Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, August 11, 2021
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166 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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One to today’s headlines:
Urban Texas in revolt over Gov. Abbott’s ban on mask requirements
People have had it.
https://twitter.com/isaacstanbecker/status/1425198099111235596
Here’s what will happen to US troops who refuse mandatory COVID-19 vaccines
@Scott: In blue cities. Elections will tell the tale.
The proliferation of different religions around the world says you can in fact, just make shit up.
@Scott:
Ah, yes, I remember this. A few knuckleheads threw their careers away for nothing.
I had the whole series of six anthrax shots 25 years ago. Aside from the immediate, normal side effects (sore arm and feeling crappy for a day or two) there has so far been nothing to report.
Unintended poetry:
Reminds me of megachurches and prosperity gospels.
Pay me or I’ll kick you out!
This is the Platonic ideal of cool.
@sam:
I could look at that all day…and probably will.
@drj:
Wait…the eviction moratorium has been extended, hasn’t it?
‘They rake in profits – everyone else suffers’: US workers lose out as big chicken gets bigger
A few telling snippets:
I have a number of friends who live on state highway 21 in NW Arkansas. It is as “Crooked and Steep” a road as there exists in AR and a major route for gut wagons. It is a common occurrence for one to wreck and as bad as they smell just getting stuck behind one, you sure as shit don’t want to be involved in an accident with 20,000 gals of chicken guts.
@OzarkHillbilly: The conditions in poultry plants is horrific.
I am certain that our overall understanding of what meat should cost has been warped by these companies. I belong to a local CSA and a single chicken from them can cost $17-$22+. These birds are raised in far better conditions, but it’s still jarring for me to do the math.
On a completely different note, I knew Joe Maxwell back in the day, and he’s who you want fighting in your corner.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Ah, yes – but how many of them does the US government recognize? Note- 1A says “religion”, not belief ; it was never intended to protect some idiot’s individual belief that orange peel water can cure cancer but to protect the organized systems of religion. Much like how 2A has mutated, freedom of organized religion was never intended to be freedom of individual or singular beliefs. Conservatives have been pushing this nonsense to try and cover their bigotry – now we’re seeing the fruits of letting “sincerely held belief” be a standard instead of actual facts or medical exemptions.
“Sincerely held belief” is a BS statement meant to try and tow the line between respect the intent behind 1A and realizing the reality that anyone can cynically claim anything with no proof because you cannot prove a belief or sincerity, only adherence to the “logical” behavioral pattern said belief would cause. If the government is saying not all beliefs are equal, then they are essentially picking and choosing which to support – a 1A no-no. The only way to square the circle and prevent the more obvious fraud is to tie behavior to belief under the impression that if you believe it, you would practice or adhere to it. The classic example is Catholics and BC – 95% don’t follow the official church teaching so who’s belief is correct and sincerely held? And yet even that fails us here. If you whine the COVID vaccines are made from aborted fetus (they not – it’s mRNA!!), should this obviously incorrect fact be treated seriously because you “believe it”? What about 5G chips, making you magnetic or any other idiocy we’ve seen spouted – they believe it enough to risk their lives in a pandemic (acceptable behavioral adherence for sincerity) but should we really be honoring complete disprovable fallacies only a year old because they’re “sincere”?
@Jen:
Good grief. ARE horrific. The conditions in poultry plants ARE horrific, not IS.
Clearly more caffeine is in order.
@KM:
There are legal precedents for “sincerely held beliefs” that are used in RFRA cases and prisons. They are far more strict than someone just claiming to believe something. Criteria include being part of an established and recognized religion, the belief being a core tenet of that faith, and the individual having an established history of following that tenet.
There are, I’m guessing, very very few people who will have made it through basic training while meeting those criteria well enough to claim an exemption from this vaccine.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-variant-covid-children/619712/
…
https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1425205554876723213
@KM: @Mu Yixiao: All of which still comes down to shit that was just made up. Whether it was 4,000 years ago (Hinduism), 2500 years ago (Buddhism), 2000 years ago (Christianity), 1400 years ago (Islam), 200 years ago (Mormon), or just a few decades ago (Scientology), and oh so, so many others, it’s still shit that was just made up.
If one of them works for you, I’m fine with that. But if one believes that theirs is the one true faith that leads to salvation, by default one must also believe that all the others were just made up.
@Jen:
I was wondering about that. 😀
@CSK: My kingdom for a consistent edit button…! (It was very much a YIKES reaction on my part, re-reading that.)
It’s sad, but it was still long past time we got out of there.
Alec Baldwin yesterday tweeted that Cuomo’s resignation was an example of “cancel culture.” (He also used that phrase a few months ago to describe the controversy with his wife pretending to be Spanish.)
@Teve: Just bought a year’s supply of heartworm medicine for my three dogs. Contains Ivermectin. Wondering if I can sell it at a profit. Has a couple of other ingredients but I’m sure that won’t be a problem, will it?
@Teve: That kind of stuff just floors me.
@Kylopod: Baldwin’s a very good actor. So is Tom Cruise. Eric Clapton plays a mean guitar. Dennis Rodman was hell on the boards. Get them outside their wheelhouse and they’re often no better than the dimwit at the end of the bar. 😀
Russian trolls are using Facebook to spread the word that AstraZeneca turns humans into chimpanzees. Apparently they use Planet of the Apes memes in so doing.
Can people who’ve received the AstraZeneca vax not look in the mirror and see that THIS. IS. NOT. TRUE?
@Teve:
Some of them aren’t even so impressive in their wheelhouse. I remember some years back when Jerry Lewis started claiming that women aren’t funny. Someone asked him, you don’t think Lucille Ball was funny? to which he flatly responded, “No.” (I happen to think Lucille Ball was a far more gifted comedian than Jerry Lewis, but YMMV on that.) I admit I take a certain pleasure in reading snarky anti-Republican tweets by certain celebs whose politics align with my own, like Bette Midler or Stephen King, though I’m under no illusion that they have any more wisdom than the average person just because they happen to be famous in their particular vocations. Baldwin’s comments caught my attention because unlike, say, Jon Voight, he’s a liberal–though has some history of bad, un-liberal behavior such as using homophobic slurs. In any case, whenever I hear supposed liberals using the term “cancel culture” (as Cuomo himself did a few months ago), it really rubs me the wrong way. One of my pet peeves is when liberals fall back on right-wing cultural buzzwords (cancel culture, woke, PC, SJWs, and more), which is distressingly common.
@Kylopod:
The late John Belushi was notorious for declaiming that “women aren’t funny” and for giving the actresses and women writers on SNL a really hard time, sometimes sabotaging sketches.
So there’s this family wedding next Saturday. Naturally I don’t want to attend due to COVID concerns. At that, it’s only 40 people or so and all claim to have been vaccinated. Still, Delta is to be treated warily.
Last weekend the groom had a bachelor party out of town, where he proceeded to catch a major intestinal bug, and one of his pals caught COVID (he says he’s vaccinated). There’s talk of postponing the whole thing. they should.
A friend of my mom’s has a wedding tomorrow, with over 150 guests. When I heard this, I asked my mom, “have they picked a funeral home along with flowers, catering, and the wedding cake?”
If it’s any consolation, you can see covidiocy, even major covidiocy, is not confined to Red America.
