The streaming site I use has the unedited version of that Fawlty Towers on there. Is it ok to post it? Obviously warning for certain words used in it
Cancel Culture
- Thread starter Buchan
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I would have seen that Fawlty Towers episode when it aired and I don't remember it. But who watches it anymore anyway? It's pretty dated and I'd think nobody under 60 is looking for it. Nobody over 60 knows how to use iPlayer anyway.
I expect channels like DaveTV shows a lot of old repeats that have some dodgy bits in them.
I expect channels like DaveTV shows a lot of old repeats that have some dodgy bits in them.
Christ, I missed that bit when pasting the story over, might be the cherry on the cake.
In conculsion: Sharing a study from a black researcher praising the peaceful methods of Martin Luther King = racist. Advocating non-violence = threatening people's safety.
I think it was. I thought the whole point of the Major was to be an out of touch old man who barely knows his own name, not exactly promoting the term.
HBO stopping streaming temporarily, or BBC removing something from streaming, is surely not a permanent deletion. Hard copies still exist and are even being bought and sold, and in the case of Gone with the wind, someone showed that it's still available to buy/rent on 4 different online platforms including youtube. Fawlty Towers is still on Netflix.
Yes that data scientist is a bad case, and I seem to have stumbled into this realm of twitter leftists who unanimously agree that it's a bad case.
And as usual the leftist argument would be about money and power. Tucker Carlson is not cancelable, he can talk abotu Gypsy invasions and claim that blcks didn't build the country, but until Fox itself doesn't want him, no amount of twitter hashtags can make him quit. J.K Rowling literally restricted who could reply on her tweets since she has the power to do so. Her fame and fortune aren't threatened even when her actors speak against her. I do not understand what it would practically mean to cancel her.
The scientist was employed. Thus vulnerable. Similar happened to a Bernie-supporting leftist who got fired from his 2 jobs for calling a Hillary supporter a scumbag on twitter, in the context of her role in depriving people of welfare. He later wrote this about the cancellation of James Damore: http://mattbruenig.com/2018/02/16/trump-nlrb-smashed-google-guy/
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Agree. I loved Fawlty Towers back in the day and the Major was just a bumbling fool to me. The only character off the top of my head from old sitcoms that still makes me wince to this day is Spike Milligan's portrayal of a coolie in "Some like it hot".
Guys, I think I'm going mental. What was that sitcom about the British indian army called? I can't find it on YouTube now and I'm sure spike Milligan was in it.
"It Aint Half Hot Mum"?" I don't think Spike Milligan was in it though.
That's the fecking point. If you/I /we don't care enough to follow through why bother? WE'RE REALLY ANGRY... but ok that's fine. We weren't actually that bothered, we just all decided to go on the hunt.
Spike was the blackface Indian coolie
The Indians in IHAHM were always portrayed as the sensible ones laughing at the stupid British. I don't remember Spike being in it but he used to lots of Indian stuff in his Q series probably because he spent his early life there.
Ignore everything my weed addled brain says. It's not spike Milligan it's Michael Bates.Spike was the blackface Indian coolie
I just did a GoogleSpike was the blackface Indian coolie
Spike played an Indian in "In Sickness and in Health" and also something I've never heard of called (this is true) "Curry and Chips".
I don't think he was in Aint Half Hot Mum.
Yeah I corrected it duffer
Firing a black academic for a tweet like that is frightening and to my mind racist in the extreme sense. It almost directs people of colour to act in one singular way only, something I find as racist as it gets.
Curry and Chips was terrible, like really bad even for that time.
For clarity (it's a pretty convoluted story), Omar Wasow (the black academic) wasn't the one fired, it was David Shor (the white data analyst who tweeted promoting Wasow's work).
argh ok. it's sheeeet for a different reason then (Hope that's not racist) I'm not very good at this..... i should probably keep quiet as I agree with the work.
That's not what I said at all.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
I hate Taibbi, but this was commendable
The American Press Is Destroying Itself
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
I hate Taibbi, but this was commendable
The American Press Is Destroying Itself
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
It is reaching ridiculous levels, and I am starting to get annoyed. Obviously, Twitter and Silicon Valley are the worst symptoms, but the main problems are at the university level. Character-assassination nowadays can happen for anything, including having different scientific opinions. A couple of examples:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/...Onk200PvhM5e3isPvY/mobilebasic?urp=gmail_link (against Steven Pinker)
renaming Fisher lecture (arguably the father of statistics): https://www.change.org/p/american-s...dium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard
I've been in the middle of some similar thing, for simply stating data-proven facts. Honestly, political correctness is the new religion of the ultra-left, and things are getting from bad to worse. I am part of academia and it is soon gonna reach extreme levels when you will need to do research based on political correctness, not on the truth.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/...Onk200PvhM5e3isPvY/mobilebasic?urp=gmail_link (against Steven Pinker)
renaming Fisher lecture (arguably the father of statistics): https://www.change.org/p/american-s...dium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard
I've been in the middle of some similar thing, for simply stating data-proven facts. Honestly, political correctness is the new religion of the ultra-left, and things are getting from bad to worse. I am part of academia and it is soon gonna reach extreme levels when you will need to do research based on political correctness, not on the truth.
