Cancel culture

[Marshmallo]

Just now, topcat(The most tip top) said:

 

You love a sweeping over simplification don’t you!

 

[topcat(The most tip top)]

Point taken

[welshbairn]

Quote

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting b*****dization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.

Quote

You can’t employ logic against faith, which is why censors are right about this: our battles over free speech, like our battles over abortion rights, are power struggles, not debates. They’re shaped by fundamentally conflicting values. ‘I support free speech, but…’ is no longer the mantra of people who aim to censor allegedly hateful speech. Now they openly deride free speech and its ‘privileged’ defenders, as attacks on the ‘Justice and Open Debate’ letter show. It’s ‘fatuous, self-important drivel’, one critic sneers.

 

[pandarilla]

Ok here is my proper response.
Spiked is funded by the Koch brother (one of them thankfully died). They have an interest in keeping things hell bent on a hyper capitalist future that will make parts of planet earth uninhabitable for humans in my kids lifetime because ambient temperatures will rise high enough for long enough in summer to denature proteins in living cells.
Any and all attempts to stave this off by attacking capitalism are a mortal threat to these people. One of the important threats they have identified  is a rising level of social democratic and environmentally conscious thought among people under 40. You'll most often see this being expressed by Brendan O'Neill who quite literally writes articles with a template of 'If you thought [thing] was progressive because [person] said it, then get real.'
Nobody buys Spiked. It's kept afloat by Koch cash, as are a dozen other similar outfits with other backers. All designed to inflate a neoliberal doctrine that is not at all popular with normal people. But it all contributes to a cacophony of stuff that shunts enough people away from voting for social democracy to maintain their status quo.
Koch and people like him are to their cores evil people. Clicking a link, reading an article, hearing someone out in the marketplace of ideas connected to them is an act of violence against humanity.

That's a pretty poor response, mixu., and just more of the same.

Do you never read articles written by people you disagree with? Or are you not even going to attempt to engage with those who are political opponents?

[NotThePars]

44 minutes ago, Henderson to deliver ..... said:

Well, I for one enjoyed the article.

 

42 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

I very much enjoy reading the replies under every Brendan O'Neill tweet these days.

Love that he's taken to wearing a cap indoors on all of his public appearances these days.

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

That's a pretty poor response, mixu., and just more of the same.

Do you never read articles written by people you disagree with? Or are you not even going to attempt to engage with those who are political opponents?

I read it because you suggested it. It's just empty waffle and I'm amazed your philosopher friend would recommend it. If you try to condense it into a sentence or two you'll see what I mean. Or ask him to as a challenge. 

[invergowrie arab]

@pandarilla nobody is under any obligation to engage with a fucking Spiked article in good faith.

Why dont you distill what you found interesting about it?

You seem to revel in being the "reasonable man". I don't know if you get some sort of satisfaction and sense of superiority in doing this or if you genuinely have no familiarity with any of these subjects beyond the superficial.

[DA Baracus]

Do folk actually regularly seek out right wing pish just to read an opposing view?

I doubt any right wing c**t has anything of value to say and I'm not going to wade through their hate and greed to find out.

[invergowrie arab]

4 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

Do folk actually regularly seek out right wing pish just to read an opposing view?

I doubt any right wing c**t has anything of value to say and I'm not going to wade through their hate and greed to find out.

But echo chambers!!

[pandarilla]

I read it because you suggested it. It's just empty waffle and I'm amazed your philosopher friend would recommend it. If you try to condense it into a sentence or two you'll see what I mean. Or ask him to as a challenge. 

There's a genuine point about attacking the letter (and folk who signed it) for trying to shut down debate when the letter is advocating the exact opposite. There's only one side trying to shut down debate here, as evidenced by the reaction on here.

There's another genuine point about free speech being made the enemy of progressive politics. Many posters on here presume that anyone defending free speech is doing so from the right, and that's a dangerous path to go down.

Then there's the point about the two folk who have backtracked - and surely everyone would agree that their actions are indeed pretty pathetic.

It's a dangerous precedent when you put so much faith in to the 'who's who' of a particular debate, rather than thinking for yourself and making your own judgment (no matter who else is on that side of the argument). Who you're sharing a view with or who you're arguing against is a factor that should be taking into account, but it shouldn't entirely dictate your views on a subject.

The best line in the article is the one about having no desire to speak only with or to people who applaud them. Social media promotes echo chambers (and again the politics threads on p&b have a lot of that going on).