@Kylopod: the Hyper Republican Jack Donaghy character on 30 Rock had a great bit about how he’d defeated all his stupid liberal enemies. “Oprah…Rosie…Baldwin.”
Reminder; two days until the former guy is reinstated as POTUS.
@charon:
You known, when poor Carthaginians gave one of their children to a rich family to offer as a sacrifice, in lieu of the rich family’s child, they at least were paid for doing so. Today common people are sacrificing their children for nothing.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
That would be…Friday the 13th. Hmmm.
I do want to reiterate that Mike Lindell has pushed the date of The Restoration to sometime in September.
@Teve:
This is what TV Tropes calls the Celebrity Paradox. It’s the idea that most movies, shows, etc. implicitly take place in a universe in which the celebrities involved in the work don’t exist. So in a movie starring Alec Baldwin playing a fictional character, you wouldn’t expect his character to suddenly start talking about the actor Alec Baldwin; you’re forced to pretend there is no such actor in the movie’s reality because otherwise it means the character happens to be a perfect doppelganger of said actor yet somehow no one seems to notice.
Of course comedies sometimes violate this rule, and it’s common for movies to do in-jokes that toy with the boundary, though they’re usually more subtle than the above example (like the kid in About a Boy mentioning Hayley Joel Osment, even though his mom is played by Toni Collette who played Osment’s mom in Osment’s best-known role). The movie Man on the Moon, the biopic about Andy Kaufman, has a fairly complex example of navigating this paradox. In the movie, Andy Kaufman’s agent is played by Danny De Vito. Yet De Vito the actor happens to have been one of Kaufman’s costars on Taxi. There’s an extended montage in the film showing old clips from Taxi featuring much of the original cast, with Jim Carrey inserted into the Kaufman role–yet De Vito is nowhere in sight. They just pretend he doesn’t exist in order to avoid calling attention to his playing a separate character in the same film.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: on the 13th Imma be in a theater watching Free Guy and ain’t no Trumper shenanigans gonna ruin that for me.
@Teve:
Which leaves us with a choice re their less than enlightened attitudes: cancel or ignore? If I had the ability to do it, should I erase Cream and its music from my mind? (Sorry, Ginger, I guess you go down the memory tube, too.) Should I deprive myself of art in order to send a ‘signal’ that I don’t approve of the artist?
Leonardo Da Vinci regularly hired apprentices who were always 1) male 2) young 3) good-looking and 4) almost certainly (and certainly in at least one instance) willing to fuck Leonardo. He’d be canceled in a heartbeat today. He’d be denounced as a monster on Twitter. Take the Mona Lisa down off the wall at the Louvre!
Cancel culture – and yes, it’s a thing, not just a right wing talking point @Kylopod: – is self-harm. At least it is if you actually care about art. If you care more about the moral purity of the artist than you do about the art, you’re a Philistine and inevitably a hypocrite.
Remember how outraged we were by the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas? What backward, primitive savages they were? I mean, who would destroy art just because they disliked the artist or what the artist stood for? I have a couple of Clapton tunes on my playlist, should I delete them because Clapton’s a fuckwit?
@Kylopod:
IIRC, in The Last Action Hero, they had a bit about how Stallone was The Terminator 😛
@Michael Reynolds: ” I have a couple of Clapton tunes on my playlist, should I delete them because Clapton’s a fuckwit?”
No.
This concludes today’s episode of Fight The Strawman.
@Teve: A lot of Arnold’s films feature references to Stallone. It’s one of his running gags. (For example, in True Lies his wife played by Jamie Lee Curtis comments at one point, “I married Rambo.”) Last Action Hero is part of that genre of spoof movies that toy with the Celebrity Paradox.
From the internet:
They go to a video store, and there’s a poster of Stallone as the Terminator.
Danny Madigan: “No. It’s not possible!”
– Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger): What’s not possible? The man is an artist. It’s his best performance ever!
– Danny Madigan: “But… that was you! You were in that movie!”
@wr:
OK, why not?
We’ve seen a number of books taken out of publication – effectively destroyed, the equivalent of deleting Clapton or taking down the Mona Lisa. Should those books have been canceled? Should they not have been?
You can pretend it’s all a straw man but very few people still in the business of creating art will agree with you. Oh, sorry, let me correct that: they’ll agree with you publicly because one must not fall afoul of the cancel culture that does not actually exist and in no way threatens or intimidates artists. McCarthyism is back in Hollywood and in publishing, and you’re burying your head in the sand rather than taking a stand for art.
@Michael Reynolds: ” McCarthyism is back in Hollywood and in publishing, and you’re burying your head in the sand rather than taking a stand for art.”
I called bullshit on your claim that every writer was quaking in fear before the lefty Twitterban in the Orban thread, and I’m not going to bother repeating myself here.
Who has been calling for banning Clapton? Or Van Morrison? Quick, show me someone who isn’t some Swarthmore sophomore — someone who actually has any kind of influence in the world. You can’t. They don’t exist. I’ve googled this, and you know what I’ve found. Some people on Twitter disapprove! The leader of the Mountain Goats called Clapton an asshole.
I think if Joe McCarthy had just called Dalton Trumbo an asshole, Trumbo would have been just fine.
Is Clapton being prevented from performing? Just the opposite — in fact, he is refusing (as is his right as a moron) to play at any venue that allows in people who have been vaccinated.
Meanwhile, teachers across the country are being fired — or threatened with firing — for telling students, even college students, that slavery was bad and that white people used to lynch Black people. But you can’t be bothered with the real censorship out there while there’s a chance that some kid in a Che shirt might disapprove of something.
And without reiterating too much of what I said yesterday, I know hundreds of writers in all fields, and I don’t know one who shares your terror of Twitter trolls. You are free to be as afraid as you choose, but man up and stop pretending that it’s universal.
@Mikey: Aside from the immediate, normal side effects (sore arm and feeling crappy for a day or two) there has so far been nothing to report.
Sure you’ve had no problems for 25 years, but the anti-vaxxers will tell you, “any day now…”
From what I’ve seen, the most-banned books are attacked by conservative christian types, for featuring sex, mentions of gayitude, or no-no words. Here’s the most-attacked of the last decade:
@charon: That was then and this is now? Or will we be seeing another Facebook reaction?
@Michael Reynolds: When the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas they were a major part of what passed for a government in Afghanistan. It is different when the state is canceling things.
In this day and age if a writer wants to self-publish their own version of Mein Kampf no one is stopping them. It would probably destroy their career but that is a marketplace issue. When I worked for Nielsen as a financial analyst I could have stood outside the building with a sandwich board sign proclaiming Nielsen was an evil company. The government couldn’t stop, but Nielsen would have fired my ass. The marketplace would have cancelled me.
I wouldn’t spend a dollar of my money on anything JK Rowling has a piece of based on her anti trans stance. That is my version of cancelling her. Obviously she won’t miss a meal, but I would do the same if she were a struggling writer. As someone said earlier, of course Fox News isn’t an issue here. If someone writes fifty books where every bad guy is a young Muslim male Fox would be promoting the book 24/7. But they did assist in cancelling the Dixie Chicks. And in that case the government probably was complicit, given Dick Cheney’s general attitudes towards anyone and anything opposing the Iraq war
@Scott: I would think that it’s possible that we could simply just let them leave the military–with whatever consequences leaving early entails–but I don’t know how many anti-vaxx nutters there are in service right now. Expect some level of “sincere” conversions to Christian Science. I’d give those guys the same option. I don’t see a reason for this to evolve into a struggle in a “peace time” professional military. Then again, I’m not a military guy, so I could be wrong and it does have to evolve.
