The headline for this article is: “Are those with the power to cancel people wielding that power responsibly?”
My answer to that question is no one should have the power to cancel anyone else.
I’ve said before that I find it perplexing that workers can be fired for actions which have nothing to do with their competence nor are a criminal offence.
Why on earth are employers allowed the right fire employees based on their private lives?
Excellent question. Despite the extensive coverage of cancel culture it’s hard to find in-depth articles describing strategies for legal recourse against cancellation. Once upon a time the ACLU (in America) would have been all over this type of behavior but, sadly, that organization is now thoroughly woke.
If you haven’t read it already I recommend Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Woke, Inc” where, among other things, he outlines some legal theories that could be used to push back against corporate wokeism, such as limiting the protection afforded by LLC status to only those corporate actions taken directly in furtherance of business, not politics.
Ramaswamy is a business wonderkind who now appears to be laying the ground work for a political career. His book is quite self serving but it does provide useful insight into why and how corporations became so woke and, as mentioned, he suggests strategies for pushing back. We’ll probably need some high profile cases to clarify the law in this area.
The whole problem regarding cancel culture isn’t helped by the lax labour laws, in America especially. It’s far too easy to sack an employee over there so workers, many of whom are already struggling financially, are understandably reluctant to fight back too much in fear of losing their livelihood.
Change the law so you can’t sack somebody for something that happens on social media outside of work hours and you’ll take away much of the power these people have instantly.
I believe that most American workers have their medical insurance through their jobs. Lose your job; lose your cover.
Brits are less threatened in this way.
Tom Lewis
2 years ago
Who can forget Benedict Cumberbatch’s grovelling apology, to save his career (did it work ?) when he called ‘black’ actors ‘coloured’, rather than ‘POC’. A classic example of offence being taken when no offence was given, or intended,
An ever movable feast, and deliberately so, of potential offence, guarded by the self appointed gatekeepers, designed with one aim, to ensure that, even when you’re trying to be correct, right on, and as inoffensive as possible, you can be had, brought down to size, destroyed.
I think it used, in the olden days, to be called fascism.
This rule about ‘coloured person’ or ‘person of colour’; who makes it?
In the French language they have an authority (Acadamie Francaise) to legislate correct language. We don’t. So, who banned ‘coloured’?
and occasionally, we *utt heads the way neighbours tend to do
Last week I tried to post the statement ‘every joke must have a *utt’ on this forum and had it rejected. This article uses the offensive word. The censorship is right here already
The irony of the Cumberbatch grovel for his violation of the abstruse semantics of ‘coloured’ rather than ‘person of colour’ is that the largest and oldest civil rights organisation in the US is the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Reminds me of the utterly confected outrage when some judge used the phrase “sexual preference” and we were all expected to go along with the notion that this was an offensive comment, and always had been. The goalposts move in real time, and the whole point is to try and ‘catch’ people to cement your place among the righteous.
The Western World is coming to be dominated by the type of snivelling creep who used to be shunned by all normal people. Tell-tales, curtain-twitchers and the kind of people who used to write to the BBC. For some unclear reason, they’ve gained power.
D Ward
2 years ago
I have a friend that grew up in Romania. Her stories about how they had to watch everything they said and whom they said it to were horrifying when i first heard them 10 years ago. Now we are in the same place. Astonishing.
Not really astonishing. It’s what the left does, takes the words out of peoples’ mouths, deprives them of vocabulary and makes it impossible for them to articulate their case. George Orwell warned about it in 1984. Romania was a leftist state, and the west is now in the grip of the left. There should be no astonishment that a pig grunts.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
As in so many of these things, the person doing this seems far more repugnant than the real victim. And here he is claiming victimhood. He is hardly a wise and responsible adult.
Judy Englander
2 years ago
Behind all of this is the ‘social justice’ ideology. But that ideology doesn’t stretch to being just, no matter your colour or your ethnicity’s history. I don’t care what colour you are, it isn’t just to destroy another human because you allege they’ve offended you. It’s malicious and plain evil. It takes us back to a pre-rule of law society where the local baron could destroy someone on a whim. Offence-hunting ‘social justice’ is diametrically opposite to being just.
Even among people who agree that Sarley’s punishment was grossly disproportionate to whatever she might have done, there’s a tendency to shrug it off as something she could’ve avoided, if only she were more careful. “This is just the world we live in,” they say. “If it were me, I would simply never say or do anything that could cause me to be accused of racism.”
See, there’s the problem right there. Not saying anything which could be interpreted as racist by a reasonable person won’t help because you’re not dealing with reasonable people. The people who go around screaming “racist” are not acting from any place of sincerity. Narcissism, the idea of the self as special, unique and somehow actually better than others is a disease that is killing our society. 999 times out of a thousand, those accusing others of racism are actually accusing them of refusing to kiss their narcissistic backsides and call it ice cream: essentially, they’re accusing them of refusing to acknowledge the narcissist’s superiority. It’s always about power, it’s never about racism.
