To me a victim of cancel culture is someone who didn’t do anything wrong, or did something minor, and lost their job due to an overreaction by the social justice mob.
Freddie was cancelled, but that’s not the same as being a “victim of cancel culture.”
Hobbes is a master of cherry-picking, straw-manning, and hurling insults — only to flee when someone dares offer up a rebuttal. Shame that it’s so lucrative.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, so apologies if this is mentioned (I don't think so), but it seems important that the charges against Cooper were dropped only after she had been re-educated.
From the Post:
"[A] judge granted Manhattan prosecutors’ request to dismiss Cooper’s case after she completed five therapy sessions “designed for introspection and progress,” Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said at a brief virtual hearing."
"“Psychoeducation about racial equity is woven into each therapy session to prompt understanding and reflection,” Illuzzi-Orbon told the judge of Amy Cooper’s time with the Critical Therapy Center in Manhattan."
"Psychoeducation" at the "Critical Therapy Center" as a pre-requisite to having spurious criminal charges dismissed. Seems even more chilling in that light.
How am I taking a dig at homeless drug addicts? Im taking a dig at the policy. I’m taking a dig at the notion of “body autonomy” that wouldn’t provide any handholds out of the pit of addiction.
Also, Erin seems to be pointing out that being sentenced to re-education or some other "therapy" (some of dubious value) in order to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the authorities is hardly new. It has long happened where drugs are concerned.
Right. This is an example of inconsistent policy prescriptions based on ideology. Right now it's cool to decriminalize drug use (on its face, fine) but to the point where in San Francisco, for example, they essentially have state-sponsored drug use (because even suggesting that being not-drug-addicted is better than being drug-addicted is an infraction on body autonomy). But state-sponsored reeducation of the quintessential Karen? That's morally correct, apparently.
I think criticizing you for covering this topic often is beyond dumb. You are one of the clearest minded, moat effective critics of this very concerning cultural trend. It's a genuine existential threat to a liberal democratic society - both directly and indirectly by the extremist response it is guaranteed to engender the further it goes. It stands to reason you would address it often.
What the fuck man you literally wrote a post titled "My Cancellation Was Quite Effective, As a Matter of Fact" like a week ago. How is that not positioning yourself as a victim of cancel culture? You used your experience to argue that people actually do face consequences for getting "canceled", presumably so people can draw certain conclusions about cancel culture, although it's clear you have about as solid a definition of those terms as everyone else that insists this phenomenon is a major threat.
If you had bothered to read that post, I mean actually read it, you would see that the point is that I am constantly named as someone who was canceled and yet I'm not dead broke. That's their words, their framing, not mine. My point was only that to say that that kind of social opprobrium has no material consequences just isn't true. I had to ration my meds. That's meaningful to me. At no point in that piece did I say that there was no reason that that happened to me. Do I think it was healthy or particularly fair? No. Do I myself cast my own experience in the language of canceling, or think it's useful in that frame? No. But I'm used as a bludgeon in these matters, and that's what I was reacting to.
Do not begin to believe that when you say things like "what the fuck man" you add any strength to what you say. You merely add violence.
I did read the post, and I'm aware of the consequences. I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning whether it's disingenuous to say that you have never claimed to be a victim of cancel culture when a week ago your post said "I was truly canceled."
I understand you say that's others' framing, but that post certainly doesn't dispute the frame or even acknowledge it as not yours as you pass it along to readers.
There's a big difference between Freddie claiming to be "a victim of cancel culture" and stating "I was truly cancelled," the latter of which is an irrefutable fact that can be verified with the most basic of research.
Figuring out whether others, who are often just trying to get by managing their suffering as best they can, are trying to fill a "victim" role or a "victor" role can be pretty unhelpful, or so it seems to me, with my little window on a population managing a degenerative disease. If the population is annoying you today for whatever reason, it's easy to deride their "victim mentality". But from their perspective, they're usually doing their best to be "overcomers", not "victims" — it's just that you can't be an overcomer without acknowledging you do have some added burden to overcome, and simply acknowledging that can read as "victimhood" to the cynical.
Grossman had a good piece sometime last year arguing, IIRC, that the cancel culture debate was really a line-drawing exercise rather than an argument in principle about either free speech or hate speech - in other words, not "can comedians say whatever they want?" but rather "was what Chappelle said actual, over-the-line transphobia?". Since a conversation about whether a particular statement/action really is ___ist/phobic is messier and much harder to resolve, it plays out in much starker and more abstract terms - eg a joke that (rightly or wrongly) would have been anodyne 10 years ago is now "questioning ___'s right to exist."
That kind of ratcheting up is what I find most worrying about the current rhetorical creep, and the accompanying, evolving norm of employers, social media mobs, etc. unhesitatingly accepting that framing regardless of what the incident actually involves. What is needed is more nuance, not less. And though it's certainly fair to call out "cultural revolution" rhetoric as overblown, focusing exclusively on state power rather than the broader consequences described in this post doesn't seem to recognize how this is playing out in the same way the previous article did.
I'm also curious how common these concerns actually are among students. As we've seen, so called "twitter mobs" might actually be just a few dozen people. Do we just have one or two social justice Karens running amok*?
* Sort of like condo board, HOA, local police Karens. You always have some loudmouth busy body that the powers that be have learned to ignore. That system seems to often break down due to social median and people's mistaken belief that it's real life.
I agree that it would be interesting to know how many. I have a kid who is a student at a small liberal arts college where divisions between students on what racial justice outside the campus required of students on the campus arose during the pandemic and there was very immediately a lot of list making and comments on social media about how students "on the right side of history" were keeping track of who was not with them. After that effort (a student strike that lasted a couple of weeks) ended, it seemed that there was kind of appalling use of the COVID rules to punish people on the wrong side of the other debate to the extent that the campus safety people would refuse to respond. I guess my point is that in the planet of cops world, a small number of people on any campus can make it unpleasant for the others and it definitely chilled a lot of speech and disillusioned a bunch of bright young people who really do believe in trying to make a more racially just and inclusive world.
I do know at least some college students decide to cover up minor wrongs done against them for fear that addressing them these days will bring disproportionate punishment down on the wrongdoer.
I think it's probably an emperor's new clothes scenario, where not many people care about this stuff but act like they do because they think everyone else does.
One other interesting item that's come up in the cancel culture debate - at will employment. Conservatives are suddenly shocked to discover that employers can fire them for any reason or no reason at all (outside being a member of certain protected classes).
Could is possibly be because the overwhelming majority of the people who have been fired for this sort of thing have actually been liberals trying to do things like organize #metoo protests or raise awareness of the fact that there's no AC in the warehouses?
I keep a running tally based on media reportage. Look at the post below where I list out the actual cases. On the "conservative" side you could conceivably put James Damore and some guys who were fired from their job making sandwiches for demonstrating in Charleston. But as far as I can tell the numbers aren't even close to being comparable.
I keep a running tally in my head I mean, not an actual spreadsheet or anything. I have a newsletter on here that's currently empty. I might pin a post there with links just to get something a little more robust (emphasis on little).
I mean that woke attempts to cancel people get a lot of publicity.
But if you actually look at the reality of who gets fired from their job for activism/politics then as far as I can tell it isn't even close: it's overwhelmingly liberals who embarrass their corporate overlords with undesired media attention. The hype just doesn't match up to reality.
Good god, that billboard pic. I don't know why it bothers me so much that an ordinary English name so rapidly became a shorthand for some kind of folkloric bogeyman of white middle-class entitlement, but it's irritating and disturbing how quickly the internet decided any middle-aged white woman going through her life with anything less than perfect grace and humility is now A Problem for the world to mock and loathe. Just feels like another one of those cases where memes are eating reality.
The whole concept of "hate crime" makes no sense to me. If somebody beats me up, it's bad and it's wrong, no matter what the perpertrator was thinking.
We make distinctions based on intent and how much effort/planning went into actualizing that intent. Hate crime looks only at the "why" behind the intent, which I find repugnant. The "why" is relevant to demonstrating motive, which is relevant to convincing of the commission of the crime itself. But it shouldn't be a penalty augmenter because we really, really, really disapprove of your thoughts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I thought the planning / effort thing showed it was premeditated rather than some in the moment passion. We more harshly penalize crimes where there was planned intent vs. "uncontrollable" passion.
I don't know exactly how I feel about that, but I do think it's not the same as penalizing someone for committing a crime because they hate the victim's race vs. because they hate the victim vs. because it would make them feel better in some manner (and whatever other motivations there may be).
From the risk-mitigation perspective, sorting harms from least avoidable to most avoidable, and punishing according to avoidability, makes sense. At the one end, some accidents are so costly to prevent that they aren't worth preventing. At the other end, a harm that happens only because someone carefully planned it is the opposite of costly to prevent — it's a harm that's costly to commit!
In between are crimes of passion, which most of us will successfully prevent ourselves from committing, accidents involving some amount of negligence, which we are somewhat less successful at preventing, but still successful enough that punishing negligence can be worthwhile.