@OzarkHillbilly: “(The spokesman) added: “We have a very large immigrant workforce and this is, for us, a source of pride.”
World class snip positioning. “Two snaps up!” 😀 😛
@OzarkHillbilly: And now I see why I never buy Tyson Chicken at the supermarket. Sadly, I’m pretty confident that Foster Farms (our local provider) isn’t much better. You’ve got the right idea. I wish I could raise chickens in an urban studio apartment.
Made the first of two installment payments on my 2020 Real Estate Tax today. All $12.23 of it. The remaining $12.23 is due in October. Lest anyone think that I am getting off light I note that $24.46 only covers the 1/2 acre hillside that my 1977 model 14 x 60 5th Avenue trailer house sits on. I paid the entire $50.40 county Mobile Home annual tax, homestead exemption included, in June.
The county has billing set up on the internet these days. However I did reflect on the days when I mailed in a check.
There was time when instead of placing a return address on the upper left corner of the envelope I would copy a line or two of the Beatles tune Taxman in that space.
Recently I ran into an acquaintance that I had not seen in a while. When she said she was working at the County Courthouse in the Treasurers office I mentioned the envelopes that I had written the Beatles tunes on.
“Yeah, I know you did that.” She said “We put them up on the wall!”
*I am quoting George Harrison
@Michael Reynolds: It’s a straw man because what you choose to do or not do with your own music collection is entirely irrelevant to “cancel culture.” I spent decades loving Bill Cosby’s comedy routines, to the point where I used to have a playlist called “Bill Cosby is a God”. Guess what got renamed and then simply dropped as a playlist a few years ago? That’s not “cancel culture” (whatever that even means, since its barely defined anyway), it’s me deciding I wasn’t going to support a racist, even by listening to things I already paid for.
As far as I can tell, people being afraid or concerned about sharing things openly isn’t “cancel culture”, it’s simply “culture.” Not too long ago you could say things about African Americans that you can’t today. Why? Culture changed, and people decided it wasn’t acceptable any more. People who still say such things get in all sorts of trouble.
Every culture ever has had taboo subjects, and they are constantly changing. You and your friends may have legitimate concerns and may disagree with current arbiters of what’s acceptable or not, but you aren’t being “cancelled.” You’re deciding whether you want to go along to get along, or argue back. That dynamic is eternal, and I think cancel culture is just the latest iteration of PC or whatever else it gets called when people complain that current culture doesn’t let them say what they want without consequences.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1425492860619481098
@Jen: You worry too much. I’m a typical reader and I read it as “are” despite having 20 years of experience at looking for such mistakes so that I can destroy student self-esteem by marking the mistake in blood red ink. 😉
@Teve:
Those are extant books for which there are people calling for bans.* There are a lot of books that are being “cancelled” before they’re ever published. If I’m hearing about them, it means there’s a pretty big stink. I’m sure Michael can regale you with the tales of “cancel culture” in kid lit–and it’s coming from the left.
*Wow. That’s a difficult sentence to construct. 😛
@Just Another Ex-Republican: JEEBUS! Missing edit button bites me. Previous post should refer to Bill Cosby as a rapist, not a racist.
@Teve: You be go to a movie theater in FLORIDA? You’re very brave.
@wr: We’re in luck, though. In the post show interview, Strawman said he’d be ready to fight again next week despite the beating he took today.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
After plowing through a paper that had six grammatical or spelling errors in a seven-word sentence, did you ever get the urge just to start stamping “NO” over the mistakes?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Well, I do try NOT to make such mistakes, given my line of work (freelance *writer*). 😉 It’s unnerving when I make an error like that!
@wr:
The Hollywood blacklist in HUAC and Joe McCarthy days is Twitter today. The blacklist wasn’t run by government, it was Hollywood cowardice and complicity that destroyed careers and drove a few to suicide. Hey, we’re just criticizing communist sympathizers and refusing to hire them, we’re not doing anything to them, it’s just the free market. Right?
You’re like the MAGA Christians who sat through a thousand sermons on golden calves and still didn’t recognize that they were dancing around a golden calf. You and I were both raised on stories of the blacklist, and your take-away seems to be that it’s all different now because it’s not pinkos we’re going after, but people you don’t approve of. As long as it’s my McCarthyism it’s OK.
@Michael Reynolds: It sounds to me like you object to people exercising their right of free speech against other people exercising their right of free speech.
It’s messy. Always has been.
@Jen:
Could be worse. I’ve had my mother point out errors in my newspaper articles. 😛
@Mu Yixiao:
Is there any way to measure that and know if it’s really ‘a lot’?
@Jen:..It’s unnerving when I make an error like that!…
I proofed my post of 13:07 in this thread at least 10 times (maybe 20) before I finally hit the POST COMMENT key. Since then I have reread it again and again.
Now, some 40 minutes later I finally see There was time… that should read There was…a…time beginning the third paragraph.
AAAARRRRGGGGGHHH!!!!
@Teve:
No. It’s an entirely subjective quantity.
But it’s a significant enough issue that the New Yorker wrote about it.
@Michael Reynolds:
Honest question as I am trying to understand where you are coming from, could you cite some examples of artists (broadly defined) who have been canceled?
I know JK Rowling has taken flack for her position on transsexuality, but it is hard to see her as “canceled”
Bill Cosby was pretty much canceled, but I gotta admit that seems justified–I am not sure I could enjoy his comedy knowing what I know.
Louis C. K. was canceled for a minute or two, but seems to be back on stage.
Who would you say has been canceled?
Also: my definition of “canceled” is stopped from earning a livelihood–not just being criticized on a Twitter for a hot minute.
@Steven L. Taylor: I just thought of an example: Bean Dad (John Roderick). He definitely lost several podcasts because of the Twitter mob. I do not know if his music career has suffered or not.
@Mu Yixiao: “There are a lot of books that are being “cancelled” before they’re ever published.”
Wow. A lot? I’m convinced.
“If I’m hearing about them, it means there’s a pretty big stink”
I’m hearing that Mike Lindell has discovered computer code proving that the Chinese stole the election for Biden. If I’m hearing it, it must be really big.
@Michael Reynolds:
I gotta admit, I am not sure how that is the take-away from what he has said.
@Mu Yixiao:
I guess I need to understand what you are saying here. As an author, I have things I have written that no one wanted to publish. That doesn’t mean I was canceled.
@wr:
Fledgling kid-lit authors getting cancelled is happening in a niche industry which I don’t follow (probably nobody here except Michael does). The fact that the New Yorker is writing about it kind of means it’s a “significant issue”.
Lindell is a well-known figure and you’re a political junkie, so… Not exactly the same thing.
@Michael Reynolds: That’s right, Michael. Because I’m not cowering in fear of Twitter, I’m a MAGA Christian. While you are Moses.
