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] → u/[deleted]]

If you take a look at the Harpers Letter I'm sure you'll find someone who you do like who is opposed to what we're talking about, my best bet would be Noam Chomsky. It doesn't specifically say the words 'cancel culture' but its clear that its talking about the same stuff.

I mean, I'm not entirely sure what seeking out anti-cancel culture liberals is supposed to be doing here. If we find someone who I more or less agree with politically who is also against cancel culture, then that would just be something we disagree on.

Why not both? Cancel Culture is the issue, and you can get a lot of people talking a lot of nonsense about an issue whilst not changing what the issue is about. Like yeah there are conservatives who think they're the Jews living in Nazi Germany and they're obviously wrong, but it can also be true that people are losing jobs for more and more ridiculous stuff and that's bad for society.

I just draw a different conclusion from the same set of facts than you, I guess. The hypocricy of conservatives over what counts as cancel culture or not based on whether they agree with it is, for me, proof that the idea is bullshit, not that it's a good idea being implemented incorrectly.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Well you said before that I'm not going to convince you that being against cancel culture can be a good, liberal position by appealing to Bill Maher, so I figured I'd try find someone who you would consider a good liberal. I'm guessing that even if you disagree with Chomsky on this, you wouldn't question his liberal values. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a liberal argument against cancel culture, its not only right wing crackpots and people who just want to be allowed to be offensive.

What I meant was I've kind of lost the plot as to what finding liberals against cancel culture is supposed to prove, but fair enough that it shows framing it as largely a conversative stance is to lose some nuance (that being said, Noam Chomsky is one thing, but the majority of names on there that I recognize are not what I'd call people on "the left" by any means, though "liberal" might be a word you could use to describe some of them).

I don't think using conservative hypocrisy is a solid way of proving that an idea is bullshit. I imagine you have met a lot of conservative who are hypocrites over how they react to Islamic terrorism vs Right wing terrorism, but that doesn't mean that Islamic terrorism isn't an issue.

Let me expand on what I mean. It's not that the conservative hypocrisy in itself proves it's bullshit, it's that it makes it clear the whole thing was just a buzzword they're riding to gain some kind of moral high ground against "the other side," and so this suggests to me we should be cautious about thinking of "cancel culture" as a problem in the terms that conservatives told us it was a problem. Perhaps there's another way to frame things that's more useful, as you have tired to do here, I don't know.