An actuarial perspective merging accident and crime into one long continuum is morally flattening, I realize. But it does reveal an underlying unity to the law's function in harm reduction. People usually agree that incurring great cost to prevent slight harms is itself harmful, since that cost could have better been spent elsewhere. There's plenty of disagreement, of course, over which harms really are only slight, and which costs are too much.
Even 5 year olds on the playground understand the difference between being knocked down by accident and being tackled on purpose. The penalty augmenter for intent mainly serves to separate causing harm unintentionally/accidentally from causing harm intentionally.
In terms of penalty augmenters based on effort and planning put into the crime, I'm only aware of premeditation making a difference to murder charges (manslaughter/murder 1/murder 2, etc.). I'm not an expert, but I don't know that there are separate charges for intentional arson, rape or embezzlement in the moment vs premediated arson, rape or embezzlement. Apparently society has decided that someone who plans and plots murder is more dangerous than someone who kills in the heat of the moment, or via negligence.
I do think accidental killings and deliberate murders require different consequences, but I haven't wholeheartedly bought into the distinction between heat of the moment killings vs. premeditated killings.
I assume your point about penalizing work ethic is tongue in cheek.
If something is characterized as a hate crime, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Shopping for the best court venue (state, federal, etc.) is a game lawyers play all the time.
Targetting oppressed groups for just being who they are is worse than casually committing a crime. Mens rea is at the center of what we think of criminality is, so inquiring as to why is not a stretch by any means.
Do I really have to drag out the statistics on LGBT+ suicides and self-harm to prove to you that there is still discrimination against some groups?
I should add that the very narrow definition of what a hate crime is legally makes it very hard to prosecute. This is a good thing.
For those who oppose giving Federal authority to prosecute, I would point out the long and sorry history of ignoring things like cross burnings all across The South. It still goes on today.
Don't really have a dog in this particular fight, but I would note that even if you did drag out such statistics, it wouldn't prove discrimination, because correlation does not equal causation. There may very well be high rates of self-harm, but *why* the rates are high is the more relevant question, and assumption doesn't cut it.
How about the fact that members of the LGBT+ community are four times as likely to be victims of assault?
From research on the topic:
More than 1 in 3 LGBTQ Americans faced discrimination of some kind in the past year, including more than 3 in 5 transgender Americans.
Discrimination adversely affects the mental and economic well-being of many LGBTQ Americans, including 1 in 2 who report moderate or significant negative psychological impacts.
To avoid the experience of discrimination, more than half of LGBTQ Americans report hiding a personal relationship, and about one-fifth to one-third have altered other aspects of their personal or work lives.
Around 3 in 10 LGBTQ Americans faced difficulties last year accessing necessary medical care due to cost issues, including more than half of transgender Americans.
15 percent of LGBTQ Americans report postponing or avoiding medical treatment due to discrimination, including nearly 3 in 10 transgender individuals.
Transgender individuals faced unique obstacles to accessing health care, including 1 in 3 who had to teach their doctor about transgender individuals in order to receive appropriate care.
LGBTQ Americans have experienced significant mental health issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Can you provide a link and does the study itself disclose how the information was gathered and how sampled universe was set up? I hope that they come from places other than the advocacy groups whose funding depends on these crimes being touted.
Ascertaining empirical facts about reality is actually exactly what science is. Sometimes doing so is challenging -- in this case, ruling out confounders and identifying the root cause(s) of an observed phenomenon. Nevertheless, well-practiced science -- rooted in intellectual humility -- is a toolkit for objectively forming evidence-based conclusions. And the conclusion may well be (and often is) that the existing data don't support strong conclusions, regardless of any feelings we may have from our pre-existing notions or desires.
Intelligent design proponents think they have the preponderance of the evidence and can spend hours pointing to their supporting data. Though it's easy enough to craft an argument that sounds good, doing so without science's (imperfect!) tools for rigorous scrutiny is the domain of pseudo-science and religion.
To put it in currently fashionable terms, you could really argue that these poor women are crabby for systemic reasons. They’re working full time, managing the home, and probably taking care of elderly parents as well as their kids. Of course they lose it once in awhile when they’re stuck in a slow line or a service worker is rude or incompetent! They’re stretched to the breaking point and are only human. If they were young and attractive, people would feel sorry for them.
Or, if they were young and attractive, they'd get threatened with arrest for being high for losing it in public. I'm amazed at the extra grace I get now that I'm a middle-aged mom. It's not that the demographic I'm in now is never unfairly picked on just for having a bad day, but it does seem less bad.
Police will actually believe me now if I forgot to turn on my lights because of a migraine. And politely let me head home, rather than do what they're entitled to do, which is to punish anyone who drives impaired for any reason, including innocent ones — it's not like the accident I could cause would be any less bad simply because the impairment was involuntary.
Younger people are statistically more dangerous than even middle aged ones. You could make a case for ageism next time you get a warning at a traffic stop. 😂
It's partially because in general, it's women who are doing the shopping and other household chores and thus they're the ones who might have to ask to speak to *gasp* managers.
I find it interesting how credulous the internet is for stories. You see it all the time in forums; someone will post a story that's so one-sided it strains credulity, but everyone will immediately side with the storyteller. And so with all the maligned cashiers who were of course just quietly and competently doing their jobs until some nasty white woman with *that* haircut blew up over some trivial incident. It's definitely never the cashier's fault. Nope.
(Which is not to say that people never blow up at cashiers, just to say the stories about it only ever run one way despite everyone encountering completely incompetent service workers. Maybe "Karens" are too busy to post on reddit)
Another angle on it: When people are afraid to speak up about something, they can overcompensate and come off as overly aggressive. When I see some "Karens" that's what my mind immediately goes to: Here is a woman who is deeply uncomfortable starting conflict and voicing her needs, and is struggling to find the right way to speak up.
I don't have that haircut, but I do sometimes wonder if I've just "Karened" someone, so I do use the "Karen" stereotype as an informal check on my own behavior. And the funniest joke I've heard in the past five years was a Karen joke — a woman introducing her own elbow, which fussily hadn't responded well to any orthopedic treatment, as "Karen".
It often seems it's not service-workers' fault that they're working in a system set up to gatekeep better service against anyone who isn't willing to be a persistent jackwad to get it. This seems particularly true of service by phone. There seems to be an art to playacting the jackwad effectively, an art I don't trust myself to have. I'm a bit in awe of successful "Karens", actually. How do they pull it off?
Still, it's disturbing to see the Karen stereotype used on a billboard calling for legal action.
Lol @ the elbow story. I’ve got a pixie haircut and I had to remind my stylist last time to “please, please make sure I don’t end up with a ‘talk to the manager’ cut.”
This is a misunderstanding of historical fact. Almost all of our free speech jurisprudence predates the internet. Average citizens had tons of ways to publicize opinions. They did not have any as simple as typing something while sitting on the toilet, but free speech cases were fought over banners, t-shirts, leafleting, going door to door, and the proverbial soapbox in the public square. All of these were relatively (to the time) simple ways to express ideas. Society was much less fragmented and more community oriented then, so something as simple as holding up a cardboard sign at the mall could reach a lot of people.
In the time period we're comparing to, NO ONE had the ability to send out opinions while sitting on the toilet. So even if the means I listed don't seem simple, it has to be remembered that compared to the abilities that even powerful entities (including the government) had, these were actually much simpler and easier.
Now, there's the obvious issue that the government (or media corporations) could reach much larger swathes of the masses. But that's true even today. Freddie can write a post that's seen by hundreds of thousands. I could actually publish something on my Substack and it'll be seen by five people. That's not because of censorship. It's because he's a successful and talented writer and I'm a lazy hack.
We still don't have any way for the average citizen to reach the masses. There are edge cases of people who devote their life to getting a successful YouTube business off the ground, and maybe .0001% of them will reach a substantial audience. But that's just a more successful version of someone starting their own newspaper (a common occurrence throughout American history). The average citizen is still reaching an equivalent amount of people. It's just now occurs in cyberspace instead of at the rotary club or in the public square.
I hope it doesn't sound like I'm dismissing your idea. I recall you're a STEM person and I've been thinking a lot lately about how the promise of the internet - the democratization of opinion - has been a massive failure. With the exception of the first movers in the blogosphere and the first movers on YouTube, we're still listening to the exact people we would've without the internet. Substack is this great "free speech" platform. Almost all of the popular Substacks are written by the same people who came through the gatekeeping of large newspapers and magazines.
It's much easier to instigate mob action quickly than it used to be. It's not what I had in mind when I started working on building out the Internet in 1991, but it's sort of Democratic. In the worst kind of way.
The term "cancel culture" is particularly stupid because it makes this seem like some new thing when it very much isn't. This is Mob justice. Mob justice is bad, has always been bad, and has always been a problem. This isn't some new thing but is instead the 21st century version of hangings in the old West, witch trials in Salem, and the Red Scare.
Re: your disclaimer at the end: Apparently this is a thing now, accusing people we don't approve of of only writing about [things, people, institutions, trends we like or at least don't think are so very bad].
There must be some sort of private Twitter club where, in the last week or so, it was decided that Matt Taibbi, who for most of the last 20 years was every progressive's hero, is now a menace because he only writes about the media, which are filled with people we really like and so shouldn't be criticized as scathingly as Matt does it. He must be cashing in, it's the only possible explanation.
