I wrote about Operation Underground Railroad because I have seen several members focusing their birthday fundraisers on it. The idea for this series, though, started with another person I know.
He is planning on trying to make the world a better place (things have gotten so ugly) by taking on "cancel culture".
This is the guy who tried to hold an event showing support for John Schnatter after Schnatter was criticized for refusing to give his workers health care. This was seen as more egregious because employee health care would have been very affordable (.02 per pizza, though it was thought it would be .08 when he first refused) and because Schnatter already had a pretty opulent lifestyle.
What I am saying is that this person I know is on the board -- if not the actual chairman of the board -- of barking up the wrong tree.
I criticized the event for what I thought were obvious reasons and got a lot of abuse from his minions. To be fair, any time he doesn't agree with a given conspiracy theory his minions abuse him too, so perhaps being him is his own punishment.
I blocked him a while ago, but I still hear about him through mutual acquaintances. His fight against cancel culture is a response to all of the negativity out there post-election, but he is also focusing on how China is more of a danger than Russia.
Now, that is a key conservative talking point. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but it still gets repeated a lot. That indicates to me that a lack of scrutiny is the problem.
The thing is, you can have a pretty good discussion about "cancel culture", and I will try and do that over the next post or two. Before that, I want to talk about it NOT being discussed, like when it just becomes a phrase that gets thrown out there, believed to be unassailable. Since there is no listening by the person who uses the term, they continue to believe they made a valid point.
We see similar issues with "fake news", "snowflakes", and "politically correct", though "cancel culture" is kind of replacing that one.
There was a book I really appreciated: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. It makes short, critical points from the last century and what was seen of fascism and authoritarianism.
Lesson 9 was "Be kind to our language."
Part of that is not simply repeating words without knowing their meaning or if they merit the repetition.
For example, the phrase "fake news" did not start with the United States and Trump. It was used by Russia in Ukraine. Its purpose was not merely to discount specific stories (that tended to be true) but also to make it so people got cynical and didn't trust anything. Fighting gullibility may be a worthy cause, but spreading general cynicism is not the solution.
Therefore, even if you need to criticize something for being false or fragile or overly delicate, it is best to find your own way of phrasing it. If in the process of thinking about that, you discover that your criticism is unfair, that's a good thing to learn.
My plan is to explore "cancel culture", and show how it does and does not work. We will get into that in subsequent posts.
For this post, I would like to make one more point about conservative talking points.
Currently, Republican politician Matt Gaetz is under scrutiny for various things, including sex trafficking, which conservatives have tried really hard to frame as something Democrats do.
It does look bad for him, especially considering that the investigation started under Bill Barr, who was not know for his diligence in prosecuting Republicans.
However, there was a noticeable uptick in leading conservative figures complaining about Hunter Biden, and how he should be investigated.
This comes after one very convoluted story that was not even close to true, then another story that was at least more probable, but still proven to be untrue upon investigation, though there were phone calls requesting that it be made to look more true, but those phone calls don't incriminate any Bidens.
I know, all of that is convoluted, and it might be unfair for me not to delineate all of that, except the information is out there. Also, if you think that is complicated, wait until you catch up to the Joel Greenberg part of the Gaetz story.
However, this is the point. Once the story about Gaetz broke, conservatives started talking about Hunter Biden right away. It was an immediate attempt at deflection. It is not really possible to tell how well the attempt is coordinated because it gets picked up on so quickly, without questioning.
Of course, anyone who really wants to stop trafficking should be focusing on Gaetz, but the distraction seems to work.
And, it is not completely coordinated. There was also a smaller-scale resurgence of #FireFauci, which seems like an odd way to go now, except it is still a way to deflect. There is less to choose from now. Other choices are mainly focused on Major the dog, and too many people rightly love dogs and have sympathy for older ones.
So because it is visceral and vague and appealing in an alliterative way, you will be hearing "cancel culture" a lot. It will be helpful to recognize why it is being used and notice patterns in when it is being used.
As I first started taking notes, there were a few examples but the list kept growing.
I can only imagine how many more there will be next week.
Related posts:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/09/economic-corruption.html
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