But I do want to thank you for one of the funniest sentences of the day: “The Hollywood blacklist in HUAC and Joe McCarthy days is Twitter today. The blacklist wasn’t run by government,”
You might want to google the definition of HUAC — shockingly, it turns out to be a committee of the congress. Oh, and Joe McCarthy was not a Bennington junior — he was a United States senator. They used the powers of the state to destroy people of the left, something you don’t get to do on Twitter even if you have a blue checkmark.
It’s pretty clear you don’t give a damn about censorship. You’ve never been able to rouse yourself to utter a word against the southern states literally forbidding entire topics even to be discussed in schools and universities.
For some reason, you hate and fear a bunch of jerks on Twitter. You ascribe to them magical powers that only you are wise enough to understand. You’re like Bill Maher declaring that the single greatest threat to America is college students who don’t think his comedian friends are funny.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ron-desantis-is-the-nations-worst-covid-governor
@Steven L. Taylor:
Two of the most prominent examples (from the New Yorker):
This is an industry that employs “sensitivity readers” to essentially censor anything that might offend anyone. This isn’t “The publisher turned me down”, it’s “the angry mob is threatening me so I apologize and hide”.
@Mu Yixiao: “Fledgling kid-lit authors getting cancelled is happening in a niche industry which I don’t follow (probably nobody here except Michael does). The fact that the New Yorker is writing about it kind of means it’s a “significant issue”.”
Yes, there is or was a problem in kidlit. (Don’t know if it’s ongoing…) A bunch of power-hungry provocateurs announced that they were the sole arbiters of what was appropriate for kids. And they knew exactly who to target — the librarians, the foremost buyers of children’s books.
There was a terrible period in kidlit. You know what didn’t happen after that? This kind of “cancelling” didn’t spread out to other kinds of publishing. Partially, probably, because kidlit is particularly vulnerable for various reasons.
But more importantly, for the same reason that no one has hijacked an airplane with a box cutter in twenty years. Because people saw what happened and are now wise to it. They saw the malice in these bad faith actors and no longer jump at every accusation.
By the way, it’s astonishing how much work a verb tense can do to make your argument sound stronger than it is. “The New Yorker is writing about it”? Nope, The New Yorker wrote about it. Two years ago. When the problems broke out into the mainstream and people started addressing them openly… thus already diminishing the power of the self-style gatekeepers.
@wr:
And you might want to read the Wikipedia page on the Hollywood Blacklist.
Here… let me excerpt it for you:
Neither HUAC nor McCarthy ran the Blacklist. It was Hollywood.
@Mu Yixiao: “This is an industry that employs “sensitivity readers” to essentially censor anything that might offend anyone”
Whereas your newspaper will print anything anybody submits to you no matter what?
Or is what you do called “editing” but when other people do it it’s “censorship”?
@Mu Yixiao: I will read the piece, thanks.
To a degree, this sounds like market testing a product and then declining to produce it if the market tests go poorly.
Mike Richards and Miyam Bialik are the new Jeopardy hosts.
I would note, too, that this conversation seems to be conflating a lot of stuff.
A number of people getting upset at someone due to something they said (e.g., JK Rowling) seems a bit different than publishing test-marketed something and critics with outsized power led to book not being published. (Not to mention the Twitter mob as the new McCarthyites).
There is a lot of fast and loose being played with the notion of “cancel culture” here, IMO.
@Steven L. Taylor: “Bean Dad (John Roderick). He definitely lost several podcasts because of the Twitter mob.”
Had to Google to find out what you were talking about.
Man, there are a lot of stupid people with too much time on their hands in this country.
I admit, I’m killing time here today. Finished two scripts ahead of schedule and don’t feel like starting to pack for vacation yet. But if I ever had so little going on in my own life that I felt the desire to lecture someone about his parenting skills on Twitter because of an anecdote he posted about his kid and a can opener, I would feel morally obligated to step in front of a subway train, as it would be evidence that I had nothing further of use to contribute to society.
And this isn’t left or right. It’s just Americans exercising the constitutional right be be busybodies.
@wr:
I’ve published letters to the editor that I absolutely disagree with, and think the writer is an idiotic asshat spouting MAGA bullshit.
I’ve published letters to the editor that are guaranteed to piss people off (and have did a pretty good job of it).
I edited for formatting, but not for content–with the exception of removing a “come join our closed FB group” comment at the end of one of the more egregious letters. I gave them a platform to speak. I’m not required to promote their bullshit.
But… continue on with the black-and-white of your world if you wish. On the worse of days, I’ve got at least 255 settings of greyscale.
@Mu Yixiao: “Neither HUAC nor McCarthy ran the Blacklist. It was Hollywood.”
It was collaborative. It was studio heads currying favor with right-wing politicians, who farmed out a lot of their work to a handful of consultants. It was a shameful time and many people acted shamefully, but to remove the governmental aspects from it is disingenuous.
@Mu Yixiao: B TW, while it appears that Jackson’s book still has not been published, Amelie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir has been (and the second book in the series was published earlier this year).
It is kind of hard to say she was canceled, yes?
@Mu Yixiao: “I’ve published letters to the editor that I absolutely disagree with, and think the writer is an idiotic asshat spouting MAGA bullshit.”
Of course, there’s no correlation between a newspaper publishing a letter to the editor — which, by definition, can not be said to reflect the paper’s values — and a publisher putting out a book. You are complaining about publishers’ editorial standards — I’m pointing out that you also have editorial standards, and make judgments about what is appropriate to put on your front page.
But you knew that.
@Steven L. Taylor: “There is a lot of fast and loose being played with the notion of “cancel culture” here, IMO.”
That’s because it’s like “social justice warrior,” a phrase with no actual meaning. It basically means “whatever I don’t like at a given moment.”
@Mu Yixiao:
Yes, but the purpose of the letters to the editor section is to allow multiple voices to be heard and the readers know what that section of the paper is for.
But you are certainly not going to publish some freelancer on your front page just because she submitted something.
@Mu Yixiao: I can state with a fair degree of confidence that the New York Times or the the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal is not going to publish an op-ed arguing that the Holocaust didn’t happen or the earth is flat or the moon-landings were faked. Every newspaper in existence refuses to publish certain points of view. There is nothing remotely new about this. It has always been true about every newspaper that has ever existed in all of history, and always will be true.
@Kylopod:
Of course. But in the case of the kid-lit, it wasn’t the publisher making an editorial choice. It was mobs harassing the author until the author backed down.
@wr:
Nope. The publishers were willing to publish the books. The authors were harassed by self-appointed defenders of the “right way to think” until those authors gave in and withdrew their books.
@Mu Yixiao: @Mu Yixiao: So I read the article. The article talks about two books, one of which was still published.
Even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that the one book that didn’t get published was truly the result of the mob (which I actually don’t think fits the facts of the case), this is pretty thin evidence for cancel culture.
One. Book.
(I think the other books noted in the story were all published).
@Michael Reynolds:
They’re all going to get deleted anyways, just because only a vanishingly tiny sliver of art is able to retain relevance out side the specific temporal context it was created in.
In 2121, when no one has ever heard of Clapton, will it really matter if that’s a result of people deliberately choosing not to listen to Clapton now or people just forgetting to listen to Clapton in 10 years?
Would it help to mention intolerance of dissenting voices is a common trait in fanatics of all stripes?
@Stormy Dragon:
e.g. Are you distraught that, outside of a small niche of film scholars, almost no one alive today has actually seen “Birth of a Nation”? Does it matter if that’s because people cancelled it or if most people just don’t care about a movie that old?
