Cancel Culture Quotes

When someone else seeks to control what I see or hear, I have to assume they think they're superior and I'm too stupid to make up my own mind.

When she gets rattled, the South really comes out. Once when Daddy tried to cancel our country club membership because he said the dues were too high, she went from zero to Atlanta burning in zero point five seconds.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.

It Isn’t Hate to Speak the Truth’ J.K. Rowling

Cancel culture’, as it’s become known, is one of the very worst things about modern society, and it’s driven by the same woke liberals who profess to stand for tolerance.

Cancel culture is a term bounced around by people afraid of accountability. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

Cancel culture is a real thing. Your digital footprint is your legacy, so think before you post.

There are two ways to choke off free expression. We've already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use.

Diversity” has become a term of art, a symbol, one so powerful that the symbol is now more important than the thing it was supposed to represent. Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive.

A government powerful enough to control your physician or your hospital has proven it can limit your treatment choices to your detriment.

Suffering does amazing things to people, they become very different in a very short period of time, in many cases, they get a lot wiser an alot braver and become very much more worth listening to.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

Sometimes people decide not to like me for the most arbitrary reasons. Sometimes it's just because I'm famous, and successful people make them uncomfortable. Sometimes it's because I voted differently than them. And sometimes it's because I frowned outside their favorite yogurt shop and now they want to cancel me forever because they think I'm against yogurt.

Wise people will say Daniel should like me just as I am, but I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can’t take the pressure. I am going to cancel and spend the evening eating doughnuts in a cardigan with egg on it.

So, a mistake is made, a word is spoken out of turn, a cultural norm is broken, and all is fair in the pursuit of cancelling this person, erasing them off the face of the earth, banishing them to a world of shame and regret.

Cancel Culture doesn't really exist. It's a myth created by people who have been used to saying whatever they want without being challenged and are now surprised when there are consequences to their words. Rowling is still a very rich bestselling author with a massive platform. (7/8/2020 on Twitter)

Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their purported oppressors. This leads to a 'cancel culture' that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.

Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.

Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.

The cancel culture is a radicalized stance based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform.

generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood. And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

Aurora shuddered, her face white with anger. The only thing worse than having to compete for Gold Stars was not being allowed to compete anymore. Muting was the Neon God’s favourite punishment, for He loved to hijack human language, almost as much as He loved hijacking perfectly human societal norms. Judging people on their supposed worth was His favourite pastime, and God forbid you didn’t follow His arbitrarily-chosen set of beliefs, which appeared to change every hour. Under the Neon God’s law, innocent words such as “powerline” or “screwdriver” had become obscene, trigger words that would most definitely get you muted, thrown in a Mind Prison or killed.

People choose to solve the person, not to solve the problem, caused by the person. That is why cancel culture, doesn’t cancel wrong things ,but it cancels people. It is because themselves are doing the same things, for they see nothing wrong, but the person who did them ,being wrong.

Somehow each of the three bears figured out exactly what was comfortable for them. And yet despite the obvious differences, they did not try to impose their preferences on the rest of the family. And if we can take a lesson from that, maybe that would make our society a bit more bearable.

It’s an online coliseum now… we feel evolved, but we’re still throwing those we disagree with to the lions… Entertained with the social bloodshed we see.

What a sad generation. In the olden days. We used to learn from our mistakes. These days you get canceled for your mistakes.

To ‘cancel’ someone is a manifestation of our inability to defend our position, which is compounded by the fear that the one that we’re ‘cancelling’ can actually defend theirs.

Canceling’ a conversation never eliminates the opinion that you didn’t have the ability to refute.

For Du Bois, there was no such thing as an a priori wrong conclusion; there was only a conclusion proven wrong.

A particular lethal combo is when culture of victimization -we were wronged last week, last decade, last millennium- is coupled with a culture of honor's ethos of retribution.

Direct questions are the worst. Cops must know this--when someone asks you a question, it is really, really hard not to answer it. It's even harder when people dig up old tweets and put them side by side with new ones and you can't really explain the discrepancy. And then other people see the discrepancy and they start liking and retweeting and rephrasing. And they also see your silence, and your silence looks like an answer. It's an extremely effective interrogation tactic, and most people make either a tearful apology or an enraged counterattack. This is why Twitter callouts tend to end so badly. Apology is never enough (and probably shouldn't be), so you're basically being asked to willingly give up power for no clear end. The best people actually do that. But the real shitfucks go on the offense, and then their communities get an infusion of victimhood narratives straight into their veins.

According to Flinders, all religious and spiritual traditions and specifically meditative practices—because they were built by men and for men—promote the following: self-silencing; self-naughting (destruction of the ego); resisting desire; and enclosure (turning inward, sealing off from the world). As a feminist, naming these four requirements of transcendence troubled her. “I realized that however ancient and universal these disciplines may be, they are not gender neutral at all. Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, they cancel the basic freedoms—to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford, and most of all, to be somebody—that have normally defined male privilege” (emphasis mine).

A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when white people used to own slaves.

Appreciation for history is scarce today, public debate is only rarely lit by foundational principles, and there is a further reason why the needed discussion fails to get off the ground—especially in the speech code, cancel culture of many American and European universities. Debate is often ended by prejudice and a fashionable consensus that chokes it off from the start.

Winston Churchill reportedly quipped that “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That was before the internet. Today, the truth can’t even find its shoes.

The road to redemption is a treacherous one that the accused must walk through in darkness but if we don’t shine the light then there is no hope for anyone finding their way to the other side.

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

Many in our culture have employed scare tactics simply because reason cannot support their agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas since reason is not available to do so.

Woke and cancel culture are both signs of a judgmental culture, not a mentally mature one. A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when the white people used to own slaves. Let me tell you this, if you are kind, if you are compassionate, if you hold no discrimination towards people whatsoever, then you have no reason to worry about whether you are woke enough.

The kids of well-off parents, bored and dulled by easy pleasure, find that hit of dopamine every time they cancel a nobody or, better, a non-nobody on Twitter. It's entirely possible that the misery junkies fueling cancel culture are doing it because they have nothing else going on in their lives. And that "nothing else" could be beyond their control-- consequences of a society that paradoxically offers dwindling opportunities for fulfillment despite offering huge opportunities for distraction.

In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught.

The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology.

The worst part of this obscenity, this shameless visibility, is the forced participation, this automatic complicity of the spectator who has been blackmailed into participating. And it is this which is the clearest objective of the operation: the servitude of the victims, but a voluntary servitude, one in which the victims rejoice from the pain and shame which they are made to suffer. The complete participation of a society in its fundamental mechanism: interactive exclusion - it doesn’t get better than that! Decided all together and consumed with enthusiasm.

