I refuse to potentially share oxygen molecules with Louis CK. If he entered a room with a plant in it and later I was to go into that room, I’d hold my breath and kill the plant.
Jan 31, 2023·edited Jan 31, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer
I think that with "cancellation," the true target isn't the specific person being cancelled, but the broader public that’s being disciplined and conditioned to adopt a range of politically acceptable norms and behaviors. This is why a climate of cancellation is so pernicious. It can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the more famous people who are targeted.
The attacks still serve to discourage other people from saying what they think. The goal isn’t just to punish someone, but to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform. When opening your mouth is liable to get you ruinously accused of committing a long list of -isms, this obviously has a chilling effect on speech. People self-censor. Wrote about this here:
I liked your article. I read Taleb many years ago and I've been pushing back against ever since. It is hard because it always feel I am the aggressor, after all, it is often only a minor inconvenience.
However, what you and Freddie seem to ignore is the giant elephant in the room. Isn't this the result of the feminization of society? Male culture has( had?) an almost absolute ban on snitching and cancel culture fits the mean girls stereotype to a t. Maybe I am biased but in my experience the far, far, far, majority of cancel operations are driven by women?
You can see how in companies the HR grew in size & role in parallel with the increase in women. The defense could be that women, since they are physically weaker, need the protection of something like an HR squad. The dominant role of women in education has changed what we learn a lot. Here Taleb's insight into anti-fragility is interesting. The experiences in my youth made me resilient to handle the sometimes painful experiences in later life. A culture where every one gets a price regardless of performance will create fragile people that can't handle the disappointments and vagaries of life.
The link between cancel culture/woke and the feminization of of society seems so jumping out that I am always flabbergasted that it is not discussed in articles like you wrote and Freddie's. Afraid to be canceled by the mother of all cancel cultures? :-)
Yes, isn't that a given by any opinion? One tries to understand the world, writes about it, in the hope that others can point out mistakes in logic or facts. Isn't that the purpose of commenting? To learn?
Love it when people disagree with me, only way to grow and learn! However, it would help if you could explain why it is sexist bullshit? The way you pose it now it is only the opinion of some random dog barking on the internet?
There is a significant incongruity between the number of words he typed in his original post versus the number of words you wrote for your reply. Maybe that's because he's actually trying to advance/explore an idea and you're just being snide?
Let me weigh in here and say that Peter's original post is a dumpster fire of clunky grammar and tenuous associations. Going through his arguments with him would be a waste of time.
But! There might be hope! Peter is flabbergasted that nobody shares his observations, and muses that it must be that he alone is unafraid to speak the truth--can Davis present an alternative theory for why nobody says what Peter is thinking? Might that spur a little self-reflection on Peter's part, and have a shot at bringing down this rotten intellectual edifice?
So rather than try to debate him the solution is to insult him. Of course, to a neutral bystander the inability or unwillingness to engage in debate usually implies that the side refusing to do the debating can't actually muster a counter argument.
"unwillingness to engage in a debate... implies that the side refusing to do the debating can't actually muster a counter argument"
This is what children think. Adults decline to engage in debate for any number of reasons all the time.
My brother. I've already spent far, far more ink on this than I'd like to. But we've got a pretty good lesson for Peter here, and he got it for free: if your thought process leads you to believe that Freddie deBoer is unwilling to address something controversial(!), that thought process may warrant further inspection.
If Peter is insulted by me calling his post a dumpster fire, he can rely on "the experiences in [his] youth" that "made [him] resilient to handle the sometimes painful experiences in later life". And then he can grow up.
I suspect and hope this is the end of this exchange.
I agree with him, and also think it's blazingly obvious, since the institutions and workplaces most beset by cancel culture are those that have the most women. And the reverse. You could likely map an almost perfect line plot correlating percentage of men vs women in an industry to the level of extreme wokeness/cancel culturitis. On the left you'd have male predominate industries like mining, construction, and mechanics where this issue is unheard of, with the line going in a straight upwards direction as you get to those dominated by women (schools, non-profits, media). I've also wondered many times why no one mentions this when the correlation is so strong.
I believe the origin of the term “decimation” was the execution of every tenth soldier when a Roman Legion was guilty of mutiny, cowardice, or insubordination.
I think this is true. In 2019, one of my kids pushed back on some of the more radical things like defund the police and it's all right to smash windows of upscale stores. She was particularly offended that they were using Martin Luther King's words to justify their actions. She didn't get in too much trouble but she saw other's in her peer group destroyed personally and professionally. She keeps her mouth firmly shut.
When people say that cancel culture doesn't exist by naming famous figures like Louis C.K. or Dave Chappelle, they are engaging in survivorship bias. The people that were successfully cancelled simply disappeared from the public eye. So you only get to hear about the ones that survived.
Yeah. I remember reading an essay of yours a few years back about movie director Nate Parker. I bet most today people have no idea who he is, because he was successfully cancelled over unproven allegations. But before that, he was set to be Hollywood's next great Black filmmaker.
He had a second Netflix standup special and a third season of Master of None since his proto-cancellation, but I don't think I heard much chatter about either.
Looks like he fell off and did an indie movie and is trying to find a distributor for his next movie. I don't think he'll ever make another Hollywood movie no matter how much he tries to apologize, which is just digging a deeper hole for him.
Ultimately, most peoples concerns are about themselves, not celebrities. Louis CK’s survival, predicated on him being one of the most popular comics alive, doesn’t make me any more confident about Joe Random Professor’s odds.
