Cancel Culture: A letter from Prison

[Kamala Harris]

I am holding these old papers, crumpled and worn for having changed hiding-places so often, and I read them over again. They were written in secret, unknown to @mu4, and as such, they express a kind of survival of my independence; that is why they are dear to me, if only as mere objects-the plain reality of paper. They were written at times when I was struggling, through writing, to overcome the anguish of being in prison. They are simply fragments of that anguish. And yet I did not write them for myself alone..

My only friends are these rats that mock me and eat cheese. There are friends in other cells as well, such as @Joe Biden. We are mercilessly separated by the barbed wire which fences in humanity in this cancel-culture we have today.

It is as if they were standing on dry land, while we are being drawn far away at sea by a strong dark current. It is only natural, then, that these signals of distress should be addressed to them. This is precisely what I am doing, sending smoke signals to my friends, both to those I have known and to those I have not chanced to meet. Signals that do not say very much and that certainly do not ask for anything. But they do give me something very precious: the feeling that I still exist, and that they exist too.

Would they
See a poor girl?
No siree.
They'd find out
There's so much
More to me

[Computer Loser]

But in the current digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness.

Never fading, always accessible.

Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slanders, gas lighting… All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.

It will only slow down social progress,

It’s not just censorship, but controlling the context.

The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths.
Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you.

You exercise your right to freedom and this is the result

All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt.

The untested truths spun by different interest continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.

Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of larger forum.

They stay inside their little ponds,

Leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.

The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh.

No one is invalidated. But nobody is right.

And this is how things will end.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

[Computer Loser]

[gone]

Anyone who's supportive of cancel culture is a fucking retard

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Most people, especially the mobs or normal people- need a villain in order to feel like a Hero. They need a scapegoat, a devil to fight to make their own shitty lives better.

And "being liberal" in America really isn't about liberating anything or being a leftist but about another type of dogmatic authoritarianism.

OTOH I don't think one should just sadistically bully minorities all day trying to get a rise out of us and then blame us for being "oversensitive" all the time then crying victim when we do fight back and give you a taste of your own sadism - but the PC thing and forced representation/Tokenism is really problematic and hurting society.

I was watching some shows from the 90s yesterday - whoah it was so much more innocent then. Stuff felt so much real and 'natural' and less way talking down on you. ((I'm sure there was still this thing but everything just felt so much more like 'whoah that actually kinda felt real and humane.'))

Then there is blaming another group for your own failures which does work both ways. I can't blame normal white straight males or whatever (lol) for my own fuck ups and they don't get a pass to hatefully project and blame me for theirs either.

The fact that we are responsible for our own selves and to make our own selves happy is lost on too many people.

"Many people don't want to truly end discrimination or prejudice, or racism/homophobia. They just want to be the ones that get to hold the whip." I guess this is hypocritical of me because I get power easily wherever I go- but that's not because I'm gay. That's cuz I'm a bad-ass.

[marooned]

Cancel culture seems connected to the constriction of moral views that comes with rising extremism. Ideas like:

• If you do not condemn X, then you are actually supporting it
• Silence is violence
• You are either for X or you are against it, there is nothing else
• Silence is acquiescence
• Words are as cutting and deadly as knives
• If you associate with anyone who has even one extreme view/idea, you are yourself a dangerous extremist
• You are either 100% morally pure by some standard or you are 100% evil

To not cancel someone in this 0/1 thinking is to tolerate them and every belief they may hold on a societal level, is to allow for them as they continue to murder people just by speaking, and ofc all words are assumed to lead to direct violence because there actually are some fringe extremist people who will carry out violence (the fringe minority and how dangerous it is, is assumed to be everyone). It's an insane hysterical way of thinking. The US isn't Nazi Germany. This kind of thinking creates Nazi Germanys.

The more people see extremism increasing among those different than them, those they fear, the more afraid people become and the more prone to becoming more extreme themselves. In this way everything starts winding up into a tense tight coil or paranoia, 0/1 thinking, imaginings of horrors (like labor camps, war, genocide). The more it winds the more it becomes possible for what is feared to actually occur. The answer is to unwind the thinking, restore what comes between 0 and 1, reduce fear, etc.

The future can be created out of collective fears, the more it's feared, the more it's focused on, the more it begins to become reality.

[xerx]

IMO, the most interesting thing about cancel culture is how it has changed conservatism.

The so-called victims who really milked the anti-SJW message to rise to influential positions — folks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, nevermind QAnon and other harebrained nonsense — are such mediocrities, that their rise may have the most detrimental effect on conservatism itself, both in terms of its appeal and its political acumen.

One can hope, at any rate.

[xerx]

Are we watching the protracted ritual suicide of the Republican party? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...d-execute.html

[Adam Strange]

IMO, the most interesting thing about cancel culture is how it has changed conservatism.

The so-called victims who really milked the anti-SJW message to rise to influential positions — folks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, nevermind QAnon and other harebrained nonsense — are such mediocrities, that their rise may have the most detrimental effect on conservatism itself, both in terms of its appeal and its political acumen.

One can hope, at any rate.

Nah. There is no bottom.

[Adam Strange]

Are we watching the protracted ritual suicide of the Republican party? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...d-execute.html

I can't access that article, but I can say that about 42% of Americans still support Trump. Fox News knows its audience.

[xerx]

Nah. There is no bottom.

As an interesting political strategy, Twitter could permaban a baboon who flings his faeces at zookeepers.