There will always be someone whose identity is wrapped up in being offended. They're constantly searching for it. These people are the woke mob devotees. Let them be. It's all perfect. Just don't let their tears stop the important discussions from happening. [...] Good people don't go out of their way to cause suffering, but they also don't avoid upsetting people at all costs. They speak their truth unapologetically. Discussing topics that might get you cancelled is incredibly important. Let them be offended. Do not let them silence you through fear of the repercussions.

I turn books around and around in my hands like precious jewels ... staggered that someone compiled 600 pages of tiny handwritten words in an Antwerp turret in1751. To me, its the ultimate achievement, and when I hear of the Cancel Vultures trying to rewrite the classics ... the room goes dark.

Even if we manage to get rid of Trump [...] the political left still needs a course correction. We need to stop devouring our own and canceling ourselves. We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of course. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.

I can't say anything though. Even if it’s true I’d sound like a prick. Believe that. How can we even— Christ! That’s the problem with people living however they want. When anything goes, reason is no longer credible. You can’t point out trouble. If the truth is offered, and they don’t want it, they get to say the truth is a lie. Autonomy is now prioritized over understanding.

People choose not to care about right or wrong. They only care about who did what ? They choose to only call out people they don’t like, because when the same actions done by others. They don’t see anything wrong. To them is not about what happen, Is who made it happen. It is not the problem or offence committed. They are concerned about, but It is who made the problem or committed the offence that makes them to be concern. They are not condemning the behavior or wrong actions, but are condemning Individuals they don’t like. People choose to solve the person, not to solve the problem, caused by the person. That is why cancel culture, doesn’t cancel wrong things ,but it cancels people. It is because themselves are doing the same things, for they see nothing wrong, but the person who did them ,being wrong.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

ordinary Americans can take steps toward recovering their country by overcoming fear. Stop being afraid of everyday interactions due to COVID. Return to a healthy social life. Go out with friends or enjoy time with your family. If you’re a religious person, renew your spiritual commitments by attending a local house of worship. Most importantly, be grateful that we still live in a free country where these rights are protected by our Constitution. Do these things while being mindful about your overall risk in all health issues.

The god of the prosperity gospelists is a pathetic doormat, a genie. The god of the cutesy coffee mugs and Joel Osteen tweets is a milquetoast doofus like the guys in the Austen novels you hope the girls don’t end up with, holding their hats limply in hand and minding their manners to follow your lead like a butler—or the doormat he stands on. The god of the American Dream is Santa Claus. The god of the open theists is not sovereignly omniscient, declaring the end from the beginning, but just a really good guesser playing the odds. The god of our therapeutic culture is ourselves, we, the “forgivers” of ourselves, navel-haloed morons with “baggage” but not sin. None of these pathetic gods could provoke fear and trembling. But the God of the Scriptures is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He stirs up the oceans with the tip of his finger, and they sizzle rolling clouds of steam into the sky. He shoots lightning from his fists. This is the God who leads his children by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. This is the God who makes war, sends plagues, and sits enthroned in majesty and glory in his heavens, doing what he pleases. This is the God who, in the flesh, turned tables over in the temple as if he owned the place. This Lord God Jesus Christ was pushed to the edge of the cliff and declared, “This is not happening today,” and walked right back through the crowd like a boss. This Lord says, “No one takes my life; I give it willingly,” as if to say, “You couldn’t kill me unless I let you.” This Lord calms the storms, casts out demons, binds and looses, and has the authority to grant us the ability to do the same. The Devil is this God’s lapdog. And it is this God who has summoned us, apprehended us, saved us. It is this God who has come humbly, meekly, lowly, pouring out his blood in infinite conquest to set the captives free, cancel the record of debt against us, conquer sin and Satan, and swallow up death forever. Let us, then, advance the gospel of the kingdom out into the perimeter of our hearts and lives with affectionate meekness and humble submission. Let us repent of our nonchalance. Let us embrace the wonder of Christ.

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.

The intolerance and cancel culture have spread to outright discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publication of professors and graduate students who do not abide the ideology demanded by the campus revolutionaries. A March 1, 2021, study by Eric Kaufmann of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found, among other things: “Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter… ; only 1 in 10 academics support firing controversial professors, nonetheless, while most do not back cancellation, many are not opposed to it, remaining non-committal; right-leaning academics experience a high level of institutional authoritarianism and peer pressure; in the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs; in the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics… say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague; more than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching; younger academics and PhD students, especially in the United States, are significantly more willing than older academics to support dismissing controversial scholars from their posts, indicating that the problem of progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years; [and] a hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia….

We know how you all want us to cancel black people when they do something bad, but you keep making excuses for people you revere. People say, “can’t we just draw the line at rapists and murderers?” But for us history is rife with horrible men and then we’ve learned that we have to sing praises to those horrible men, and we see them on our money and their names on our schools and our bridges. So horrible man is not a disqualifier. Our lives are imbued with them. When they ask us about Michael Jackson (how can you sing those songs?) and R Kelly; it’s complicated. I will get rid of Michael Jackson when you get rid of Andrew Jackson. At least you can dance to Beat It. But our stories are so full of irredeemably horrible people that it’s something we can compartmentalize. Literally, if Bill Cosby was a priest, he wouldn’t be in prison.

The great weight shift must be understood as one of the major historical developments of the century, a direct solution to the dangers posed by the women’s movement and economic and reproductive freedom. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. Researchers S. C. Wooley and O. W. Wooley confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to “a virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness.” Researchers J. Polivy and C. P. Herman found that “prolonged And periodic caloric restriction” resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are “passivity, anxiety and emotionality.” It is those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried! Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males! I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t. For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangu­tan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversation­ist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

It is “trickling down” to women of all social classes from elitist schools and universities because that is where women are getting too close to authority. There, it is emblematic of how hunger checkmates power in any woman’s life: Hundreds of thousands of well-educated young women, living and studying at the fulcrum of cultural influence, are causing no trouble. The anorexic woman student, like the anti-Semitic Jew and the self-hating black, fits in. She is politically castrate, with exactly enough energy to do her schoolwork, neatly and completely, and to run around the indoor track in eternal circles. She has no energy to get angry or get organized, to chase sex, to yell through a bullhorn, asking for money for night buses or for women’s studies programs or to know where all the women professors are. Administering a coed class half full of mentally anorexic women is an experience distinct from that of administering a class half full of healthy, confident young women. The woman in these women canceled out, it is closer to the administration of young men only, which was how things were comfortably managed before.

Without objective benchmarks for right and wrong, this is about the best a world ruled by subjective truth can do: accept morality defined by the mob. Whoever controls our means of communication and information arbitrates what's true and what's false, what's right and what's wrong, and who's canceled and who's not.