More's the point, many people who were successfully cancelled were *never* in the public eye: they were random nobodies completely lacking in fame, power, wealth or influence, who simply had the poor fortune to (for example) make a circle with their thumb and forefinger while being filmed by a malicious bluecheck (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/).
Go one step further: the people confidently asserting that "cancel culture doesn't work" are basing their opinion on the failed attempts to cancel people who are too famous, successful and/or powerful to be cancelled. They simply never hear about the successful cancelling attempts aimed at random nobodies, BECAUSE they are random nobodies.
I think cancel culture comes down to two main driving forces:
1. The desire for people you don't like to be permanently banished from society
2. The need for people you like to be forgiven, regardless of their transgressions.
Donald Trump is maybe the easiest example for this right now. Those who hate him want him ejected from the planet. Those who love him are willing to overlook any possible bad behavior.
But this seems to hold true for most people most of the time.
To be fair, it goes both ways. There are plenty of people who will believe any tomfool thing that they think Trump says (an ant who works for the public health department tells me that their phone lines were overwhelmed when Trump mentioned in passing that injecting bleach might benefit COVID sufferers) and there are people who believe implicitly the wildest and most outlandish allegations about Trump, simply because they detest the man that much.
I don't understand why Trump, who is good at trolling and bullying if he is good at nothing else, doesn't use this. "Oxygen. I breathe it all the time. Powerful stuff, the best, fresh oxygen, you gotta try it, I tell ya! In fact, I'm breathing oxygen in between sentences right now, taking little pauses, little breaks here, right here on this podium, breathing in some of that fresh American oxygen! Nothing else like it!"
Upon hearing those words, a certain segment of the American population would throttle themselves, rather than take in any more oxygen and thinking that, by asphyxiating themselves, they were somehow managing to spite Trump in the process.
There is an associated issue with erasure of centrists and third party types. For partisans what really matters is the fight and so anybody who is a non-conformist, an adherent of a third party, etc. does not fit into a convenient box and must be either attacked or ignored.
That extends to the viewpoints of those individuals. Trump for example: I think it's pretty clear that he's an idiot. He's also completely undisciplined--his childish reactions to defeat in 2020 have made it much more difficult for him to mount a comeback in 2024. But the office of the President being what it is oftentimes enthusiasm is more valuable than talent or ability. There is a long history of administrations led by supposed intellectuals, like Clinton or Obama, who were undone because they were unable to rein in their appetites or bring themselves to sully their hands with politics.
So utilizing the same perspective to examine Trump the man as well as his administration yields some interesting results I think. Is there any important measure where Trump didn't fare better than Biden is doing now? In foreign relations obviously there was no crisis in Ukraine. In terms of crime the historic spike in violent crime rates after 2020 hadn't yet occurred. In terms of the economy the country experienced full employment without the considerable drawback of runaway inflation. And in terms of Covid roughly twice as many Americans have perished from the disease under Biden's administration as compared to Trump's despite the widespread availability of vaccines.
Important measures that Biden has fared better than Trump:
- lying (or more broadly, trust)
- lowering the temperature (or, not requiring chaos and permanent attention)
- legislative progress (even some gun control!)
- western solidarity, American geopolitical influence
- international stature, particularly with allies
If you're an American, you might not understand some facets of the last. Democratic administrations are generally bad for the interests of other western nations, who are almost all more dependent upon trade. Trump's treatment of US military and trade allies, and the coddling of the West's enemies, was off the scale. The US is no longer quite the indispensable nation (see TPP), and today it cannot achieve almost anything alone.
How convenient that all of those measures don't have quantitative metrics attached to them.
In terms of foreign policy Biden has sowed the seed for chaos down the line. Russia and Iran just announced that their national banks are now linked electronically over an infrastructure that is completely independent from the West. That is the natural consequence for taking international financial institutions that should be completely neutral and subverting them to serve a policy agenda.
As for lowering the national temperature, seriously? As far as I can tell the US is headed for a blowup of epic proportions right around 2024 when Trump and Biden get their rematch.
Do the number of lies really matter once you've told a few whoppers?
How about the countries that gave Biden the finger and continued to buy Russian oil, like India? How about the fact that the only countries that have signed to the Ukrainian coalition are in Europe while the rest of the world remains studiously neutral or actively aids and abets Russia like China and Iran?
In terms of the real world I think that a recession induced by high interest rates passed by the Fed will probably have more of an impact on US citizens--and their votes--then American prestige abroad.
Re: the temperature, there's certainly plenty of division, but as a Canadia who casually observes American politics, my Twitter timeline is no longer chock-full every single day with angry tweets re: whatever the hell your President did or said to make the sky fall. And thank God for that.
Getting legislation through that will allow Medicare to bargain for drugs...using market forces to reign in drug prices which was lost under the GW Bush Medicare Part D.
The FTC is starting to take on non-compete clauses which are destroying market forces because competition is crucial to a functioning market economy.
Getting more funds to the IRS to go after millionaire tax cheats.
Interestingly, no player on my favorite teams have ever been deserving of a penalty or foul. Conversely, I find it disgraceful when refs don't immediately eject the opposing players for their egregious, obvious fouls that bring the game into disrepute. Of course, all refs are biased against my favorite teams.
Every no-call on Duke and the Patriots further proves that they’re awful cheating scum who pay off refs. They only occasionally get called on things to throw everyone off the scent.
"But I am on record, obviously, as saying that we live in a public culture that is too retributive and insufficiently forgiving."
Yes, the idea that someone should suffer certain kinds of social "life sentence" such as permanent loss of career, permanent exclusion from public life, etc, with no possibility of forgiveness or redemption is exactly not what I would expect from people who consider themselves secular democratic leftists (or, for that matter, Christian or observant Jewish democratic leftists with a humane conception of their religion).
