Scott Cawthon (FNaF guy) cancelled
- Thread starter Johnny Novgorod
- Start date
Where does what end; personally deciding to not financially support a really, really rich person? I also don't get how being critical of someone's behavior currently when they weren't (that) critical of similar people in the past somehow makes it invalid now. People change and people figure stuff out. If we're not allowed to call out questionable behavior now because we were okay with it or more willing to ignore it a decade ago then nothing's ever going to change. Not for the better atleast.
And people are generally going to care more about what's happening right now than what happened years ago. People right now don't care too much about Arnie having been a creep on set with women, but they certainly cared when he was running for governer. Not as much as they would these days, but it was very much a thing.
But going 'if you care so much about this right now, why don't you care about everything all the time' is a little silly. Also, considering what the republican party has turned into - not exactly starting with Trump but certainly exploding with him, and in the wake of january 6th and with the host of insane republican figureheads now in office - it's not too hard to understand that donations to them in current times are looked upon a lot more critically then they were in the 90's.
He made 60 million dollars off of FNaF?! Jesus, I think that's the real crime here. Heck I think we should go ahead and cancel all multi-millionares.
And take their money.
And take their money.
So what?
To turn your own weird all or nothing mentality back on you, we all get labelled every second we are in the public eye. Everything we say and everything we do invites judgement, so who cares? It's not like noone is labelling you anyway.
If you're that terrified of criticism then staying quiet is probably the best option.
I don't think you have any concept of what it means to actually be unsafe, and I think using that word in this context just signals how incredibly low the stakes are for you.
The singular, tiny grain of truth in what you're saying is that a situation exists which is hostile to political nuance, and that's because ultimately you were correct that this is a war. It's a war the right started and has waged for generations with unrelenting venom and ever diminishing success. It is a war that has ruined and even ended countless lives, which has created conditions of genuine unsafety for those the right deems its enemies. There cannot be political nuance until that war ends.
The world is full of people, and a lot of them have strange ideas. Anyone in a public-facing role is going to have to deal with the people who turn up and talk bollocks. If you ill-temperedly let fly at cranks with comments likely to piss off a huge number of people, you can suck up the resultant shitstorm you needlessly brought on yourself.
Part of the complaint here is often bringing politics into an arena where it is not necessary or desirable. Well, that also means that if someone does bring unnecessary or undesirable politics into your arena, you don't double down and kick up an even bigger, more divisive political mess. Otherwise you are exactly what you are complaining about.
So, I actually agree with you, though I'm kind of left to wonder where True Lies factors in. Arnie fighting and killing ME terrorists who want to do bad things because...reasons.
But yeah, Cameron's films seem to be left wing in general - not just Avatar, but arguably the Terminator films and Aliens (though I've seen interpretations of Aliens suggesting it's celebrating colonialism and whatnot). So how does Cameron end up donating to Republicans when, even before Trump pushed them off the cliff, were still, y'know, right leaning?
Democrats are shit, but they're not actively malicious to marginalized people like the Republican party is. Consider yourself fortunate that you have the privilege of not recognizing this.
Well good for you, you're wrong. If you honestly think the elites do not have far more power than the rabble to destroy someone's life and career when they feel their privilege is in some way challenged or threatened, then you haven't been paying attention at all.
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Well they often are, just not as on a gleefully wide scale, and they're aware enough that it's bad to not make it the centre of their campaigns.
Oh cool, now we can talk about a problem that's actually real.
You missed Natalie Wynn.
And that's important because Natalie Wynn is where I noticed it.
So, Natalie Wynn did actually make a genuine mistake. Using Buck Angel in a video was a bad move because it did give the impression of legitimizing Buck Angel's views on non-binary people, some of whom were already kind of annoyed at things Natalie had said. Now personally, I don't really care. I think Buck Angel is cringe, but he's still part of the trans community whether he returns the favour or not. But I can see why some non-binary people got mad at her for that.
But trans and non-binary people are not a unified group who share a single hive-mind opinion, and every non-binary person I knew and who was aware of this (which is a pretty decent sample) just kind of got over it quietly, because even if they thought it was bad there were just bigger things going on than worrying about some transwoman who, ultimately, is allowed her own perspective because she's lived it, and some old transman who noone cares about.