YouTube Short: CANCEL CULTURE is preparing us to be MASS MURDERED by 21 Studios July 31, 2022 Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder. They are seeing if people can be disappeared from social media, and if people accept people being disappeared from social media, then they will accept people being disappeared from the world. When communists get into power, when socialists get into power, they kill us. No kidding, no fooling, and our families are lucky to get away. Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for extermination. And the kind of lies that are told about me in the main stream media, in Wikipedia and other places, are very specifically designed to get crazy people to target me in a violent manner. They call it character assassination, because it’s a rehearsal. See, culture is when you disagree, and we are allowed to disagree, because that’s what culture is. When you silence people you disagree with, that’s the opposite of culture. It’s a cult. It’s just the first syllable, “cult.” Not culture.

Cultural disgust to bizarre new ideas protects low-openness people not only from psychosis, but from maladaptive memes. They may not adopt useful new ideas very quickly, but neither do they join suicide cults.

Feminists, in vivid essays praising Shulamith Firestone’s legacy, fail to mention this emphatic celebration of incest and paedophilia; had she been male, she would not only have been dismissed by the same women on these very grounds, but her legacy would have been cancelled

The bottom line is most often a false floor.

Lo peor es que hemos tratado de reordenar nuestras sociedades, no a partir de lo que sabemos gracias a la ciencia, sino de falsedades políticas patrocinadas por los activistas de las ciencias sociales.

The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals. [...] In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.

There are many instances of people being called out, apologizing, adjusting their behavior, reconciling the conflict and moving on The folks caught up on "cancel culture" are primarily bigots who feel entitled to engage in transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc w/o any challenge. (7/7/2020 on Twitter)

Como sabe cualquiera que haya vivido bajo un régimen totalitario, hay algo humillante y hasta autodestructivo en tener que marchar al son de consignas que uno no cree ni puede creer.

L'histoire se fait ou plutôt s'incarne, par représentation, en érigeant des monuments tout autant qu'en les faisant tomber.

N'allez pas chercher la violence de la cancel culture ailleurs que dans la brutalité du pouvoir.

Everyone in science is terrified of crossing him. He’s like a mafia kingpin. He controls everything and everyone in public health.” Dr. Fishbein added, “He spreads so much money around and everyone knows he is vindictive. I had one friend tell me, ‘I can’t risk hiring you because I can’t afford to anger Fauci.’” Says Dr. Fishbein, “This was my first exposure to the cancel culture.

One of the most outstanding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.

Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can't be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problemas lurking just beneath the surface.

Accountability and cancellation are not the same thing. ... Cancel culture does not leave space for people to make mistakes, disagree, change, and transform their behavior. It simply asks that they be canceled, as if they never existed. While canceling someone may feel good or may feel like a form of justice, it leaves us with an uncompassionate world where change can never happen. ... Accountability is not about blame, shame, or punishment, toward ourselves or others. It's about taking ownership of and responsibility for our actions and the impact of our actions and asking others to do the same for themselves too. ... Cancel culture cancels the person. Accountability culture asks the person to be accountable for their behaviors.

Cancel culture uses bullying and personal attacks as a way to find justice. Accountability culture uses ownership and compassion as a way to find justice. It's not just that cancel culture is about being "mean" and accountability culture is about being "nice." Rather, it's that cancel culture asks us to treat each other as disposable, whereas accountability culture asks us to treat each other as redeemable. We do not need to practice antiracism by throwing ourselves or each other away. We can practice antiracism by calling out/in the harmful behaviors and then throwing ourselves and each other a life raft to find our way back to doing better.

Vague harangues against ‘cancel culture’ miss the mark because they fail to acknowledge the justice of ostracizing certain people and marginalizing certain ideas… All cultures ‘cancel.’ In the 1950s, American society ‘canceled’ Communists; in the 2020s, it ‘cancels’ anti-Communists. If conservatives hope to recover anything akin to traditional standards, they must not only articulate a moral and political vision but also suppress ideologies and organizations that would subvert that vision. p. 231

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

Other states also reoriented their telling of regional and national history. In Maharashtra, in the rewriting of history textbooks, a drastic cut was made in the book for class 7: the chapter on the Mughal Empire under Akbar was cut down to three lines.78 Uttar Pradesh simply deleted the Mughal Empire from some of its history textbooks,79 while the University of Delhi drastically reduced the study of this period in its history curriculum.80 In the syllabus of Nagpur University, a chapter that discussed the roles of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League in the making of communalism has been replaced by another one titled “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Role in Nation Building.”81 Alongside official examinations in Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar organized a test of general culture open to all schools in the state. According to the brochure designed to help students prepare for this test, which Amit Shah released in Lucknow in August 2017, India was a Hindu Rashtra, and Swami Vivekananda had defended Hindutva in Chicago in 1893.82 In Karnataka, after canceling Tipu Sultan Jayanti, the festival that the state used to organize to celebrate the birth of this eighteenth-century Muslim ruler, the BJP government also dropped the chapter dealing with this historical figure from the class 7 textbook in 2019.83 This decision was made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that had led the government of India to ask all states to reduce syllabi for students in classes 1 through 10 by 30 percent, in light of the learning challenges brought about by the lockdown.84 The decision of the Karnataka government, in fact, fit in with a larger picture. Under cover of the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest education board, decided that all over India “government-run schools no longer have to teach chapters on democratic rights, secularism, federalism, and citizenship, among other topics.”85 To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.

In a civilized world even bigots have a voice, but in a bigoted world, the only place where you can find reason and inclusion is prison.

The political correctness ideology is the religion behind cancel culture, which attempts to end people’s livelihoods for a perceived offense of certain people. This religion has no high priest or organized central authority to hold accountable for its abuses committed via cancel culture. Cancel culture is the modern day character lynching, where society takes matters into its own hands and attempts to place arbitrary consequences on arbitrary violations of constantly devolving left-wing orthodoxy. The punishment is often the career death penalty, frequently leaving the offender fired from his or her way of earning a living and isolated from society. To cancel someone is to end conversation with that person, cast them away as a pariah, and offer no real opportunity for reconciliation.

Solving racism cannot happen by blaming the rich, the racist, or the politician through protests, riots, or cancel culture.

Its disregard of borders, national infrastructures, local bureaucracies, internet censors, tariffs, laws, and languages; its disregard of margins and the marginal people who live there; its formidable, engulfing properties accelerating erasure, a flattening out of difference, of specificity for marketing purposes. An abhorrence of diversity. We imagine indistinguishability, the elimination of minority languages, minority cultures in its Wake. We speculate with horror on what could be the irrevocable, enfeebling alteration of major languages, major cultures in its sweep. Even if those dreaded consequences are not made completely manifest, they nevertheless cancel out globalism's assurances of better life by issuing dire warnings of premature cultural death.