@Stormy Dragon: FWIW, the only song I can definitively say that I know is a Clapton song is “Layla.” (There are probably others, that I would know if someone pointed them out).
@Mu Yixiao: “The publishers were willing to publish the books. The authors were harassed by self-appointed defenders of the “right way to think” until those authors gave in and withdrew their books.”
And yet it seems like just minutes ago you were complaining that:
“This is an industry that employs “sensitivity readers” to essentially censor anything that might offend anyone.”
Which is, of course, what sparked the part of the conversation about editorial judgment, and your proud pronouncement that you published letters to the editor.
These are two different things. If publishers won’t publish because of the mob, that’s a problem — but you now say that’s not the case.
As for writers who choose not to publish because a Twitter crowd yells at them, then they shouldn’t be competing in the public square. Unless — and this can happen — the author listens to the crowd and actually thinks they have a point, and withdraws to make changes.
@Stormy Dragon: “re you distraught that, outside of a small niche of film scholars, almost no one alive today has actually seen “Birth of a Nation”? ”
No. Because it is in fact far more available than it ever was to me when I was growing up and seeing every movie I could — it streams for free on youTube and (I just checked) it is a gorgeous print.
I’ve had grad students who don’t know what Casablanca is and are shocked to discover Bruce Willis was in a TV series. There is far too much ignorance of our cultural history for me to get bugged by this one lapse.
@Steven L. Taylor: While he did have success as a solo artist, a lot of his stuff in the ’60s was with several bands–Cream, Blind Faith, and the Yardbirds, which after personnel change eventually evolved into Led Zeppelin. The original version of “Layla” was by Derek and the Dominoes, though he later had a solo hit with a softer, acoustic version for MTV Unplugged. The song was inspired by his love for Pattie Boyd, who was also the subject of the Beatles’ “Something” (she was married at different times to both Harrison and Clapton).
@Steven L. Taylor:
There have been to my personal knowledge at least four kid’s books canceled by publishers or pulled off the market over complaints that were at best trivial. One example: a book about slaves working in the White House kitchen under Washington. In one picture the artist showed a young Black kid smiling at his mother who made the cake.
That is literally it. Was it supporting slavery? Duh, no. It was an artist choosing to have a character smile despite the fact that he was enslaved. Did slaves never smile? Was a smile of pleasure at his mother’s skill a betrayal of Black people? I know for a fact that jokes were told and smiles formed in fucking Auschwitz.
At least four books that I know of have been shoved down the memory hole for similar crimes.
A personal example. I was attacked for ‘erasing Native American characters,’ by a woman who has positioned herself as an expert on all things NA – and subsequently been largely discredited after similar nonsense attacks. So, did I do it? Did I erase a Native American character? There are exactly two adults in the 400 page book in question. One is a white male who gets two lines of dialog before he disappears. (The premise of the book.) The adult NA character existed for the sole purpose of having two pages of conversation to set up the backstory of a major character before he, too, disappears.
I’d mentioned that this irrelevant character was NA, a shout-out to the Chumash who used to own a lot of SoCal. She insisted it was a deliberate slam against Indians on the theory that – and I am not making this up – I must have actually researched this NA character because at one moment he points at an object with his chin and that’s an Indian thing. Oh, BTW, he was driving an ancient pick-up truck on a dirt road beside a ravine. This woman has a PhD.
We liberals used to talk about a ‘chilling effect’ when it was conservatives attacking. Now it’s liberals so despite the fact that absolutely everyone in kidlit knows there’s a chilling effect, and absolutely everyone knows that YA has become – in the most frequently-used term – toxic, we have to pretend it isn’t happening.
It is nonsense to pretend that everyone wearing the liberal or progressive label is well motivated. These are people making careers out of destroying writers. Everyone knows it, no one can talk about it, because everyone knows that a single word spoken in defense of a targeted book results in exile.
Does this hurt me? No, I’m a guy with a 2 million dollar home, a Mercedes in the garage, a pool I’m getting ready to jump into, and enough money to live a good life. But to say I’m an outlier doesn’t begin to describe the gap between me and the desperate newbies clinging to a shred of a career and terrified they’ll be targeted over some similarly absurd attack.
@wr:
Does it matter if they know Bruce Willis as in a TV series? Thing is, not knowing about Moonlighting isn’t a sign of ignorance of cultural history, it’s a sign that Moonlighting wasn’t culturally significant. What’s really upsetting you is the recognition that just because something is significant to you personally doesn’t necessarily make it significant to civilization as a whole.
@Kylopod: And Patti Boyd was the subject of Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” , as well as “Bell Bottom Blues”.
@wr:
If publishers won’t publish because of the mob, that’s a problem
I’m glad to hear that. Because that is exactly what’s happening.
@Stormy Dragon:
What a stupid, cruel thing to say. We’re all going to die, too, so who cares about Covid?
People put their lives into this work. Do you not understand that? Most people are not glib, DGAF, characters like me, they’re sincere, they’re vulnerable, they’re people working shitty jobs hoping for an escape through writing, knowing the crushing odds and hanging on anyway. But hey, fuck ’em, it’s all for nothing because it’s all going to disappear when the sun blows up.
@Stormy Dragon: “What’s really upsetting you is the recognition that just because something is significant to you personally doesn’t necessarily make it significant to civilization as a whole.”
No, what’s upsetting to me is that this was a class on the history of TV writing taught to a group of grad students studying TV writing and producing, and they were completely ignorant about a series that — despite your opinion of it — actually is quite significant in TV history.
I will admit it does bother me that people who want to work in a creative field have no clue about what happened in that field before they were born. That’s why I created this class. Because there is a lot for TV writers to learn from writers who worked in the ancient days before Friends.
But thanks for explaining my reaction to me, even if you were entirely wrong.
A little historical footnote: The backlash against Clapton’s racist remarks in the ’70s were part of what inspired the Rock Against Racism movement.
@Kylopod:
This one too
@Michael Reynolds: “a woman who has positioned herself as an expert on all things NA – and subsequently been largely discredited after similar nonsense attacks.”
Exactly. When these attacks started, they were all taken as good faith. Then people saw what was going on. It’s like the earliest days of Me Too.
So glad you valiantly fought the good fight and prevailed against this woman who has, as you realized, exactly as much power as you choose to give her.
@Michael Reynolds: “It is nonsense to pretend that everyone wearing the liberal or progressive label is well motivated.”
The nice thing about living in California where it is so hot and dry is that you’ll never run out of straw.
@Michael Reynolds: “Because that is exactly what’s happening.”
Four books in, what, five years?
The one example you gave is one of the very earliest.
Not seeing a trend here.
@Kylopod:
Several groups have announced new social platforms committed to Free Speech and No Censorship and First ‘Mendment Rights!!!1 and learned Immediately that with no censorship your site becomes Nazi Child Porn ISIS Snuff Films Fisting Dot Com.
@wr: i showed a 35-yro friend a photo of Bruce Willis from Moonlighting and she barely recognized him.
@CSK: I never used a stamp, budgetary restraints prohibited it. But I did have an essay where I wrote
I wondered a minute ago why “don’t DeSantis” was trending on Twitter. It all seems to have started with this:
And it’s catching on.