Sure, you may have lost your job and your social circle but at least you have that figurative support. That sounds much better than Jesus just tempering people's hearts so that they aren't such judgemental jerks in the first place.
Hope can come from art but also the knowledge that there are other people out there who understand/don't care about your so-called transgressions.
That's true for me and many of my friends. I don't want to be associated with the intolerance committed in the name of Progressive and Liberal. I'm also talking to more young people who are turning away from the radicalism on the illiberal left.
In Catholicism, in order to be forgiven, it requires a truly sorrowful confession and recognition of what they did wrong by the sinner and a real commitment to both change and acts of atonement and reparation for the harm caused.
I am a strong believer in forgiveness, but what bothers me is that usually when these rich, popular people are cancelled, they "atone" with, at best, a half-assed Notes app apology and laying low for a couple years. Nothing seems to have been learned and I'm not confident that they wouldn't do it again, given the chance. Louis CK absolutely suffered consequences, but is he a changed man?
In contrast, you have someone like Freddie, who has been very upfront about what he did a couple of years ago, has apologized sincerely and honestly both in public and directly to the offended party, and has committed himself to real, serious changes in his life to ensure that it won't happen again. That merits forgiveness to me.
I've heard of instances where the apology intensified the baying for blood, resulting in catastrophic consequences for the person who wishes to repent.
The rich and famous being cancelled is not good, but usually they survive just fine. It's regular people being cancelled that concerns me. Someone living paycheck to paycheck can fall a long ways.
I joined Twitter recently because of the Elon Musk kerfuffle so I saw the Tweet referenced in this article. The best reply by far comes from Dan Friedman.
"Louis CK has enough fans that he can sell out stadiums, yet nobody will put him on TV. Cancel culture doesn’t mean that somebody’s audience abandons them, it means that institutions act to attempt to sever a person from their intact audience."
In this sense cancel culture is gatekeeping and attempted censorship at its most noxious, an attempt by a tiny minority to impose their tastes and will on everyone else. It's fundamentally anti-democratic.
Obviously once somebody is rich and famous enough the ability of institutions to cut them off from their fan base is limited. The problem is everyone else who is not sufficiently rich and famous, meaning that the consequences of cancel culture inevitably fall most heavily on the little guy. So much for "punching up".
Louis CK had a slew of comedy specials on Netflix from previous years. Now they've vanished despite far less prominent names still being featured. His movie "I Love You Daddy" was dropped by its distributor because of the controversy forcing the comedian to repurchase the film's rights.
This comment approaches the level of obtuseness I referenced above. The audience required to have a successful TV show depends almost entirely on how much the industry is behind that show. "Girls" was a huge show culturally, but it got a fraction of the viewers of shows like "Two and Half Men." Why? Because the industry and the media liked it.
People who get cancelled almost never lose their audience. They lose the support of the gatekeepers who give them access to their audience. That's not an opinion about whether people should face consequences for their actions, beliefs, whatever. It's just a factual observation about how the business works. But for some reason, some folks can't bring themselves to acknowledge plain facts.
I've never watched it, but "Louie" was popular enough to be renewed four times. The second season was budgeted at $4 million. Episodes routinely attracted at least a million viewers. There was talk of the show being renewed for a sixth season in 2018, which to me suggests that CK's sexual misconduct was literally the only reason it was cancelled, and wasn't just a convenient excuse for the network to drop a show which was already failing.
Louie was basically revered by comedy fans and considered one of the best shows on TV. It was a show on FX with a niche audience, not some broad NBC comedy. You can go back and look at the reviews from 2011 thru 2014 and they are across the board glowing. Season 3 had a 100% rating from critics and 97% rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, the idea it was a failure is incredibly wrong. Four seasons and was slated for another til the cancelation.
The negative responses to that Tweet are really something, and really telling. The number of supposedly-prominent people who cannot employ the most rudimentary levels of logic is astounding.
If you want to be a member in good standing in any of the big culture war tribes, you really have to perform some kind of virtual self-lobotomy.
Kat Rosenfield has made this point eloquently as well. The problem with Cancel culture isn't that it affects rich, famous people. They'll be fine. The real issue is that the up-and-comers, the less famous folk with far fewer resources trying to break into entertainment or journalism or whatever.... they can see this culture of fear happening and they're worried they'll be next.
Yeah, only the already-powerful survive. Big figures like Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Dave Chappelle, etc. already had massive fanbases, so they survive cancellation. But the up-and-comers get destroyed.
I was a big Louis CK fan and will have some of his brilliant work lodged in my head forever. The expose by the NYT was tough to absorb. He did wrong. But the timeline was such that its not clear to me he didn't reform himself/stop his unacceptable behavior. Though too late for some of his victims and so maybe it doesn't matter but it matters to me.
The thing about it that bothered me was his comedy took a turn towards speaking up for women's issues but once the news broke it was assumed he did this for disingenuous reasons. That his work on the topic was only to normalize it and rationalize his predatory behavior. Based on the timeline I held out hope that it was actually a case where a creative person used his craft to help reform his behavior. As such there would still be some redemptive quality to his comedy and work as a director. We laud artists that use their art to get over addiction. Is there room for that in the realm of #metoo? This was no doubt a secondary concern to some form of justice being served but I wish there was an effort to explore.
The guy would have went down as a contender as a top 10 comic of all time, now he's just shy of Cosby for half the nation. So I think cancel culture is still a real thing even if it doesn't lead to permanent removal from society and castration.
