Vent Switch: Why I Am Not Against Canceling
Based upon my observations, some facts about the latest American absurdity we all know and hate: canceling.
First, the terms “canceling” and “cancel culture” are, like nearly everything else in American culture, dumb sounding and immature, the fruit of intellectually and spiritually stunted minds. But that’s a hurdle we’re just going to need to get over because this is an intellectually and spiritually stunted country.
Canceling, at its base, is about removing a person or idea from the bounds of acceptable discourse. This can be done, contra to many idiots who tell you otherwise, by any combination of government, private entity big business, tech corporation, or any other organization with (a) a common set of values and (b) a vested interest in ruthlessly punishing anyone or anything to violates those values.
Our misfortune is that the powers that be all have the same values, and their values are evil.
It works like this:
Someone or something is found to have violated those values.The powers that be mobilize their shock troops, usually really, really, really emotionally unstable, low-value, and easily manipulated freaks online, to point and shriek.Those in charge use the pointing and shrieking as proof that the person or thing they’ve targeted is evil.These entities coordinate their efforts to make association with the thing or person professionally and personally costly.The person or thing is not allowed to conduct their business because all sympathetic and amenable authorities conspire to keep them pushed to the margins.Anyone who dares to associate with the canceled person or thing is likewise smeared and canceled.It’s not that difficult, but people get the process and the point of it wrong all the time. It is censorship by another name, but the difference is that it’s not done by the government. This is what makes it worse.“Private businesses can do anything they want!” libertarians and conservatives say (to be fair, many progressives do as well to mock conservatives and libertarians who complain). But like usual, they neglect several important points, among them:
The government has outsourced censorship. That is the great American innovation: privatizing oppression.No one and nothing gives private businesses the right to control so much of the public discourse.No one and nothing gives private businesses the right to dictate who can engage in commerce.There are many other misconceptions, both deliberate and accidental, about canceling that I have seen. Here are a few:
Canceling is not, for example, Christian parents refusing to expose their kids to disgusting and degenerate mainstream American culture.Canceling is a coordinated effort among all channels of production and commerce to refuse selling something.Canceling is not a boycott whereby private citizens decide en masse not to give money to people who hate them.This last point about boycotting is one thing that drives me nuts. Progressives and libertarians do the same thing: “You hypocrites are against canceling but you boycott!” Yet there is nothing hypocritical about choosing not to spend money on things created by people who hate you, and encouraging others to do the same. A boycott does not remove a person or thing from the public discourse. It is merely a signal that you and others of a like mind object to said thing or person and will be taking your business elsewhere. Like usual, though, extremely online libertarians laugh at and mock private individuals doing something that is not censorship or canceling, yet defend big businesses from doing the actual censoring and canceling. I just don’t understand it, and I’m just as embarrassed that I used to call myself a libertarian as I am that I used to call myself a conservative.
A few final points about canceling:
It works.It should have been used by normal people decades ago.Being against the censorship or removal from public discourse of destructive ideas is so stupid that it beggars belief. “I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it” is, shall we say, a cognitively impaired point of view. Censorship works and should be used to nip bad ideas in the bud. “If you censor or ban something you get more of it!” is total nonsense. If that was the case, all of these canceled people and things would have greater influence now than they did pre-cancellation. Yet they don’t.
People love to use the argument about Prohibition, but what they decline to tell you was that Prohibition worked. Alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths dropped sharply and there is evidence that it didn’t lead to a massive increase of crime and violence.
Further, this anti-censorship free-speech purity, like most pie-in-the-sky libertarian fantasies, only works if every single person is on board. You only need one defector to ruin things. Unfortunately, our defectors are the entities who have all the power . . . power given to them by ostensible opposition that didn’t oppose anything.
It feels good to say you’d never burn books, and the book burners were always the bad guy, and so on. But it doesn’t matter. When the baleful Eye of Progressivism turns on you, your moral high ground won’t protect you one fraction of an iota. All that matters is friend/enemy. Wake up and get in the game.
Anyway, imagine where we’d be if we censored all of the horrible ideas that are now mainstream instead of actually taking groups like the ACLU seriously defended reprehensible speech. We wouldn’t have actual, literal demons saying stuff like this, and you being punished for disagreeing with them:
As always, the end result of progressivism is sex with children. And as always, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, but an iron law.