In recent years, the term “woke” has been widely used to describe those who’ve attained doctrinal purity in regard to the social justice movement. While that movement is secular, it seems to fulfill many of the psycho-spiritual appetites once served by religion.

Our current higher education system is steeped in a philosophy that doubts our ability to even perceive the physical world. That philosophy is called postmodernism.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed.

Because killing random people just because they did something you don’t like makes you the bad guy.

Fry was at pains to stress that although his own sympathies leaned more left than right, both sides in this ferocious culture war were to blame. ‘Is that what is meant by the fine art of disagreement?’ he asked. ‘A plague on both their houses.’ And he concluded with this advice: ‘If someone is behaving like an arsehole, it isn’t cancelled out by you behaving like an arsehole. Be better. Not better than they are. But better than you are. The shouting, the kicking, the name calling, spitting hatred, the dogmatic distrust, all have to stop.

It doesn’t need a Che Guevara to raise a guerrilla army. The leaders have already been elected to state, local, and federal governments. Sympathizers have been infiltrated into our media establishment, entertainment industry, big tech, academia, even professional sports. Breitbart was right, ‘politics is downstream from culture.’ “You don’t need to take up arms in this war. Their weapons are hurled from social media platforms from which there is no defense and the assassinations are character assassinations. Public executions come not from a slice of the guillotine but by tweet, gleefully cheered on by the mob. You can fight it from your mom’s basement as you eat Cheetos and collect an unemployment check from the very government you seek to destroy. It doesn’t take courage, moral or physical, nor does it take resiliency. In fact, it takes the opposite of those once-lauded traits. It takes apathy. You don’t have to be creative, well-read, in shape, resourceful, or strong. The weaker your mind and body the better. You can be taken advantage of. You are ripe for recruitment. Racism is the witchcraft of the twenty-first century, and cancel culture is the stake at which you are burned.

Cancel Culture grows because we accept (and gluttonously consume) social violence. We no longer seek truth or both sides of a story. Whichever side is loudest, wins… regardless of its relationship to the truth.

Divided by fear, citizens are easier to control.

One Politburo meeting had an important topic to discuss, but before the meeting began, Jiang Qing raised a fuss, saying, 'Premier, you need to solve a serious problem for me, otherwise there will be real trouble!' Zhou Enlai asked, 'Comrade Jiang Qing, what is this serious problem?' Jiang Qing said, 'The toilet im my quarters is so cold that I can't use it in chilly weather - I'll catch the flu the moment I sit on it, and once I catch the flu, I can't go to see Chairman Mao for fear he'll catch it. Isn't this a serious matter?' Zhou Enlai said, 'How shall we deal with this? Shall I send someone to have a look at it after the meeting?' Jiang Qing found this unacceptable, saying, 'Premier, you lack class sentiment toward me; the class enemies are just waiting for me to die as soon as possible!' Zhou Enlai had no choice but to cancel the meeting and take us all over to Jiang Qing's quarters. Zhou Enlai looked at Jiang Qing's toilet and rubbed his chin thoughtfully without coming up with a solution. Finally he said, 'Comrade Jiang Qing, how about this: We don't have the technology to heat this toilet, but we could wrap the seat with insulating material, and also pad it with soft cloth, and that should solve the problem temporarily.' Jiang Qing agreed to this, and Zhou Enlai immediately told the Central Committee Secretariat to send someone over to deal with it.

Independent thinkers had been replaced by risk-averse technocrats taking orders from the government, the consortium, even the media.

Washington figures like Nancy Pelosi lined up against HCQ on the incredible grounds that it was “something that has not been approved by scientists,” and added that the drug wasn’t intended for the likes of the “morbidly obese” President Trump.

Our decisions were influenced by our education and formal training, experience, articles in scientific journals, and discussions with colleagues. To us, the CDC was less than irrelevant: it was nonexistent. I was witnessing a sea change, and I didn’t like what I saw.

On May 19 I sent a letter to the Trump administration to this effect, co-signed by seven hundred other doctors. “It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown,” I wrote.

One doctor I knew told me about a patient who was prevented from getting the wound care she required due to the quarantine measures, resulting in the amputation of her leg below the knee.

My letter was intended as a wake-up call to NIAID’s Dr. Fauci. The New Yorker had declared him “America’s Doctor.” Brad Pitt portrayed Fauci on “Saturday Night Live” as the omnicompetent medical expert with a Brooklyn accent.

Take Dr. Fauci’s blatantly unscientific statements during an interview on MSNBC on July 29: “On trials that are valid, that were randomized and controlled in the proper way, all of those trials show consistently that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of coronavirus disease or COVID-19.” The comments came a day after President Trump reiterated his support for the drug.

The drug can be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers, the young and the old.

It’s one thing for the public at large to blindly follow someone on television who seems to know

It’s one thing for the public at large to blindly follow someone on television who seems to know something. But to see physicians voluntarily surrender their medical judgment was positively surreal.

That’s when the elite media, the medical establishment, their allies in the political world, and the social media mob launched their war against a humble malaria drug.

On March 20, a day after Trump mentioned the drug, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the powerful and media-savvy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), answered “no” when asked if he thought HCQ had promise. “[T]he evidence you’re talking about … is anecdotal evidence,” he said.

Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself and has been consistently inaccurate on a massive scale, and I welcomed President Trump adding new members with different perspectives to the Task Force, which ultimately he did.

Incremental and anecdotal infection cases are irrelevant. Total numbers are irrelevant. Most of these are not even “cases” but just positive test results. Most will experience no symptoms or mild to moderate symptoms and recover quickly. Many international studies show that countries that use HCQ as an early treatment for COVID patients have an exponentially lower mortality rate. You’ll never hear that in the United States.

Is it possible to forestall cancel culture—and even civil war—by emphasizing ministries of compassion and justice for the poor within the church?

A cancel culture is people who have failed in life. People who failed to accomplished anything good .People who have failed to be themselves and to accept themselves. There is no successful person, Who can try to take away someone's plate or who can try to destroy what someone has built, because they know what does it take to accomplish and to achieve something.

One of the biggest problems with so-called "cancel culture" is not the "cancelling" itself. Instead, it the crisis of imagination that exposes our collective inability to engage the complexities of social issues with nuance. What generally happens is that when there is any significant call for accountability and justice, it is uncritically deemed "cancel culture", pointing to the few extremes as "proof". Without question, ruthless public shaming and ostracization is never ultimately beneficial to all involved. However, that fact is too often forced through a binary lens that fails to address the individual and systemic issues at play, posit restorative/transformative consequences, and require better, more informed accountability. This is further complicated by the tendency of those with social privilege to lean into the rhetoric of "dialogue" and some variety of "bothsidesism" that fails to address underlying systemic imbalances of power and relative impact of social issues, all while policing tone and emotion as though anger and hurt are disqualifying. If there is a tendency for some to lean too strongly into "cancelling"- a legitimate issue that we need to address- it is largely because it is an attempt at correcting the over-emphasis on biased, normative systems that benefit the privileged and perpetuate harm.