How about we just ignore the artist and focus on the art? I don't know if Roman Polanski is a great guy or not but some of his films are understandably lauded as classics.
Never met the guy so frankly I don't care. It's not going to stop me from watching and enjoying his work.
More to the point he's acknowledged as a great auteur who had produced some of cinema's greatest films. A cursory examination of history should make clear that being a great artist has zero to do with being a good person.
Caravaggio was engaged in a feud with some fellow over a prostitute. They fought a duel and apparently he was in the process of castrating his opponent when he accidentally killed him. In the long run history judges the work first and the maker second.
The French think Polanski is a genius and are actively engaged in protecting him.
That's the complicating issue. Not everyone is going to share the same opinion. If the matter isn't being handled in an arena with relatively well defined standards and rules, like for instance the criminal justice system, how does the debate get settled?
I can only speak for myself. to me, anything having to do with sex with minors is unacceptable. I just find it uber repulsive. But I'm not the cosmos. I understand that people have different opinions on all sorts of subjects. We can agree to disagree without trying to whip up an online mob to harass the Other into submission whatever that means.
I think this is generally a good principle, but most people have a line at which they just can’t. I’d like our norm to be that this is a personal decision, so live and let live . If you don’t wanna buy Michael Jackson music, fine, but don’t demand the club stop playing it. If you think Roman Polanski films are fine, accept that some others won’t wanna see them and that’s fine too.
I had a slightly different angle in mind for my original post. If you take any retrospective college course on the arts--painting, literature, film, etc.--you will end up learning about the works of artists who were by pretty much any standard terrible people. A cursory examination of history reveals that there is basically no correlation between being a great artist and a good human being. Does that mean that the work of those individuals should be removed from college courses? I think that's laughable. Great art is great art because creative work has an independent life from the person who made it.
When I read “cancel culture isn’t real”, it’s typically a lament. I think it comes as a shock to the twitteratti when the rest of culture doesn’t comply. In the real world, Dave Chappelle is the worlds wealthiest comedian, JK Rowling is still a best selling author, and “Yellowstone” has like 5 times the audience share of any HBO series. These celebrities haven’t in a real sense been “cancelled”, but not for lack of effort
Actually nobody from that cast has (though Costner has always been an outspoken and rare Hollywood conservative), but you wouldn’t guess it’s the highest rated scripted show in TV due to its total lack of traction with tastemakers
I haven't seen it. I have heard many people enjoy it. I get the idea its sort of a soap opera type show that were way more common back in the 1980s (e.g., "Dallas"). Certainly being wildly popular is a great defense to cancelation - or at least to total cancelation. For example, Kyle Dunnigan's "Time Canceler" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-oxgWZKyyc&t=117s
Thats a good description. I like it, Taylor Sheridan is a great writer, and the cast is solid. It’s not a timeless classic, but perfectly serviceable popcorn TV
I've seen a few episodes and the events/happenings are just so outlandish that I couldn't commit.
Although I do really like Costner, his character and the way he plays him turn me off in a visceral way: he inhabits the character so well that I feel that I'm back with the rural, rich assholes (mainly farmers/ranchers/(not small) business owners) I grew up with/knowing.
`Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' and `Waterworld' are canonical at this point, though.
Short of a video showing Costner beating a dog, I'm going to continue appreciating him (well, if it's a small dog, like a Corgi or Pomeranian, I could probably excuse it).
You know, I thought this too but apparently he's been supporting Democratic candidates for some time (Obama, Buttigieg, Biden). He even narrated an ad for the Democrat in the district (Steve King's old one) I grew up in, in Iowa!
Would recommend Bill Simmons' interview with Costner in 2019 (Ringer podcast).
Nicely phrased. I was surprised, too. Apparently switched his affiliation to Democratic in the 90s? At least according to Wikipedia.
He could stump for Republicans (maybe not Trump) and I wouldn't mind, at this point. He's stuck around the Midwest/Dakotas long enough that it seems he actually cares about those places.
This speaks to the real defense against Cancel Culture. It only works if everyone goes along with it. The moment we stop paying attention, it stops working.
I refuse to potentially share oxygen molecules with Louis CK. If he entered a room with a plant in it and later I was to go into that room, I’d hold my breath and kill the plant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo5MLolgMWk
Link goes to "Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Goon Squad" #SavedYouAClick
Good tune.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dgLT4G563Ds
Another solid tune. I like this live version from 1978:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKS8gmXGCT4
Elvis has always had quality live shows; that's excellent!
cancel culture is panideological too. we need to be vigilant aways against the impulse
All that means is that the rules are different for the cool kids.
The loser kids get dumped on if they step out of line, or even if they don't.
I think that with "cancellation," the true target isn't the specific person being cancelled, but the broader public that’s being disciplined and conditioned to adopt a range of politically acceptable norms and behaviors. This is why a climate of cancellation is so pernicious. It can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the more famous people who are targeted.
The attacks still serve to discourage other people from saying what they think. The goal isn’t just to punish someone, but to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform. When opening your mouth is liable to get you ruinously accused of committing a long list of -isms, this obviously has a chilling effect on speech. People self-censor. Wrote about this here:
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-and-the-renormalization
I liked your article. I read Taleb many years ago and I've been pushing back against ever since. It is hard because it always feel I am the aggressor, after all, it is often only a minor inconvenience.
However, what you and Freddie seem to ignore is the giant elephant in the room. Isn't this the result of the feminization of society? Male culture has( had?) an almost absolute ban on snitching and cancel culture fits the mean girls stereotype to a t. Maybe I am biased but in my experience the far, far, far, majority of cancel operations are driven by women?
