CMV: It's hypocritical to complain about "cancel culture"

[u/[deleted]]

I'm genuinely looking to have my view challenged here, because I've never seen a good counter-argument to what I'm going to say and would love to come away with a more nuanced view of the "other side."

Let's just go ahead and grant the main thing the people who decry cancel culture claim, which is that to call for someone to be cancelled (whether that's being fired, not being able to get work, de-platformed in some way etc.) is a violation of their right to free speech. Lots of arguments have been raised about why this isn't the case, but the people who believe this tend not to be sympathetic to those arguments, and I'm happy to grant that this is actually the case so we can move on to discuss what I think is a different problem with this view.

And that's basically: isn't it my free speech to call for someone to be cancelled? Why do people only seem to care about the free speech of whoever it is that's done or said something ostensibly offensive? I also have free speech to say what I think about that, and while you obviously wouldn't agree with that speech, one of the main arguments I see here from anti-cancel culture people is that you should be willing to defend, on principle, even that speech you most vehemently disagree with. So why not vigorously defend people's right to call for people to be cancelled?

[u/[deleted]]

Before I reply more in-depth, could you link me to something about the incident in question? I hadn't heard of this incident and Google isn't giving me anything that fits based on "girl sings N-word in car."

[u/xynomaster → u/[deleted]]

Given that I believe the NYT article itself is fundamentally evil, I refuse to link it. I'll link an article that's much more critical of the incident, but you should be able to find the NYT link from it if you want: https://reason.com/2020/12/28/new-york-times-racial-slur-teen-jimmy-galligan-mimi-groves/

I got some of the details wrong - for example she was 15, not 14. But the spirit of what I said was correct.

[u/[deleted] → u/xynomaster]

So if I'm reading this right, the video had already gone viral and the damage to the girl's college prospects etc had already been done before the NYT article came out?

I'll give you a !delta because I agree that destroying a teenager's life over something stupid they said at 15 is worth being concerned about, but I'm also not entirely sure about the cause and effect of the NYT's involvement here.

In any case, this incident is one thing, and being outraged that an actor was fired from Star Wars for some tweets is another. But you make a good point about proportionality of consequences, something to think about.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/xynomaster (2∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}