But then I noticed the cis talking about it, and what I noticed was that there was no debate. The cis had simply absorbed the message by osmosis that Natalie was bad and that they needed to disavow her. The nuance, the differences of opinion and the general spirit of acceptance that I saw in most of the trans and non-binary community was completely absent in the cis discourse (ciscourse?).
And the reason was very obvious. The cis people, all of whom were nice and well meaning and who were trying to be trans allies, had not realised that there could be more than one trans or non-binary perspective. They wanted to be the person listening to trans and non-binary voices, but they had not realised that trans and non-binary voices didn't always agree with each other. It's not surprising, these were often people who I knew at best tangentially, they probably didn't have any close trans or non-binary friends. They weren't listening to the debates in the affected communities, they were listening to other cis people, and basing their opinions on what the "trans voices" were saying on information provided by other cis people.
Lindsey Ellis, whose recent dogpiling probably had a lot to do with her refusal to publicly disavow Natalie Wynn, noticed a very similar thing, and I'd recommend watching her video on it because it's hard but it's incredibly revealing. The overwhelming, overwhelming majority of the hate she received wasn't coming from east Asians concerned about cinematic orientalism, it was coming from white people. White people who would repeat the refrain over and over about listening to POC voices, as if all the POC voices in the world agreed with them. Some of the people involved who seemed to actually be POC actually turned out to be white people.
But, another thing I agree with Lindsey Ellis on is that this isn't cancel culture. Cancel culture is this mythical conservative boogeyman because the reality is, this doesn't happen to conservatives. Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich and countless other truly, truly awful people have somehow failed to be cancelled, because trying to cancel them would be pointless. Someone who goes around misgendering trans people for a living doesn't care if people hate them. These people have a level of power and privilege and clout which protects them from shit like this. The only people this happens to is marginalized people. Women, people of colour, LGBT people, people who are vulnerable.
Instead of cancel culture, Lindsey Ellis calls it the beast, and I think that's the best metaphor I've ever heard. In Lord of the Flies, the children trapped on an island start to imagine a monster they call the beast. They see it everywhere. They hold elaborate hunts for it. They end up killing each other because they start to see each other as the beast (spoilers for Lord of the Flies by the way). What the children can't see is that the beast was actually a part of them all along.
People in positions of privilege often have this manichaeistic view of bigoty or prejudice, that either you are a bigot or you're not. You're either an evil racist or you're completely blameless. You're either a transphobe or you're a trans ally. But from an outside perspective that's laughable. Trans allies are still vulnerable to engaging in forms of transphobia (like assuming that all trans people share a single opinion or perspective). As the song goes, everyone is a little bit racist, because we all grew up in a racist society. Not being bigoted is something you have to work at every day of your life, and even then you will never completely succeed. But that's not satisfying, that can't provide what a lot of people need, which is a definitive knowledge that they are 100% not bigoted, so these people imagine a beast. They take the monster inside themselves and project it onto someone else (someone who isn't going to be able to fight back, typically someone who is themselves marginalized) so that they can convince themselves that they're on the right side, and that they're not a racist or a transphobe or a bigot because they're opposing someone who is.
Tl;dr: It's not cancel culture, it's performative allyship.
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Is it racism and a racist society or is it the natural leaning of humanity to become tribal? Humans often hated others simply because they were the "others", and part of that was the protection of the tribe and the tribe's lands, and the part was the tribal influence of "they are not us, therefore we don't like them." And it wasn't unique to specific tribes either, this occurred pretty much everywhere and occurs with every society including the LBGT and the sub groups within. Even within that space there are subsets that don't like the other letters.
Today most humans are a bit more locational with their tribe, Americans, Germans, Europeans, depending on how broad the scope goes. Sometimes it's religious based Muslims, Jewish, Christians. Then each of those bigger groups breaks down further, sub-divisions of religion, states and cities of a given country or sometimes even down to just the neighborhood.