The term ‘hate speech’ is typically code for our hatred of the truth, not the speech.

Everything woke, turns to shit.

In life you have not made it , If they haven't tried to use your history or past life against you. to bring you down. People who have failed in life. Want to see others fail. Most people hate greatness. They feel superior and good , when they see you being a great mess. Since they can't elevate to your level. They always try to bring you down to their level.

A Christmas Without Mistletoe by Stewart Stafford What a holiday season! No deliveries of mistletoe, Could it be a Grinch-like, Cancel culture embargo? At the rate we're going, We'll have no chance to kiss, Can the Scrooge supply chain, Find salvation after Christmas? So save up your kisses, Dampen down your ardour, And maybe we can smooch, In January's restocked larder. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Do I hate the speech? Or do I hate the truth within the speech?

If it can’t stand without the props of rationalization and justification, you can be assured that it never stood to begin with and it will never stand to end with.

Democratic Socialism is just the latest Socialist movement with One-World ambitions seeking to create the perfect society of their imagination through a Cancel Culture different this time only in its advanced technological sophistication.

This is the stoic point. If you can live on rice and beans you're uncancellable because you're always rich relative to your needs.

Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their purported oppressors. This leads to a 'cancel culture' that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.

Many conservatives today fail to grasp the gravity of this threat, dismissing it as mere “political correctness”—a previous generation’s disparaging term for so-called “wokeness.” It’s easy to dismiss people like the former Soviet professor as hysterical if you think of what’s happening today as nothing more than the return of the left-wing campus kookiness of the 1990s. Back then, the standard conservative response was dismissive. Wait till those kids get out into the real world and have to find a job. Well, they did—and they brought the campus to corporate America, to the legal and medical professions, to media, to elementary and secondary schools, and to other institutions of American life. In this cultural revolution, which intensified in the spring and summer of 2020, they are attempting to turn the entire country into a “woke” college campus. Today in our societies, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, homophobes, and the like. And they are afraid to resist, because they are confident that no one will join them or defend them.

You either have to participate or vacate. Contribute or be cancelled.

Do not confuse the crippling hauntedness of judgment with the transformational power of awareness.

physicians have an imperative to live within the truth. The Hippocratic Oath, not political correctness nor government decree, must determine our actions as doctors. It wasn’t until late January 2020 that the Chinese government admitted to human-to-human transmission of a new coronavirus, named corona for the “crown” of spiky proteins the virus appears to wear when viewed under a microscope.

The Awakening Web by Stewart Stafford One defamatory word starts reputations dragging, And spreads the virulent and incessant tagging, As the cat cruelly with the mouse has toyed, By a kangaroo crucible, condemned, and destroyed. For these spiders of the great stalking portal, Do bend the ears of mobs of mortals, And spin others in silken shrouds, Shaking the web, shameless and proud. So be cautious of the image you put out, And with the carefree words that leave your mouth, For tempests form over waters calm, When self-righteous arachnids hypocritically cause harm. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 52 Humanhood isn't him, her or them, Humanhood requires realization beyond sex. Pronouns may be a step in the right direction, But they are not passport for arrogance and disrespect. The purpose is to erase hate from society, And we ain't gonna do that by passing judgment. If we want there to be equity and acceptance, We must learn to trample first our own arrogance. Rebelling for the sake of rebelling achieves nothing, Arrogance only produces just another bitter creature. In trying to fight against prejudice and oppression, Be cautious that you don't end up as the new oppressor. Revolution is the foundation of civilization's evolution, But it must be rooted in gentleness, not cancellation.

Revolution is the foundation of civilization's evolution, but it must be rooted in gentleness, not cancellation.

The political perspective of Bishara and the NDA has been adopted in principle by the majority of the Palestinian intellectual and political leadership in Israel, as reflected in the four Position Papers, released in 2007 by leading Palestinian organizations. One of the papers, “The Future Vision of the Palestinians in Israel,” was issued by the Palestinians’ highest and most authoritative representative vis-à-vis the state—the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arabs in Israel.27 All four papers demand, first and foremost, that Israel become a state of all its citizens. The Haifa Declaration, for example, calls for canceling the Law of Return, recognizing Palestinian national identity, and implementing collective national rights for Palestinians through representatives in government. These rights include, among others, the ability to veto all matters pertaining to their interests and the right for cultural autonomy.28

And then one day it hit me. Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and 1839 in the United States) it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer - the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way - I would leap into the middle of it.

That was when The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus – which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’43 It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’44 Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’45 Jeong

The common antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) had been shown to be effective against the first SARS outbreak close to two decades ago.

Then came a sudden and nonsensical reversal. The CDC announced on April 7 that there were no approved drugs to treat COVID-19. “Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are under investigation in clinical trials” for use on coronavirus patients and “there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19,” the agency’s updated guidelines stated. It was downright bizarre to single out HCQ like this, I thought. I began to suspect some kind of behind-the-scenes decision had been made to sideline the drug.

In May, the other shoe dropped. Very suddenly, “respectable” research papers were rapidly published claiming HCQ was ineffective at treating COVID-19 and dangerous. The Lancet, a British medical journal, linked HCQ with heartbeat irregularities as part of a dubious study that was later discredited. Nevertheless, changes at my hospital followed.

I smelled something fishy. How did The Lancet study researchers get more than ninety thousand patients’ data from hundreds of hospitals analyzed and published so quickly? And why was the lead researcher the only author to have seen the raw numbers? My hunch was right: as it turned out, The Lancet study was a fake.

Less than two weeks after its findings went public, The Lancet retracted its HCQ study. A retraction of such significance is nearly unheard of in this field, occurring perhaps once in a generation. The retraction and corruption of the research was never given the same attention in the press or online as the original study blasting HCQ. The public therefore was at best confused, or at worst relying on junk science.

Next, Risch noticed correctly that safety concerns among the large public health institutions seem to be driven by something other than science: namely, partisan politics.

something. But to see physicians voluntarily surrender their medical judgment was positively surreal.

I tell my friends and family to avoid the emergency department (ED) at almost any cost. While the doctors, nurses, tech and administrative staff at EDs tend to be outstanding individuals, the healthcare system as a whole is so broken that it’s harmful.

