in the habit of not saying them (publicly). But once permission was given they reveled in behaving like the worst assholes possible all the time, and the sweet, sweet dopamine rush was unbelievable.
Now that people are used to acting like unfiltered toddlers, I don’t know how we go back. Maybe it will burn itself out eventually, as when toddlers archly saying “Shit!” In front of everyone no longer provokes a reaction.
Part of that license is simply that being an asshole online carries with it much less risk of getting punched in the nose. Only a privileged few (those who can hire bodyguards or get their bodyguards provided at taxpayer expense) can engage is this shitty behavior in the real-life, in-person world.
It's highly possible that lack of filtering has always been most common among the most entitled portion of the population, because they've never had to a filter their expression for consequences or effect.
I've had numerous bosses who think the thing whatever they thought while takimg a shit was like the most brilliant plan for their business possible & will brook no critique. With social entitlement (read: Big Whitey, Big Str8, Big Cis-Male) absolute social freedom of speech which was the center of liberalism in its 18th-century form.
This is an old complaint, but I believe the gradual cultural shift over the 20th century from physical communal entertainment experience (theatre, nightclubs, concerts, lectures) to the current physical family/solitary one of personal screens has changed something fundamental in our monkey brains. We gathered in large and small groups outside the immediate family for many thousands of years for shared experience. Its been raised before about radio, then television, the computers, but the psuedo-interactve nature of social media seems different, and the fact that wealthy and state interests are busily gaming it for all its worth is not helping. I think people are literally being rewired, and a lot of this unfocused and undefined anxiety that's being spit out is from that. Our monkey brains are unhappy, and they don't know why.
Better Q: Why do sooo many people answer the question “Are you going to believe my lies are or the truth you see?” Incorrectly? Why do so many believe so much bullshit? Personally, as a defective human being, it’s not for me to do more than guess, I mean, I can’t know, but my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive.
As for the Edrosos’ theory, I’m not persuaded. As Roy notes (and I don’t doubt), the questions are... well, a problem if clarity is a goal. Too, as cancel culture -- again, a perverted term, speaking of clarity -- trickles down to the masses, it’s seen as holding people accountable when they offend. By offend, I mean both deliberately giving offense as well as stating something beyond the pale. (I was going to add that the right to be an asshole is going to be one of the last rights the SCOTUS junta will take away but then I realized that that right, as it were, is part of the foundation of this site in a way so sure, okay, maybe it can be okay.)
So little more than that: Assholes don’t want be held accountable and people have fears of being rejected for giving offense.
Which is cancel culture only in the debased, perverted sense of the term.
BTW: Those bleating loudest about being canceled aren’t actually being canceled.
I'm sure I've said this before, I do tend to repeat myself, but people don't become Republicans because they believe certain things, they believe certain things because they are Republicans. Those of us who have any political identity at all pick it at an early age, usually just inherited from our parents, and then spend the rest of our life picking and choosing the "facts" that fit our identity. What's new, I think, is one political party going so far off the rails in terms of the things that it asks its followers to believe. But the fact that they would believe if asked to believe was never in doubt, I think.
Why are there Red states and Blue states? Something about the geography that makes people like certain positions? Or is it that people inherit a party identity from their parents and the people around them, and then make their views on policy (if any) conform to the party's views?
Red staters *generally* insular, tribal. And I’d like to think, not that I’d bet on it, suffering from too many generations of too much booze and the reproduction of a stagnant gene pool. Maybe, too, something like mass narcissism.
Right, but what all those things point to is that party ID comes first, and the ideas and philosophy come ready made and are mostly adopted without a struggle. Nobody develops a coherent political philosophy first and then goes shopping for a party to match it.
No one reason, of course but a large part of it is because Democrats have abandoned large swathes of the country. Party policy, and I am not speculating here or making this up, is to get registered Democrats to vote, not to engage with anyone who might not vote for them. I can tell you from direct experience that in my little corner of a red state the Democratic Party officials have open contempt for regular working people, at least those who are not union leaders. But to your point, many of the red states, and red counties at a more granular level, used to vote Democratic and some, such as Kansas and Wisconsin were very progressive (in the old sense of the word). As Howard Dean and his 50 state state strategy proved, getting a red county to vote 55 - 45 Republican instead of 70 - 30 has huge ramifications nationwide. With more time and money we could have turned that 55 -45 Republican into 52 - 48 Democrat, taken over (or held onto) the local and state governments and courts, and avoided this friggin nightmare we now inhabit. But no, the Democratic Party believes the best strategy is to not engage with the people they consider morons and as far as I can see they are retrenching rather than re-evaluating.
Winning races lower down ticket, getting power, obsoleting the DLC acolytes running the DNC. Offering an actual choice that gets shit done, playing the long game. (Yes, I know I’m echoing there.) Growing blue oases in red areas.
I should add that the down ticket areas are the only areas where there’s time for any sort of long game thanks to the GOP SCOTUS junta.
AOC’s one big mistake in her progressive project was/is thinking doing it from Congress is the way. But she has doubts about it and I think the doubts are correct there. Congress now is like overshooting into an area where little can be done other than enhancing one’s personal brand. I mean, it helps making one a leader and… that’s about it. It then raises the question of what kind of leader.
My personal knowledge of Democratic politics is very local. My congressional district has two small cities and a lot of small towns and vast swathes of rural areas. The party in the largest city is dominated by snooty country club type white women with a few African American women and male pastors and smarmy white salesmen and lawyers on the side. Some of the rural counties are dominated by similar white women, though more garden club than country club. Otherwise the rural leaders tend to be older men who farmed or worked in trades. They all get guidance from the national party, which they tend to follow, the semi-urbanites more than the rural folk. So I'd say change needs to start with the national party as the locals are more followers than leaders.