I think it's a fruitless endeavor to try and make not only your own group (tribe), but to also somehow many every other group (tribe) welcome you with open arms. Or welcome you with reluctance. No matter what happens some tribes will not accept yours, and nothing will change that. But each tribe can control how they react to those who dislike them right? Accept that not everyone can or will accept your tribe and leave it alone.
However there are certain exceptions to that. I think in the trans(group) case, it's perfectly right to push back again people trying to make laws that make treatments stupid difficult. Within reason. Nobody will ever convince me that trans procedures (homormones, puberty blockers, etc) should be allowed on children (counciling and mental health psychology is fine though), that is just something I'll never agree with ever so don't bother trying. But i do think that if trans adults want surgeries, or need medications, then they should have reasonable ways to get them. Insurance coverage with a high deductible if necessary, or lower deductible at a higher premium whatever the insurance company wants to do. Making it illegal to treat people is a frankly stupid idea.
All that being said, I think it's hard to control who you support politically (bringing this around to Scott) that thoroughly. As some companies and parties support ill-practices in secret or at least don't announce all their donations and since a lot of people aren't always looking into every detail that kind of thing is easy to miss. You hear someone campaigning for election and if you like what you hear then you support it, and that's usually as far as it goes. I doubt that Scoot specifically hunting for the people who actively push for anti-trans agenda's.
Then you also have to consider the fact that not everyone knows or cares about the full consequences of anti-anything means. Maybe religious people are anti-LBGT but would support denying them healthcare or shooting them in the face (whatever extreme thing you wanna put here). They just don't agree with it as a lifestyle (despite it not being a choice but you get my point I hope). So they are going to vote for other like-minded political people, despite not really knowing that the politician will be voting for suppression of the LBGT because again they don't really look into it.
For example: I don't want my house painted pink, I don't like pink. But that doesn't mean I don't want other people to love pink if that is their favorite color.
I guess the point im trying to make is that it's not a black and white scale of for/against. But that is what a lot of the "cancelling" seems to result from. Some says, "Man I really don't like this pink car." Then the mob screams, "Pinkphobic!!! How dare you spew this hate upon the pinkfavoritists!".
And, anyway, what is it to be the elite, if it's not to have far more power than the rabble?
Uhrm, who is who in this analogy? Cawthon didn't say "I don't like X", that's not what happened. A group of lawmakers made concerted legal efforts to restrict equal rights, and Cawthon gave them a bunch of money.
It's more apt if the guy who doesn't like the pink car is the person accused of "cancelling". He doesn't like the pink car, so decides not to buy it for himself. Then people turn up to tell him that if he doesn't buy it, then he's "cancelling" pink cars.
I think that argument doesn't really work for the Republican party. Republican candidates are often very vocal about their desire to make life hell for LGBT people. They often broadly boasts of legislation that directly harms the LGBTQ community. Even Trump who hilariously tried painting himself as somewhat LGBTQ friendly had a policy banning all trans people from the military. And any pretentions he had would have been undercut anyway by the presence of Mike ''Conversion Therapy'' Pence as his running mate. Not wanting trans people to use the bathroom for instance or being opposed to gay marriage are not policy ideas that Republican candidate keep hidden from the public.
Not to mention that not seeing how anti LGBTQ Republican candidates are can be excused in the beginning of their career. In 2016 you might at least understand why someone would be willfully ignorant about Trump's stance, but Cawthon also funded him in 2020 long after it because clear Trump is anti LGBTQ.
Thank you, oh enlightened one, for being here to tell us what's real and what isn't.
This feels like it almost belongs in another topic, but I actually agree with the point you're making. There's a strain of thought, particuarly on the left, which thinks "if you're X, you must think Y," or in this case, people getting offended on behalf of other people. It's the type of nonsense that Biden's "if you don't vote for me, you ain't Black" comment represents in all its ugly, identitarian glory.
I have watched her video. It's a video that's far longer than it needs to be IMO, but yes, I watched it - it's a further affirmation of why cancel culture is terrible, because it empowers little shits on the Internet (among other things) to ruin people's lives. Also an affirmation as to why being more offended than the group you're claiming is offended isn't something you should do.
