So, given how much I have talked about trans issues on this thread, your decision to default to using he/him pronouns is an interesting decision.
If you want me to use different pronouns, I'll use them.
You don't actually have the power to remove me from the Escapist. You saying that I should be removed from the escapist is both protected speech and not in violation of any rules. It's a personal opinion to which you are entitled. The people who can remove me from the escapists are the staff and moderators, who have that power because they are given it by the people who own the site, and who have a right to unilaterally determine who uses their site because it is their site. The idea that you personally could censor me is a ludicrous overestimation of your own power within this situation.
I never said I had the power to personally censor you, that's beside the point. It's the mere idea of someone thinking you should be for...what? Expressing an opinion? Ideas?
You saying that you want me to be removed from the Escapist is just words. The only power those words have is that they might potentially convince people, which is not a problem, it's literally just how words work. It's also entirely possible that you saying I have bad opinions could result in someone with power concluding that I should be removed from the site. There is no fundamental difference. It is all just words, and this idea that words alone can be censorship is just another attempt to control the discussion.
Words alone aren't censorship, that was entirely the point of the distinction I made.
I mean...sorry, usually I'd try and respond in detail, but all I can really say is that I fundamentally disagree with everything you said. If you think there's absolutely no difference between saying someone has a bad opinion, and making an active, concentrated effort to punish/deplatform/whatever for that opinion, I...I'm sorry, I just can't comprehend that line of reasoning.
Your entire argument hinges on the fact that people are entitled to access to a platform, and that removing someone's access to a platform is a violation of their rights. Several times now, you have used the example of people being fired for expressing horrible opinions as an example of cancel culture. But if those people were not entitled to their careers, then what exactly is the problem? The decision to fire them was made by their employers, who had the legal right to do so.
Okay, but horrible opinions according to whom? You? The employer? The mob? There's safeguards in place to stop employers discriminating on traits such as sex and religious belief, but employers have the legal right to terminate people for expressing opinions? Also, even if there are some things that are universally acknowledged to be terrible, when people dug up the tweets of people like Ollie Robinson, Hartley Sawyer, and Sarah Jeong (who actually did escape cancellation, which is good, even if the reasoning wasn't), if the opinions are made well before joining the period of employment, if the person is genuinely sorry, is there a grace period, or not?
So, let's follow your line of argument, which seems to be:
a) People aren't entitled to a career (technically true)
b) The employer has the legal right to fire anyone for expressing an opinion.
You absolutely see no problem with that? None at all? You don't think if you were brought in before your boss, who says "well TB, you said this thing, so out you go" (you can protest about time passed and/or character change, it doesn't matter, you're still out), you don't think there's something wrong going on here? Nothing at all? Because if not, then we're approaching territory where employers can fire people for any number of things. Or, alternatively, a condition of employment should be to not express an opinion about anything, because at least there we're approaching some kind of consistency.
If someone who is already a journalist is entitled to keep their job, and thus their platform regardless of what they do or say because otherwise it would be cancel culture, then does that not indicate that they possess some fundamental right or entitlement to their platform? If they possess that fundamental right, then what about the rest of us? Do we also possess that right, or is that a right that only some people actually have? Furthermore, if a journalist did get fired for something they wrote, would that not be a decision made by their editor, or their employer, a person who is entitled to make that decision. If the audience's demands do not impinge upon the ability of a journalist to freely use their platform, why do they impinge on the ability of a publication (or any business) to decide who they want to have access to that platform?
Do people have an inherent right to access to platforms or not?
Most people aren't journalists for starters, and there's already a vetting process for journalists. If I go to work for a news group, I'm almost certainly going to be signing some kind of contract. The rules are clearly established. Most social media doesn't have any real vetting process.
So, do people have an inherent right to access platforms? Well, in the strictest sense, no, but if your platform is open-access, then people are going to start to notice when terms and conditions aren't equally applied.
So, most of the specific examples of cancel culture you've provided are only similar in extremely superficial ways. A person says something, they are criticized and (either as a result of what they said or the criticism that followed it) something happened to them which was not very pleasant. Maybe they lost their jobs, maybe they felt overwhelmed and had to quit social media, maybe they were banned from a social media platform, maybe they were protested. In some cases, even this really broad equation is going too far and the cancellation took the form of criticism merely being too shrill or unwarranted (i.e. Dawkins).
For an individual, losing their job or being dogpiled on social media is always an undeniably bad experience, and if you have empathy towards that person then maybe it seems like that bad experience is a societal problem, but that isn't necessarily true. It is normal for bad things to happen to people, it is normal for someone to lose their job if they piss off their employer or become a liability. It is normal for someone to encounter anger if they say something which makes people angry.
There can be times when criticism is unwarranted, or unjustified, or unreasonable. I see nothing wrong with calling out those times just as I see nothing wrong with calling people out in general. But I'm not buying into this logic that a bad thing happening to you as a result of you saying something is automatically a violation of your rights, let alone an actual societal problem.
Again, we've reached the point of fundamental disagreement.
First, societal. It absolutely is a societal problem in my mind, because even if we haven't used the term, cancel culture has existed in some form or another across time and cultures. We don't have to worry about something like blasphemy laws here (well, it seeks the UK does these days), but it's a kind of inverse moral puritanism that really distinguishes cancel culture in my eyes. People will be shitty to one another for all sorts of reasons - I've said repeatedly that not all abuse is cancel culture, but I'd say what distinguishes cancel culture (as in, distinguishing it as an actual culture), is the following:
1) People are either good or evil, right or wrong. There is no grey area whatsoever. It is a battle between "us and them," and we can't afford to give any ground.
2) By extension, it isn't enough to criticize people, one has to remove them entirely.
3) There is no chance of redemption or character growth. If you did something or said something, it doesn't matter when you did it, or how much you might be genuinely sorry, it doesn't matter. You did/said this, so you must be punished.
Doesn't that sound like something else? Like religion, maybe? How certain religions have acted, and in some parts of the world, continue to act?
I've commented before that the right absolutely does wield cancel culture as well, so it's really strange, for me, when we get this kind of secular version of it. I'm certainly not the only person who's noticed it either - everyone from Steven Fry, to Barrack Obama, to Jonathan Haidt, to John McWhorter, to countless individuals (and I mean countless) have noticed the shift - people who've been on this earth longer than I have. You don't think maybe, possibly, SOMETHING has shifted in the culture?
I'm actually going to return to Ellis for a bit, and reiterate what I said. I could actually understand the bullying angle, because I can understand bullying. Bullying at least gives you a sense of power. But these people, and in so many other examples, apparently genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. That they were in the right. That even if Ellis had said something wrong, even after the apology, nope, that still wasn't good enough. Without hyperbole, it's actually kind of terrifying to see that level of certainty in people. So apply that to society at large, and, yeah, I think there's a problem, because the world doesn't operate in moral binaries. I get that religions certainly do, but now you see otherwise agnostic people applying the same certainty.
Second point, you mention "there can be times when criticism is unwarranted, or unjustified, or unreasonable." I agree, but something else that's been established is that we clearly have very different ideas as to when it is warranted (see Dawkins, where we apparently disagree so much we can't even look at the same words and deduce the same meaning). Which, okay, fine, intellectual exercises are fine, and we've never agreed about anything on this site when it comes to interpreting media, but then we come to the real world. If some people are punished, and others not, for pretty much the same thing, people are going to notice. And to borrow a quote, "you cannot keep people stupid forever."
So yes, in a practical sense, tightening EEO laws could at least lay some groundwork, or alternatively, gag people entirely, because if you can't agree, and I can't agree, and 8 billion people can't agree, then we're in a minefield.