Last edited 2 years ago by Francis MacGabhann
Mikey Mike
2 years ago
A year later, a video of Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann smiling in front of a Native American protestor resulted in wall-to-wall media coverage, death threats, and the mass condemnation of a group of high school kids as evil white supremacists — even after additional footage revealed that the true story was somewhat more complicated.
Somewhat? What is “somewhat” about the kids not being guilty of any of the things of which they were accused? You should probably check some less partisan sources, ma’am.
Indeed. “somewhat more complicated”? More like “quite the opposite”.
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
Maybe dog parks in certain places in America should be renamed Great Dog Runs, or GDR for short. A place where you can step back into the recent past and experience the lives of East Germans who had had to be very careful about what they said and in whose earshot they said it. They could not even look over their shoulder knowing that even that gesture would draw suspicion. People learned to keep their head down in the old GDR. If not, the barking of denouncements came the usurper’s way.
The West Germans, on the other hand, were the creative bunch. Things stagnated in East Germany. No surprise that Kraftwerk came from the West, for example. And that’ll be the outcome of a fearful people who must tip-toe through their daily lives lest they are revealed to be very naughty people for having spoiled all their good works and kindnesses as a result of one dastardly, miserable, heart-breaking, insane thing they did …. that put ‘em in the doghouse. Let’s face it: nobody wants to end up in the doghouse. But because of glorious technology, strangely enough the good country could go to the dogs. Just like that!
Take a look at the film ‘The Lives of Others’.Set in the GDR…….the Stasi are now alive and well in the West.
Jeremy Bray
2 years ago
In Priestly’s “An Inspector Calls” members of a family are called out for exercising their social power to cancel the employment and other life opportunities of a factory girl who has supposedly been driven to suicide by their revenges over perceived slights on her part. Perhaps a halt to this trend to wreck someone’s life over petty slights will only occur after a few high profile suicides by the victims. Racial minorities now appear to be able to exercise the petulant power reserved to princes and the socially superior in former days.
It is surely time for employers to develop a better sense of proportion before they dismiss someone for a petty piece of ill judged behaviour or comment.
I’m afraid suicides won’t stop this. The left doesn’t care about individual lives, only about their ideology. If people start killing themselves, the left will just assume that means they’re not doing enough lefty stuff and they need to double down.
Just one more step by the Left to exercise complete control over our lives. This is one to the final steps toward a Communist state. Read Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals”, published in 1970, for the instructions he gives to radicals who want to bring about a socialist state. This is all happening right before our eyes.
Mo Brown
2 years ago
This article oddly omits discussion of the real tragedy and the logical conclusion of all of this behavior – re-segregation and the destruction of hard earned racial progress over the years and decades. Common people tend to avoid hypersensitive fairies who can unleash magical hell on them at any moment.
Ian Moore
2 years ago
What the do-gooders who enable this nonsense don’t realise is that the main protagonists in this situation, those carrying out these “cancellations” will not stop at “equality”. This is a power grab, pure and simple, now they have the podium they are not giving it back. No doubt there are genuine people somewhere in this sordid mess, who are interested in real social justice, but the vast majority see this as a way to grab money, power and eventually control over the masses. Gleefully and naively aided by bien pensant imbeciles who think cancelling, tearing down statues, defunding police, sloganeering, flag waving and all the other myopic rubbish is in their best interests. You only need to look at places like Sweden now, where the “social elite” decried ordinary Swedes as being racist over deeply irresponsible immigration policy are now living in fear of what they have done. People in America, and all the other places following suit, need to wake up and deal with this properly.
Positive action should never and can never be to the detriment of anybody else, otherwise you are just transferring problems.
Steve White
2 years ago
There used to be State power to destroy the lives of others such as in the time of McCarthyism even though it was legal in theory to be a member or supporter of the Communist Party. Now it is networks that form a mob and pressure employers and State.
William Hickey
2 years ago
“He screams in pain as he attacks you.”
Kat L
2 years ago
yah, that train has left the station, never to return. this country is imploding, cancel culture is just one of the cancers metastasizing the whole.
Dawn McD
2 years ago
Everything mentioned in the last paragraph is what these Marxists want to destroy. They have no use for our individualism, our common humanity, or actual diversity. Their idea of diversity is literally skin deep, a room full of people who look different but have no diversity of thought.
We need more people, and especially more employers, to grow a spine and not cave in to the cancellation mob in a panic. This is supposed to be a country of due process, not Judge Dredd.
mike otter
2 years ago
Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The b*****d- a phrase u can interpret nay way u like with regard to this article
mike otter
2 years ago
Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The B’stard – a phrase u can interpret any way u like with regard to this article
The headline for this article is: “Are those with the power to cancel people wielding that power responsibly?”
