Social Media Outrage/Cancel Culture

[swampfrog]

Lol. Ohio State professor.

Threaded painful but illustrative response from a victim of abuse.

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[swampfrog]

Critical Race Theory costs in schools.

This can't be legal.

According to the draft policy, employee speech that "will not be tolerated" includes anything that district leaders believe could be perceived as "undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements" of Schools Superintendent Eric Williams or the school board.

Per the policy, LCPS employees would have a "duty to report" their colleagues alleged free speech violations to the school administration.

LCPS employees accused falsely of "violations" of the speech policy are prohibited from "retaliating" against their accuser. Also, the policy would accommodate "false complaints" and not discipline those making them so long as they were found to have been made in "good faith."

[Jeff Lebowski]

Critical Race Theory costs in schools.

This can't be legal.

[swampfrog]

Anyone glutton for punishment can also read through Teach For America's work on Critical Race Theory. It requires constant monitoring for deconstruction of ever smaller and smaller grievances.

• Actions in our community have caused hurt and pain. Many among us, have made mistakes, committed wrongs, and taken actions preventing others from fully contributing to our community. These have taken many forms, ranging from micro-aggressions to a lack of action or response when concerns were raised, to failing to interrogate the white dominant culture within our organization. As CEO for the last five years, I take responsibility for the impact and the systemic failures that led to that impact.
• BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ staff feel a disproportionate and unfair responsibility to hold DEI work for their colleagues and the broader community.
• While we have become significantly more racially and socioeconomically diverse as a staff community over the last decade, the representation and distribution of certain subgroups across teams, roles, and titles remains uneven. From leadership across TFA to our board of directors to our corps members in classrooms, we must move closer to having all of our communities represented in all spaces.
• Members of our community, including our Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian/Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian communities, our Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, our Native and Indigenous communities, and Multi-Racial/Multi-Ethnic colleagues feel invisible, erased, and a lack of belonging, particularly when their voices, stories, and perspectives are missing from our training and communications.
• Our organization’s orientation to data fails to capture the identity of our staff, corps members, and alumni in many ways and, at times, leads to meeting goals only on average as we miss the specific experiences within certain groups. Small sample sizes for certain groups means they are not captured in our reporting, which does not allow for those voices to be considered. We need to build a greater understanding of our organizational data-collection processes, what is captured in that data, and why.
• Alumni, corps members, and staff cited painful lived experiences as evidence that our corps member selection model and selection process do not sufficiently live into our DEI commitments.
• Alumni, corps members, and staff shared examples of the ways our DEI programming for corps members fails to meet the high standard to prepare and develop the aspiring anti-racist educators our students expect and deserve.

[swampfrog]

This seems like a great idea.

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[Jeff Lebowski]

This seems like a great idea.

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Lol. Look at that ratio. Idiots.

Yelp is a racket anyway.

[Katy Lied]

I wish no one attributed any legitimacy to yelp.

[frank ryan]

This seems like a great idea.

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It's not worth being outraged over. Yelp sucks, ignore it. Maybe people can boycott them and then we can complain about that being a case of cancel culture.

[Jeff Lebowski]

It's not worth being outraged over. Yelp sucks, ignore it. Maybe people can boycott them and then we can complain about that being a case of cancel culture.

Weird response

[Donuthole]

Weird response

Weird, but 100% on brand for frank.

[frank ryan]

Weird response

Just fatigue at the overblown fears of political correctness run amok. Anti-PC culture is becoming dogmatic, with its own vocabulary, experts and academics, and sensitivities. It could catch up with PC culture. I usually stay out of these threads and probably will carry on doing that.

[Pelado]

Anyone else here still watch Saturday Night Live? Comedian Bill Burr took a swipe at cancel culture. He also poked fun at white women co-opting the woke movement and gay pride month's preferential treatment over black history month.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/enter...ng/5953221002/

https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/13...724818433?s=19

[Tweet]1315158295724818433[tweet]

Here's my favorite reaction quoted in the article:

https://twitter.com/AlainaToTheMax/s...525585408?s=19

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Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[swampfrog]

Some random interesting (to me anyway) things related to the topic from the last couple of days.

The Washington Post talks the NYT Magazine 1619 project.

Portland again in the news, rioters pull down more statues. Breaks windows at a museum. Shots fired into a cafe (which was closed at the time).

By the time police declared a riot, people in a crowd of up to 300 had toppled two historic statutes on the South Park Blocks, thrown at least three flares inside the Oregon Historical Society lobby, fired shots into a closed cafe and smashed windows of the Portland State University campus public safety office.

Also, quilt made by 15 black women was taken from the museum and was found wet in the street.

"We are deeply saddened and hurt by the destruction of property," Tymchuk said in a statement. "While windows can be replaced, our greatest concern has been for the Afro-American Heritage Bicentennial Commemorative Quilt, which was taken from its display in our pavilion last night. Each square of the quilt, crafted in the mid-1970s, honors a Black individual or moment in history, and was sewn by 15 Black women from Portland, who donated it to OHS and entrusted it to our care."

Reminder that anything can be problematized by Critical Social Justice Theory. You can never do enough. From the editor of Willamette Weekly, which generally is sympathetic to the protests/riots. Read the replies. Yes it's just Twitter, but where do these ideas come from?

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[swampfrog]

Meant to include this opinion piece also, from the HuffPost UK.

Although the left does not pose the kind of imminent violent threat that the far-right does, we are nevertheless moving towards an extremism of thought that historically has often ended in bloodshed. The second and more immediate cause for alarm is that as we become increasingly intolerant of dissent, we also become increasingly intolerable to dissenters. The result? They move toward the right.

And finally, with fascism on the rise across the globe, a strong and effective left-wing is our only hope of avoiding catastrophe, and at the moment, we are tragically far from meeting the challenge.

If you have read this far and are already forming defensive judgements, I implore you to keep an open mind and read on. Below I will very briefly note some of the most alarming behaviours I see on the left:

[swampfrog]

Another piece on the destructiveness and seriousness of the movement behind cancel culture and social outrage. From Bari Weiss who resigned from the NYT after the internal politics became too much. From a Jewish perspective--mostly.

But it wasn’t AOC who was mixed up. The savvy politician had read the room and was sending a clear signal about who belongs in the new progressive coalition and who does not. The confusion—and there seems to be a good deal of it these days—is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.

Listen, it’s been a hell of a year. We all have a lot going on, much of it unnerving and some of it dire. Moreover, many of these stories only surface on places like Twitter; they don’t make it into the pages of The New York Times or your friends’ Facebook feeds, which is where most Americans get their news these days. Reporters don’t cover these stories adequately, contextualizing them, telling readers which ones are true and which ones aren’t, which ones matter and which ones don't.

So it makes sense that many smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

There is also the X factor of Donald Trump, which is impossible to overstate. Understandable hostility toward him has prevented many Jews from seeing the problem on the other side. To even look away from the obscenity in the White House for a moment strikes many, as they have told me, as irresponsible or beside the point.

I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society. That truth doesn’t detract from another: There is another danger, this one from the left. And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America's elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance. So let me make my purpose perfectly clear: I am here to ring the alarm. I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore. Stop saying, can you believe. It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly—and then to explain it to others.

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the writer Audre Lorde put it. And the master’s house must be dismantled—because the house is rotted at its foundation.