Engaging with their terms legitimizes them. I’m not going to use “cancel culture”, it’s an unserious aspiration to victimhood by those who the status quo benefits and protects. It’s term designed to defend the status quo by obfuscating what is at stake.

We can’t effectively counter these people by listing who the real victims of “cancel culture” are, we can’t correct the application of the term. We have to reject it completely, it’s very premise is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as what the term refers to.

Advocates for Palestine are not “cancelled” they’re punished. Women who are sexually harassed or assaulted are not “cancelled”, they suffer harm. Do not subscribe to the terms pushed on us by people who insist “cancel culture” exists.

It is not in our interest to expose the hypocrisy of terms. The stakes are not the hypocrisy of the dishonest. What is at stake is power. What we have been trying to name is power, how it’s used, who has it and how much. What we have been trying to expose is power.

When arguing against the people seeking to protect their power in a society that benefits and protects them, we cannot win by seriously engaging with their unserious claims. We have to reject their propagandizing language entirely.

The version of reality people upset about “cancel culture” are insisting on is false. The phrase is designed to be weilded hypocritically. Even correcting it is more recognition that it deserves. Refuse to recognize what they claim is real, because it simply isn’t.

More importantly, the goal and effect of terms like “cancel culture” (like “social justice warrior” before it and like “political correctness” before that) is to position those in favor of the status quo as the dissenters. As the embattled opposition. As the bold truth tellers.

This is not an argument of terms, this is an argument about the nature of reality. Of history. Of factual experience and evidence. As soon as you consent to an argument of terms, they’ve won. You’ve let them get away with their positioning. Which is the goal.

Because then, they are boldly defending. They are the “dissenting voices” Offer them no position. Present no engagement they can respond to in defense because that legitimizes their claim that they have something to defend. Their goal is that very pretense, it proves their point.

And they crave the position, they crave the engagement and the outrage. Because the truth is, they have no threats. Their lives are secure. People in power don’t enjoy power, they fear losing it. Politically, psychologically, and emotionally, they need the pantomime of a fight.

So I cannot and will not show Jonathan Chait or Bari Weiss all the students that have suffered within the very institutions they claim are fortresses for unsettling student agendas against society. Or the countless other examples that prove the absurdity of their squawking.

And I reccomend you don’t either. Because the stakes are not in the columns of people who have the time and space for columns. We know this. They, on some level, do too. People are dying.

And with all that is being usurped, we can’t afford volunteering an ounce of oxygen to the recreational charades these people can make their careers on. They have only loud noises for small events and an embarrassing, albeit lucrative (for now), legacy.

I’ve spent so much of my life being told what I see hear and feel doesn’t exist. I’ve experienced the consequences of holding my beliefs anyway. We don’t need these people to validate what we know to be true about the world we live in. But they need us to. And we can just, not.

As this thread reaches more people please recognize these thoughts are specific to how one particular phrase operates as used by the media figures that deploy it against the left, those you’d recognize from the Harper’s letter and elsewhere.

It’s not about your friend getting cyber bullied. It’s my view of the prominent people who keep trying to characterize the trans rights movement and BLM and unhappy @ replies to them as democracy threatening cyber bullying operations. It’s goofy.

“Cancel culture” and the way it’s used collapses obvious material and political differences between the types of consequences possible and the people who experience them. Who they advantage versus who they can newly harm or bother versus whose marginalization they reproduce.

That rhetorical collapse equates events as disparate as a rapist being outed and a pundit receiving criticism or a black protestor being doxed and killed. It keeps us from actual critical thinking around punishment and harms and power, and how the digital and analog interact.

People should grapple with those questions. But with some integrity and self awareness. And we already have the words to do that. We don’t need to cede ground to the right wing while indulging safe and secure people’s whining. Again, the stakes are higher. It’s not worthwhile.

Anything called “cancel culture” is already something else, name it. We can describe events as they factually are. Those that avoid naming what they mean, & who they’re speaking of, are hiding their intentions. This malleable, recklessly used phrase isnt. trustworthy or helpful.

an example of my point that the phrase isn’t helpful or needed but in fact makes it more difficult to discuss existing social issues, which we already have direct language for https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1281426637586755585?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1281426637586755585

example of what I mean when I say they crave the arguing bc it affirms how they position themselves (as “under attack”)...the terms are designed to allow themselves this feeling. speaking of misuse of words...”wars”..gross.

accurate impression of these people https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-10/harpers-open-letter-free-speech-cancel-culture-twitter

example of avoiding direct language, instead of naming who and what they’re addressing (which would expose their priorities) there’s vague righteousness. Here the left is both an aggressive threat to free society and a weak allergy to debate.

while we could ask her the same question she poses...this is also the typical masking of stakes. The left is capable of being both frightening and thin skinned bc the aim isn’t to coherently describe reality it’s to establish and limit the terms available for a response.

This has been done for years. 2014 black feminists on twitter were characterized as “toxic twitter” warmongers. Goal is to locate the stakes in feelings instead of the material reality & harms of the transphobia & racism (which they equate to an unfollow even in the illustration)

The obvious irony of announcing you’re being silenced in a major publication isn’t as important as how these people occupy public media in an effort to retain a hold on outlets for information,

outlets which are mostly archaic institutions approaching a financial bankruptcy that matches their moral bankruptcy.

I’ve been avoiding voicing these thoughts for years now. But since we are in a competition to describe reality and inform each other about the world we live in, towards improving it, I wanted to remind us we can reject the impositions of the emotionally insecure and feckless.

Especially since I can be just as verbose as those dorks, but a little more precise.

I don’t need to mention the indecency of complaining about one’s @ replies in a newspaper column during the fever pitch of global wars, border & police violence, white nationalism, economic precarity and a pandemic bc the people I value and am speaking to here already know this.