My answer to that question is no one should have the power to cancel anyone else.
I’ve said before that I find it perplexing that workers can be fired for actions which have nothing to do with their competence nor are a criminal offence.
Why on earth are employers allowed the right fire employees based on their private lives?
Excellent question. Despite the extensive coverage of cancel culture it’s hard to find in-depth articles describing strategies for legal recourse against cancellation. Once upon a time the ACLU (in America) would have been all over this type of behavior but, sadly, that organization is now thoroughly woke.
If you haven’t read it already I recommend Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Woke, Inc” where, among other things, he outlines some legal theories that could be used to push back against corporate wokeism, such as limiting the protection afforded by LLC status to only those corporate actions taken directly in furtherance of business, not politics.
Ramaswamy is a business wonderkind who now appears to be laying the ground work for a political career. His book is quite self serving but it does provide useful insight into why and how corporations became so woke and, as mentioned, he suggests strategies for pushing back. We’ll probably need some high profile cases to clarify the law in this area.
The whole problem regarding cancel culture isn’t helped by the lax labour laws, in America especially. It’s far too easy to sack an employee over there so workers, many of whom are already struggling financially, are understandably reluctant to fight back too much in fear of losing their livelihood.
Change the law so you can’t sack somebody for something that happens on social media outside of work hours and you’ll take away much of the power these people have instantly.
it depends on which group you belong to.
American labour laws are a lot less protective (of employees) than ours.
I believe that most American workers have their medical insurance through their jobs. Lose your job; lose your cover.
Brits are less threatened in this way.
Who can forget Benedict Cumberbatch’s grovelling apology, to save his career (did it work ?) when he called ‘black’ actors ‘coloured’, rather than ‘POC’. A classic example of offence being taken when no offence was given, or intended,
An ever movable feast, and deliberately so, of potential offence, guarded by the self appointed gatekeepers, designed with one aim, to ensure that, even when you’re trying to be correct, right on, and as inoffensive as possible, you can be had, brought down to size, destroyed.
I think it used, in the olden days, to be called fascism.
This rule about ‘coloured person’ or ‘person of colour’; who makes it?
In the French language they have an authority (Acadamie Francaise) to legislate correct language. We don’t. So, who banned ‘coloured’?
Last week I tried to post the statement ‘every joke must have a *utt’ on this forum and had it rejected. This article uses the offensive word. The censorship is right here already
The irony of the Cumberbatch grovel for his violation of the abstruse semantics of ‘coloured’ rather than ‘person of colour’ is that the largest and oldest civil rights organisation in the US is the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Reminds me of the utterly confected outrage when some judge used the phrase “sexual preference” and we were all expected to go along with the notion that this was an offensive comment, and always had been. The goalposts move in real time, and the whole point is to try and ‘catch’ people to cement your place among the righteous.
The Western World is coming to be dominated by the type of snivelling creep who used to be shunned by all normal people. Tell-tales, curtain-twitchers and the kind of people who used to write to the BBC. For some unclear reason, they’ve gained power.
I have a friend that grew up in Romania. Her stories about how they had to watch everything they said and whom they said it to were horrifying when i first heard them 10 years ago. Now we are in the same place. Astonishing.
Not really astonishing. It’s what the left does, takes the words out of peoples’ mouths, deprives them of vocabulary and makes it impossible for them to articulate their case. George Orwell warned about it in 1984. Romania was a leftist state, and the west is now in the grip of the left. There should be no astonishment that a pig grunts.
As in so many of these things, the person doing this seems far more repugnant than the real victim. And here he is claiming victimhood. He is hardly a wise and responsible adult.
Behind all of this is the ‘social justice’ ideology. But that ideology doesn’t stretch to being just, no matter your colour or your ethnicity’s history. I don’t care what colour you are, it isn’t just to destroy another human because you allege they’ve offended you. It’s malicious and plain evil. It takes us back to a pre-rule of law society where the local baron could destroy someone on a whim. Offence-hunting ‘social justice’ is diametrically opposite to being just.
Great comment. Who knew Social Justice Warriors could be so unjust?
If the question was meant seriously, I’d say “anyone who has followed them at all”. But I assume that it was actually facetious and rhetorical.
In a word, it’s bullying.
Even among people who agree that Sarley’s punishment was grossly disproportionate to whatever she might have done, there’s a tendency to shrug it off as something she could’ve avoided, if only she were more careful. “This is just the world we live in,” they say. “If it were me, I would simply never say or do anything that could cause me to be accused of racism.”
