Cancel Culture and Harper's Letter

I have to admit, I did not expect to see a Jezebel headline and think, &quot;Well, that is an extremely reasonable thing to say.&quot;<p>A good section:<p>&gt;&quot;And like many religions, the cancel culture congregation is teeming with members eager to point out the sins of others to deflect from their own. Mass free expression is chaotic, clearly, which at the very least means we should be wary of pat explanations that attempt to squeeze the nature of the problem down to 500 words and place certain manners of expression in tidy boxes on either side of an ideological divide.&quot;<p>Jezebel has always (perhaps fallaciously) been considered something of a thought leader in some communities. Maybe this gutsy article, which some their audience may not like, signals a return to some kind of capacity for normal discourse among human beings.

In my view, the issue is not so much cancel culture. It’s that journalists can publish inaccurate information and libel people without any sort of punishment or way for the targeted party to respond.<p>Also, this article is extremely racist. They are supporting the decades old trope of the “uppity” black male that just won’t shut up and behave like an Uncle Tom. At least these journalists are no longer hiding what they really think about minorities.

&gt; Last year in The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu characterized social media backlash that is often seen as the root of cancel culture as not a threat to speech itself, but perhaps just noise. “It seems at least possible that tweets are just tweets—that as difficult as criticism in the social media age may be to contend with at times, it bears no meaningful resemblance to genocides, excommunications, executions, assassinations, political imprisonments, and official bans past,” wrote Nwanevu. “Perhaps we should choose instead to understand cancel culture as something much more mundane: ordinary public disfavor voiced by ordinary people across new platforms.”<p>Anti-Cancel Culture seems just as anti-Free Speech as Cancel Culture. Everyone has a right to express their opinion. And everyone has a right to react and respond to your opinion. People are allowed to boycott, demand, shun whoever they want. And &quot;cancel cancel culture&quot; folks are doing exactly that: expressing outrage, demanding change, shaming others, etc. It&#x27;s totally fine, just ironic to see people shaming people for shaming others.<p>Have people in power made bad decisions based on a few loud voices? Sure. But it&#x27;s the people in power who bare the responsibility, not the people who expressed outrage.