@wr:
Oh, you’re not seeing a trend? Why don’t we ask someone who actually knows what’s going on in kidlit? I wonder if such a person might be here?
I know your IMDB page and you know I could fire up the Netflix and find dozens of ‘cancelable’ infractions in your work. If you were looking for a writing gig in Hollywood now you could have the legs knocked out from under you with a few choice quotes from a few choice shows. This is all other people to you now, because you’re safe in academia. This isn’t your fight anymore, and it’s a good thing because while I was teaching kids that females are at least the equals of males, you were writing about women as sex objects. While I was writing about a young Black character’s justifiable fear of police brutality, you were still writing Black characters you wouldn’t want to stand behind, today.
I wonder if some of your dead certainty on this issue comes from your distance from your writing/producing life, and perhaps even a tinge of guilt.
Incidentally, don’t worry, I would never reveal your secret identity. I’ve had a few myself.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
And did you get the standard response: “Well, I know what I was trying to say.”
To which my standard reply was: “Well, I didn’t.”
@Steven L. Taylor: “To a degree, this sounds like market testing a product and then declining to produce it if the market tests go poorly.”
That was my take on the New Yorker passage cited. Without further information, I’m open to the possibility that the authors did, in fact, realize that some elements of the books needed reexamination and pulled the books because they realized it was the right thing to do.
@wr: Your comment piqued my curiosity. (Part of that whole “containing multitudes” thing. 😉 ) I had to go look at the romper.com account and came across this:
I always thought that Ken Jennings was smarter than this…
@wr: I may need to check that out. The presentation that I saw was incomplete and seemed to be an old print with lots of flaws. (That doesn’t have anything to do with the story itself being threadbare and ridiculous and the acting a little stilted even for the era, but every so often I like to put on my film buff hat.)
@Michael Reynolds: “This is all other people to you now, because you’re safe in academia. ”
Bullshit. I created and wrote a series for HBOAsia that aired last year; another Chinese series that has yet to be produced, and I’ve just finished my half of an international miniseries co-produced by ITV and a Scandinavian streamer.
I’m not sure which Black characters I’ve written you find objectionable — please, report me to the Race Police if you want. And if suddenly you think it’s somehow morally objectionable that I wrote for Baywatch, that’s fine — it was a pretty miserable experience. Or maybe you meant that She-Spies episode? I never actually saw it, but if you want to take out an ad in the trades, be my guest. Hell, I’ll pay half of it.
But it’s hilarious you think you could undercut me in TV by sending out quotes from scripts I wrote. Dude, I was writing them in the 1990s — that’s enough to disqualify me in a lot of place already! But with other writers? Get a grip. And learn something about how TV actually works. Yes, I know you’ve had a meeting or two, and so you know far more about the industry than I ever could from my hundreds of hours of produced work.
“I wonder if some of your dead certainty on this issue comes from your distance from your writing/producing life, and perhaps even a tinge of guilt.”
Well, I can’t say I actually have this great distance you want to attribute to me. And I can’t say I have any guilt about anything I’ve ever written. Plenty of episodes I don’t have any great desire to rewatch on a Sunday afternoon, but nothing I’m not proud to cash the residual checks.
@Michael Reynolds: “Oh, you’re not seeing a trend? Why don’t we ask someone who actually knows what’s going on in kidlit? I wonder if such a person might be here?”
I did ask. You said you knew of four examples. The only two you cited in any detail were both years old. If we’re going by the words of someone who actually knows what’s going on in kidlit, no, there is no trend.
If you have actual information, I’d love to see it. But the fact that you switched to attack mode and called me a racist and a sexist in order to shut me down — gosh, how very SJW of you — pretty strongly suggests you don’t have a leg to stand on but you can’t bear to admit you’re wrong.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: This one is something like 3:30 long, and the scenes are tinted. The quality of the source material seems really good. (I just scrolled through a little of it to check…)
@Just nutha ignint cracker: “I always thought that Ken Jennings was smarter than this…”
I blame Twitter. I think it automatically steals 50 IQ points from anyone.
@Kylopod: I looked at his discography and it jogged my memory. Clapton is one of those artists I have known about all my life, but whose catalog has only penetrated my brain tangentially.
@Michael Reynolds: I can see why these examples would be concerning.
But four examples do not comport with the way you talk about this topic (especially, and specifically, for you to agree that “cancel culture” is a thing).
@Michael Reynolds:
Who in the world said that?
I am not disputing that dumb people do bad things or that people don’t use righteous-sounding motives to cover bad behavior.
I certainly have never said that anyone claiming to be liberal or progressive is always right.
You talk about all of this like it is a massive wave of intolerance-that the “mob” are canceling authors and it is essentially a New McCarthyism.
You might see how your examples don’t comport with the dramatic way you have been talking about.
Mu Yixiao points us to the New Yorker and two books, but one of which was published.
You now bring four books to the table.
Even if we assume that you are 100% right and these books should have been published but weren’t, that is hardly McCarthyism.
@Scott:
TENETS. T-e-n-e-t-s. Tenants are people who pay rent. Tenets are principles, beliefs that you hold — indeed, from the Latin tenere, “to hold”. I will give Bracknell the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the idiot reporter was the source of the error.
This usage rant brought to you by the letter W and the number 3.
@Michael Reynolds: Also, I am a bit confused since at one point in this thread the question was about canceling people like Clapton and now it is solely about kidlit. This amorphous ambiguity about what “cancel culture” is is part of why I asked in the first place.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Also, it isn’t what 99% of people are talking about when they cry cancel culture. And no disrespect to Michael, but I really don’t find it useful when someone in a conversation appeals to personal experience that is difficult for the rest of us to verify. The fact remains that the vast majority of claims of cancel culture by politicians, media figures, and celebrities, when examined closely, turn out to be overstated at best, and often total bullshit (like the idea that JK Rowling has been “canceled”). But it’s only because these are in public view that we’re able to evaluate them at all.
@wr: And, I think, Jennings was defending his podcast partner (and presumably friend).
I am willing to bet that some of the truly terrible tweets from Roderick were actually attempts are sarcastic humor but that taken on their own just were damning (I had listened to a handful of episodes of his war movie podcast, “Friendly Fire” and he has a cantankerous, snarky, sarcastic approach, but I certainly can’t say for sure. I listened to a couple of his podcasts with Jennings, which I found kind of meh).
@Michael Reynolds: And 95% of what most people write is absolutely forgettable drivel. C’mon Michael, climb down from the “But it’s my art!” cross. Yes they sweat over it. Yes they tweak it 7 ways till Sunday. That doesn’t mean it is sooooo beautiful it should last a thousand years.
Maybe it will. The Mona Lisa has a pretty good jump on it and Shakespeare has aged pretty well. But the chances are pretty damned good that everything you and your wife have written will be forgotten in a hundred years. Maybe people will still be reading it like they do Dickens, but you won’t be around either way. For right now tho… And my hat is off to you for it.
I have known and worked with waaaaaayyyy too many artists who thought their stuff was the absolute epitome of… Hell if I know. Humility is not a characteristic most artists have a speaking relationship with.
Apparently replying to a comment with a link to NPR about the Mona Lisa will get you into the sin bin 🙂 Please release.
@wr:
I watched She-Spies. There was nothing wrong with it at all. It was exactly what it intended to be–which as I recall was a riff on Charlie’s Angels. Schlock has its place in the programing line up, too.