It's much easier to speculate on what would work if different people were in charge than how to get different types of people in charge. In an ideal world, people like us would run for office, but people like us can't put up with all the bullshit it takes to run for office. And of course that wouldn't change the establishment's minds anyway. It would only lead to further retrenchment as you see with how they treat "the squad" and any other individual who manages to sneak past the country club guards.
So since we are basically stuck with the type of people who have the wherewithal and basic lack of intellectual type intelligence and creativity to dedicate their lives to politics, I'd say the only way to change their minds is to change the minds of the voters, which is essentially what the Republicans have done. The Republicans mostly ignored the establishment politicians and created communication networks to take power from below. They focused on local and state offices and taking over law enforcement and the judiciaries. And importantly, they did not limit their efforts to jurisdictions where they were the majority. The county I'm from, for example, voted roughly 70-30 Democrat from the Great Depression through the election of Reagan. After 1980 it began slipping and now it is 70-30 Republican. But more importantly still, they use mind conversion techniques straight out of "1984" to literally change people's minds.
So I'd say the way to change the minds of the establishment Dems, who will always be with us, is to change the minds of regular people, and the way to do that is to create a smarter, more effective communication network than the Republicans, and to use effective mind conversion techniques, though for good rather than evil.
The short of it is that when people are subjected to a constant barrage of fear, their minds become open to a change of their fundamental beliefs. Add hate to the fear, as the Republicans (and Big Brother) did, and the conversion process is even more effective. The difference between us and the Republicans in this respect is that they manufacture the reasons to fear and subsequently to hate whereas we have very real reasons to fear, starting with what Republicans and sociopathic billionaires and big businesses are doing -from catastrophic climate change to the host of other issues we are all so familiar with. I wouldn't advocate fostering hate towards people, but there are plenty of good reasons to hate and fear the institutions, policies, and outcomes that these people create.
It's doable, as the Republicans have so effectively demonstrated. It takes rich people writing checks to create communication networks tightly focused on mind conversion to an outlook that fosters sustainability, justice, and peace. Problem is, of course, that any sane person would rather make the best of their short lives than dedicate themselves to that kind of massive effort and we are not lacking near as much in sane people as the Republicans. On that note, I'm off on my Saturday morning bike ride and hike. It's another beautiful day in paradise, and I don't mean that sarcastically.
The New Deal/Great Society Dems can’t deliver but they also can’t respect that cohort either. It’s a dilemma. Then again, a problem is that red states are so red in part through gerrymandering which gives the voters the Dems are rejecting disproportionate power. Then again, the nation was founded with a democracy limited to an elite so…
"Why do so many believe so much bullshit?" ..." my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive."
Yup. I realized when quite young that I was not a 'joiner'. And it's been a way to define myself v. the other, not necessarily in a good way, but effective as far as it goes. On their worst days (oh so many) the joiners are weird amalgams of passive/aggressive dominant/submissive muddlebrains. And very vocal about it, as if we somehow are not listening hard enough.
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?"
In my experience, the people who feel most oppressed in this regard:
1.) Are the people who spend most of their time expressing their viewpoint, loudly and obnoxiously. And then wondering why others avoid them.
2.) Are people with utterly abhorrent viewpoints who feel oppressed because it's no longer socially acceptable to tell racial jokes or to "compliment" the receptionist on how nice her tits look.
3.) Are people who do not actually know what "cancelculture" is, but they've heard about it and they know it's bad, and they know that it's coming for them so they will SOON be unable to express themselves.
America is not a land of contrasts. It is a land of ever-declining intelligence and ever-increasing stupidity.
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?" - substitute “hit someone in the face” for “express your viewpoint” and it becomes clearer. I the push-poll nature becomes obvious. What does retaliate mean? If I express my viewpoint that abortion shouldn’t be legal and someone, even vehemently, disagrees, was I retaliated against? If I think of my expression of my view as an attack in the first place, I guess it could be, but then, I started it.
I think the reverse side of this coin is victimhood culture, a staple ingredient of the right wing fever swamp.
100% agree. The entitlement is off the charts. The most stark example of this is white people who say, "why can't I use the n-word when THEY do?"
I recommend responding with "There are, conservatively, more than 170,000 words in the English language. There are maybe three dozen you shouldn't say. Relax, you'll be fine." So far, it's been quite effective at shutting them up.
"But most of those are words I don't know, and the ones I'm not supposed to say I do know, so what am I supposed to do? Learn things? That's not the American Way, buddy!"
I mean, people have sort of always bought this bullshit, right? For example, not being able to say the n-word can be traced straight back through civil rights and Jim Crow to the Peculiar Institution. Likewise, Joe the Plumber grumbling that he can’t say “tranny” is an improvement (relatively speaking) over how being openly gay or trans just a few decades ago was a ticket to getting beat up or killed. I suspect that all too many of the people bitching about cancel culture today would be quite happy to go back to the “good old days” of beating up gays, and lynching and enslaving people of color.
I think a lot of people take their cultural cues from right wing media and “respectable” outlets like the NYT and NPR, and the people running those places are consumed with cancelculture for their own reasons—either because they’re awful people politically, or because it’s easier to write about the alarming cancelculture problem at Oberlin than it is to cover, say, a rolling conservative coup.