Al tempio c'è una poesia intitolata "la mancanza", incisa nella pietra. Ci sono 3 parole, ma il poeta le ha cancellate. Non si può leggere la mancanza, solo avvertirla.

Viruses spend virtually all of their time and energy replicating themselves inside a host cell. In fact, the singular goal of a virus is to make more viruses. A drug that interferes with a virus’s ability to replicate itself will neutralize it. Chemically speaking, HCQ acts as the doorman to the cell, allowing zinc to march in behind it, and it is actually the zinc which halts the viral reproduction. Zinc jams the genetic photocopier, to be sure, but HCQ enables zinc to get inside the cell in the first place.

it seemed that the business of medicine was taking priority over the practice of patient care.

I take no issue with the new cancel culture; it acts to obliterate that which is judgemental and must surely end by canceling itself.

Everyday we are complaining about scarce job opportunities and how hard is it to get employed, yet everyday on social media we are trying to get someone fired from their employment ,because we had our differences or argument with them. I think we should choose to find better ways to resolve our issues , without getting others unemployed. Cancelling someone is not solving a problem, but is avoiding it and is causing more damages, because the problem still exist. You can’t be passionate and proud, about destroying someone's life and future, unless your evil yourself. If we think we are better, than the people who wronged us. Then we should choose better ways to resolve our issues.

I take no issue with the new cancel culture; it acts to obliterate that which is offensive and must surely end by canceling itself.

An anonymous goddess. Her phone is both a video camera and the sharpest pitchfork in the room, shoeing away the big monster.

Association of dissimilar ideas “I had earlier devised an arrangement for beam steering on the two-mile accelerator which reduced the amount of hardware necessary by a factor of two…. Two weeks ago it was pointed out to me that this scheme would steer the beam into the wall and therefore was unacceptable. During the session, I looked at the schematic and asked myself how could we retain the factor of two but avoid steering into the wall. Again a flash of inspiration, in which I thought of the word ‘alternate.’ I followed this to its logical conclusion, which was to alternate polarities sector by sector so the steering bias would not add but cancel. I was extremely impressed with this solution and the way it came to me.” “Most of the insights come by association.” “It was the last idea that I thought was remarkable because of the way in which it developed. This idea was the result of a fantasy that occurred during Wagner…. [The participant had earlier listened to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’] I put down a line which seemed to embody this…. I later made the handle which my sketches suggested and it had exactly the quality I was looking for…. I was very amused at the ease with which all of this was done.” 10. Heightened motivation to obtain closure “Had tremendous desire to obtain an elegant solution (the most for the least).” “All known constraints about the problem were simultaneously imposed as I hunted for possible solutions. It was like an analog computer whose output could not deviate from what was desired and whose input was continually perturbed with the inclination toward achieving the output.” “It was almost an awareness of the ‘degree of perfection’ of whatever I was doing.” “In what seemed like ten minutes, I had completed the problem, having what I considered (and still consider) a classic solution.” 11. Visualizing the completed solution “I looked at the paper I was to draw on. I was completely blank. I knew that I would work with a property three hundred feet square. I drew the property lines (at a scale of one inch to forty feet), and I looked at the outlines. I was blank…. Suddenly I saw the finished project. [The project was a shopping center specializing in arts and crafts.] I did some quick calculations …it would fit on the property and not only that …it would meet the cost and income requirements …it would park enough cars …it met all the requirements. It was contemporary architecture with the richness of a cultural heritage …it used history and experience but did not copy it.” “I visualized the result I wanted and subsequently brought the variables into play which could bring that result about. I had great visual (mental) perceptibility; I could imagine what was wanted, needed, or not possible with almost no effort. I was amazed at my idealism, my visual perception, and the rapidity with which I could operate.

I’ve lived for nothing and might soon die for less. My Life, Part One will be cancelled midway through the first season

It all started when World Vision, a humanitarian organization I had long supported and even traveled with, announced a change to its hiring policy allowing people in same-sex marriages to work in its US offices. In response, conservative evangelicals rallied in protest, and within seventy-two hours, more than ten thousand children had lost their financial support from cancelled World Vision sponsorships. Ten thousand children. To try and stem some of the bleeding, I joined with several other World Vision bloggers to encourage my readers to sponsor children or make one-time donations to the organization, which was reeling as church after church called to cut off funding. We had raised several thousand dollars and multiple sponsorships when the CEO of World Vision announced the charity would reverse its decision and return to its old policy against gay and lesbian employees. It had worked. Using needy kids as bargaining chips in the culture war had actually worked.

The cross of Christ is the touchstone of our faith. From the beginning it has caused offense, as we have seen in Paul’s statement that the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. It is typical of American Christianity, as of American culture as a whole, to push the cross out to the margins, because we prefer a more upbeat and triumphalist form of proclamation and practice. The Great Recession put a crimp in our style for a brief time, but it has not canceled out the disturbing trends in our culture toward self-centered lives based on consumption, sensation, and instant gratification —all this coinciding with the exponential growth of the gap between the superrich and the struggling middle class, not to mention the gap between those barely holding on and the truly poor. The “word of the cross” (I Cor. 1: 18), in contrast, calls the Christian community to embrace struggle on behalf of others as the way of discipleship.

Socialists’ two favorite rhetorical tools are envy and shame, and the platform they build on is identity politics. It’s culturally sanctioned prejudice… Identity politics is a tactic of statists, who foster resentment and envy and then peddle the lie that a bigger government can make everything FAIRER. These feelings justify the cruelty inherent in identity politics. Democrats’ favorite tactic is smearing as a ‘racist’ anyone who disagrees with them, challenges their opinion, or simply exists while thinking different thoughts.” -p. 20

