I bet absolutely nothing changes and we never hear about this story ever again. Just another story for the culture war fetishists to get worked up about online and then immediately forget about. Museums will conduct reviews of their collections all the time, for many different reasons. I bet even if they did remove an item from public display you wouldn’t even notice anyway because probably like 80% of the Darwin related items they have aren’t on display and they’d replace it with something just as interesting or significant.
We could just wait until the review is conducted and then actually decide if there’s something to be outraged by, instead of playing into the hands of the right wing press like The Telegraph who absolutely love to stir up outrage over things like this.
Charles Darwin isn’t about to get cancelled. He’s one of the most important scientific figures full stop, certainly in our nation’s history, and he will continue to be celebrated as such.
Either that or some of the people who liked your post would be highly critical of him for being racist to white people and try to get him cancelled for that. Wonder who would have got there first.
Darwin was, after all, a man of his time, class and society. True, he was committed to a monogenic, rather than the prevailing polygenic, view of human origins, but he still divided humanity into distinct races according to differences in skin, eye or hair colour. He was also convinced that evolution was progressive, and that the white races—especially the Europeans—were evolutionarily more advanced than the black races, thus establishing race differences and a racial hierarchy.
Billy Brag rightly asks at the end of that piece, what actually is cancel culture. For me it’s a shorthand for denying people the right to say things which which are essentially reasonable, or at least defensible. Both the left and the right do it. Bragg wastes time talking about the Daily Mail, we all know they are hypocritical twats. I think the Right are able to win the ‘culture war’ on this stuff because it feels kind of new for the left to be doing it too. And he’s right too about how it’s always been going on. Like I say it feels new when the left do it, behaving like Mary Whitehouse all the time, and with social media it just takes a small bunch of twats to make it look massive, but that small number, if it results in people say getting fired, is really damaging. Ultimately, I feel the left has lost this argument so saying it doesn’t exist is like a pointless rear-guard defence. Just stop being Mary Whitehouse would be best. On the other hand, the fact that Right are able to gain so much traction with ‘cancel culture’ implies the Left are winning the cultural fight in actual political terms. fuck knows. That was rambling lol.
I don’t really think people are being denied the right to say things, are they? I think what you have an issue with, as far as I can tell, is there being consequences to how people exercise their free speech.
I’m allowed to say some awful shit online, but it doesn’t mean I’m allowed to avoid any consequences whatsoever for what I say. If my employer’s name gets dragged through the mud as a result of what I’ve said, they might want to distance themselves by no longer employing me, and it may well be justified because I’ve brought their name into disrepute.
At the end of the day, you cant stop people having an opinion online about whether organisations continue to employ people who have made perceived transgressions, so as Billy Bragg says, what needs to be done is to strengthen employment rights and make further restrictions to the right of employers to dismiss their workers. There’s the solution, and it’s one recognises that people have the right to air their opinions about these matters on social media and that they aren’t ever going to stop doing so.
It makes me laugh though, consumers kick up a fuss about something they dislike like, threaten to withdraw their custom, and the company in question makes a calculation as to what action will best protect the viability of their business in the eyes of the consumer. Then right wing people get their panties in a twist about cancel culture as if this isn’t basically just companies reacting to the market, like they always say it should.
No companies react because people actively drag them in to the conversation case and point the guy that lost his job because of an argument/altercation (he didn’t even start it) over wearing a mask. Also disagreeing with any such things like BLM etc. I don’t think anyone would have a problem if was just simply people saying just outrageous and wildly terrible things.
Just saying the right is salty is actually minimising the problem.
I’m just saying I find it funny when people who advocate letting the market regulate itself then complain when companies regulate their actions based on the market.
I hear what you’re saying but I’m talking more about speech which is essentially reasonable or at least was until what feels like a recent attempt to redefine what is reasonable.
Yeah that’s true if you say something patently awful but then there’s the example of the guy who got fired from a supermarket for reposting a Billy Connelly video on his Facebook. You could strengthen laws and that’s probably for the good, but we could also just stop being morons. I suppose we could label these excesses as growing pains of dealing with social media and how private lives are now less private as a result.
The problem is the market is regulating itself, a few people get to decide what is acceptable and what isn’t. I agree with you if someone says something truly awful you
reap what you sow; however when people petition your employer to fire you because they don’t like what you’ve said just because it’s not something their agree with is something else.
Well that’s just a silly and impractical suggestion really mate, you can’t eliminate stupidity from the population lol. And stupid people have freedom of speech too of course.
So obviously strengthening employment laws is the answer (not just “probably for the good”) so fucking Asda can’t sack someone for posting a Billy Connolly bit.
It’s the only practical answer to the problem you’ve identified.
I do very much look forward to right wingers calling for employment laws being strengthened and corporations having their powers limited.
I’m saying that the solution to something upsetting a lot of right wing people is for them to advocate for a position you usually only ever hear from the left, I sarcastically said I look forward to seeing this, because it won’t happen.
The guy who was fired was fired for gross misconduct as it was deemed Islamophobic. So the problem is how do employment rights help if being offensive is a legitimate reason for dismissal. I guess you’d need an independent tribunal and for costs to be covered by the state and then for that tribunal to be reasonable enough to not deem it offensive. I don’t know. I don’t know much about this stuff. How would employment laws help in a case like this. If it could help I’d support it obviously.
I am all for employment laws that prohibits firms to take action based on judgement call of select individuals of the firm.
We have a legal system in place for the very reason. Let the legal system determine the extent of the punishment for an altercation over mask or a lady threatening to call cops on a black guy or whatever.
If people are aggrieved by someone’s action, they can then go register a complain with the police as the firms are now rendered a position where they can’t legally take any action for activities conducted outside work premises for non work related scenarios.