If any writers want to be embarrassed about writing for a TV show, they can be embarrassed about having written for The Protectors. THAT’S a bad television show.
@wr: Thanks. That sounds interesting. I’ll probably check it out.
@DrDaveT: Heh. I missed that. Thanx for the giggle.
@Steven L. Taylor:I suspect that when someone says something to the effect that cancel culture isn’t a serious issue, some out there are hearing “cancel culture doesn’t exist.” So they’re weighing in with their knowledge to say “yes, it does! I’ve seen it!” Whether it’s existence constitutes a problem is question for stakeholders to address–which will bring a bunch of “well that depends on whose ox is being gored” questions.
A good topic to sit on the sidelines for. Kind of like nerd NASCAR in my take.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I have to admit I suddenly remember an episode of The Highwayman in which creator Glen Larson demanded I have a bunch of Native Americans “on the warpath.” Somehow managed to keep that phrase out of the actual show… Glen needed a reason for them to be protesting, I suggested someone was looting ancient artifacts. Glen was outraged. The American people won’t stand for that. They’ll be too offended at the thought of these artifacts being destroyed.
But, he said, a gleam coming into his eyes, if the bad guys raped the seven high fashion models who were out in the desert for some reason, that wouldn’t be offensive.
I stuck to my guns on that one. I think it ended up looted artifacts. Never made it far enough through the episode to find out.
But my name’s on it. My name’s on everything I’ve had produced, no matter what happens to it after it leaves my hands. I took the check, I did the work, I’ll take the blame.
Michael may feel free to report me to AIM. Or Parents for Quality Television.
@wr:
Harlan Ellison referred to Glen Larson as “Glen Larceny.”
I am so FURIOUS about a thing… but I will write about it in the morning so more folks have a chance to see it.
I could just spit. Harrumph.
@liberal capitalist: You forgot “Get off my lawn”. That would’ve been the twist of lemon to the harrumphing. 😛
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m about to head off to bed, but I’ll look at responses tomorrow.
It seems to be your position that “if it’s not permanent, it’s not been cancelled”. Am I correct in my understanding of that?
Let me take it to an extreme…
If a 20-year-old writes a book and people harass the author to the point that they commit suicide, but the book is published 50 years after the death of the author… would you say that they haven’t been cancelled?
Let’s take it down to the examples given. Your responses seem to say that you’re okay with an author being harassed to the point of giving a “prisoner confession” style apology–as long as that one book eventually gets published.
As long as that one book gets published, anything that precedes that moment is irrelevant? Economic hardship, personal trauma, an amazing author never writing again because they’re not able to handle the hateful mobs… As long at that one book gets published, there’s no “cancel culture”?
Exactly how likely do you think the authors in the New Yorker article are to write another book?
The first one is a young, black, gay man.
The second is an immigrant from an oppressive country.
Exactly how likely do you think it is that they will stick their necks out again?
It’s almost certain that we have lost two young authors who could have written scores of books that share their insights and experiences and reach out to so many young people who are looking for a voice that speaks to them.
And how many aspiring authors saw the mob and stopped writing before they even got to the point of submitting a completed work to a publisher?
@Stormy Dragon:
“Birth of a Nation” is one of the primary films shown–and discussed–in film, theatre, and possibly art classes. I’d wager a guess it’s also being shown in a whole lot of sociology classes.
It was the first film shown in the “Film Appreciation” class I took at a small university (5k students). I can guarantee you that thousands of people who aren’t film scholars have seen that movie at just one tiny university.
@Stormy Dragon:
Moonlighting defined the “will they, won’t they” trope. It’s also probably the most common reference to instances where that trope was taken to “yes they will”… which destroyed the dynamic of the show and tanked the viewership.
@Mu Yixiao:
By definition, delayed and canceled mean two different things.
To say otherwise is to radically redefine the word “cancel.”
That is not to say that delays don’t matter, but a few months is a far cry from canceled.
You are now shifting from what you presented as serious evidence of your position (that the New Yorker is writing about it) to now having to go to some extreme hypothetical?
That suggests, does it not, that your previous evidence was not as strong as you initially asserted?
Perhaps I would. But how is this germane to the current conversation?
I said no such thing. I did not, in fact, render a judgment on those activities in the least. I noted that the evidence presented does not further the argument for massive cancel culture (let alone a new McCarthyism).
Let me stress the culture in cancel culture. One example does not a culture make. “Culture” suggests more than a handful of cases. Indeed, it suggests a pervasive condition.
(And to say that is neither to approve or disapprove of the one cancellation).
Look, I am open to reassessing my understanding of this situation, but it is not too much to ask for those arguing that the problem is serious to provide evidence to back the claim.
That you are retreating from your evidence to having to make extreme hypotheticals suggests your evidence is weak, does it not?
You seem to be missing the part wherein. one of the two published the book that was supposedly canceled and has published a sequel with a third on the way.
Regardless of what else you may want to call that, it is a horrendously terrible bit of evidence for cancel culture.
I am not saying that bad decisions aren’t made, or that it is impossible for the Twitter mob to cancel someone (although no one has given me an example of that in this thread–the New Yorker piece is based on Goodreads feedback, IIRC). But MR is claiming a new McCarthyism and you are trying to make a mountain out of what boils down to one case.
Again, if you have further evidence to help me understand your position, please provide it. But you have to admit in terms of an evidence-based argument, you are falling short, yes?
@Michael Reynolds:
Correct. It was run by a cartel. The core problem was not that they were blacklisting; it’s that a cartel had the power to blacklist.
Is kidlit publishing still a cartel? Serious question; I don’t know the answer. But it matters — a lot — to whether what’s happening is censorship or market forces.
@Mu Yixiao: Let me revisit this:
Let me stress again, Amélie Wen Zhao published Blood Heir (the book in the New Yorker piece), it’s sequel Red Tigress, and a third, Crimson Reign can be pre-ordered.
So, the answer for Zhao is “pretty damn likely.”
Is it unreasonable for me to ask that you evaluate the evidence presented?
(And, I would note, you ascribe an awful lot of things I did not say to me in your response–are you just trying to win the argument at all costs, or are we having a conversation aimed at enhancing understanding here?).
@Mu Yixiao:
You just contradicted yourself — who do you think “the industry” is, if not the publisher? If the book had sold 127 million copies, the publisher would happily have told the sensitivity readers to go cancel themselves. If the book were successfully self-published, the author wouldn’t care what the “sensitivity readers” think. Ascribing the problem to anyone but the publishers here is yet another instance of “only ___ have agency”.
@Michael Reynolds:
So, whose fault is that? Before you answer, you might want to revisit the 15,000 words you wrote a few weeks ago in this comment section about personal responsibility. You can’t make this be about anyone except the publishers without retracting most of your arguments in those threads.
For anyone who is interested, here is an interview with Zhao from Weekend Edition (which I vaguely remember hearing at the time):
Look, I have no doubt that getting a bunch of criticism about one’s first novel sucked. And maybe some of the criticisms were unfair (that seems likely, in fact), but how in the world is this an example of cancel culture? (At least if the words “cancel” and “culture” are to have any meaning).
