This is a pretty apt characterization of some of the markers of "cancelling", including, e.g.:
1) Punitiveness: Are people denouncing you to your employer or your social connections? Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities? Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood?
2) Deplatforming: Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches or attending meetings? Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?
3) Organization: Does criticism appear to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?
4) Secondary Boycotts: Is there an explicit or implicit threat that people who support you will also get punished? Are people putting pressure on employers and colleagues to fire you or stop associating with you? Do people who defend you have to fear adverse consequences?
5) Moral Grandstanding: Are the attacks on you ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged? Are people flattening distinctions, demonizing you, slinging inflammatory labels and engaging in moral one-upmanship? Are people ignoring what you actually say?
6) Truthiness: Are the things being said about you inaccurate? Do the people saying them not even seem to care about their veracity? Do they feel at liberty to distort your words, ignore corrections and make false accusations?
It would be nice if critics of the Harper's letter about "cancel culture" actually focused on these features, instead of fabrications (in which this particular author specializes) like "the pushback against cancel culture has come from prominent journalists and intellectuals who perceive every negative reaction from ordinary people on social media as an affront." The pushback has come from "prominent" people because they can't be cancelled; they are speaking up for the victims of cancellation who can't really defend themselves.
ADDENDUM: Speaking of fabrications, readers have alerted me to the fact that on both Twitter and Facebook, Chris Bertram (the fabricator alluded to above) responds to the preceding not by contesting the substantive point about his misrepresentation of the critics of cancel culture, but by introducing another fabrication: "If I so much as mention Brian Leiter in a tweet he accuses me of 'obsession'.And yet here he is, blogging about me, accusing me of being a specialist in 'fabrications' with a special tag set up on his blog to refer to me." But I have never accused him of being obsessed with me for a tweet or otherwise, and he of course cites no examples: so yet more fabrication! Indeed, I've hardly mentioned him on the blog (5 posts in the last 4 years), and mostly, as here, when relevant to an actual topic. Most bloggers use tags, including for people, as Professor Bertram well knows.
PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION WATCH (AUGUST 13 update): To recap: Chris Bertram is not obsessed with me—and I never blogged that he was, indeed, as noted above, I’ve barely mentioned him on the blog. Although I blocked him long ago on Twitter, Professor Bertram tracked down what appears to be a reply tweet from more than a year ago in which I described him to someone else as a “hectoring ninny” (which he is) and “obsessed” (which of course he isn’t, you know). I can’t find this tweet myself, but I was sent the screen shot he posted--I’ll assume his propensity for fabrications isn’t *that* extreme and I’m just inept at finding old tweets. Although obviously not obsessed with me, he’s apparently been stewing on this for the last 14 months! Pathetic or funny? You decide!
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