Grace Canceled: How Outrage is Destroying Lives, Ending Debate, and Endangering Democracy by Dana Loesch 4/ 5 stars Great book! Book summary: “Popular talk radio host and political activist Dana Loesch confronts the Left's zero-tolerance, accept-no-apologies ethos with a powerful call for a return to core American principles of grace, redemption, justice, and empathy. Diving deep into recent cases where public and private figures were shamed, fired, or boycotted for social missteps, Loesch shows us how the politics of outrage is fueling the breakdown of the American community. How do we find common ground without compromising? Loesch urges readers to meet the face of fury with grace, highlighting inspiring examples like Congressman Dan Crenshaw's appearance on Saturday Night Live.” “Socialists’ two favorite rhetorical tools are envy and shame, and the platform they build on is identity politics. It’s culturally sanctioned prejudice… Identity politics is a tactic of statists, who foster resentment and envy and then peddle the lie that a bigger government can make everything FAIRER. These feelings justify the cruelty inherent in identity politics. Democrats’ favorite tactic is smearing as a ‘racist’ anyone who disagrees with them, challenges their opinion, or simply exists while thinking different thoughts.” -p. 20 “Democrats still need the socialists to maintain power, but it’s a dangerous trade. Going explicitly socialist would doom the Democrats to the dustbin of history. Instead, they’re refashioning the party: It believes wealth is evil, government is your church and savior, and independence is selfishness. Virtue is extinct- ‘virtue signaling’ has replaced actual virtue.” -p. 24 “The socialist definition of social justice ignores merit, neuters ambition, and diminishes the equity of labor. Equal rewards for unequal effort is unjust and fosters resentment.” - pp. 26-7 “The state purports to act on behalf of ‘the common good’. But who defines the common good? It has long been the justification for monstrous acts by totalitarian governments. ...In this way, the common good becomes an excuse for total state control. That was the excuse on which totalitarianism was built. You can achieve the common goal better if there is a total authority, and you must then limit the desires and wishfulness of individuals.” -p. 27 “Socialism is the enemy of charity because it outsources all compassion and altruism to the state. Out of sight, out of mind, they may think-- an overarching theme throughout socialism and communism (and one is just a stepping-stone to the other)... What need is there for personal ambition if government will provide, albeit meagerly, for all your needs from cradle to grave?” -pp. 32-3

But this is no longer a photograph and, liter-ally speaking, it is no longer even an image. These shots may be said, rather, to be part of the murder of the image. That murder is being perpetrated continually by all the images that accumulate in series, in 'thematic' sequences, which illustrate the same event ad nauseam, which think they are accumulating, but are, in fact, cancelling each other out, till they reach the zero degree of information. There is a violence done to the world in this way, but there is also a violence done to the image, to the sovereignty of images. Now, an image has to be sovereign; it has to have its own symbolic space. If they are living images- 'aesthetic' quality is not at issue here- they ensure the existence of that symbolic space by eliminating an infinite number of other spaces from it. There is a perpetual rivalry between (true) images. But it is exactly the opposite today with the digital, where the parade of images resembles the sequencing of the genome.

Why should everything that happens be the entire world's business?

Caption and cancel culture brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.

After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17 America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.”18 There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy. The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.

In our earthly world we debate the idea of prison reform and rehabilitation, yet the cyber world’s ‘cancel-culture’ leaves no room for such hopes.

Humanity is fallible and every single one of us is capable of sin but if it were not for the hopes of one day being redeemed none of us will seek to understand our flaws and make the effort to rectify the damage our actions have made.

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.

The last stage of a Muslim takeover is the most chilling,” he concluded. “It ends with the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy, a government in which Islam becomes an all-encompassing religious, judicial, political, and cultural ideology. Shariah becomes the ‘law of the land,’ with all non-Islamic rights cancelled. Under shariah law, barbaric practices like female genital mutilation, amputation, stoning, execution of apostates and homosexuals, and military rape become commonplace. All other religions are outlawed, free speech and freedom of the press are rescinded, and non-Muslim populations are either enslaved or eliminated.” Jacob

The Soul. O true God, 5 you who see and suffer this, says this Soul, who will pay such a debt? The Soul herself answers. Ah, dear Lord, you will pay it yourself. For your immense goodness, overflowing with graciousness, could not allow me not to be released by the gift of Love, by whom in one moment you make all my debts to be paid. This sweetest Far-Near has borne the last penny of my debt, and tells me that you have as much to pay to me as I have to you. For if I owe you as much as you are worth, you owe me as much as you have; for such is the generosity of your divine nature. And therefore this noble Far-Near, of whom I have spoken before, says that these two debts should cancel one another, and from now on be all one; and I agree, for that is the counsel of my neighbor.

The David Dao incident is a classic example of how a poor articulation of company values can weaken the culture. The employees on the ground believed they needed to bump passengers from the flight so that United could get another flight crew to their plane (i.e., “flying right”) and that meeting metrics such as on-time departures and flight cancellations was more important than treating customers with “respect and dignity” (which most of us would agree does not include breaking their noses and knocking out their teeth). In contrast, Southwest Airlines is not only clear about its company values but makes them the emphasis of hiring and management. The mentality isn’t: “We’ll know it when we see it.” Instead, it is: “Does this person already live the way we do?” The company uses behavioral interview questions to determine whether candidates are a cultural fit. For example, to determine someone’s ability to be a selfless team player, they might ask her to describe a time when she went above and beyond to help a coworker succeed. The airline acknowledges that certain positions call for specific skill sets. As Southwest puts it, “We’re not going to hire a pilot who has a great attitude but can’t fly a plane!” But, when it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, the one who lives Southwest’s values receives the offer. And, even when Southwest finds a qualified candidate who doesn’t have the right values, it will keep looking until it finds someone who does—no matter how long the job has gone unfilled.

Historically, the most effective way to take an entire, large-scale functioning country from meeting the basic needs of its population to absolute starvation with very high mortality rates has been to, first, implement communism, and second, wait.

Interestingly enough, the reason people still support the idea of communism is because they ignore or are ignorant to what we’re looking at in this book; how human behavior works - what motivates humans to do anything. People don’t just work hard for no reason; expending great effort with the promise of zero reward. In fact, they always, predictably, will do the opposite, all animals will, and starvation is absolutely guaranteed when a mechanism ensuring this lack of merited reward is implemented via communism.

Las redes se han convertido en el medio ideal para instaurar nuevos dogmas y aplastar al oponente justo cuando más convendría escucharlo.

In America, communities of color have always put our "economic anxieties" second to placate the economic anxieties of "real Americans" from the "Rust Belt." We just pray and hope they will do the right thing and vote for a qualified candidate who doesn't want to put babies in camps. Sometimes it works, and other times we get Trump. If we are to be honest with ourselves, the group that has historically always played identity politics is white voters, and the rest of us have been hijacked by their rage, fear, and anxiety. Theirs are the grievances of "regular Americans from the heartland." When we voice our concerns, we are "playing the race card," engaging in victimhood, not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, abusing political correctness, and enforcing cancel culture and affirmative action.

I think things like ‘cancel culture’, call-out culture and pile-ons are sometimes necessary to draw attention to things. But I don’t believe this is going to be enough for change. Social media companies aren’t built to overthrow systemic oppression; they uphold it within the very functioning of their platforms. In addition to this, billionaires are not the people who are about to hand us the tools to overthrow power structures that they benefit from. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and ByteDance are not about to liberate us. The algorithmic functioning of social media companies simply isn’t built for marginalised people because at large they are not coded by people with marginalised experiences.

it’s fair to say that America is going through rather a turbulent period in its history. The past eighteen months alone have seen roughly three-quarters of a million deaths from contagion, a tanking economy, serious civil unrest around multiple issues dear to various shades of “left” and “right,” a bitterly contested election followed by a not precisely peaceful transfer of power, a migrant crisis at the southern border, mushrooming conspiracy theories, bitter debates around “cancel culture,” growing anxiety about the power of tech giants, and much else besides.