Um...
Yeah, see a few posts down.
That's patently absurd - lots of conservatives have been deplatformed or cancelled in some form or another. Gina Carano, Katie Hopkins, Steve Bannon, Milo Yianapolis, Stefan Molyneux, Alex Jones, etc.
We can debate about whether they deserve to be platformed or not (all of those listed above are terrible people apart from Carano), but the idea that conservatives aren't cancelled and only people on the left are is a claim that just doesn't hold up. Conservative speakers are heckled on campus far more than left-leaning ones.
So it's not cancel culture but "the beast." Because semantics.
We can call it what we want, but it's two terms to describe the same phenomena. And yes, I do recall her term "the beast" from the video, and yes, I have read Lord of the Flies - I don't know if it's really the metaphor I'd use, because if there's a single main theme of LotF, I'd say that it's "savagery is the true nature of Man" or "without an ordered society, people will collapse into chaos." Moral puritans, cancellers, call them whatever - the people who try to be offended in others' behalf (among other things) aren't living in the collapse of civilization, they live in an ordered society, even if that society has its share of insanity, especially over the last half decade.
At the end of the day, people tried to drive Ellis into ruin because, either through idiocy or as disingenuous a reading as possible, she conflated Raya and the Last Dragon with Last Airbender. It's the same idiocy that came for Zhao as well.
I disagree that it's people in positions of privilege. The type of binary you're describing tends to come from bottom up rather than top down. Yes, every so often you get Ibram X. Kendi dividing everyone and everything between racist and anti-racist, but the sentiments usually come from people on the ground, so to speak. I've used Biden as a top-down, but I've read about how in the US in the 1970s, activisits would yell (paraphrased) "if you're Black/Latino and haven't come to speak with a Black/Latino voice, don't bother showing up." The people saying this being Black/Latino themselves, because God forbid that people have beliefs and opinions that aren't dictated by inherent traits.
...anyone else want a reminder why identity politics is terrible?
Um, yeah, but it's also a song that sattarizes political correctness, among other things, and not something that would ever make it to the stage today. The song's in contrast to the point you're making below, at least in its 'perscription.'
No, not really.
There's a term for performative allyship - virtue signalling. We're all guilty of it. I'm guilty of it. How annoying virtue signalling is will depend on who's doing it, and what the circumstances are, but virtue signalling doesn't have to be cancel culture.
Let's go back to Ellis. Let's say someone, genuinely (somehow) was offended by her tweet. Virtue signalling would be something like writing a blog post, saying "Unlike Lindsay Ellis, I'm not a sinophobe who conflates all Asian culture into a single fantasy genre, I'M a good person who has plenty of Asian friends and who's read books by Asian authors and I'm oh so virtuous, and please, fund me on Patreon." It crosses over into cancel culture when you start trying to attack someone directly - to have them fired, to have them deplatformed, to do any number of shitty things that people do out of some moral crusade.
And I'll be clear, as I said earlier, Ellis didn't need to make the video she did, and frankly, she got off easier than a lot of other people who've been abused on social media (Kelly Marie Tran comes to mind). But the whole thing still stinks, because the whole debacle is a case of either moral puritanism, online sadism, or an utter lack of reading comprehension. Call it "cancel culture," call it "the beast," call it what you want, it's terrible, and it's even worse when people do terrible things because they genuinely believe they're doing good.
It's just that republicans come off as cartoonishly evil at times whereas democrats are trying to act like they care but the policies they implement aren't beneficial to the majority of Americans either. I wouldn't be surprised if democratic policy actually hurts marginalized people more than republican policy if you actually do a deep dive. And, I'm far more liberal than conservative by the way. If the average American actually wants things to change for their betterment, nobody should be voting republican or democrat regardless of how conservative/liberal they are. Instead of voting against the worst candidate, vote for the candidate that may actually help. Maybe the ranked-choice voting "experiment" in NYC will start a domino effect and become the standard way to vote and allow people to vote for who they want vs who they don't want.
Oh. Are we doing the stupid Olympics of cancelling. Can I join in?