You can see how in companies the HR grew in size & role in parallel with the increase in women. The defense could be that women, since they are physically weaker, need the protection of something like an HR squad. The dominant role of women in education has changed what we learn a lot. Here Taleb's insight into anti-fragility is interesting. The experiences in my youth made me resilient to handle the sometimes painful experiences in later life. A culture where every one gets a price regardless of performance will create fragile people that can't handle the disappointments and vagaries of life.
The link between cancel culture/woke and the feminization of of society seems so jumping out that I am always flabbergasted that it is not discussed in articles like you wrote and Freddie's. Afraid to be canceled by the mother of all cancel cultures? :-)
Yes, isn't that a given by any opinion? One tries to understand the world, writes about it, in the hope that others can point out mistakes in logic or facts. Isn't that the purpose of commenting? To learn?
> I don’t think that’s true.
Love it when people disagree with me, only way to grow and learn! However, it would help if you could explain why it is sexist bullshit? The way you pose it now it is only the opinion of some random dog barking on the internet?
"However, it would help..."
What would it help?
There is a significant incongruity between the number of words he typed in his original post versus the number of words you wrote for your reply. Maybe that's because he's actually trying to advance/explore an idea and you're just being snide?
Who's actually contributing to the conversation?
Let me weigh in here and say that Peter's original post is a dumpster fire of clunky grammar and tenuous associations. Going through his arguments with him would be a waste of time.
But! There might be hope! Peter is flabbergasted that nobody shares his observations, and muses that it must be that he alone is unafraid to speak the truth--can Davis present an alternative theory for why nobody says what Peter is thinking? Might that spur a little self-reflection on Peter's part, and have a shot at bringing down this rotten intellectual edifice?
So rather than try to debate him the solution is to insult him. Of course, to a neutral bystander the inability or unwillingness to engage in debate usually implies that the side refusing to do the debating can't actually muster a counter argument.
"unwillingness to engage in a debate... implies that the side refusing to do the debating can't actually muster a counter argument"
This is what children think. Adults decline to engage in debate for any number of reasons all the time.
My brother. I've already spent far, far more ink on this than I'd like to. But we've got a pretty good lesson for Peter here, and he got it for free: if your thought process leads you to believe that Freddie deBoer is unwilling to address something controversial(!), that thought process may warrant further inspection.
If Peter is insulted by me calling his post a dumpster fire, he can rely on "the experiences in [his] youth" that "made [him] resilient to handle the sometimes painful experiences in later life". And then he can grow up.
I suspect and hope this is the end of this exchange.
I agree with him, and also think it's blazingly obvious, since the institutions and workplaces most beset by cancel culture are those that have the most women. And the reverse. You could likely map an almost perfect line plot correlating percentage of men vs women in an industry to the level of extreme wokeness/cancel culturitis. On the left you'd have male predominate industries like mining, construction, and mechanics where this issue is unheard of, with the line going in a straight upwards direction as you get to those dominated by women (schools, non-profits, media). I've also wondered many times why no one mentions this when the correlation is so strong.
I believe the origin of the term “decimation” was the execution of every tenth soldier when a Roman Legion was guilty of mutiny, cowardice, or insubordination.
It's now taken to mean either the destruction of 1/10 or something or that things near total (but not absolute) destruction.
So either 10% or 90% destruction...English evolves in odd ways, sometimes.
I think this is true. In 2019, one of my kids pushed back on some of the more radical things like defund the police and it's all right to smash windows of upscale stores. She was particularly offended that they were using Martin Luther King's words to justify their actions. She didn't get in too much trouble but she saw other's in her peer group destroyed personally and professionally. She keeps her mouth firmly shut.
When people say that cancel culture doesn't exist by naming famous figures like Louis C.K. or Dave Chappelle, they are engaging in survivorship bias. The people that were successfully cancelled simply disappeared from the public eye. So you only get to hear about the ones that survived.
Could even be an example of survivorship bias in a statistics textbook.
Yeah. I remember reading an essay of yours a few years back about movie director Nate Parker. I bet most today people have no idea who he is, because he was successfully cancelled over unproven allegations. But before that, he was set to be Hollywood's next great Black filmmaker.
Hell, whatever happened to Aziz Ansari? Has he appeared in anything since whatever that weird accusation was?
IIRC that was one of the first cancel attempts that fell flat. Everyone sort of agreed it was a bad date nothing less nothing more.
He had a second Netflix standup special and a third season of Master of None since his proto-cancellation, but I don't think I heard much chatter about either.
He had a big write up
in the Post two months ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/11/11/nate-parker-film-career-david-oyelowo/
Looks like he fell off and did an indie movie and is trying to find a distributor for his next movie. I don't think he'll ever make another Hollywood movie no matter how much he tries to apologize, which is just digging a deeper hole for him.
Ultimately, most peoples concerns are about themselves, not celebrities. Louis CK’s survival, predicated on him being one of the most popular comics alive, doesn’t make me any more confident about Joe Random Professor’s odds.
Exactly!
More's the point, many people who were successfully cancelled were *never* in the public eye: they were random nobodies completely lacking in fame, power, wealth or influence, who simply had the poor fortune to (for example) make a circle with their thumb and forefinger while being filmed by a malicious bluecheck (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/).
Go one step further: the people confidently asserting that "cancel culture doesn't work" are basing their opinion on the failed attempts to cancel people who are too famous, successful and/or powerful to be cancelled. They simply never hear about the successful cancelling attempts aimed at random nobodies, BECAUSE they are random nobodies.
The “cancel culture doesn’t exist” argument is similar to the Covid isn’t real/vaccines don’t work sort of argument.
