The Jian Ghomeshi 'scandal'.

[WOM]

NYRB has published a large sampling of the scathing letters they received in response to the Ghomeshi piece.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...rom-a-hashtag/

[Bruno]

Yet another "cancel culture" refrain, Anne Applebaum in this week's Atlantic:

Here is the second thing that happens, closely related to the first: Even if you have not been suspended, punished, or found guilty of anything, you cannot function in your profession. If you are a professor, no one wants you as a teacher or mentor (“The graduate students made it obvious to me that I was a nonperson and could not possibly be tolerated”). You cannot publish in professional journals. You cannot quit your job, because no one else will hire you. If you are a journalist, then you might find that you cannot publish at all. After losing his job as editor of The New York Review of Books in a #MeToo-related editorial dispute—he was not accused of assault, just of printing an article by someone who was—Ian Buruma discovered that several of the magazines where he had been writing for three decades would not publish him any longer. One editor said something about “younger staff” at his magazine. Although a group of more than 100 New York Review of Books contributors—among them Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, Ariel Dorfman, Caryl Phillips, Alfred Brendel (and me)—had signed a public letter in Buruma’s defense, this editor evidently feared his colleagues more than he did Joyce Carol Oates.

The New Puritans

[Satchmo Distel]

It's funny how people like John McWhorter are able to make entire careers out of saying that they've been canceled, or how many people's most famous articles or books (including some that Applebaum cites, with no sense of irony) are ones they published after their supposed cancellation.

[Bruno]

She's talking about and interviewing people whose careers have been effectively derailed, though.

[Satchmo Distel]

But how numerous are these cases as a proportion of all the boundary-pushing work being done in the arts and education, and can we be sure they are increasing rather than just getting more publicity? The research she's doing is anecdotal and piecemeal unless she has any data to show a trend.

[Bruno]

That's a worthwhile question, though as someone once said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. At any rate the latent, extrapartisan, Orwellian threat of social-media mob justice is obvious and cause for concern.

[Satchmo Distel]

I totally agree, and could easily imagine it happening to me, as a professor who asks difficult questions and doesn't refuse to show a work that takes a stance that some students might find challenging to their beliefs. I have certainly become more cautious about expressing a view on a controversial topic, such as abortion, especially working in Florida. My concern here is simply that conclusions are being drawn about a puritan climate that I don't really perceive to exist in my classroom or faculty and possibly didn't exist in the establishments reviewed by Applebaum: the victims were just usually incredibly unlucky that some vindictive cunt recorded them out of context, and the administrators were incredibly spineless in caving to a fake scandal.

Moreover Buruma simply doesn't belong with the other cases. As Ursus noted above, he was spectacularly unqualified to be judging the suitability of giving Ghomeshi a platform to whitewash his crimes; he was objectively fired for gross dereliction of his job duties.

[Bruno]

My concern here is simply that conclusions are being drawn about a puritan climate that I don't really perceive to exist in my classroom or faculty and possibly didn't exist in the establishments reviewed by Applebaum: the victims were just usually incredibly unlucky that some vindictive cunt recorded them out of context, and the administrators were incredibly spineless in caving to a fake scandal.

"Puritan climate" may not capture it, but spineless does, and the spinelessness is the more troubling for seeming unexamined, unselfaware, or indifferent/oblivious. It's a latent problem and threat, and I'm coming at it from the standpoint that academia is not in a good place for lots of administrative and economically driven reasons. Regardless of how common it is, the phenomenon of allegation followed by dismissal is familiar enough to appear like a kind of reflex response when it happens, and it's not hard to see it getting out of hand in a dystopian way. Prevalence aside, I think Applebaum is right to note that it's how places like East Germany worked in a nutshell. But I'm not losing sleep over clueless highly privileged people losing the highest privileges.

I don't know anything about Buruma and am willing to believe he was a blockhead, and I personally haven't found it difficult, yet, to avoid controversy in my job, which is the same as yours. Nor do I think it's remotely bad to be obliged to think something through before saying or assigning it! But my classes deal with racism a lot, which sometimes entails looking at historical racists expressing themselves in print, and I wouldn't exactly be shocked at this point to get a complaint about it as though I were "platforming." Avoiding the appearance (let alone the reality) of inappropriate interpersonal behaviors or advances, on the other hand, always struck me as a no-brainer, so if you're failing on that front you shouldn't be working with students.

[San Bernardhinault]

My experience of reading Applebaum is that she's almost always wrong. And starting into that article doesn't disabuse me of the notion.

[Hot Pepsi]

But I'm not losing sleep over clueless highly privileged people losing the highest privileges.

yes

[San Bernardhinault]

I've managed to make it a few more paragraphs into the article. What utter cock-rot it all is.

"Of course people on the right use the phrase cancel culture inappropriately, but when it's my friends who aren't getting the gigs they used to because they turn out to have obnoxious opinions that people don't want to read or listen to, then that really is cancel culture"

Blah blah Stalinism... "But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere" blah blah "In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion"... yet you mention it as if it is, in fact, Stalinism when you've made clear that it's not.

"Blah blah I believe in due process... blah blah legal recourse... blah blah not done anything actually illegal... we have juries and courts...." Do you really believe that every person who loses a job should get full judicial process? Really? You do understand that this is nonsense, right? Due process and the fifth and fourteenth amendment don't apply to students not going to your lectures any more because you came up with a load of racist old shit. Particularly as - when I head down the article - it turns out that lots of these people are actually still in the jobs they were in before.

What a load of absolute fucking tosh.

[Satchmo Distel]

A quick Google of his current podcast work suggests that Ghomeshi's future seems to rely on sponsorship from the Iranian regime or its fellow travelers.

[WOM]

Yeah, that's the last I heard. I can't imagine more than a few dozen people listen to it, and it can't pay that much. Word around town is that his criminal defense pretty much broke him financially and his future earning potential is nil. All of which is fine by me, despite him being found not guilty....which is a far cry from innocent.