You too, Freddie.
I can be pretty cynical, but I will never become as cynical as that.
In the "Bidens: corrupt or crazy?" piece, Taibbi admits that he's just repeating hearsay from a right-wing activist. That's not an argument that requires rebuttal.
No. Allegedly the FBI has a laptop that is allegedly Hunter Biden's. These allegedly's are all from unknown off-the-record sources. This isn't enough to establish anything.
Mark, you’ll always paint yourself into a corner by defending power brokers of any brand. The more salient point here is that Taibbi’s Sub now has a single theme, and it doesn’t really matter if that’s due to grift or ideological degradation. It’s just boring and sad.
The real test is would you say the same thing if he was attacking Trump 100% of the time.
Who cares if he's only addressing one issue? All that matters is the factual content of what he's writing. If it's accurate who cares if he's essentially repeating "The world is round 100 times"? Do you disagree? And if not why feel compelled to comment at all?
Because the obvious reading is that the people protesting the loudest right now are doing so solely because they are political partisans. For them the truth is just a secondary issue if it's being used to attack their political favorites.
For the record: I was a huge fan of Taibbi due to his financial-sector reporting back in the day. So I paid for a year in advance of his substack. What I got for the three months it took me to figure out how to cancel and get a refund was endless click-bait for trumpistas, like the recent "Bidens: corrupt or crazy?", and endless pieces about how Trump (who admitted to attempting to subborn perjury from the leader of Ukraine) was totally innocent of everything. And his comments section is straight out of 4chan.
His take is around a million dollars per year. It's logically possible that he's just become an idiot, but IMO Occam's Razor favors the cashing-in explanation.
Actually, I know exactly what happened to him and why it's so hard for a lot of his previous fans to understand: he has principles, and when he sees his principles trampled he calls it out no matter who's doing the trampling.
I know where he's coming from because on one of these Substacks recently I was snidely attacked for suggesting (perhaps snidely on my part) that people who could abandon their support for due process in the wake of 9/11 weren't very principled themselves. It was clear to me that for many, many people, habeas corpus is something like a really good idea than the almost religious dogma it is for me.
And so it is for millions of folks who cheered Taibbi so long as he was embarrassing Bush or hedge fund managers, but now draw the line when he is embarrassing the Bidens for the same shenanigans.
Except that his standard of evidence has dropped precipitously for the alleged transgressions of the left, whereas he now completely forgives the trumpista right for everything. Trump, in particular, is just (according to Taibbi) a clown who could not possibly actually stage a coup, and so the crimes for which Trump was twice impeached should just be ignored, while those who sought evidence for these crimes are Deep State criminals.
tl;dr: I've read old Matt and I've read new Matt, and new Matt is not old Matt. New Matt is just another useful idiot for Trump.
Trump hasn't staged a coup and whether that's because he's too clownish is admittedly a value judgment. But there was no attempted coup and there was not even an attempted insurrection, so in these respects, once again, Taibbi tells a more accurate story than almost everyone else in the media.
So his subscription is certainly worth what I'm paying for it. If you prefer to be lied to, I guess you have lots of alternatives, many of them free of charge.
Enjoy the Emperorship of Donald the Second. Unlike Matt, you won't have the million dollars a year to insulate yourself. Better get going on that newsletter you've been promising for half a year now.
Hey, I never promised anybody anything. In fact I updated it with one line a month ago guaranteeing that I would do one post a month, max. I am way too busy to do the kind of writing that I would like.
To deny that Hunter Biden's cocaine use and generally crazy behavior could conceivably be problematic is especially jarring given that the media would have gone insane if one of the Trump kids had done the same thing. Once you go down the rabbit hole of arguing that unpleasant truths should be suppressed because of the political implications you can never go back.
I never said Hunter Biden's behavior wasn't problematic, I said it was several orders of magnitude less problematic than Trump's 1/6 coup attempt. As we all will learn in 2024.
My point is that the concerted, coordinated effort by one segment of the population to suppress unfavorable information is just as poisonous and corrosive to democratic norms. The Hunter Biden stuff is just one example.
What does Hunter Biden's cocaine use have to do with the Presidents performance? Are you just upset that the press doesn't obsess on it as much as you would like it to?
The argument has always been that if you have a direct family member smoking crack cocaine, patronizing prostitutes, blacking out while on abusing substances, etc. that represented a possible target for blackmail or other influence peddling from both foreign (the Russians, Chinese, etc.) and domestic sources.
Thank you for this. Jeez Louise. Everyone's a critic.
I'm not a trumpista and I enjoy Taibbi's heterodox take on nearly everything. I like that he is a slayer of sacred cows - on all fronts. So, he shifted his focus to the things he finds most toxic at the moment. So what? This expectation that since he wrote an article you liked he now has to be some kind of verbal superman covering the topics you most value and if he isn't doing this, he's caved to the trumpistas and cashing in is ridiculous and the worst kind of speculation.
@ Mark S: Also, for the record, people from all walks of life have the right to spew their views on whatever platform will allow them. If you don't like it, don't read them. But, don't act like those you disfavor need to shut up. God, the whole push for conformity on the left just makes me sick. You want a pristine little lock-step world like the 1950s where everyone knew their place and lied out their asses all the time just to survive? You want society to be fake with everyone behaving themselves according to your diktats so you can have your pure little disneyland? All you care about is a new kind of propriety. And propriety is a most pernicious social force - a lie that people hide behind so they don't get shamed and punished by the greater society; so they can survive. You want Matt Taibbi to write about "proper" subjects or you will accuse him of grifting? Give me a break.
You remind me of nothing so much as the Christian right in their heyday. You don't want truth. You want sanctimony and sanitization of the commons - according to your groupthink. It's no different - just the details. You are what I have fought against all of my life. I want freedom - to think as I choose and be as I choose (and it harm none). And as long as I keep my head down and nominally agree with you - everything's hunky dory. But, if I don't, then you want there to be hell to pay. You want people to be punished for not agreeing with you. Just admit it. All you know how to do is complain and destroy. You build nothing. You solve nothing. You help nothing.
Sorry, you don't get to be my (or anyone's) priest. You don't get to tell me (or anyone) what to think or how to live. And luckily, you don't get to do this to Matt Taibbi either.
I'll render my protest against you and your shrill, hyperbolic, defamatory, conformist ilk at the ballot box in 2022. And there are millions more fed up progressives and liberals who will do the same.
Matt is far left of me on most issues and always has been (same with Greenwald, who I first started reading back during the Iraq Debacle). I loved his reporting in the past because he uncovered corruption. I love his reporting today because he continues to uncover corruption. I don't care about his politics, and it is astonishing to me that anyone could allow Matt's politics to interfere with their appreciation of the good work he has been doing for two decades.
But I can see that for many that's all it was ever about: politics. Matt wasn't respected because he exposed the grifters, it was because he was making certain people look bad: he was "owning the neocons." Now that the "good guys" are in charge and are looting the nation with as much zeal and enthusiasm as any investment banker, Matt's a "sellout" for continuing to expose the grifters.
I'm probably far left of you as well but it's good that we can agree on some common sense. He won't conform to the current power narrative so they have to tear him a new one. I support his efforts to speak truth to power of any stripe.
Sorry I lost it a bit. But, I'm just sick of the whining and complaining that he won't get with the program. Oh, and the ultimate sin - that he's actually making money from heterodox writing. That's what they really can't stand — that they can't completely control the narrative. I, for one, am grateful that he can't be controlled and have found myself with strange bedfellows of late as I have come out in defense of certain conservatives on substack boards. There are some gems in conservative thought and we on the left are fools if we think we can have it all our own way just because we won the culture wars. Talk about going to our heads. Sheezsh!
What the woke left is up to is not okay and as a veteran, I won't stand for it. I want my country back - the one whose ideals espoused universal humanism and civil rights for everyone and didn't dissect us into oppression categories. Maybe we hadn't reached the apex of that ideal, but we were on our way and in some ways, now, I feel like we are going backwards.
I will always fight prissy, puritanical bullies who think they have a right to coerce others. Live free or die tryin'.
Good luck to you too. Your anti-conformist protest votes will just elect more Republicans in 2022, who will then rig more states in 2024. It's a glorious future you have planned for us all, with VP Don Jr taking the reigns when his dad finally kicks off circa 2025.
The Democrats will win far more elections tacking to the center than trying to get the loyalty of the hysterical fringe. They have never been very reliable Democratic voters in the first place.
Anything the Repubs take away, we can get back. I hate to say this, but in certain contexts, conservatives and republicans are acting more liberally these days than certain elements of the far left.
But, if you kill the First Amendment and give the government the power to coerce speech, we will never get that back. Just like if we give up gun rights, we will never get that back. But, it's not just these issues. There is an effort to kill the whole constitution, something I swore an oath to defend. The Declaration of Independence has been declared racist. The Dems want to stack the Supreme Court. Radical leftists are invading bathrooms and showing up at people's homes - using intimidation tactics. They are defending looting and burning of small businesses, some of which are owned by POC. Do you know how hard it is to start and maintain a business? The sacrifices you have to make? They are defending the tactics of Antifa. They are defending the destruction of people's lives by mobs. They are calling any dissent against the prevailing narrative of biological sex in trans circles transphobia and demonizing and harrassing those who speak out. No one is allowed to have any other opinion that that which the high priests of the far left decree is valid and good. They have conferred upon themselves the absolute right to define the meanings of words and what is allowed to be said. And, worst of all, they have killed the benefit of the doubt in our social fabric - the very thing that holds civilization together. Our ability to trust each other and believe that we are all trying our best.