So, I actually have some “evidence” that “supports” The Reynolds/Yixiao position on the evils of cancellation and in which said cancellation had an extremely negative effect:
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter
For the most part I think whole cancel culture thing is nonsense. Hell, did my argument that a particularly beloved movie should be viewed through a different lens do anything but get people riled up? It made me realize I really don’t understand Straight culture, but hey.
Eric Clapton is an ass, cancellation can’t touch him. Cosby is a rapist, cancellation is meaningless. It does nothing to the powerful. But when it does harm someone it gives the powerful (and get off my lawn types) something to point to and say see! Cancel culture is evil!
Hell, love what you love, love the art you love even if the artist sucks. Just have an understanding that some people make beautiful art, but are scumbags.
@Michael Reynolds: “A personal example. I was attacked for ‘erasing Native American characters,’ by a woman”
So one woman = the HUAC? You’re being absurd. Go delete all your Clapton stuff, preferably while water skiing over a shark, so you can complain that a guy, me, made you do it.
@wr: I remember The Highwayman. It was so bad that I couldn’t watch it. And I watched that Michael Nouri show where he plays a criminal court judge by day and a biker vigilante by night. I’ve watched soooooo much trash in my day, but I still couldn’t get past Highwayman.
@CSK: “Harlan Ellison referred to Glen Larson as “Glen Larceny.””
I don’t know if he came up with that. Pretty much everyone in the biz used that name.
My favorite Glen story — and this may be apocryphal, but it sounds right: Glen had a new show on the air, and one day he decided that the protagonist needed to drive a Maserati… so he demanded that the studio buy one for the show. They kicked and screamed, but Glen had a lot of power back then, so they gave in. As soon as the car arrived, Glen suddenly realized that it was all wrong for the character. So the show sold the car off as surplus. To Glen. For a dollar. Then Glen had another change of heart, and he decided that the protagonist really was a Maserati guy. But rather than inflict another big charge on the show, he graciously leased his own Maserati to them at the going rate…
@Mu Yixiao: “If a 20-year-old writes a book and people harass the author to the point that they commit suicide, but the book is published 50 years after the death of the author… would you say that they haven’t been cancelled?”
Hey, this is a great point! If the circumstances were entirely different from what they really are, our reactions would probably be different, too!
Imagine, it could be even worse. What if this 20 year-old wrote this book, and SJWs across the country decided they would hunt him with knives wherever he went? Wouldn’t he be cancelled then? Huh? Huh?
Definitely, this shows a completely different light on the picture!
@Beth: “Hell, love what you love, love the art you love even if the artist sucks. Just have an understanding that some people make beautiful art, but are scumbags.”
And if I may offer a hand of peace after last week’s argument, I’d add: have an understanding that to some other people the art we love is bad, harmful, evil and that some other people love art that we find equally horrible… and that doesn’t make them wrong or us right.
@Beth: “So, I actually have some “evidence” that “supports” The Reynolds/Yixiao position on the evils of cancellation and in which said cancellation had an extremely negative effect:”
I read the link — thanks! — and I have to say I don’t think this is cancel culture at all. This woman wrote a story — and it got a huge reaction. Yes, a lot of it negative, a lot of it stupid, a lot of it trollish — but also a lot of positive, leading to a Hugo nomination.
For most writers, this is the gold ring. You write a story and somehow it affects all sorts of people and gets elevated into a cultural moment.
It happened to Krysten Roupenian when The New Yorker published her story Cat Lover and it hit the zeitgeist at exactly the right time. And because of that she got a 1.2 million advance for her next book and HBO bought the rights to develop the book into a series.
The sad thing here is that the author of “Attack Helicopter” wasn’t able to deal with this kind of attention, and instead of being able to ride it, she was crushed by it. That’s really terrible — but she wasn’t cancelled. She chose to withdraw because the publicity her writing brought her was too much for her.
I hope that she is able to get past this and start writing again — if she chooses to. She’s got the ability to reach an audience, that’s for sure. Now she’s got to want that.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: ” I remember The Highwayman. It was so bad that I couldn’t watch it. ”
Yeah, it blasted right past “so bad it’s good” to “so bad you want to poke out your eyeballs with knitting needles.” It’s hard to be that bad without ever being any fun, but somehow it managed.
When I think of real examples of a Twitter mob, I think of stories like this: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life.
Another example in which someone lost a job due to a Tweet, Cancel Culture Comes for Will Wilkinson.
I am not saying that people don’t lose jobs over things on Twitter (which, I would note, the whole kidlit discussion above isn’t about).
But since people like Rod Dreher and his ilk use “cancel culture” as a reason to support authoritarianism, it would be nice if we could hone in on what we are talking about. If we are going to add fuel to the fire of a Fox News boogeyman, it would seem that we should be able to define with some clarity what we are talking about.
Vague impressions, poor definitions, and a handful of examples simply don’t cut it, or so I am arguing.
So, for example, when MR asserts it is like McCarthyism, that is a pretty significant charge–and one that I think needs more evidence than 4 examples and personal feelings on the subject.
I don’t think that that is an unreasonable position for me to take.
@Steven L. Taylor: :I don’t think that that is an unreasonable position for me to take.”
Even when I have disagreed with you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take an unreasonable position here…
Surprised they still let you on the internet.
@wr: I appreciate you saying so. A very kind remark, thanks!
Another example of cancelation that came to mind on my morning drive: the Smothers Brothers.
CBS Cancels Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
And yes, that was 1969.
I am not being snarky, but am struck that this represents an example from 50 years ago and was a literal cancelation. (In this caew because they were too liberal for network television).
@Steven L. Taylor:
Because “cancel culture” doesn’t impact mega stars like Clapton. It predominantly impacts those just entering the industry.
Understood. Your definition of “cancelled” is absolute.
Just curious: If you were told you couldn’t teach a specific topic for the next 20 years would you say you had been “delayed”?
And, again, the absolute.
Because she eventually published her books, everything she went through before that can be ignored? Because it didn’t succeed, there was no effort to cancel her?
The existence of cancel culture isn’t about how many times a creator leaves the arts forever. It’s about the concerted effort–from all sides–to suppress “unapproved” or “wrong” expressions. It’s about creators being “delayed” (to use your word) because they had to fight a political battle.
The fact that people do not win against the enemy does not show that the enemy does not exist. It does, in fact, prove that the enemy does exist–or else there would be no fight.
Cancel Culture isn’t a result, it’s a movement.
If you ignore it until it actually has the power to impact you… it’s too late.
@Mu Yixiao:
Not necessarily. You seem to want to box me in in unfair ways to enhance your position.
This is a non sequitur as far as I am concerned. You are picking some arbitrary formulation that is unmoored from the conversation. Is there some concrete example I am missing?
No–a direct refutation of your assertion that the authors in the New Yorker story might not ever write another book. I must confess to some exasperation on this point–it is as if you aren’t paying attention to the discussion.
This is a shifting goal post. So now “cancel culture” means an “effort to cancel her”? Books and manuscripts get criticized all the time. How much of an effort? When is criticism legitimate and when is it not? When is a critic not liking an advance copy just the judgment of the critic and when it is “cancel culture”?
Surely you can see the lack of definition that you are working with here?
Again, the issue is one of scale. Your evidence is limited and you are making broad generalizations and asserting your position without really backing it up. You have not done a very good job of establishing the “movement” you describe.