Plus, even if they don’t belong to such rarefied clubs as the NYT op-ed page, they’re still comfortable and don’t want that comfort disrupted by any social justice stuff, or they fear something in their own past—something not ill-intentioned, and something they’re probably unaware of—will become the newest target of CANCELCULTURE, and they’ll find themselves banished to the outer darkness like Al Franken and Garrison Keillor—or even that nice Andrew Cuomo and Bari Weiss.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
And that's Karl Motherfucking Marx, so you KNOW it's true.
To be kinder to the respectable media outlets than they perhaps deserve, they think they objectively reporting on the cultural phenomenon of cancel culture, while vigorously averting their gaze from the fact their reporting grants a legitimacy to an obvious con it objectively doesn't deserve. Look at what it took to get them to label Trump's whinging about a stolen election "baseless", just a premeditated attempt to violently overthrow a duly elected government. They really don't want to disturb their phoney-baloney jobs.
I think your last sentence gets at the most concrete definition of "cancel": being blocked out of media presence (just ask Bari Weiss). That's gotta be the most frightening thing a media person can imagine, and that's why they can't shut up about it.
Re: Jordan Peterson—the other day in the Fun Half of The Majority Report, Sam Seder and crew had a grand old time sending up Jordan Peterson’s overwrought self-crucifixion diatribe, which he inexplicably thought wise to record and disseminate.
Savonarola was canceled when he was hanged and burned by the Florentines. Hitler was canceled when he killed himself instead of letting the Red Army take him captive. When one of these snowflakes undergoes something similar, then I might concede that they have a point.
First of all, I was happy to hear that Jeff Bezo's $500 million yacht was stuck in a boatyard in Holland because it was too big to fit under a bridge, but not because I think for a minute that it makes me just like him because I once built a dinghy in my basement that wouldn't fit out the door, but because I think he's an asshole. If he wasn't an asshole, I might have empathized, given my own over-sized vessel history. So some celebrity woes make me happy because some celebrities are assholes, and others I might think in passing, "Oh, that's too bad. Let's check the baseball scores."
Secondly, the whole idea of the word "cancelculture" and the fact that we're all using it, to the point that people who wouldn't know the difference between a tenured professor and a professional tennis player can opine positively or negatively about it, proves Gingrich's Law (which I just made up), that any word - old, repurposed or created - can be inserted into the minds of Americans as a bad thing they should be opposed to and worry about and have an opinion about, preferably along with a distaste for liberals and Democrats. Think about it, "cancelculture" makes no sense, especially in the way it's applied to actual things that happen. No culture is cancelled when someone is taken off social media, or even loses their job. If it were, what culture would that be? The culture of white American pseudohistory? And cancelled? What has been so eliminated from our purview that it can be said to be cancelled? These rightwing assholes, as Roy and others have pointed out again and again, never go away. Gingrich is still around and I just made up a law in his name. My point is, every time someone uses these terms, we give them life and not in a way that has any connection to what they really mean. "Woke" - who wouldn't rather be awake than asleep to the reality of the world? Assholes, that who. "CRT" - if you're going to propose a theory about race to apply to the study of American history, why wouldn't you want it to be critical (in the sense of examining, not as negative)? Oh, not if you're an asshole. I'll force myself to look at this NYT article and if the comments are still open, say there is no such thing as "cancelculture" and they might as well ask random boobs if they're against jabberwockies. Some percentage will undoubtedly say they are.
Anyway, gas prices have been going down for three weeks, so I guess we won't be hearing about the agony of the gas buying public on network TV for a while.
I'm not sure people really need a reason to believe anything they believe, other than that the thing they believe is in circulation and believed by others. That's the power of the ruling class, that they get to put ideas out into wide enough circulation that they get believed by millions of people simply because they're believed by millions of people.
I often see the effectiveness of this particular brand of centrist/conservative equine enema solution has had in our mentalité whenever I read student writing. I so often find a claim that this particular movie/book/poem/whatever "just couldn't be made right now" because of some scene or language or characterization that they know now that people find objectionable. Sometimes I find it encouraging in that they understand that there's consequences to language and representation. But usually it's a kind of "this just shouldn't exist" — and they get that way, I think, because media whinging about cancel culture forestalls actually interesting & socially responsible conversationsabout inclusion and ethics from happening.
Those papers are almost always extended & enriched & made relevant by just asking "why the fuck should anybody care" (or, more pedagogically perhaps, "why is it important that we notice and what is your action item here").
But I have to say it's not exactly anything new. I'm a medievalist as you all know (grouchy as they come) & it's always been a habit for a student in considering piece of literature like Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," which discusses misogyny, domestic violence, the antifeminist tradition in medieval scholastic discourse and throw ones hands up and say well that's just how they did things back then. With the implication that "we do things better now" & that's all that needs to be said. It reveals both of a lack of desire to engage with the relics of patriarchy, but also a reflexive insistence on cultural or social progress, right? We take it for given that because women can now vote or have credit cards, they're free. Which isn't really true as we all see & are seeing.
Post Dobbs, I would be interested to see how many students find that complacency challenged and are a little easier to convince that the questions of past oppressions or exclusions are actually important to understand.
I am regularly amazed at how relevant Chaucer remains. The Wife of Bath being concerned with “sovereignty” predates the medieval misogynist Sammy Alito quoted when attacking women’s rights.
Her prologue, 1350 lines long or so, also shows the longue durée of men's tendency to interrupt any woman speaking in a public space and blatherate about their fee-fees.