These extreme and dissonant stances of the radical left (and more) are forcing me to the right. You may be okay with the use of mob violence to destroy people simply for disagreeing or making a mistake. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with beliefs being decreed by fiat and heretics being excommunicated (because trust me, this is a VERY toxic religion). I am not and never will be. You may be okay with demands for genuflection and psychic guilt and being told that the only way to cure discrimination is with more discrimination. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with an entire demographic of people being dehumanized based on nothing except the immutable color of their skin and told that there is no redemption, no atonement for the original sin of being white. I am not okay with this and never will be. You may be okay with millions of people being told that they must pay for the sins of ancestors who may or may not have been involved in the horrifying institution of slavery. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with revenge politics. I am not and never will be.
Take your scare tactics - the "if you don't vote for a Dem the world will end" and put it you know where. The Dems are just as corrupt as the Repubs, just as bought by corporate, and haven't stood for the little guy for a long, long time. In fact, from my position, the Dems are mostly made of up of rich, white, overeducated idiots who don't have a clue what people in this country need or want. How many of the MBAs that played slave wage arbitrage and shipped jobs off shore over the past 30 - 40 years were Dems, eh? I'm betting at least half if not more.
So go ahead and drink your self-righteous wine, dude. You can pretend that Repubs are the devil if that pleases you and makes you feel superior. I just see people, fellow citizens, neighbors - most of whom just want to have a decent life and not be called deplorable. I don't need people to be pure. I don't need them to agree with me. I don't care if they are socially regressive. I still want the best for them. I won't dehumanize them just to feed my fucking ego.
"These extreme and dissonant stances of the radical left (and more) are forcing me to the right"
I don't have much problem with anything else you wrote, but this is just silly and I hope you don't really mean that, especailly after you just wrote that you aren't "okay with revenge politics".
That might make sense in a relative sense I guess, but I don't feel it's a sensible way to express it. If everyone is moving left and you still have the same moderate beliefs, you're not moving right.
If the behaviour of (some) people on the left is making you want to disassociate yourself from them, I think you can and should do that without changing your beliefs.
"I am a moderate. That said, I am pro gun."
I'm from Australia, grew up owning and using guns, still shoot from time to time but don't , and I generally support our gun control laws here (they could stand to be a little looser around sporting firearms, but I don't think it's worth a big political or cultural battle). I'd self-describe as a left-leaning moderate on most issues.
So I don't think that's a particularly odd combination, but I'm aware that this issue is very different and quite awful in the US for so so many reasons :(
This comment doesn't seem to square with what I just saw you say on the I Might Be Wrong stack:
"Here's some anecdotal evidence: I'm 66, I have never voted for a Republican in my life, but today if I lived in Virgina I would vote Republican, because the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left has finally convinced me that the Trumpista right, as awful as it is, is actually less bad."
Okay, you convinced me to read Matt Taibbi's substack. I like to read people who hold controversial opinions. Usually, they are just idiots, but I am occasionally surprised.
Yeah, I've liked his writing for years and still do, but don't go reading the comments over there. I don't think it's really Matt's fault, so I'm happy to ignore them.
I am concerned about what cancel culture does to its targets (and highly recommend Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed).
But I am even more concerned about what it does to good people who cry for vengeance. When I read that the shelter confiscated Amy Cooper’s dog, I suggested politely in a Facebook comment that that was excessive punishment (not least to the dog!). And friends who I know in real life to be good people lost their minds. They were so angry with me! My tentative suggestion was tantamount to a lynching and also dog-murder in their eyes. (Much hay was made of how Amy Cooper pulled on her dog’s collar.) There was apparently to be no limit to the hell that was supposed to rain down on Cooper. Any still, small voice asking for a sense of proportion was by definition coming from an evil racist. I really felt despair about it, because I knew that it was good people who were taking such pleasure in imagining Amy Cooper’s suffering. This is not good for our souls.
One thing that made me a feel a little better was that the guy she called the cops on publicly said he didn't want her to lose her job or be prosecuted. That was gracious of him but his plea for mercy was ignored.
Not to be a total downer, but I think people have always been sadists, and we just conveniently not noticed or dealt with it head on for a long time. Usually the sadists just used popularity or coolness to exclude and shame people. Morality x relational aggression is a really toxic combination.
"My tentative suggestion was tantamount to a lynching and also dog-murder in their eyes. (Much hay was made of how Amy Cooper pulled on her dog’s collar.)"
I had the same experience a few years ago when I suggested to a long time friend group of women friends and mothers that maybe saying that teenager from Covington has a punchable face was a really messed up thing to do.
"UC-Santa Barbara students passed a trigger warning resolution that, if enacted, would have enabled any student to skip any class or material if they felt it might trigger them."
"I also think that anti-CRT laws are a terrible imposition on free speech and teacher autonomy, just as I view conservative efforts to ban books to be exactly as toxic as when it’s progressives doing the banning."
I'm really interested in this idea- have you written more about this? How much autonomy should teachers have in the classroom? Complete freedom, even if they are presenting false or misleading ideas or neglecting to teach important concepts? How do we balance the need for teachers to have freedom of speech with the fact that their students are young and impressionable and a captive audience?
I generally agree with the courts that it's absurs to consider teachers should have free speech rights in their professional capacity.
I have no idea why people have taken up the mantle that government employees, paid to do a specific job, with a captive audience who are forced by law to be there (unless their parents can afford otherwise) should be allowed to say whatever they want.
Firstly, the law protects them in their private capacity. If they wish to spam people's Facebook feeds with how much they hate white supremacy, they are welcome to.
Second, all of these people already accept that government employees should have restricted free speech rights in their official capacity. It would not be possible for a 2nd Grade teacher to try and convert every student to Mormonism. Because of the conflicting First Amendment issues, people acknowledge that the speech one is less important. So you already accept this idea.
Thirdly, it's a shockingly undemocratic idea. The view is that the government should be allowed to force (and, as this piece acknowledges, all government action is through threats of violence) parents to make their children attend school. And unless they can afford that to be a private school, it must be a government school. But, people should not have any input on what is taught in those schools. Ironically, this is completely left out of the analysis. As a leftist, I cannot support the elevation of burucreatism over popular will.
Fourthly, in any other context they would be aghast at this. I'd like these people who are aghast at the violation of teacher's "free speech rights" to be subjected to an hour long harangue about the evils of the Federal Reserve (or pick your own dose of libertarian wierdness!) next time they go to renew their driver's license. I suspect they would suddenly find a newfound appreciation for the legal distinction between a government employee's official duties and their private speech.
It effectively made Mr. deBoer rich, or at least well off. I'm not sure that's true of everyone he cited.
To me a victim of cancel culture is someone who didn’t do anything wrong, or did something minor, and lost their job due to an overreaction by the social justice mob.
Freddie was cancelled, but that’s not the same as being a “victim of cancel culture.”
1. See my response to the same question.
2. Read carefully.
Hobbes is a master of cherry-picking, straw-manning, and hurling insults — only to flee when someone dares offer up a rebuttal. Shame that it’s so lucrative.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, so apologies if this is mentioned (I don't think so), but it seems important that the charges against Cooper were dropped only after she had been re-educated.
From the Post:
"[A] judge granted Manhattan prosecutors’ request to dismiss Cooper’s case after she completed five therapy sessions “designed for introspection and progress,” Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said at a brief virtual hearing."
"“Psychoeducation about racial equity is woven into each therapy session to prompt understanding and reflection,” Illuzzi-Orbon told the judge of Amy Cooper’s time with the Critical Therapy Center in Manhattan."
"Psychoeducation" at the "Critical Therapy Center" as a pre-requisite to having spurious criminal charges dismissed. Seems even more chilling in that light.
jesus
This shit is enough to make me want to pray to Jesus, and I’m an atheist for heaven’s sakes
I don't think I've seen you post before.
Oh, I don’t comment too often, although I have done so here before
That's actually really scary.
That seems appropriate. What is not appropriate is expecting a homeless drug addict to agree to drug treatment before being given free housing.
(Irony)
It's never a bad time to take a dig at homeless drug addicts.
Given that it's clearly a dig at the irony of the contrasted political positions, not at homeless people themselves, your zinger is underwhelming.
How am I taking a dig at homeless drug addicts? Im taking a dig at the policy. I’m taking a dig at the notion of “body autonomy” that wouldn’t provide any handholds out of the pit of addiction.
Also, Erin seems to be pointing out that being sentenced to re-education or some other "therapy" (some of dubious value) in order to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the authorities is hardly new. It has long happened where drugs are concerned.