I think cancel culture comes down to two main driving forces:
1. The desire for people you don't like to be permanently banished from society
2. The need for people you like to be forgiven, regardless of their transgressions.
Donald Trump is maybe the easiest example for this right now. Those who hate him want him ejected from the planet. Those who love him are willing to overlook any possible bad behavior.
But this seems to hold true for most people most of the time.
To be fair, it goes both ways. There are plenty of people who will believe any tomfool thing that they think Trump says (an ant who works for the public health department tells me that their phone lines were overwhelmed when Trump mentioned in passing that injecting bleach might benefit COVID sufferers) and there are people who believe implicitly the wildest and most outlandish allegations about Trump, simply because they detest the man that much.
I don't understand why Trump, who is good at trolling and bullying if he is good at nothing else, doesn't use this. "Oxygen. I breathe it all the time. Powerful stuff, the best, fresh oxygen, you gotta try it, I tell ya! In fact, I'm breathing oxygen in between sentences right now, taking little pauses, little breaks here, right here on this podium, breathing in some of that fresh American oxygen! Nothing else like it!"
Upon hearing those words, a certain segment of the American population would throttle themselves, rather than take in any more oxygen and thinking that, by asphyxiating themselves, they were somehow managing to spite Trump in the process.
There is an associated issue with erasure of centrists and third party types. For partisans what really matters is the fight and so anybody who is a non-conformist, an adherent of a third party, etc. does not fit into a convenient box and must be either attacked or ignored.
That extends to the viewpoints of those individuals. Trump for example: I think it's pretty clear that he's an idiot. He's also completely undisciplined--his childish reactions to defeat in 2020 have made it much more difficult for him to mount a comeback in 2024. But the office of the President being what it is oftentimes enthusiasm is more valuable than talent or ability. There is a long history of administrations led by supposed intellectuals, like Clinton or Obama, who were undone because they were unable to rein in their appetites or bring themselves to sully their hands with politics.
So utilizing the same perspective to examine Trump the man as well as his administration yields some interesting results I think. Is there any important measure where Trump didn't fare better than Biden is doing now? In foreign relations obviously there was no crisis in Ukraine. In terms of crime the historic spike in violent crime rates after 2020 hadn't yet occurred. In terms of the economy the country experienced full employment without the considerable drawback of runaway inflation. And in terms of Covid roughly twice as many Americans have perished from the disease under Biden's administration as compared to Trump's despite the widespread availability of vaccines.
To be fair, Biden never had a reputation as intellectual, and I'm not sure how much he's really in charge now.
Important measures that Biden has fared better than Trump:
- lying (or more broadly, trust)
- lowering the temperature (or, not requiring chaos and permanent attention)
- legislative progress (even some gun control!)
- western solidarity, American geopolitical influence
- international stature, particularly with allies
If you're an American, you might not understand some facets of the last. Democratic administrations are generally bad for the interests of other western nations, who are almost all more dependent upon trade. Trump's treatment of US military and trade allies, and the coddling of the West's enemies, was off the scale. The US is no longer quite the indispensable nation (see TPP), and today it cannot achieve almost anything alone.
How convenient that all of those measures don't have quantitative metrics attached to them.
In terms of foreign policy Biden has sowed the seed for chaos down the line. Russia and Iran just announced that their national banks are now linked electronically over an infrastructure that is completely independent from the West. That is the natural consequence for taking international financial institutions that should be completely neutral and subverting them to serve a policy agenda.
As for lowering the national temperature, seriously? As far as I can tell the US is headed for a blowup of epic proportions right around 2024 when Trump and Biden get their rematch.
I'm confident someone is tracking Trump's and Biden's public lies somewhere, and that the measure would not be close.
For some other, you are welcome to go examine close proxies like counting major bills, countries joining an American-led initiative etc.
As for the rest that are qualitative rather than quantitative, that's the real world for you.
Do the number of lies really matter once you've told a few whoppers?
How about the countries that gave Biden the finger and continued to buy Russian oil, like India? How about the fact that the only countries that have signed to the Ukrainian coalition are in Europe while the rest of the world remains studiously neutral or actively aids and abets Russia like China and Iran?
In terms of the real world I think that a recession induced by high interest rates passed by the Fed will probably have more of an impact on US citizens--and their votes--then American prestige abroad.
Re: the temperature, there's certainly plenty of division, but as a Canadia who casually observes American politics, my Twitter timeline is no longer chock-full every single day with angry tweets re: whatever the hell your President did or said to make the sky fall. And thank God for that.
I just signed up to Twitter. As far as I can tell the trending topics every night are Trump or the vaccine holocaust. Real calm now.
Getting legislation through that will allow Medicare to bargain for drugs...using market forces to reign in drug prices which was lost under the GW Bush Medicare Part D.
The FTC is starting to take on non-compete clauses which are destroying market forces because competition is crucial to a functioning market economy.
Getting more funds to the IRS to go after millionaire tax cheats.
Yes, turning down the rhetoric dial.
Interestingly, no player on my favorite teams have ever been deserving of a penalty or foul. Conversely, I find it disgraceful when refs don't immediately eject the opposing players for their egregious, obvious fouls that bring the game into disrepute. Of course, all refs are biased against my favorite teams.
The ones who aren't biased against you are perfectly fair and balanced, though.
Every no-call on Duke and the Patriots further proves that they’re awful cheating scum who pay off refs. They only occasionally get called on things to throw everyone off the scent.
"But I am on record, obviously, as saying that we live in a public culture that is too retributive and insufficiently forgiving."
