Cancelling Quotes

“I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza: Political Treatise

“The Awakening Web by Stewart Stafford

One defamatory word starts reputations dragging,
And spreads the virulent and incessant tagging,
As the cat cruelly with the mouse has toyed,
By a kangaroo crucible, condemned, and destroyed.

For these spiders of the great stalking portal,
Do bend the ears of mobs of mortals,
And spin others in silken shrouds,
Shaking the web, shameless and proud.

So be cautious of the image you put out,
And with the carefree words that leave your mouth,
For tempests form over waters calm,
When self-righteous arachnids hypocritically cause harm.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“One of the biggest problems with so-called "cancel culture" is not the "cancelling" itself. Instead, it the crisis of imagination that exposes our collective inability to engage the complexities of social issues with nuance.

What generally happens is that when there is any significant call for accountability and justice, it is uncritically deemed "cancel culture", pointing to the few extremes as "proof". Without question, ruthless public shaming and ostracization is never ultimately beneficial to all involved. However, that fact is too often forced through a binary lens that fails to address the individual and systemic issues at play, posit restorative/transformative consequences, and require better, more informed accountability.

This is further complicated by the tendency of those with social privilege to lean into the rhetoric of "dialogue" and some variety of "bothsidesism" that fails to address underlying systemic imbalances of power and relative impact of social issues, all while policing tone and emotion as though anger and hurt are disqualifying.

If there is a tendency for some to lean too strongly into "cancelling"- a legitimate issue that we need to address- it is largely because it is an attempt at correcting the over-emphasis on biased, normative systems that benefit the privileged and perpetuate harm.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci