I think each side of the Cancel Culture debate sometimes practices a kind of moral flattening. A misconstrued joke is different to someone potentially putting a man's life in danger, which is different to a political activist, which is different to a provocative columnist.
I write in Shamed that shamings are always about more than the transgression, but you can't look at a shaming and ignore the nature of the transgression either. Some on the right and centre like to criticize ALL online shamings, no matter the circumstances...
Some people on the left want to put minor transgressions and major transgressions in the same bag, to make the minor ones seem more major. We can't have a world where people can do whatever the fuck they want without consequences. That wouldn't work, and I wouldn't want it to!
So while I'm obviously very much against bullying, death threats, disproportionate shamings, frightening people into bland behavior, all the things I wrote a book criticizing, I also think it's crazy for an agent provocateur writer, say, to call criticism cancellation.
In Britain if someone enters the public space as a political activist or firebrand writer, they have to expect loud pushback, the rough and tumble of discourse. I'm not a fan of it, but to call it a new, Justine Sacco-like phenomenon just isn't true.
As I say, I'm no fan of pile-ons or excessive, cruel, shamings. I think they especially punish people who aren't great in adversarial situations (like me). But they're all very different circumstances. The end! Now back to the WAP challenge.