See, there’s the problem right there. Not saying anything which could be interpreted as racist by a reasonable person won’t help because you’re not dealing with reasonable people. The people who go around screaming “racist” are not acting from any place of sincerity. Narcissism, the idea of the self as special, unique and somehow actually better than others is a disease that is killing our society. 999 times out of a thousand, those accusing others of racism are actually accusing them of refusing to kiss their narcissistic backsides and call it ice cream: essentially, they’re accusing them of refusing to acknowledge the narcissist’s superiority. It’s always about power, it’s never about racism.
Somewhat? What is “somewhat” about the kids not being guilty of any of the things of which they were accused? You should probably check some less partisan sources, ma’am.
Indeed. “somewhat more complicated”? More like “quite the opposite”.
Maybe dog parks in certain places in America should be renamed Great Dog Runs, or GDR for short. A place where you can step back into the recent past and experience the lives of East Germans who had had to be very careful about what they said and in whose earshot they said it. They could not even look over their shoulder knowing that even that gesture would draw suspicion. People learned to keep their head down in the old GDR. If not, the barking of denouncements came the usurper’s way.
The West Germans, on the other hand, were the creative bunch. Things stagnated in East Germany. No surprise that Kraftwerk came from the West, for example. And that’ll be the outcome of a fearful people who must tip-toe through their daily lives lest they are revealed to be very naughty people for having spoiled all their good works and kindnesses as a result of one dastardly, miserable, heart-breaking, insane thing they did …. that put ‘em in the doghouse. Let’s face it: nobody wants to end up in the doghouse. But because of glorious technology, strangely enough the good country could go to the dogs. Just like that!
Take a look at the film ‘The Lives of Others’.Set in the GDR…….the Stasi are now alive and well in the West.
In Priestly’s “An Inspector Calls” members of a family are called out for exercising their social power to cancel the employment and other life opportunities of a factory girl who has supposedly been driven to suicide by their revenges over perceived slights on her part. Perhaps a halt to this trend to wreck someone’s life over petty slights will only occur after a few high profile suicides by the victims. Racial minorities now appear to be able to exercise the petulant power reserved to princes and the socially superior in former days.
It is surely time for employers to develop a better sense of proportion before they dismiss someone for a petty piece of ill judged behaviour or comment.
The irony is that minority groups and their advocates claim they are disempowered, while all the while exhibiting great power
The other irony is that GCSE English pupils study “An Inspector Calls” as part of their syllabus
I’m afraid suicides won’t stop this. The left doesn’t care about individual lives, only about their ideology. If people start killing themselves, the left will just assume that means they’re not doing enough lefty stuff and they need to double down.
Correct, suicide will be taken as proof of guilt and seen as a just and proportional punishment.
Just one more step by the Left to exercise complete control over our lives. This is one to the final steps toward a Communist state. Read Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals”, published in 1970, for the instructions he gives to radicals who want to bring about a socialist state. This is all happening right before our eyes.
This article oddly omits discussion of the real tragedy and the logical conclusion of all of this behavior – re-segregation and the destruction of hard earned racial progress over the years and decades. Common people tend to avoid hypersensitive fairies who can unleash magical hell on them at any moment.
What the do-gooders who enable this nonsense don’t realise is that the main protagonists in this situation, those carrying out these “cancellations” will not stop at “equality”. This is a power grab, pure and simple, now they have the podium they are not giving it back. No doubt there are genuine people somewhere in this sordid mess, who are interested in real social justice, but the vast majority see this as a way to grab money, power and eventually control over the masses. Gleefully and naively aided by bien pensant imbeciles who think cancelling, tearing down statues, defunding police, sloganeering, flag waving and all the other myopic rubbish is in their best interests. You only need to look at places like Sweden now, where the “social elite” decried ordinary Swedes as being racist over deeply irresponsible immigration policy are now living in fear of what they have done. People in America, and all the other places following suit, need to wake up and deal with this properly.
Positive action should never and can never be to the detriment of anybody else, otherwise you are just transferring problems.
There used to be State power to destroy the lives of others such as in the time of McCarthyism even though it was legal in theory to be a member or supporter of the Communist Party. Now it is networks that form a mob and pressure employers and State.
“He screams in pain as he attacks you.”
yah, that train has left the station, never to return. this country is imploding, cancel culture is just one of the cancers metastasizing the whole.
Everything mentioned in the last paragraph is what these Marxists want to destroy. They have no use for our individualism, our common humanity, or actual diversity. Their idea of diversity is literally skin deep, a room full of people who look different but have no diversity of thought.
We need more people, and especially more employers, to grow a spine and not cave in to the cancellation mob in a panic. This is supposed to be a country of due process, not Judge Dredd.
Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The b*****d- a phrase u can interpret nay way u like with regard to this article
Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The B’stard – a phrase u can interpret any way u like with regard to this article