Well, the way I translated "pardee" [by God in French], a rather benign expletive. My new project of making "bouncy, fun" translations of medieval literature is designed to create bridges to medieval thought & challenge stuffy, stertorous old-guard renderings.
I see among the latest trends in elite media: 1) “why don’t the rabble know their place when it comes to wages/protests/etc” and 2) anti-trans “thought” pieces. You might call it Serf & TERF.
You know, I think of myself as a bit of a wordsmith, and yet I come here and to alicublog and I realize I am indeed standing on the shoulders of giants.
I wonder how these polls would turn out if, instead of the vague phrase, "express your viewpoint" they gave a list of expressions and asked "How comfortable are you saying these things in public?" The list would start with the n-word, of course, got to pay respect to ones elders, and then run on down through the f-word and the b-word (bonus pay for the poor souls who'd have to read this list over the phone.)
And then, after people indicate their level of discomfort over saying these specific things publicly, comes the followup: "Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing that you should feel uncomfortable saying some of these things in public?"
I don’t think your theory is wrong – misery loves company, as we all know – and “relatability” has really come front and center as a litmus test for public figures. The conventional wisdom says Bush 43 won because people wanted to have a beer with him. I’ve never wanted to even *meet* let alone imbibe with any politician in my life. Just do the fucking job I voted for you to do, and leave me alone. So the whole “relatability” thing leaves me cold.
But while relatability is a piece of it I don’t think it’s all of it. I think many people have become very inward looking, very vaguely dissatisfied with their lives, and very entitled as a result. Most of these people already hold a pretty privileged position, so it’s a quandary. Late capitalism, living so much of our lives atomized and online, and a global pandemic are all isolating factors. But how you persuade a guy living in a McMansion who owns a boat to begin thinking, “I want to say the word “tranny” but I can’t, help, help I’m being repressed” remains a mystery to me.
I think it’s fear of displacement (“you will not replace us”), fear that their status hasn’t really been earned so it can be taken away at any time, fear of the “other,” and just free-floating fear. When you measure your life by the wrong yardsticks – how much money/stuff do I have, who is below me and who is above me on the ladder of society, what do other people think of me – you open yourself up to be prey to every kind of con out there.
Fear of threats to what can be called limited lives. Pride goeth before triggering the fall of a relatively (potentially) great nation.
Every now and again the Covid mists part and I think I glimpse stuff clearly.
My guess on the CancelCulture thing is that way too many folks have said vile, heinous things, racist, sexist, mean, violent things, and fears someone making them pay for it, some underling they have abused or said crap about, some vengeance crazed ex, some abusive liberal, like in D. Mamet's late oeuvre. They are the ones who's sensibilities are supposed to be considered...and they might be Running Scared...
A lot of 'em should be.
And the rise of tfg gave a certain license to folks who wanted to say anything they damn well pleased and suffer no consequences... Of course, I live where folks can say any damn stupid and vile thing they want: if you never saw Adult Swim's Squidbillies, the main character, a hillbilly squid, says stupid things that are eerily accurate to the discourse in the greasy cafes of Redneckistan...
It's not like they are going to actually hear much pushback, but the Fox/RightMedia/Conspiracysphere had them scared of having to use "the Wrong pronoun" or someone calling out their yelling "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" as a political platform...
Bullies, and mobs, are basically scared.
I keep coming back to the money. What strikes me about it is how much there is, floating – no, SLOSHING – 'round our homeland. And for any folks it must seem so desperately just outta reach. But it's there, apparently for the taking, if one just has the right amount of godliness/gumption/griftitude.
We're all like Lonnie in the Grapes of Wrath, we've seen that ad in the back of the magazine where you get to be a radio expert in 10 easy lessons, but we find ourselves in the back of a truck headed to a job as a peach-picker, if we're lucky.
And pretty soon we're all Winfred Joad with the skitters...
"ROYAL SCANDALS" "O.J. SIMPSON"
Always up to date, that rag.
And I think that word 'cancel' does not mean what they think it means...I mean, if we/they are STILL reading about it upon every conceivable platform, where's the damn cancellation I was promised?
"Americans know it exists and feel its burden. -"
If you act like an asshole or say something really stupid it's really not a burden when someone says, " Hey. Stop acting like an asshole and saying stupid shit. "Sure, you are certainly free to be an asshole- I am free to tell you to knock it the fuck off.
You have summarized perfectly what gets obscured with editorial boards and all the hifalutin terminology. The complaint with "cancel culture" seems to be a desire to say disturbing or even hateful things and still be treated as if it were charming, charismatic, the apex of wit and brilliance. "Give me all the verbal room to be an ill-mannered child because when I cast aspersions and spout vulgarity and hate it has a different quality. Let the market decide!" When the market responds negatively, the purveyors insist people need to buy?
About half of adult Americans will admit to using Facebook daily. If they've ever had someone unfriend them as a result of an argument, then they've felt (in their minds) the lash of CancelCulture.
What's new, I think, is that we've all had people who've stopped talking to us for one reason or another, but what they didn't do is send us a formal notice that "I am henceforth canceling our friendship."
Being an asshole is an enumerated right in the constitution. I don’t know where it is but Sam Alito can tell you.
We filter what we say all the time even when we are alone. That process in our own minds is a mirror of what happens socially. Arguably, the internal process comes from our learned experience, from what we learn from feedback, not just with speech but also broader experientially, what to do, how to do, what to say, how to say, to get what we want, achieve certain results.
