this article claims CN argued "complaints about cancel culture are a matter of rich & powerful celebrities complaining about being justly criticized." The is false. What we argue is The Harpers Letter™ is mostly whiny celebrities because it objectively is. Big difference!
This is like if we were to say "Pompeo is cynically wielding the language of human rights to demonize Iran" and someone said we loathed human rights as such. The power dynamics and motives of the person evoking these abstract concepts is CENTRAL to the discussion. Intent matters.
Because I’m a thin-skinned weirdo I want to talk about this for a minute.
Removing power asymmetry, motive, and many of the signatories’ racist dog shit politics from an "open debate" discussion and instead focusing on the term as an abstract principle is to check one's brain at the door. On Citations Needed we try and deal in reality not puffy slogans
In principle, for example, I'd enthusiastically sign a letter saying we need more public funding for historical research. Absolutely. History's important. But if i was handed a letter to support more public financing for historical research written by a dozen Holocaust Deniers…
I would use my adult brain to infer motive and CONTEXT and say no because I'm a pattern seeking mammal who can spot a bad faith con when I see one. In rejecting this bad faith con I am not making a comment on the substance of the nominal, abstract goals of said letter.
What "open debate" as a principle means in a country where a handful of corporations control almost all media, where 2.4 million prisoners have zero free speech rights, where think tanks make policy while doubling as lobbyists for weapons makers & oil corporations, I have no clue
Are people too eager to judge on twitter? Yes. Does neoliberal job precarity create a toxic social media system w/ dubious due process? Yes (Indeed we discussed this in the ep) Does any of this have to do w/ what Bari goddamn Weiss & Co mean, in reality, w/ the Harpers Letter? No
It's an intellectual sieve, a con by thin-skinned rightwing hacks. "The Left" cannot share abstract principles with the right/Extreme Center when they've shown, time and again, they have a completely different definition of said principle and have a long history of bad faith
Arguing the left can somehow own the Cancel Culture debate by refocusing it on job precarity is superficially appealing but it again accepts the premise "open debate" is a meaningful concept in the belly of a violent empire w/ runaway poverty & 25% of the worlds prison population
Noting what’s missing from the letter isn’t incidental or leftier-than-thou whataboutism or a clever aside, it’s essential to understanding why the “debate” is entirely capitalist and empty in it's framing
Prisoners, those in the global south living under the US bombing and IMF austerity, poor kids in Atlanta. Those who can’t eat, those who don’t sound and look a certain way, those who don’t have a meaningful platform, cannot ante up to this supposed “open debate.”
Their uniform exclusion from this letter and any subsequent debates about said letter exposes how bourgeois and dull the popular "open debate" framing is.
What’s weird is in most contexts we would rightfully see suspiciously vague letters of principle as a massive red flag but with anti-cancel culture discourse otherwise smart people fork their pocketbooks right over to the wallet inspector...
A dozen Iran war pushers call on you to support “freedom in the Middle East”? That’s odd! Trump immigrantion officials insist you support “rule of law.” Sounds suspect. 50 ppl on the Epstein’s flight logs want you to support “innocent until proven guilty.” Dont know about that!
Maybe context and motive matters!
tl;dr until there's an "open debate" letter that calls for the eradication of prisons & US empire, including a fully liberated Palestine & public control over media I don't really give a shit who signs what because abstract principles without political pain points mean nothing