Right. This is an example of inconsistent policy prescriptions based on ideology. Right now it's cool to decriminalize drug use (on its face, fine) but to the point where in San Francisco, for example, they essentially have state-sponsored drug use (because even suggesting that being not-drug-addicted is better than being drug-addicted is an infraction on body autonomy). But state-sponsored reeducation of the quintessential Karen? That's morally correct, apparently.
Taking "educate yourself" to a new level
I think criticizing you for covering this topic often is beyond dumb. You are one of the clearest minded, moat effective critics of this very concerning cultural trend. It's a genuine existential threat to a liberal democratic society - both directly and indirectly by the extremist response it is guaranteed to engender the further it goes. It stands to reason you would address it often.
What the fuck man you literally wrote a post titled "My Cancellation Was Quite Effective, As a Matter of Fact" like a week ago. How is that not positioning yourself as a victim of cancel culture? You used your experience to argue that people actually do face consequences for getting "canceled", presumably so people can draw certain conclusions about cancel culture, although it's clear you have about as solid a definition of those terms as everyone else that insists this phenomenon is a major threat.
If you had bothered to read that post, I mean actually read it, you would see that the point is that I am constantly named as someone who was canceled and yet I'm not dead broke. That's their words, their framing, not mine. My point was only that to say that that kind of social opprobrium has no material consequences just isn't true. I had to ration my meds. That's meaningful to me. At no point in that piece did I say that there was no reason that that happened to me. Do I think it was healthy or particularly fair? No. Do I myself cast my own experience in the language of canceling, or think it's useful in that frame? No. But I'm used as a bludgeon in these matters, and that's what I was reacting to.
Do not begin to believe that when you say things like "what the fuck man" you add any strength to what you say. You merely add violence.
I did read the post, and I'm aware of the consequences. I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning whether it's disingenuous to say that you have never claimed to be a victim of cancel culture when a week ago your post said "I was truly canceled."
I understand you say that's others' framing, but that post certainly doesn't dispute the frame or even acknowledge it as not yours as you pass it along to readers.
Here I am. You have direct access to me. You have no need to read tea leaves.
There's a big difference between Freddie claiming to be "a victim of cancel culture" and stating "I was truly cancelled," the latter of which is an irrefutable fact that can be verified with the most basic of research.
what's the difference?
canceled = publicly and professionally condemned and shunned
cancel culture = it happened because you ran afoul of evolving social justice norms
He's not interested in the victim credentials, and has decided to be a victor instead.
Figuring out whether others, who are often just trying to get by managing their suffering as best they can, are trying to fill a "victim" role or a "victor" role can be pretty unhelpful, or so it seems to me, with my little window on a population managing a degenerative disease. If the population is annoying you today for whatever reason, it's easy to deride their "victim mentality". But from their perspective, they're usually doing their best to be "overcomers", not "victims" — it's just that you can't be an overcomer without acknowledging you do have some added burden to overcome, and simply acknowledging that can read as "victimhood" to the cynical.
Grossman had a good piece sometime last year arguing, IIRC, that the cancel culture debate was really a line-drawing exercise rather than an argument in principle about either free speech or hate speech - in other words, not "can comedians say whatever they want?" but rather "was what Chappelle said actual, over-the-line transphobia?". Since a conversation about whether a particular statement/action really is ___ist/phobic is messier and much harder to resolve, it plays out in much starker and more abstract terms - eg a joke that (rightly or wrongly) would have been anodyne 10 years ago is now "questioning ___'s right to exist."
That kind of ratcheting up is what I find most worrying about the current rhetorical creep, and the accompanying, evolving norm of employers, social media mobs, etc. unhesitatingly accepting that framing regardless of what the incident actually involves. What is needed is more nuance, not less. And though it's certainly fair to call out "cultural revolution" rhetoric as overblown, focusing exclusively on state power rather than the broader consequences described in this post doesn't seem to recognize how this is playing out in the same way the previous article did.
I'm also curious how common these concerns actually are among students. As we've seen, so called "twitter mobs" might actually be just a few dozen people. Do we just have one or two social justice Karens running amok*?
* Sort of like condo board, HOA, local police Karens. You always have some loudmouth busy body that the powers that be have learned to ignore. That system seems to often break down due to social median and people's mistaken belief that it's real life.
Dwight Shrute, but on Twitter. Except, as FDB is pointing out, there are actual real world consequences for these people.
I agree that it would be interesting to know how many. I have a kid who is a student at a small liberal arts college where divisions between students on what racial justice outside the campus required of students on the campus arose during the pandemic and there was very immediately a lot of list making and comments on social media about how students "on the right side of history" were keeping track of who was not with them. After that effort (a student strike that lasted a couple of weeks) ended, it seemed that there was kind of appalling use of the COVID rules to punish people on the wrong side of the other debate to the extent that the campus safety people would refuse to respond. I guess my point is that in the planet of cops world, a small number of people on any campus can make it unpleasant for the others and it definitely chilled a lot of speech and disillusioned a bunch of bright young people who really do believe in trying to make a more racially just and inclusive world.
I do know at least some college students decide to cover up minor wrongs done against them for fear that addressing them these days will bring disproportionate punishment down on the wrongdoer.
I think it's probably an emperor's new clothes scenario, where not many people care about this stuff but act like they do because they think everyone else does.
One other interesting item that's come up in the cancel culture debate - at will employment. Conservatives are suddenly shocked to discover that employers can fire them for any reason or no reason at all (outside being a member of certain protected classes).
PREACH BROTHER
Claira Janover.
Timnit Gebru.
Meredith Whittaker.
Claire Stapleton.
Tim Chevalier.
Emily Cunningham.
Maren Costa.
Etc. etc. etc.
I am still so surprised by conservatives who seem shocked to discover this that I'm having trouble believing it.
Could is possibly be because the overwhelming majority of the people who have been fired for this sort of thing have actually been liberals trying to do things like organize #metoo protests or raise awareness of the fact that there's no AC in the warehouses?
I keep a running tally based on media reportage. Look at the post below where I list out the actual cases. On the "conservative" side you could conceivably put James Damore and some guys who were fired from their job making sandwiches for demonstrating in Charleston. But as far as I can tell the numbers aren't even close to being comparable.
I keep a running tally in my head I mean, not an actual spreadsheet or anything. I have a newsletter on here that's currently empty. I might pin a post there with links just to get something a little more robust (emphasis on little).
Not sure what you're asking.
If you're asking, am I aware that the "woke" crowd often seems to go after targets who are left-of-center, then yes, I was aware of that.
My surprise goes a bit deeper than that, though, to what I thought conservatives were taught, about their own tough luck as well as other people's.
I mean that woke attempts to cancel people get a lot of publicity.
But if you actually look at the reality of who gets fired from their job for activism/politics then as far as I can tell it isn't even close: it's overwhelmingly liberals who embarrass their corporate overlords with undesired media attention. The hype just doesn't match up to reality.
Good god, that billboard pic. I don't know why it bothers me so much that an ordinary English name so rapidly became a shorthand for some kind of folkloric bogeyman of white middle-class entitlement, but it's irritating and disturbing how quickly the internet decided any middle-aged white woman going through her life with anything less than perfect grace and humility is now A Problem for the world to mock and loathe. Just feels like another one of those cases where memes are eating reality.
The whole concept of "hate crime" makes no sense to me. If somebody beats me up, it's bad and it's wrong, no matter what the perpertrator was thinking.
We make distinctions based on intent and how much effort/planning went into actualizing that intent. Hate crime looks only at the "why" behind the intent, which I find repugnant. The "why" is relevant to demonstrating motive, which is relevant to convincing of the commission of the crime itself. But it shouldn't be a penalty augmenter because we really, really, really disapprove of your thoughts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I thought the planning / effort thing showed it was premeditated rather than some in the moment passion. We more harshly penalize crimes where there was planned intent vs. "uncontrollable" passion.
I don't know exactly how I feel about that, but I do think it's not the same as penalizing someone for committing a crime because they hate the victim's race vs. because they hate the victim vs. because it would make them feel better in some manner (and whatever other motivations there may be).
From the risk-mitigation perspective, sorting harms from least avoidable to most avoidable, and punishing according to avoidability, makes sense. At the one end, some accidents are so costly to prevent that they aren't worth preventing. At the other end, a harm that happens only because someone carefully planned it is the opposite of costly to prevent — it's a harm that's costly to commit!
In between are crimes of passion, which most of us will successfully prevent ourselves from committing, accidents involving some amount of negligence, which we are somewhat less successful at preventing, but still successful enough that punishing negligence can be worthwhile.
An actuarial perspective merging accident and crime into one long continuum is morally flattening, I realize. But it does reveal an underlying unity to the law's function in harm reduction. People usually agree that incurring great cost to prevent slight harms is itself harmful, since that cost could have better been spent elsewhere. There's plenty of disagreement, of course, over which harms really are only slight, and which costs are too much.
Even 5 year olds on the playground understand the difference between being knocked down by accident and being tackled on purpose. The penalty augmenter for intent mainly serves to separate causing harm unintentionally/accidentally from causing harm intentionally.