We are trying in the context of so-called cancel culture to isolate a segment of that selection process for expressing ourselves. What are we considering? The impulse to say something for a reason, for a rhetorical impact, but also from a feeling, the desire for attention and also for control of how others consider something, a framing, a portrayal. The concept of "being canceled" is itself an example. There are as many ways of understanding what those words mean, what the concept being expressed is, as there are persons with personal experiences that inform their individual understanding of it.
At the heart of the matter is perhaps the set of clichés and well-worn almost meaningless concepts and the feelings behind them. No one listens anyway, and the shock value wears off after the hundredth monkey barks out the same harsh tones, one, more, time. Cue the fat lady.
These days, I meet more and more people for whom there is no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever is rolling around inside their head just comes right out. I have no idea why or when the idea that you should think before you speak went out of fashion.
I was thinking about this the other day. I think mass media outlets like Fox, social media cesspools, and politicians like Trump gave people permission to bellow and whine and spit out whatever was fermenting in their curdled minds at any moment. People always had those thoughts, but it was socially unacceptable to say them, and people grew up in the habit of not saying them (publicly). But once permission was given they reveled in behaving like the worst assholes possible all the time, and the sweet, sweet dopamine rush was unbelievable.
Now that people are used to acting like unfiltered toddlers, I don’t know how we go back. Maybe it will burn itself out eventually, as when toddlers archly saying “Shit!” In front of everyone no longer provokes a reaction.
Part of that license is simply that being an asshole online carries with it much less risk of getting punched in the nose. Only a privileged few (those who can hire bodyguards or get their bodyguards provided at taxpayer expense) can engage is this shitty behavior in the real-life, in-person world.
Tourette's Nation.
It's highly possible that lack of filtering has always been most common among the most entitled portion of the population, because they've never had to a filter their expression for consequences or effect.
I've had numerous bosses who think the thing whatever they thought while takimg a shit was like the most brilliant plan for their business possible & will brook no critique. With social entitlement (read: Big Whitey, Big Str8, Big Cis-Male) absolute social freedom of speech which was the center of liberalism in its 18th-century form.
This is an old complaint, but I believe the gradual cultural shift over the 20th century from physical communal entertainment experience (theatre, nightclubs, concerts, lectures) to the current physical family/solitary one of personal screens has changed something fundamental in our monkey brains. We gathered in large and small groups outside the immediate family for many thousands of years for shared experience. Its been raised before about radio, then television, the computers, but the psuedo-interactve nature of social media seems different, and the fact that wealthy and state interests are busily gaming it for all its worth is not helping. I think people are literally being rewired, and a lot of this unfocused and undefined anxiety that's being spit out is from that. Our monkey brains are unhappy, and they don't know why.
Monkey Brain: “I just want the Wire Mom back!”
That’s the real Trumpism.
Queue the fat lady:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2xdhal6sqo
That's a new one for me!
Better Q: Why do sooo many people answer the question “Are you going to believe my lies are or the truth you see?” Incorrectly? Why do so many believe so much bullshit? Personally, as a defective human being, it’s not for me to do more than guess, I mean, I can’t know, but my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive.
As for the Edrosos’ theory, I’m not persuaded. As Roy notes (and I don’t doubt), the questions are... well, a problem if clarity is a goal. Too, as cancel culture -- again, a perverted term, speaking of clarity -- trickles down to the masses, it’s seen as holding people accountable when they offend. By offend, I mean both deliberately giving offense as well as stating something beyond the pale. (I was going to add that the right to be an asshole is going to be one of the last rights the SCOTUS junta will take away but then I realized that that right, as it were, is part of the foundation of this site in a way so sure, okay, maybe it can be okay.)
So little more than that: Assholes don’t want be held accountable and people have fears of being rejected for giving offense.
Which is cancel culture only in the debased, perverted sense of the term.
BTW: Those bleating loudest about being canceled aren’t actually being canceled.
My 2¢ (as opposed to $70/year).
I'm sure I've said this before, I do tend to repeat myself, but people don't become Republicans because they believe certain things, they believe certain things because they are Republicans. Those of us who have any political identity at all pick it at an early age, usually just inherited from our parents, and then spend the rest of our life picking and choosing the "facts" that fit our identity. What's new, I think, is one political party going so far off the rails in terms of the things that it asks its followers to believe. But the fact that they would believe if asked to believe was never in doubt, I think.
Nah, I think there’s any number of reasons including some who really, really like GOP positions.
Why are there Red states and Blue states? Something about the geography that makes people like certain positions? Or is it that people inherit a party identity from their parents and the people around them, and then make their views on policy (if any) conform to the party's views?
Urban/rural.
Recent immigrants/here for centuries.
Partially handed down partisan biases.
Red staters *generally* insular, tribal. And I’d like to think, not that I’d bet on it, suffering from too many generations of too much booze and the reproduction of a stagnant gene pool. Maybe, too, something like mass narcissism.
Right, but what all those things point to is that party ID comes first, and the ideas and philosophy come ready made and are mostly adopted without a struggle. Nobody develops a coherent political philosophy first and then goes shopping for a party to match it.
