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Friendly reminder that if our pasts were audited the same way public figures pasts are audited, we would all be cancelled too. Angry audiences aren't practicing empathy nearly as much as they think they are.
This isn't to say that awful actions shouldn't warrant punishment. They should but, we should be willing to consider a broad amount of context before doling out justice. If we take Shane's case. He wasn't persecuted when millions of people were watching those videos 10 yrs ago.
Why? Because the world was different, and as a result, he, and the rest of us were different too. This punishment based on a retrospective view is not a great route to take imo. Young Shane wasn't in control of the cultural shift that has taken place in the last decade.
Thus, he couldn't predict which actions would retrospectively be viewed in a negative light. It seems obvious now that his jokes were absurd and frankly not funny but, that was VERY par for the course in 2010.
There are cases where retrospective justice is completely fine (i.e. D'elia) but, I think we need to be careful with what we decide to persecute. When you can find 60 celebs who've done blackface & made extremely explicit jokes pre-2010;
maybe it's worth considering that they're not horrible people. They were simply existing in a time where that behavior was commonplace. We're obviously moving in the right direction. I just don't want that movement to be taken less seriously by focusing on the wrong things.