In terms of penalty augmenters based on effort and planning put into the crime, I'm only aware of premeditation making a difference to murder charges (manslaughter/murder 1/murder 2, etc.). I'm not an expert, but I don't know that there are separate charges for intentional arson, rape or embezzlement in the moment vs premediated arson, rape or embezzlement. Apparently society has decided that someone who plans and plots murder is more dangerous than someone who kills in the heat of the moment, or via negligence.
I do think accidental killings and deliberate murders require different consequences, but I haven't wholeheartedly bought into the distinction between heat of the moment killings vs. premeditated killings.
I assume your point about penalizing work ethic is tongue in cheek.
If something is characterized as a hate crime, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Shopping for the best court venue (state, federal, etc.) is a game lawyers play all the time.
That makes it even worse than I thought it was.
Targetting oppressed groups for just being who they are is worse than casually committing a crime. Mens rea is at the center of what we think of criminality is, so inquiring as to why is not a stretch by any means.
Do I really have to drag out the statistics on LGBT+ suicides and self-harm to prove to you that there is still discrimination against some groups?
I should add that the very narrow definition of what a hate crime is legally makes it very hard to prosecute. This is a good thing.
For those who oppose giving Federal authority to prosecute, I would point out the long and sorry history of ignoring things like cross burnings all across The South. It still goes on today.
Don't really have a dog in this particular fight, but I would note that even if you did drag out such statistics, it wouldn't prove discrimination, because correlation does not equal causation. There may very well be high rates of self-harm, but *why* the rates are high is the more relevant question, and assumption doesn't cut it.
How about the fact that members of the LGBT+ community are four times as likely to be victims of assault?
From research on the topic:
More than 1 in 3 LGBTQ Americans faced discrimination of some kind in the past year, including more than 3 in 5 transgender Americans.
Discrimination adversely affects the mental and economic well-being of many LGBTQ Americans, including 1 in 2 who report moderate or significant negative psychological impacts.
To avoid the experience of discrimination, more than half of LGBTQ Americans report hiding a personal relationship, and about one-fifth to one-third have altered other aspects of their personal or work lives.
Around 3 in 10 LGBTQ Americans faced difficulties last year accessing necessary medical care due to cost issues, including more than half of transgender Americans.
15 percent of LGBTQ Americans report postponing or avoiding medical treatment due to discrimination, including nearly 3 in 10 transgender individuals.
Transgender individuals faced unique obstacles to accessing health care, including 1 in 3 who had to teach their doctor about transgender individuals in order to receive appropriate care.
LGBTQ Americans have experienced significant mental health issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Where do these statistics come from?
Can you provide a link and does the study itself disclose how the information was gathered and how sampled universe was set up? I hope that they come from places other than the advocacy groups whose funding depends on these crimes being touted.
This is not the sort of thing that can be logically proven, but only decided by the preponderance of the evidence. It's not science.
Ascertaining empirical facts about reality is actually exactly what science is. Sometimes doing so is challenging -- in this case, ruling out confounders and identifying the root cause(s) of an observed phenomenon. Nevertheless, well-practiced science -- rooted in intellectual humility -- is a toolkit for objectively forming evidence-based conclusions. And the conclusion may well be (and often is) that the existing data don't support strong conclusions, regardless of any feelings we may have from our pre-existing notions or desires.
Intelligent design proponents think they have the preponderance of the evidence and can spend hours pointing to their supporting data. Though it's easy enough to craft an argument that sounds good, doing so without science's (imperfect!) tools for rigorous scrutiny is the domain of pseudo-science and religion.
How would you propose an experiment to prove or disprove the existence of discrimination?
To put it in currently fashionable terms, you could really argue that these poor women are crabby for systemic reasons. They’re working full time, managing the home, and probably taking care of elderly parents as well as their kids. Of course they lose it once in awhile when they’re stuck in a slow line or a service worker is rude or incompetent! They’re stretched to the breaking point and are only human. If they were young and attractive, people would feel sorry for them.
Or, if they were young and attractive, they'd get threatened with arrest for being high for losing it in public. I'm amazed at the extra grace I get now that I'm a middle-aged mom. It's not that the demographic I'm in now is never unfairly picked on just for having a bad day, but it does seem less bad.
Police will actually believe me now if I forgot to turn on my lights because of a migraine. And politely let me head home, rather than do what they're entitled to do, which is to punish anyone who drives impaired for any reason, including innocent ones — it's not like the accident I could cause would be any less bad simply because the impairment was involuntary.
Younger people are statistically more dangerous than even middle aged ones. You could make a case for ageism next time you get a warning at a traffic stop. 😂
Well, also, women spent decades learning to speak up and advocate for themselves, and now if you have a problem with anything, you are a Karen.
It does not surprise me that we have once again targeted women, and there is no male Karen equivalent.
It's partially because in general, it's women who are doing the shopping and other household chores and thus they're the ones who might have to ask to speak to *gasp* managers.
I find it interesting how credulous the internet is for stories. You see it all the time in forums; someone will post a story that's so one-sided it strains credulity, but everyone will immediately side with the storyteller. And so with all the maligned cashiers who were of course just quietly and competently doing their jobs until some nasty white woman with *that* haircut blew up over some trivial incident. It's definitely never the cashier's fault. Nope.
(Which is not to say that people never blow up at cashiers, just to say the stories about it only ever run one way despite everyone encountering completely incompetent service workers. Maybe "Karens" are too busy to post on reddit)
Yup.
Another angle on it: When people are afraid to speak up about something, they can overcompensate and come off as overly aggressive. When I see some "Karens" that's what my mind immediately goes to: Here is a woman who is deeply uncomfortable starting conflict and voicing her needs, and is struggling to find the right way to speak up.
I don't have that haircut, but I do sometimes wonder if I've just "Karened" someone, so I do use the "Karen" stereotype as an informal check on my own behavior. And the funniest joke I've heard in the past five years was a Karen joke — a woman introducing her own elbow, which fussily hadn't responded well to any orthopedic treatment, as "Karen".
It often seems it's not service-workers' fault that they're working in a system set up to gatekeep better service against anyone who isn't willing to be a persistent jackwad to get it. This seems particularly true of service by phone. There seems to be an art to playacting the jackwad effectively, an art I don't trust myself to have. I'm a bit in awe of successful "Karens", actually. How do they pull it off?
Still, it's disturbing to see the Karen stereotype used on a billboard calling for legal action.
Lol @ the elbow story. I’ve got a pixie haircut and I had to remind my stylist last time to “please, please make sure I don’t end up with a ‘talk to the manager’ cut.”
I'd like to understand your claims about private-sector censorship. So I hope you'll either write about it at some point, or provide some references.
Specific quation: prior to the internet, the average citizen had NO outlet to publicize an opinion. Was that because of censorship, in your view?
This is a misunderstanding of historical fact. Almost all of our free speech jurisprudence predates the internet. Average citizens had tons of ways to publicize opinions. They did not have any as simple as typing something while sitting on the toilet, but free speech cases were fought over banners, t-shirts, leafleting, going door to door, and the proverbial soapbox in the public square. All of these were relatively (to the time) simple ways to express ideas. Society was much less fragmented and more community oriented then, so something as simple as holding up a cardboard sign at the mall could reach a lot of people.
Actually, I should expand on that.
In the time period we're comparing to, NO ONE had the ability to send out opinions while sitting on the toilet. So even if the means I listed don't seem simple, it has to be remembered that compared to the abilities that even powerful entities (including the government) had, these were actually much simpler and easier.
Now, there's the obvious issue that the government (or media corporations) could reach much larger swathes of the masses. But that's true even today. Freddie can write a post that's seen by hundreds of thousands. I could actually publish something on my Substack and it'll be seen by five people. That's not because of censorship. It's because he's a successful and talented writer and I'm a lazy hack.
We still don't have any way for the average citizen to reach the masses. There are edge cases of people who devote their life to getting a successful YouTube business off the ground, and maybe .0001% of them will reach a substantial audience. But that's just a more successful version of someone starting their own newspaper (a common occurrence throughout American history). The average citizen is still reaching an equivalent amount of people. It's just now occurs in cyberspace instead of at the rotary club or in the public square.
I hope it doesn't sound like I'm dismissing your idea. I recall you're a STEM person and I've been thinking a lot lately about how the promise of the internet - the democratization of opinion - has been a massive failure. With the exception of the first movers in the blogosphere and the first movers on YouTube, we're still listening to the exact people we would've without the internet. Substack is this great "free speech" platform. Almost all of the popular Substacks are written by the same people who came through the gatekeeping of large newspapers and magazines.
It's much easier to instigate mob action quickly than it used to be. It's not what I had in mind when I started working on building out the Internet in 1991, but it's sort of Democratic. In the worst kind of way.
The term "cancel culture" is particularly stupid because it makes this seem like some new thing when it very much isn't. This is Mob justice. Mob justice is bad, has always been bad, and has always been a problem. This isn't some new thing but is instead the 21st century version of hangings in the old West, witch trials in Salem, and the Red Scare.
Very good point.
Re: your disclaimer at the end: Apparently this is a thing now, accusing people we don't approve of of only writing about [things, people, institutions, trends we like or at least don't think are so very bad].