1. The attack on the NFL was against 30ish players. They all been forced to conform or get fired. So already 30x worse then Carano
2. They went out of their way not to insult anyone. They were just asking for a particular action to stop. The opposite of Carano who regularly insulted trans people
3. They were then hauled in front the media for weeks on end until the team caved. They were told they were un-American and evil. Carano had a new job with her best buddy a day later
4. They had the FUCKING president adding his own cancelling points in. He used his own power to target people. Im pretty sure neither Biden or Trump said anything cancelling against Carano. Nor did I see Disney sending cancel mobs against her like Trump did.
5. That moment was THE moment to try and stop this Cancel train. And all it showed was a partisan shitshow that was only about taking people out they didn't like
But Carano is the one hardest done by.... Jesus Christ
No, I don't think Carano should have lost her job. If you (general 'you', not you in particular) wanted to save her job, you should have voiced your opinion against the cancelling that happened years ago. This coule have been stopped. Instead we had a bunch of people egging it on and then complaining years later that it now turned on them.
Also, thanks for join in the Olympics, Hawki. 'People are mad she said Beep. See arent they the worst.' And then pretended that nothing else happened. Clap, Clap
What does "becoming tribal" even mean?
Actual tribes are kinship structures, they're extended families, or confederations of extended families bound by marriage ties. Actual tribes don't typically hate each other for no reason, that's a weird colonialist view of kinship societies. If tribes fight each other, it's typically over resources or to redress some insult or offence. Tribal societies can be open minded and accepting of outside influences. Tribal societies can form stable civic societies with cities and rule of law. Tribal societies can be peaceful, resolving their differences through trade and marriage. In fact, if anything is a natural leaning of humanity, it's exogamy, because if our ancestors didn't practice exogamy they would have become inbred and died, taking their "tribal" genes with them.
And it becomes even more pronounced when we look at the human ancestral environment, because for most of the history of hominids, they didn't really seem to fight each other at all. It makes no sense why they would. Populations were too low to seriously compete with each other for resources, and a hominid is an incredibly dangerous opponent so there's a very good chance they would just kill each other. Even in the age of behaviourally modern humans, when we do start to see evidence of humans fighting other groups, we also find evidence of trade and intermarriage (again, exogamy was kind of necessary for those small human populations).
Humans are naturally intelligent. That is their defining evolutionary and behavioural trait when compared to every other animal on earth. Any speculation about other human traits is at best an educated guess, because human intelligence is so determinate of who we are that it completely eclipses anything else.
Now this is funny, because you've put forward a premise and then completely rejected its obvious conclusion.
If humans are naturally tribal, if we are just compelled to naturally hate each other, then the solution isn't to leave each other alone, the solution is to kill the other tribe. That would be the natural response. If warfare between tribes is inevitable, then peaceful strategies become suicidal, the only solution is aggression, not toleration or coexistence. The other tribe will kill you as soon as they can, so you need to kill them first. Exterminate every single one of them. Eliminate them from the gene pool.
This, incidentally, is why humans are not naturally tribal and aggressive, because naturally aggressive humans would have very quickly killed themselves (and their aggressive genes) off by constantly warring with other aggressive humans. In early human evolution, non-aggressive humans had an evolutionary advantage because there was enough resources for everyone, fighting other humans was always a net loss and thus any unusually aggressive humans would have simply been outcompeted by their less aggressive neighbours. It's only once humans became intelligent enough to choose strategies based on the situation and populations became large enough to compete for resources that aggression became rewarding, but it's only rewarding as long as not everyone is aggressive.
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Well, if you want to start a cancelling Olympics, that's on you.
Where did I say that Carano was harder done by?
When I said it isn't different, I was referring to the principle - the mob braying for someone's blood (hypothetically, since I need to spell this out apparently) based on socio-political beliefs. If you want to actually do a cancelling olympics, I actually agree that Kapernick and the NFL players had it worse. Protesting police brutality is a pretty sound principle, but nup, then Trump came in, among other things.
You started the Olympics, not me.
You want to do an Olympics? You can rank everyone on this thread if you want. I'm not particuarly interested in that game, because if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.