Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.
They were rightly cancelled, but for the wrong reason. Really, the cancellation should have been for lauding his incredibly misogynistic and offensive portrayal of women.
Internet mobs have been mainstream since Kony 2012 made slacktivism a thing. Assigning cancel culture to one part of the political spectrum is not intellectually sound.
While, as other comments have said, this is the common target these days, its a red herring.
The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.
It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period.
It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.
It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.
One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.
What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.
Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.
These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and telling everyone how horrible I am and how I should be fired and look! it’s not affecting my life in the slightest. Quitting these online-outrage tools is the first step.
I love the term meatspace! I feel the same way. I do have Instagram and even Facebook but I don't use either much (post travel photos on insta, use market place on Facebook). I generally feel like my friends are very much "meatspacers" first and foremost and any social media is additional and incidental.
The anecdote I'm describing wasn't a social media-driven thing at all. I agree though, social media makes it far worse. I should have clarified in the story though because I meant to indicate that these things occurred even before social media was such a major influence on this kind of behaviour.
Perhaps, but the left has the top universities, news media, popular media/Hollywood, much of Silicon Valley, the largest investors (Blackrock, Vanguard), and NGOs on its side.
(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)