There must be some sort of private Twitter club where, in the last week or so, it was decided that Matt Taibbi, who for most of the last 20 years was every progressive's hero, is now a menace because he only writes about the media, which are filled with people we really like and so shouldn't be criticized as scathingly as Matt does it. He must be cashing in, it's the only possible explanation.
You too, Freddie.
I can be pretty cynical, but I will never become as cynical as that.
It's part of the odious trend of ad hominem attacks on individuals because you cannot refute their actual arguments.
In the "Bidens: corrupt or crazy?" piece, Taibbi admits that he's just repeating hearsay from a right-wing activist. That's not an argument that requires rebuttal.
If Hitler said the world was round would you disagree with him?
The issue is whether or not the case has merits. And hasn't everybody agreed at this point that the laptop is genuine?
No. Allegedly the FBI has a laptop that is allegedly Hunter Biden's. These allegedly's are all from unknown off-the-record sources. This isn't enough to establish anything.
Mark, you’ll always paint yourself into a corner by defending power brokers of any brand. The more salient point here is that Taibbi’s Sub now has a single theme, and it doesn’t really matter if that’s due to grift or ideological degradation. It’s just boring and sad.
The real test is would you say the same thing if he was attacking Trump 100% of the time.
Who cares if he's only addressing one issue? All that matters is the factual content of what he's writing. If it's accurate who cares if he's essentially repeating "The world is round 100 times"? Do you disagree? And if not why feel compelled to comment at all?
Because the obvious reading is that the people protesting the loudest right now are doing so solely because they are political partisans. For them the truth is just a secondary issue if it's being used to attack their political favorites.
How about Hunter Biden's Pornhub account? Or his own admissions as to his insane cocaine use? Rick James could have learned a thing or two.
Pornhub account? Seriously???
What does that have to do with anything? Who cares what Hunter Biden does? I don't and there is no reason you should either.
Ok, I forked over $50 to Taibbi just so I could read the piece in question. Who exactly is the right-wing activist you reference?
Please tell me there is a block function on substack.
For the record: I was a huge fan of Taibbi due to his financial-sector reporting back in the day. So I paid for a year in advance of his substack. What I got for the three months it took me to figure out how to cancel and get a refund was endless click-bait for trumpistas, like the recent "Bidens: corrupt or crazy?", and endless pieces about how Trump (who admitted to attempting to subborn perjury from the leader of Ukraine) was totally innocent of everything. And his comments section is straight out of 4chan.
His take is around a million dollars per year. It's logically possible that he's just become an idiot, but IMO Occam's Razor favors the cashing-in explanation.
Actually, I know exactly what happened to him and why it's so hard for a lot of his previous fans to understand: he has principles, and when he sees his principles trampled he calls it out no matter who's doing the trampling.
I know where he's coming from because on one of these Substacks recently I was snidely attacked for suggesting (perhaps snidely on my part) that people who could abandon their support for due process in the wake of 9/11 weren't very principled themselves. It was clear to me that for many, many people, habeas corpus is something like a really good idea than the almost religious dogma it is for me.
And so it is for millions of folks who cheered Taibbi so long as he was embarrassing Bush or hedge fund managers, but now draw the line when he is embarrassing the Bidens for the same shenanigans.
Except that his standard of evidence has dropped precipitously for the alleged transgressions of the left, whereas he now completely forgives the trumpista right for everything. Trump, in particular, is just (according to Taibbi) a clown who could not possibly actually stage a coup, and so the crimes for which Trump was twice impeached should just be ignored, while those who sought evidence for these crimes are Deep State criminals.
tl;dr: I've read old Matt and I've read new Matt, and new Matt is not old Matt. New Matt is just another useful idiot for Trump.
Trump hasn't staged a coup and whether that's because he's too clownish is admittedly a value judgment. But there was no attempted coup and there was not even an attempted insurrection, so in these respects, once again, Taibbi tells a more accurate story than almost everyone else in the media.
So his subscription is certainly worth what I'm paying for it. If you prefer to be lied to, I guess you have lots of alternatives, many of them free of charge.
You're the one swallowing lies. Eastman memo.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/memo-surfaces-confirming-actual-trump-coup-was-underway-jan-6/
Did they even try to execute on that?
It is trivially obvious that there was an attempted coup. Whether Trump was in on it or not is debatable.
The Bidens are corrupt. Are they "crazy"? In the Dave Chappelle sense that cocaine is a hell of a drug, absolutely.
Enjoy the Emperorship of Donald the Second. Unlike Matt, you won't have the million dollars a year to insulate yourself. Better get going on that newsletter you've been promising for half a year now.
Hey, I never promised anybody anything. In fact I updated it with one line a month ago guaranteeing that I would do one post a month, max. I am way too busy to do the kind of writing that I would like.
To deny that Hunter Biden's cocaine use and generally crazy behavior could conceivably be problematic is especially jarring given that the media would have gone insane if one of the Trump kids had done the same thing. Once you go down the rabbit hole of arguing that unpleasant truths should be suppressed because of the political implications you can never go back.
I never said Hunter Biden's behavior wasn't problematic, I said it was several orders of magnitude less problematic than Trump's 1/6 coup attempt. As we all will learn in 2024.
My point is that the concerted, coordinated effort by one segment of the population to suppress unfavorable information is just as poisonous and corrosive to democratic norms. The Hunter Biden stuff is just one example.
What does Hunter Biden's cocaine use have to do with the Presidents performance? Are you just upset that the press doesn't obsess on it as much as you would like it to?
The argument has always been that if you have a direct family member smoking crack cocaine, patronizing prostitutes, blacking out while on abusing substances, etc. that represented a possible target for blackmail or other influence peddling from both foreign (the Russians, Chinese, etc.) and domestic sources.
He’s not a menace, he’s just boring now.
Thank you for this. Jeez Louise. Everyone's a critic.
I'm not a trumpista and I enjoy Taibbi's heterodox take on nearly everything. I like that he is a slayer of sacred cows - on all fronts. So, he shifted his focus to the things he finds most toxic at the moment. So what? This expectation that since he wrote an article you liked he now has to be some kind of verbal superman covering the topics you most value and if he isn't doing this, he's caved to the trumpistas and cashing in is ridiculous and the worst kind of speculation.
@ Mark S: Also, for the record, people from all walks of life have the right to spew their views on whatever platform will allow them. If you don't like it, don't read them. But, don't act like those you disfavor need to shut up. God, the whole push for conformity on the left just makes me sick. You want a pristine little lock-step world like the 1950s where everyone knew their place and lied out their asses all the time just to survive? You want society to be fake with everyone behaving themselves according to your diktats so you can have your pure little disneyland? All you care about is a new kind of propriety. And propriety is a most pernicious social force - a lie that people hide behind so they don't get shamed and punished by the greater society; so they can survive. You want Matt Taibbi to write about "proper" subjects or you will accuse him of grifting? Give me a break.
You remind me of nothing so much as the Christian right in their heyday. You don't want truth. You want sanctimony and sanitization of the commons - according to your groupthink. It's no different - just the details. You are what I have fought against all of my life. I want freedom - to think as I choose and be as I choose (and it harm none). And as long as I keep my head down and nominally agree with you - everything's hunky dory. But, if I don't, then you want there to be hell to pay. You want people to be punished for not agreeing with you. Just admit it. All you know how to do is complain and destroy. You build nothing. You solve nothing. You help nothing.
Sorry, you don't get to be my (or anyone's) priest. You don't get to tell me (or anyone) what to think or how to live. And luckily, you don't get to do this to Matt Taibbi either.
I'll render my protest against you and your shrill, hyperbolic, defamatory, conformist ilk at the ballot box in 2022. And there are millions more fed up progressives and liberals who will do the same.
Good luck.
Matt is far left of me on most issues and always has been (same with Greenwald, who I first started reading back during the Iraq Debacle). I loved his reporting in the past because he uncovered corruption. I love his reporting today because he continues to uncover corruption. I don't care about his politics, and it is astonishing to me that anyone could allow Matt's politics to interfere with their appreciation of the good work he has been doing for two decades.
But I can see that for many that's all it was ever about: politics. Matt wasn't respected because he exposed the grifters, it was because he was making certain people look bad: he was "owning the neocons." Now that the "good guys" are in charge and are looting the nation with as much zeal and enthusiasm as any investment banker, Matt's a "sellout" for continuing to expose the grifters.
I'm probably far left of you as well but it's good that we can agree on some common sense. He won't conform to the current power narrative so they have to tear him a new one. I support his efforts to speak truth to power of any stripe.
Sorry I lost it a bit. But, I'm just sick of the whining and complaining that he won't get with the program. Oh, and the ultimate sin - that he's actually making money from heterodox writing. That's what they really can't stand — that they can't completely control the narrative. I, for one, am grateful that he can't be controlled and have found myself with strange bedfellows of late as I have come out in defense of certain conservatives on substack boards. There are some gems in conservative thought and we on the left are fools if we think we can have it all our own way just because we won the culture wars. Talk about going to our heads. Sheezsh!
What the woke left is up to is not okay and as a veteran, I won't stand for it. I want my country back - the one whose ideals espoused universal humanism and civil rights for everyone and didn't dissect us into oppression categories. Maybe we hadn't reached the apex of that ideal, but we were on our way and in some ways, now, I feel like we are going backwards.