The police have come to represent not just racist brutality but also the chief enforcers of a heartless, corrupt, unjust

I know that ending harm may be far off yet, even unimaginable, but I also believe that the future is already alive in each of us, because all the generations to come live within the bodies, cultures, dreams, and shaping of those alive today.

Sensitive to slight, they police even unintentional verbal offenses; concerned with the oppressed, they champion minorities and vilify the privileged; reliant on help, they publicly air lists of grievances. The university is the epicenter of victimhood culture. As such it is the epicenter of microaggression complaints, as well as trigger warnings, safe spaces, and hate crime hoaxes.

The same progressive activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the banning of conservative speakers, for the forbidding of displays of support for certain political candidates, and for the creation of safe spaces where progressive ideas can go unchallenged by opposing views.

As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.

Manufacturing a case of victimhood allows the aggrieved to elicit sympathy or even to mobilize third parties such as legal authorities against their enemies. Since a victimhood culture is one where this status is most valuable, we should expect it to be especially prone to false claims of victimization.

There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser kwnos the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.

As the definition of what is harmful grows, there is a corresponding expansion of concepts related to victimization. More and more people are seen as vulnerable and in need of special protection from harms.

And just as some conceptualize racism as an inherent property of all white people, there are those who view trauma as a collective and hereditary condition shared by all members of an historically victimized group.

There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser knows the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.

Canceling a differing opinion evidences the ability of that opinion to defend what you cannot.

You can’t ‘cancel’ courage.

A rant is the attempt to overcome an opposing position through anger because the individual hasn’t been able to defeat it through fact. Therefore, to engage in a rant is to admit defeat.

(The Catholic Church was the first institutional bastion in the U.S. to oppose eugenic sterilization, not just on account of its opposition to birth control, but also because of its theological commitment to the sanctity of all human life regardless of eugenic “fitness.”)

The right to sterilize was about government interference in the reproductive process; the right to abort is about barring government interference in it. But at bottom the moral stake is arguably the same: the sanctity of human life.

Why extol the idea of changing one’s sex while simultaneously denigrating the idea of changing one’s race?

When it comes to curbing speech, experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance.

Protection,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.

You cannot tell a man’s intention by looking at his forehead, you must look through it to the inside of his head; and no judge and jury are capable of looking through the skull of a man who has done nothing but talk to see what goes on inside.” And

At its worst, the woke cult of transgenders is a cross between voyeurism and morbidity, a fascination with the sexually bizarre, a politically correct version of snuff pornography. It’s at the “intersectionality” of the lassitudinous culture of the Hamptons and the depraved sexual ennui of Hollywood.

A mathematician I consulted, Dr. Sanjeev Mahajan, had this to say: Crenshaw’s axiom can be rephrased as follows: Two categories of oppression when combined yield an entirely new, irreducible category of oppression. This seems a fair reading of her contention that the discrimination suffered by a Black woman is distinct from the sum of the discrimination that a Black person suffers plus the discrimination that a woman suffers. Let’s then consider a single individual who suffers four categories of oppression: Black (B), Female (F), Paraplegic (P), Lesbian (L). But then, per Crenshaw, we can form entirely new categories such as {BF}, {BP}, and {BL}. Then these categories can be combined to form yet another irreducible category such as {{BF}{BP}} or {{BL}{BP}}. These categories can be further combined to yield entirely new categories of oppression such as {{{BF}{BP}} {{BL}{BP}}}, etc. Now let us, per Crenshaw’s axiom, enumerate all possible irreducible categories of oppression. Given the 4 options, B F P L, there are 15 non-empty subsets, each of which is an irreducible category. Since these 15 categories are irreducible and independent, they can be combined every which way to give us 215-1= 32,767 non-empty subsets of the set of the 15 categories. Each of these 32,767 categories is an irreducible category of oppression. But then again, applying Crenshaw’s axiom, since we now have a set of 32,767 categories of oppression, we can combine them in all possible configurations to get 232767-1 non-empty subsets of a set of 32,767 categories. Repeating this process, ad infinitum, we get infinitely many categories of oppression.

What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?

Unable to defend the scientific underpinnings of their ideology in debate, liberals rely on book bans and an arsenal of coercive muzzling strategies including deplatforming, delicensing, doxxing, gaslighting, defunding, retracting, marginalizing, and vilifying scientists, physicians, journalists, and vaccine-injured Americans who complied but now refuse to toe the official line. The hallmark of Lockdown Liberalism is a bullying form of censorship called “cancel culture,” which disappears not just the heretical language, but also the heretic who uttered it.

It is those who cannot defend their argument who seek to silence those who can.

The cancel culture is born of the inability of an opinion to withstand the scrutiny of thoughtful debate. And as such, this statement is likely to be canceled.

All oblivious to my dreams, and to my state of struggle: some would greet me, smiling at me. But some laughed the hardest, laughing at me. Some would express pity, while some expressed sympathy. Some would pretend that I wasn't even there. And those who ignored me equalled my presence to that of the debris.

Nel mondo-palcoscenico di oggi spesso sapere quali termini ed espressioni linguistiche preferire, e renderlo la consuetudine fine a sé stessa di una clava da tirare in testa al primo reo che passa, equivale in tutto e per tutto al saper stare a tavola durante un inaccessibile banchetto dell’altissima borghesia, in cui al posto dell’argenteria di cui dimostrarsi avvezzi all’uso ci sono lessici impiegati da nicchie privilegiate che vanno dalle università della Ivy League agli uffici marketing delle grandi corporation.

I am saddened by those who ride the merry-go-round of circular arguments, repeatedly passing me by again and again not because they have a superior argument, but because I didn’t get on.

We need to be looking after young men a bit better before we start demonising them.

I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.

After contracting Lyme disease and operating at ~10% capacity for 9 months in 2014, I made health #1. Prior to Lyme, I’d worked out and eaten well, but when push came to shove, “health #1” was negotiable. Now, it’s literally #1. What does this mean? If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a conference call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning. In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine with paying, or I will lose weeks or months to sickness and fatigue. Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolutely all-or-nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important not to. The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health a rarity. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

But without paying attention to how and why public protest tactics are used, the phrase cancel culture has been co-opted by those most resistant to the idea of accountability to weaponize and fearmonger, changing the perception of this intervention tool from that of a strategic tactic to a blunt instrument for reactionary public takedowns for seemingly innocuous mistakes or an outright constitutional threat to free speech.