No one reason, of course but a large part of it is because Democrats have abandoned large swathes of the country. Party policy, and I am not speculating here or making this up, is to get registered Democrats to vote, not to engage with anyone who might not vote for them. I can tell you from direct experience that in my little corner of a red state the Democratic Party officials have open contempt for regular working people, at least those who are not union leaders. But to your point, many of the red states, and red counties at a more granular level, used to vote Democratic and some, such as Kansas and Wisconsin were very progressive (in the old sense of the word). As Howard Dean and his 50 state state strategy proved, getting a red county to vote 55 - 45 Republican instead of 70 - 30 has huge ramifications nationwide. With more time and money we could have turned that 55 -45 Republican into 52 - 48 Democrat, taken over (or held onto) the local and state governments and courts, and avoided this friggin nightmare we now inhabit. But no, the Democratic Party believes the best strategy is to not engage with the people they consider morons and as far as I can see they are retrenching rather than re-evaluating.
What would it take to change their minds? "Not working" does not seem to do it.
Winning races lower down ticket, getting power, obsoleting the DLC acolytes running the DNC. Offering an actual choice that gets shit done, playing the long game. (Yes, I know I’m echoing there.) Growing blue oases in red areas.
I should add that the down ticket areas are the only areas where there’s time for any sort of long game thanks to the GOP SCOTUS junta.
AOC’s one big mistake in her progressive project was/is thinking doing it from Congress is the way. But she has doubts about it and I think the doubts are correct there. Congress now is like overshooting into an area where little can be done other than enhancing one’s personal brand. I mean, it helps making one a leader and… that’s about it. It then raises the question of what kind of leader.
(signed) Not a professional political consultant
Since u asked.
My personal knowledge of Democratic politics is very local. My congressional district has two small cities and a lot of small towns and vast swathes of rural areas. The party in the largest city is dominated by snooty country club type white women with a few African American women and male pastors and smarmy white salesmen and lawyers on the side. Some of the rural counties are dominated by similar white women, though more garden club than country club. Otherwise the rural leaders tend to be older men who farmed or worked in trades. They all get guidance from the national party, which they tend to follow, the semi-urbanites more than the rural folk. So I'd say change needs to start with the national party as the locals are more followers than leaders.
It's much easier to speculate on what would work if different people were in charge than how to get different types of people in charge. In an ideal world, people like us would run for office, but people like us can't put up with all the bullshit it takes to run for office. And of course that wouldn't change the establishment's minds anyway. It would only lead to further retrenchment as you see with how they treat "the squad" and any other individual who manages to sneak past the country club guards.
So since we are basically stuck with the type of people who have the wherewithal and basic lack of intellectual type intelligence and creativity to dedicate their lives to politics, I'd say the only way to change their minds is to change the minds of the voters, which is essentially what the Republicans have done. The Republicans mostly ignored the establishment politicians and created communication networks to take power from below. They focused on local and state offices and taking over law enforcement and the judiciaries. And importantly, they did not limit their efforts to jurisdictions where they were the majority. The county I'm from, for example, voted roughly 70-30 Democrat from the Great Depression through the election of Reagan. After 1980 it began slipping and now it is 70-30 Republican. But more importantly still, they use mind conversion techniques straight out of "1984" to literally change people's minds.
So I'd say the way to change the minds of the establishment Dems, who will always be with us, is to change the minds of regular people, and the way to do that is to create a smarter, more effective communication network than the Republicans, and to use effective mind conversion techniques, though for good rather than evil.
The short of it is that when people are subjected to a constant barrage of fear, their minds become open to a change of their fundamental beliefs. Add hate to the fear, as the Republicans (and Big Brother) did, and the conversion process is even more effective. The difference between us and the Republicans in this respect is that they manufacture the reasons to fear and subsequently to hate whereas we have very real reasons to fear, starting with what Republicans and sociopathic billionaires and big businesses are doing -from catastrophic climate change to the host of other issues we are all so familiar with. I wouldn't advocate fostering hate towards people, but there are plenty of good reasons to hate and fear the institutions, policies, and outcomes that these people create.
It's doable, as the Republicans have so effectively demonstrated. It takes rich people writing checks to create communication networks tightly focused on mind conversion to an outlook that fosters sustainability, justice, and peace. Problem is, of course, that any sane person would rather make the best of their short lives than dedicate themselves to that kind of massive effort and we are not lacking near as much in sane people as the Republicans. On that note, I'm off on my Saturday morning bike ride and hike. It's another beautiful day in paradise, and I don't mean that sarcastically.
The New Deal/Great Society Dems can’t deliver but they also can’t respect that cohort either. It’s a dilemma. Then again, a problem is that red states are so red in part through gerrymandering which gives the voters the Dems are rejecting disproportionate power. Then again, the nation was founded with a democracy limited to an elite so…
"Why do so many believe so much bullshit?" ..." my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive."
Yup. I realized when quite young that I was not a 'joiner'. And it's been a way to define myself v. the other, not necessarily in a good way, but effective as far as it goes. On their worst days (oh so many) the joiners are weird amalgams of passive/aggressive dominant/submissive muddlebrains. And very vocal about it, as if we somehow are not listening hard enough.
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?"
In my experience, the people who feel most oppressed in this regard:
1.) Are the people who spend most of their time expressing their viewpoint, loudly and obnoxiously. And then wondering why others avoid them.
2.) Are people with utterly abhorrent viewpoints who feel oppressed because it's no longer socially acceptable to tell racial jokes or to "compliment" the receptionist on how nice her tits look.
3.) Are people who do not actually know what "cancelculture" is, but they've heard about it and they know it's bad, and they know that it's coming for them so they will SOON be unable to express themselves.
America is not a land of contrasts. It is a land of ever-declining intelligence and ever-increasing stupidity.