Yes, the idea that someone should suffer certain kinds of social "life sentence" such as permanent loss of career, permanent exclusion from public life, etc, with no possibility of forgiveness or redemption is exactly not what I would expect from people who consider themselves secular democratic leftists (or, for that matter, Christian or observant Jewish democratic leftists with a humane conception of their religion).
At least in Christianity, even if no one likes you, Jesus is there to forgive you and support you.
In the woke secular world, if no one likes you, you have no hope left.
Sure, you may have lost your job and your social circle but at least you have that figurative support. That sounds much better than Jesus just tempering people's hearts so that they aren't such judgemental jerks in the first place.
Hope can come from art but also the knowledge that there are other people out there who understand/don't care about your so-called transgressions.
"with no possibility of forgiveness or redemption is exactly not what I would expect from people who consider themselves secular democratic leftists"
Which is one big reason why, after identifying as a Democratic leftist for the first 67 years of my life, I no longer do so.
That's true for me and many of my friends. I don't want to be associated with the intolerance committed in the name of Progressive and Liberal. I'm also talking to more young people who are turning away from the radicalism on the illiberal left.
In Catholicism, in order to be forgiven, it requires a truly sorrowful confession and recognition of what they did wrong by the sinner and a real commitment to both change and acts of atonement and reparation for the harm caused.
I am a strong believer in forgiveness, but what bothers me is that usually when these rich, popular people are cancelled, they "atone" with, at best, a half-assed Notes app apology and laying low for a couple years. Nothing seems to have been learned and I'm not confident that they wouldn't do it again, given the chance. Louis CK absolutely suffered consequences, but is he a changed man?
In contrast, you have someone like Freddie, who has been very upfront about what he did a couple of years ago, has apologized sincerely and honestly both in public and directly to the offended party, and has committed himself to real, serious changes in his life to ensure that it won't happen again. That merits forgiveness to me.
I've heard of instances where the apology intensified the baying for blood, resulting in catastrophic consequences for the person who wishes to repent.
The rich and famous being cancelled is not good, but usually they survive just fine. It's regular people being cancelled that concerns me. Someone living paycheck to paycheck can fall a long ways.
Just to add more confusion to the discussion, I one time got shamed on Facebook just using the term “Cancel Culture” lol. It’s dizzying...
I joined Twitter recently because of the Elon Musk kerfuffle so I saw the Tweet referenced in this article. The best reply by far comes from Dan Friedman.
"Louis CK has enough fans that he can sell out stadiums, yet nobody will put him on TV. Cancel culture doesn’t mean that somebody’s audience abandons them, it means that institutions act to attempt to sever a person from their intact audience."
https://twitter.com/DanFriedman81/status/1619964420662366208
In this sense cancel culture is gatekeeping and attempted censorship at its most noxious, an attempt by a tiny minority to impose their tastes and will on everyone else. It's fundamentally anti-democratic.
Obviously once somebody is rich and famous enough the ability of institutions to cut them off from their fan base is limited. The problem is everyone else who is not sufficiently rich and famous, meaning that the consequences of cancel culture inevitably fall most heavily on the little guy. So much for "punching up".
Louis CK had a slew of comedy specials on Netflix from previous years. Now they've vanished despite far less prominent names still being featured. His movie "I Love You Daddy" was dropped by its distributor because of the controversy forcing the comedian to repurchase the film's rights.
This comment approaches the level of obtuseness I referenced above. The audience required to have a successful TV show depends almost entirely on how much the industry is behind that show. "Girls" was a huge show culturally, but it got a fraction of the viewers of shows like "Two and Half Men." Why? Because the industry and the media liked it.
People who get cancelled almost never lose their audience. They lose the support of the gatekeepers who give them access to their audience. That's not an opinion about whether people should face consequences for their actions, beliefs, whatever. It's just a factual observation about how the business works. But for some reason, some folks can't bring themselves to acknowledge plain facts.
I've never watched it, but "Louie" was popular enough to be renewed four times. The second season was budgeted at $4 million. Episodes routinely attracted at least a million viewers. There was talk of the show being renewed for a sixth season in 2018, which to me suggests that CK's sexual misconduct was literally the only reason it was cancelled, and wasn't just a convenient excuse for the network to drop a show which was already failing.
Louie was basically revered by comedy fans and considered one of the best shows on TV. It was a show on FX with a niche audience, not some broad NBC comedy. You can go back and look at the reviews from 2011 thru 2014 and they are across the board glowing. Season 3 had a 100% rating from critics and 97% rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, the idea it was a failure is incredibly wrong. Four seasons and was slated for another til the cancelation.
That seems exactly right, yep. The woke invaded the institutions in an attempt to suss out any wrongthinking or wrongliving.
The negative responses to that Tweet are really something, and really telling. The number of supposedly-prominent people who cannot employ the most rudimentary levels of logic is astounding.
If you want to be a member in good standing in any of the big culture war tribes, you really have to perform some kind of virtual self-lobotomy.
Kat Rosenfield has made this point eloquently as well. The problem with Cancel culture isn't that it affects rich, famous people. They'll be fine. The real issue is that the up-and-comers, the less famous folk with far fewer resources trying to break into entertainment or journalism or whatever.... they can see this culture of fear happening and they're worried they'll be next.
Yeah, only the already-powerful survive. Big figures like Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Dave Chappelle, etc. already had massive fanbases, so they survive cancellation. But the up-and-comers get destroyed.
Thank you for this article.
I was a big Louis CK fan and will have some of his brilliant work lodged in my head forever. The expose by the NYT was tough to absorb. He did wrong. But the timeline was such that its not clear to me he didn't reform himself/stop his unacceptable behavior. Though too late for some of his victims and so maybe it doesn't matter but it matters to me.