I will always fight prissy, puritanical bullies who think they have a right to coerce others. Live free or die tryin'.
I follow Greenwald on Twitter and the majority of what he posts is about how old Biden is. Not really muckracking.
Good luck to you too. Your anti-conformist protest votes will just elect more Republicans in 2022, who will then rig more states in 2024. It's a glorious future you have planned for us all, with VP Don Jr taking the reigns when his dad finally kicks off circa 2025.
The Democrats will win far more elections tacking to the center than trying to get the loyalty of the hysterical fringe. They have never been very reliable Democratic voters in the first place.
Alas the hysterical fringe is large enough that their sitting out can swing elections to the trumpistas (see 2016).
Not a good example. See 2000.
Anything the Repubs take away, we can get back. I hate to say this, but in certain contexts, conservatives and republicans are acting more liberally these days than certain elements of the far left.
But, if you kill the First Amendment and give the government the power to coerce speech, we will never get that back. Just like if we give up gun rights, we will never get that back. But, it's not just these issues. There is an effort to kill the whole constitution, something I swore an oath to defend. The Declaration of Independence has been declared racist. The Dems want to stack the Supreme Court. Radical leftists are invading bathrooms and showing up at people's homes - using intimidation tactics. They are defending looting and burning of small businesses, some of which are owned by POC. Do you know how hard it is to start and maintain a business? The sacrifices you have to make? They are defending the tactics of Antifa. They are defending the destruction of people's lives by mobs. They are calling any dissent against the prevailing narrative of biological sex in trans circles transphobia and demonizing and harrassing those who speak out. No one is allowed to have any other opinion that that which the high priests of the far left decree is valid and good. They have conferred upon themselves the absolute right to define the meanings of words and what is allowed to be said. And, worst of all, they have killed the benefit of the doubt in our social fabric - the very thing that holds civilization together. Our ability to trust each other and believe that we are all trying our best.
These extreme and dissonant stances of the radical left (and more) are forcing me to the right. You may be okay with the use of mob violence to destroy people simply for disagreeing or making a mistake. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with beliefs being decreed by fiat and heretics being excommunicated (because trust me, this is a VERY toxic religion). I am not and never will be. You may be okay with demands for genuflection and psychic guilt and being told that the only way to cure discrimination is with more discrimination. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with an entire demographic of people being dehumanized based on nothing except the immutable color of their skin and told that there is no redemption, no atonement for the original sin of being white. I am not okay with this and never will be. You may be okay with millions of people being told that they must pay for the sins of ancestors who may or may not have been involved in the horrifying institution of slavery. I am not and never will be. You may be okay with revenge politics. I am not and never will be.
Take your scare tactics - the "if you don't vote for a Dem the world will end" and put it you know where. The Dems are just as corrupt as the Repubs, just as bought by corporate, and haven't stood for the little guy for a long, long time. In fact, from my position, the Dems are mostly made of up of rich, white, overeducated idiots who don't have a clue what people in this country need or want. How many of the MBAs that played slave wage arbitrage and shipped jobs off shore over the past 30 - 40 years were Dems, eh? I'm betting at least half if not more.
So go ahead and drink your self-righteous wine, dude. You can pretend that Repubs are the devil if that pleases you and makes you feel superior. I just see people, fellow citizens, neighbors - most of whom just want to have a decent life and not be called deplorable. I don't need people to be pure. I don't need them to agree with me. I don't care if they are socially regressive. I still want the best for them. I won't dehumanize them just to feed my fucking ego.
LOL! Thanks for the laugh.
"These extreme and dissonant stances of the radical left (and more) are forcing me to the right"
I don't have much problem with anything else you wrote, but this is just silly and I hope you don't really mean that, especailly after you just wrote that you aren't "okay with revenge politics".
Me moving right means I am a moderate. That said, I am pro gun. So, you figure it out.
That might make sense in a relative sense I guess, but I don't feel it's a sensible way to express it. If everyone is moving left and you still have the same moderate beliefs, you're not moving right.
If the behaviour of (some) people on the left is making you want to disassociate yourself from them, I think you can and should do that without changing your beliefs.
"I am a moderate. That said, I am pro gun."
I'm from Australia, grew up owning and using guns, still shoot from time to time but don't , and I generally support our gun control laws here (they could stand to be a little looser around sporting firearms, but I don't think it's worth a big political or cultural battle). I'd self-describe as a left-leaning moderate on most issues.
So I don't think that's a particularly odd combination, but I'm aware that this issue is very different and quite awful in the US for so so many reasons :(
This comment doesn't seem to square with what I just saw you say on the I Might Be Wrong stack:
"Here's some anecdotal evidence: I'm 66, I have never voted for a Republican in my life, but today if I lived in Virgina I would vote Republican, because the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left has finally convinced me that the Trumpista right, as awful as it is, is actually less bad."
Wow.
Okay, you convinced me to read Matt Taibbi's substack. I like to read people who hold controversial opinions. Usually, they are just idiots, but I am occasionally surprised.
I already regret it. The quality of the discussion on his substack is worse than Twitter, and that's saying something.
Yeah, I've liked his writing for years and still do, but don't go reading the comments over there. I don't think it's really Matt's fault, so I'm happy to ignore them.
Good idea.
I am concerned about what cancel culture does to its targets (and highly recommend Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed).
But I am even more concerned about what it does to good people who cry for vengeance. When I read that the shelter confiscated Amy Cooper’s dog, I suggested politely in a Facebook comment that that was excessive punishment (not least to the dog!). And friends who I know in real life to be good people lost their minds. They were so angry with me! My tentative suggestion was tantamount to a lynching and also dog-murder in their eyes. (Much hay was made of how Amy Cooper pulled on her dog’s collar.) There was apparently to be no limit to the hell that was supposed to rain down on Cooper. Any still, small voice asking for a sense of proportion was by definition coming from an evil racist. I really felt despair about it, because I knew that it was good people who were taking such pleasure in imagining Amy Cooper’s suffering. This is not good for our souls.
One thing that made me a feel a little better was that the guy she called the cops on publicly said he didn't want her to lose her job or be prosecuted. That was gracious of him but his plea for mercy was ignored.
Not to be a total downer, but I think people have always been sadists, and we just conveniently not noticed or dealt with it head on for a long time. Usually the sadists just used popularity or coolness to exclude and shame people. Morality x relational aggression is a really toxic combination.
"My tentative suggestion was tantamount to a lynching and also dog-murder in their eyes. (Much hay was made of how Amy Cooper pulled on her dog’s collar.)"
Absolutely insane.
I had the same experience a few years ago when I suggested to a long time friend group of women friends and mothers that maybe saying that teenager from Covington has a punchable face was a really messed up thing to do.
"UC-Santa Barbara students passed a trigger warning resolution that, if enacted, would have enabled any student to skip any class or material if they felt it might trigger them."
I needed this for Real Analysis.
If it's not Complex Analysis, it's Fake Analysis!
I'd need therapy for that one.
"Herr Doktor, C has algebraic closure. Meanwhile, I lack closure. I feel inadequate."
"I also think that anti-CRT laws are a terrible imposition on free speech and teacher autonomy, just as I view conservative efforts to ban books to be exactly as toxic as when it’s progressives doing the banning."
I'm really interested in this idea- have you written more about this? How much autonomy should teachers have in the classroom? Complete freedom, even if they are presenting false or misleading ideas or neglecting to teach important concepts? How do we balance the need for teachers to have freedom of speech with the fact that their students are young and impressionable and a captive audience?
Since no one replied to this.....
I generally agree with the courts that it's absurs to consider teachers should have free speech rights in their professional capacity.
I have no idea why people have taken up the mantle that government employees, paid to do a specific job, with a captive audience who are forced by law to be there (unless their parents can afford otherwise) should be allowed to say whatever they want.
Firstly, the law protects them in their private capacity. If they wish to spam people's Facebook feeds with how much they hate white supremacy, they are welcome to.
Second, all of these people already accept that government employees should have restricted free speech rights in their official capacity. It would not be possible for a 2nd Grade teacher to try and convert every student to Mormonism. Because of the conflicting First Amendment issues, people acknowledge that the speech one is less important. So you already accept this idea.
Thirdly, it's a shockingly undemocratic idea. The view is that the government should be allowed to force (and, as this piece acknowledges, all government action is through threats of violence) parents to make their children attend school. And unless they can afford that to be a private school, it must be a government school. But, people should not have any input on what is taught in those schools. Ironically, this is completely left out of the analysis. As a leftist, I cannot support the elevation of burucreatism over popular will.
Fourthly, in any other context they would be aghast at this. I'd like these people who are aghast at the violation of teacher's "free speech rights" to be subjected to an hour long harangue about the evils of the Federal Reserve (or pick your own dose of libertarian wierdness!) next time they go to renew their driver's license. I suspect they would suddenly find a newfound appreciation for the legal distinction between a government employee's official duties and their private speech.
"How the overheated rhetoric of the social justice movement hurts messaging" -- I can't find this one and would like to read it.
My guess is that Freddie means this one:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/that-one-side-would-like-to-utterly