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?" - substitute “hit someone in the face” for “express your viewpoint” and it becomes clearer. I the push-poll nature becomes obvious. What does retaliate mean? If I express my viewpoint that abortion shouldn’t be legal and someone, even vehemently, disagrees, was I retaliated against? If I think of my expression of my view as an attack in the first place, I guess it could be, but then, I started it.
I think the reverse side of this coin is victimhood culture, a staple ingredient of the right wing fever swamp.
100% agree. The entitlement is off the charts. The most stark example of this is white people who say, "why can't I use the n-word when THEY do?"
I recommend responding with "There are, conservatively, more than 170,000 words in the English language. There are maybe three dozen you shouldn't say. Relax, you'll be fine." So far, it's been quite effective at shutting them up.
I did the math, and that's about 169,964 perfectly cromulent words available for your use.
"But most of those are words I don't know, and the ones I'm not supposed to say I do know, so what am I supposed to do? Learn things? That's not the American Way, buddy!"
I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield
Just thank god you didn't move to Shelbyville.
So far, it's been quite effective at shutting them up.
So you cancelled them?
They stole the idea of victimhood decades ago, jealous how well they were told it was working for actual victims.
Nailed it...
I mean, people have sort of always bought this bullshit, right? For example, not being able to say the n-word can be traced straight back through civil rights and Jim Crow to the Peculiar Institution. Likewise, Joe the Plumber grumbling that he can’t say “tranny” is an improvement (relatively speaking) over how being openly gay or trans just a few decades ago was a ticket to getting beat up or killed. I suspect that all too many of the people bitching about cancel culture today would be quite happy to go back to the “good old days” of beating up gays, and lynching and enslaving people of color.
Yes. To them Lynching On Demand was a *good* thing.
Hearted but not 'liked', if you see my meaning...
I think a lot of people take their cultural cues from right wing media and “respectable” outlets like the NYT and NPR, and the people running those places are consumed with cancelculture for their own reasons—either because they’re awful people politically, or because it’s easier to write about the alarming cancelculture problem at Oberlin than it is to cover, say, a rolling conservative coup.
Plus, even if they don’t belong to such rarefied clubs as the NYT op-ed page, they’re still comfortable and don’t want that comfort disrupted by any social justice stuff, or they fear something in their own past—something not ill-intentioned, and something they’re probably unaware of—will become the newest target of CANCELCULTURE, and they’ll find themselves banished to the outer darkness like Al Franken and Garrison Keillor—or even that nice Andrew Cuomo and Bari Weiss.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
And that's Karl Motherfucking Marx, so you KNOW it's true.
"Karl Motherfucking Marx, now with twice the socializing power of regular Karl Marx!"
Karl is regular thanks to the very fiber of his being...
To be kinder to the respectable media outlets than they perhaps deserve, they think they objectively reporting on the cultural phenomenon of cancel culture, while vigorously averting their gaze from the fact their reporting grants a legitimacy to an obvious con it objectively doesn't deserve. Look at what it took to get them to label Trump's whinging about a stolen election "baseless", just a premeditated attempt to violently overthrow a duly elected government. They really don't want to disturb their phoney-baloney jobs.
I think your last sentence gets at the most concrete definition of "cancel": being blocked out of media presence (just ask Bari Weiss). That's gotta be the most frightening thing a media person can imagine, and that's why they can't shut up about it.
I like to think the average reporter knows deep down that the mainstream’s full of shit.
Re: Jordan Peterson—the other day in the Fun Half of The Majority Report, Sam Seder and crew had a grand old time sending up Jordan Peterson’s overwrought self-crucifixion diatribe, which he inexplicably thought wise to record and disseminate.
"Get up off the Cross we need the lumber."
[to which Mssr James Brown chimes in, "Get up offa that thang."]
Upvoted for quoting The Godfather of Soul.
James was sometimes pretty conservative, you know.
I wouldn't be surprised if he were around today he'd revive his old standard "Hot Pence!"
Yeah, I know that about him.
Savonarola was canceled when he was hanged and burned by the Florentines. Hitler was canceled when he killed himself instead of letting the Red Army take him captive. When one of these snowflakes undergoes something similar, then I might concede that they have a point.
Donald Trump was canceled by Twitter, so there's that...
Thank god.
#hoping.
First of all, I was happy to hear that Jeff Bezo's $500 million yacht was stuck in a boatyard in Holland because it was too big to fit under a bridge, but not because I think for a minute that it makes me just like him because I once built a dinghy in my basement that wouldn't fit out the door, but because I think he's an asshole. If he wasn't an asshole, I might have empathized, given my own over-sized vessel history. So some celebrity woes make me happy because some celebrities are assholes, and others I might think in passing, "Oh, that's too bad. Let's check the baseball scores."
Secondly, the whole idea of the word "cancelculture" and the fact that we're all using it, to the point that people who wouldn't know the difference between a tenured professor and a professional tennis player can opine positively or negatively about it, proves Gingrich's Law (which I just made up), that any word - old, repurposed or created - can be inserted into the minds of Americans as a bad thing they should be opposed to and worry about and have an opinion about, preferably along with a distaste for liberals and Democrats. Think about it, "cancelculture" makes no sense, especially in the way it's applied to actual things that happen. No culture is cancelled when someone is taken off social media, or even loses their job. If it were, what culture would that be? The culture of white American pseudohistory? And cancelled? What has been so eliminated from our purview that it can be said to be cancelled? These rightwing assholes, as Roy and others have pointed out again and again, never go away. Gingrich is still around and I just made up a law in his name. My point is, every time someone uses these terms, we give them life and not in a way that has any connection to what they really mean. "Woke" - who wouldn't rather be awake than asleep to the reality of the world? Assholes, that who. "CRT" - if you're going to propose a theory about race to apply to the study of American history, why wouldn't you want it to be critical (in the sense of examining, not as negative)? Oh, not if you're an asshole. I'll force myself to look at this NYT article and if the comments are still open, say there is no such thing as "cancelculture" and they might as well ask random boobs if they're against jabberwockies. Some percentage will undoubtedly say they are.