[The_Kincardine]

2 hours ago, pandarilla said:

 

I have an old hospital friend who I have a lot of respect for.  He's a retired philosophy lecturer and is politically left wing.  His take on cancel culture backed up mie, and he shared the following article with me. I don't profess to be particularly intellectual but I think I'm pretty good at getting to the heart of issues.  Can anyone deconstruct the arguments put forward here?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/10/why-i-signed-the-harpers-cancel-culture-letter/

I don't know the background to 'the letter' enough to give an authoritative view.  I'm also not engaged enough with 'cancel culture' nor its opponents to be in the least bit authoritative.

However, if I treat it simply as a piece of text (being ignorant of the author or publisher can often be useful) then the guts of the author's view is pretty simple:

"You can’t employ logic against faith, which is why censors are right about this: our battles over free speech, like our battles over abortion rights, are power struggles, not debates."

If you boil down the article to these bare bones then it explains a whole lot of political/quasi-political/social movements that we see.  They aren't fact-based.  Now the author says they are 'faith based' but I think he has dropped a bollock there.  I think that movements such as the ones under discussion are identity-based and grievance-based so presenting a rational argument in opposition is pointless: 

You can't oppose identity with logic.

Trying to make it relevant to P&B?  We have the same situation in Scotland with independence.  This is not a movement of logic but, as the article says, a "power struggle" and you see the same dynamic.  There is no capacity for debate but every capacity to assert one identity over another.

As a disclaimer, tonight's gin was Spiked by the Koch brothers and I was not influenced at all...

[welshbairn]

17 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

The best line in the article is the one about having no desire to speak only with or to people who applaud them. Social media promotes echo chambers (and again the politics threads on p&b have a lot of that going on).

Given that she's employed by Spiked as "balance" I suppose she has to say that. Fair play for attempting to condense the waffle into something vaguely meaningful though!

Edited July 25, 2020 by welshbairn

[NotThePars]

it's literally impossible to be left wing in this country and live in an echo chamber unless you specifically live in the Magneto prison. 

[Pcplum]

59 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I read it because you suggested it. It's just empty waffle and I'm amazed your philosopher friend would recommend it. If you try to condense it into a sentence or two you'll see what I mean. Or ask him to as a challenge. 

Shut up you left wing mouth piece.

[Pcplum]

8 minutes ago, ali_91 said:

What’s your opinion on JK Rowling getting her lawyers on publications calling out her transphobia? That the left? 

You aswell,you little dagooberry,gif with your left wing bile.

[Pcplum]

1 minute ago, Pcplum said:

You aswell,you littledangoberry,with your left wing bile.

 

[The_Kincardine]

24 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

How do people get by in life without priors. I know not to read the Mail because it's full of right wing pish and that is a worldview I disagree with. I know not to read Spiked because it is blatantly, obviously, laughably a front organisation for rich libertarian wankers - a worldview I disagree with. There is literally no need to 'engage with the subject matter' on every occasion because I know what it is promoting and I know I disagree with it. We don't need to go through life taking everything at face value because context matters and the outlet in which an article appears, for example, can give you a good idea of what it's promoting. Spiked is probably the biggest example of this in UK media - far more so than the mail or the sun or the guardian. This is S1 level history stuff. 

It is tiresome in the extreme to go through life with right wingers badgering you with 'have you even read the article?' as they try to get you to deconstruct some turgid prose by Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro or whoever. No I haven't - it was written with the sole intention of advancing a right wing agenda and it's not incumbent on me to do a textual analysis on it for my disagreement with it to be valid. 

I know who published it so it's wrong, eh?

This doesn't surprise me.

[Pcplum]

Just now, ali_91 said:

Not a massive gammon man, but props for coming out on a Sunday auld yin, at least you know your place. 

f**k off and propgate your bile elsewhere you little left wing little hobbit.

 

[Gaz]

Spiked

[JMDP]

11 minutes ago, The_Kincardine said:

I know who published it so it's wrong, eh?

This doesn't surprise me.

Absolute NAP that you're about 2 more treble gins away from posting about the DPRS on the indyref2 thread.

Also, it doesn't surprise me to see you make such a reductive, stupid statement. There are over 50 pages on this thread and the arguments have been made extensively - engaging with the nonsense pandarilla linked to from Spiked won't add anything that hasn't already been covered. It's perfectly valid to dismiss it as the bad faith nonsense it is. 

Plenty of water before bed, brother.