The thing about it that bothered me was his comedy took a turn towards speaking up for women's issues but once the news broke it was assumed he did this for disingenuous reasons. That his work on the topic was only to normalize it and rationalize his predatory behavior. Based on the timeline I held out hope that it was actually a case where a creative person used his craft to help reform his behavior. As such there would still be some redemptive quality to his comedy and work as a director. We laud artists that use their art to get over addiction. Is there room for that in the realm of #metoo? This was no doubt a secondary concern to some form of justice being served but I wish there was an effort to explore.
The guy would have went down as a contender as a top 10 comic of all time, now he's just shy of Cosby for half the nation. So I think cancel culture is still a real thing even if it doesn't lead to permanent removal from society and castration.
How about we just ignore the artist and focus on the art? I don't know if Roman Polanski is a great guy or not but some of his films are understandably lauded as classics.
Never met the guy so frankly I don't care. It's not going to stop me from watching and enjoying his work.
More to the point he's acknowledged as a great auteur who had produced some of cinema's greatest films. A cursory examination of history should make clear that being a great artist has zero to do with being a good person.
I can still do this with Louis but I can't with Cosby.
Caravaggio was engaged in a feud with some fellow over a prostitute. They fought a duel and apparently he was in the process of castrating his opponent when he accidentally killed him. In the long run history judges the work first and the maker second.
Ah but did they have cancel culture back then?
They had the law. That didn't work either.
Kiddie stuff is a no-no from me. Can't abide that.
The French think Polanski is a genius and are actively engaged in protecting him.
That's the complicating issue. Not everyone is going to share the same opinion. If the matter isn't being handled in an arena with relatively well defined standards and rules, like for instance the criminal justice system, how does the debate get settled?
I can only speak for myself. to me, anything having to do with sex with minors is unacceptable. I just find it uber repulsive. But I'm not the cosmos. I understand that people have different opinions on all sorts of subjects. We can agree to disagree without trying to whip up an online mob to harass the Other into submission whatever that means.
I think this is generally a good principle, but most people have a line at which they just can’t. I’d like our norm to be that this is a personal decision, so live and let live . If you don’t wanna buy Michael Jackson music, fine, but don’t demand the club stop playing it. If you think Roman Polanski films are fine, accept that some others won’t wanna see them and that’s fine too.
I had a slightly different angle in mind for my original post. If you take any retrospective college course on the arts--painting, literature, film, etc.--you will end up learning about the works of artists who were by pretty much any standard terrible people. A cursory examination of history reveals that there is basically no correlation between being a great artist and a good human being. Does that mean that the work of those individuals should be removed from college courses? I think that's laughable. Great art is great art because creative work has an independent life from the person who made it.
When I read “cancel culture isn’t real”, it’s typically a lament. I think it comes as a shock to the twitteratti when the rest of culture doesn’t comply. In the real world, Dave Chappelle is the worlds wealthiest comedian, JK Rowling is still a best selling author, and “Yellowstone” has like 5 times the audience share of any HBO series. These celebrities haven’t in a real sense been “cancelled”, but not for lack of effort
I haven't seen Yellowstone (yeah, I'm that guy). What celebrity in it was (not) canceled?
Actually nobody from that cast has (though Costner has always been an outspoken and rare Hollywood conservative), but you wouldn’t guess it’s the highest rated scripted show in TV due to its total lack of traction with tastemakers
I haven't seen it. I have heard many people enjoy it. I get the idea its sort of a soap opera type show that were way more common back in the 1980s (e.g., "Dallas"). Certainly being wildly popular is a great defense to cancelation - or at least to total cancelation. For example, Kyle Dunnigan's "Time Canceler" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-oxgWZKyyc&t=117s
Thats a good description. I like it, Taylor Sheridan is a great writer, and the cast is solid. It’s not a timeless classic, but perfectly serviceable popcorn TV
I've seen a few episodes and the events/happenings are just so outlandish that I couldn't commit.
Although I do really like Costner, his character and the way he plays him turn me off in a visceral way: he inhabits the character so well that I feel that I'm back with the rural, rich assholes (mainly farmers/ranchers/(not small) business owners) I grew up with/knowing.
Costner is a CONSERVATIVE????!! Now I have to rethink my favorite movies list.
It's worse than you think. He never dines at Applebee's
`Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' and `Waterworld' are canonical at this point, though.
Short of a video showing Costner beating a dog, I'm going to continue appreciating him (well, if it's a small dog, like a Corgi or Pomeranian, I could probably excuse it).
Yeah I mean if it was one of the annoying breeds...
Anything below about a Beagle, in my view.
You know, I thought this too but apparently he's been supporting Democratic candidates for some time (Obama, Buttigieg, Biden). He even narrated an ad for the Democrat in the district (Steve King's old one) I grew up in, in Iowa!
Would recommend Bill Simmons' interview with Costner in 2019 (Ringer podcast).
Well I’ll be damned, is he a never-Trump Republican now, or was that perception of him as a Republican just pre-internet 90s gestalt?
Nicely phrased. I was surprised, too. Apparently switched his affiliation to Democratic in the 90s? At least according to Wikipedia.
He could stump for Republicans (maybe not Trump) and I wouldn't mind, at this point. He's stuck around the Midwest/Dakotas long enough that it seems he actually cares about those places.
I don't think it is a lament, though. I think it's a defense. The cancellers can keep playing their game, because nobody really got hurt.
This speaks to the real defense against Cancel Culture. It only works if everyone goes along with it. The moment we stop paying attention, it stops working.