Anyway, gas prices have been going down for three weeks, so I guess we won't be hearing about the agony of the gas buying public on network TV for a while.
Hearing "Your yacht's too big" must have been the high point of Bezos' life, because we all know the REAL reason guys like him buy big yachts.
Saw "your yacht's too big" and thought of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_elALEP4KFg
Any excuse to share Fats Waller is a valid excuse.
and "given my own over-sized vessel history" spotlights your game, too, boyo...
As a woman with large feet, all I can say is "Gunboats!"
Samesies. (In our family we're so noted for this distinction that the saying is "We [Real names] *cover* the ground we stand on.")
"You know the problems I've been having building dinghies in my basement."
Nobody knows the transom I've seen...
Media won’t be shutting up about inflation because it’s too easy to go on about in order to bash Biden and the Dems.
I'm not sure people really need a reason to believe anything they believe, other than that the thing they believe is in circulation and believed by others. That's the power of the ruling class, that they get to put ideas out into wide enough circulation that they get believed by millions of people simply because they're believed by millions of people.
I often see the effectiveness of this particular brand of centrist/conservative equine enema solution has had in our mentalité whenever I read student writing. I so often find a claim that this particular movie/book/poem/whatever "just couldn't be made right now" because of some scene or language or characterization that they know now that people find objectionable. Sometimes I find it encouraging in that they understand that there's consequences to language and representation. But usually it's a kind of "this just shouldn't exist" — and they get that way, I think, because media whinging about cancel culture forestalls actually interesting & socially responsible conversationsabout inclusion and ethics from happening.
Those papers are almost always extended & enriched & made relevant by just asking "why the fuck should anybody care" (or, more pedagogically perhaps, "why is it important that we notice and what is your action item here").
But I have to say it's not exactly anything new. I'm a medievalist as you all know (grouchy as they come) & it's always been a habit for a student in considering piece of literature like Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," which discusses misogyny, domestic violence, the antifeminist tradition in medieval scholastic discourse and throw ones hands up and say well that's just how they did things back then. With the implication that "we do things better now" & that's all that needs to be said. It reveals both of a lack of desire to engage with the relics of patriarchy, but also a reflexive insistence on cultural or social progress, right? We take it for given that because women can now vote or have credit cards, they're free. Which isn't really true as we all see & are seeing.
Post Dobbs, I would be interested to see how many students find that complacency challenged and are a little easier to convince that the questions of past oppressions or exclusions are actually important to understand.
Three cheers for Alysoun, the gat-toothed Wife of Bath!
For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve.
He is to grete a nygard that wolde werne
A man to lighte a candle at his lanterne.
He shal have never the lasse light, pardee.
Have thou ynogh, thee thar nat pleyne thee.
[Oh, excuse me please, you old fool,
You'll get all the pussy you need tonight.
How miserly is a man who would refuse
another to light a candle at his lantern.
Would he have less light, for crying out loud?
Get your fill, okay -- and stop your whining]
(III.331–6, bouncy, fun translation by GM)
I am regularly amazed at how relevant Chaucer remains. The Wife of Bath being concerned with “sovereignty” predates the medieval misogynist Sammy Alito quoted when attacking women’s rights.
Her prologue, 1350 lines long or so, also shows the longue durée of men's tendency to interrupt any woman speaking in a public space and blatherate about their fee-fees.
Wait, the expression "fer cryin' out loud!" goes back to Chaucer?
Well, the way I translated "pardee" [by God in French], a rather benign expletive. My new project of making "bouncy, fun" translations of medieval literature is designed to create bridges to medieval thought & challenge stuffy, stertorous old-guard renderings.
For whanne that woman’s speche must man endure / ful ycancelèd ys he, eek unmanned ywis
(apologies to medievalists everywhere)
Oh, come now, we all know obscene language was invented by hippies in 1965 specifically to destroy Western civilization.
Alinsky strikes again
Alinsky never gets anything done – he's always on strike.
I see among the latest trends in elite media: 1) “why don’t the rabble know their place when it comes to wages/protests/etc” and 2) anti-trans “thought” pieces. You might call it Serf & TERF.
Damn, that's good
You know, I think of myself as a bit of a wordsmith, and yet I come here and to alicublog and I realize I am indeed standing on the shoulders of giants.
I used to think of myself as a bit of a wordsmith, but I've come to realize that the size of the bit is a great deal smaller than I thought.
But when you get it between yer teeth, run with it!
All of Roy's fan are fairly articulate, or we couldn't properly appreciate him.
Here and at Aliciblog, we are each of us . . . a delight.
HEY-O
I wonder how these polls would turn out if, instead of the vague phrase, "express your viewpoint" they gave a list of expressions and asked "How comfortable are you saying these things in public?" The list would start with the n-word, of course, got to pay respect to ones elders, and then run on down through the f-word and the b-word (bonus pay for the poor souls who'd have to read this list over the phone.)
And then, after people indicate their level of discomfort over saying these specific things publicly, comes the followup: "Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing that you should feel uncomfortable saying some of these things in public?"