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Bother telling us what it is that you stated and what happened as a result?
Person A (black-woman) tweets that 'Google DeepMind gave a lecture in topic X, and they did not cite my paper despite that I did it while I was doing an internship there. This is only because I am a Black Woman. The paper has only 5 citations, would this have happened if I was a white male?' (I did not do a verbatim quote)
The tweet gets hundreds of likes. Including from some very influential people I know, and one whom I work with (though not under her directions, but the same company and she has a lot of influence). Everyone is tweeting on her support, saying how racists Google are, how she has been mistreated etc.
Person B tweets that he has read her paper, and there was nothing spectacular about it, and the results were poor (disclaimer: I checked the paper too, it looked okay while the results were poor). Obviously he gets attacked from everyone calling him a racist, and gets character-assassinated without anyone mentioning why his comment was wrong, except one who sais that the results were IMPRESSIVE (honestly, they were not).
I tweet to her that maybe the reason why the paper has not been cited in that lecture is that the paper is not peer-reviewed yet. I also mention that in that topic there are a few hundred published papers in top venues (including one from me, and well, I am a white man) who did not get cited. There are also several thousand unpublished (arxiv-only, same category as hers) papers that did not make the lecture for obvious reasons. In fact, there were only around 35 cited papers (a few from the authors). Considering that the lecture covered 6 years of arguably the hottest topic on machine learning, I say that any paper could have not been cited, and the likelihood of an unpublished paper getting cited was extremely low, without needing racism and sexism motivation.
A few people like my tweets, but more criticize me and/or like the tweets that criticize me. I get attacked for doing gaslighting from someone influential on the field (though her technical contribution on the field is very low - similar to mine actually - but she founded an organization about black people on AI which made her in words of many 'one of AI leading researchers' and even made a late-night TV show). I repeat she has two top-tier papers (same as me). Someone who is considered one of the leading scholars has from dozens to hundreds.
Essentially it was a mess. Later she tweeted that the duo who made the lecture, called her to apologize. Essentially, she bullied people to admit that they were racists/sexists with the only crime they did was not citing one of the thousands random papers which has yet to be accepted in a venue despite having been online for almost a year. As I said, they did not cite thousands unpublished and hundreds published (including mine and many people I know).
I don't mind someone using the current wave to progress her career. It is scummy, but it is the way it is, and has happened always. What I do mind though, is the people actually supporting this behavior. Not the idiots who are not even in the field and who were competing who is the most woke person there (one of them said that he was having problems on life, and then read her paper and so it became clear what is he is gonna do in the future). Whom I cannot stand are the high-influential people who are actively supporting this shameless political agenda. A few cases:
- The person I work with who liked all her tweets. She has 2 papers this year in the same topic. They do not cite that particular paper (why? because they shouldn't).
- Head of Google Research tweets on support of her.
- Very high person in Google Research posts on Facebook about how that post opened his eyes about the problems people like her has. An influential professor from Berkeley (who did not know circumstances) posts that Machine Learning community cites less papers than Computer Vision community, so this problems are caused cause of that. Of course, he gets immediately attacked, telling him how his community is even worse, and how this is a specific problem for black and women. He backtracks, cause you know, people have a career to keep.
- Influential professor of Cambridge has a series of tweets on support of that paper, and how awesome it is and how people should cite papers of black women.
- Influential DeepMind scientist (and Oxford university) tweets about diversity and mentions this case.
Now, someone might think that you know, it is okay. She might be a discriminated person and given her some advantage might help someone like her. Except that:
a) actually she is not. She is at the end of her PhD at a top 10 university in US.
b) her advisor (white guy) is a top 10 person on the field, and he was in that paper too.
c) She had done 4 internships in Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
d) She has a pretty good career so far, with multiple highly-cited other papers.
By every definition, she is a privileged person (though I think that she is smart too from her papers). However what she did was a shameless act of using politics to advance her scientific career, and she was supported from people who matter, with anyone else being attacked.
Not long ago, Chief Scientist of Facebook had to leave Twitter cause of the attacks he was getting for the crime that he had a different scientific opinion to someone (same someone who attacked me). It has gone beyond any control and is getting worse.
Me too, he was an awful keeper
I don't see a big deal with either of those links you post. In the first case, Pinker has such a pattern of problematic behaviour (the first example is literally him misrepresenting research that contradicts the report's own conclusion in order to downplay racism as a factor in police brutality) that is documented there that it's hard to defend him and easy to see why he is fostering animosity against his position. It is not a petition for him to be sacked but for LSA to remove him 'from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts'. Is that 'cancelling' or is that not just asking one institution to clarify how its values align with an individual and if it is happy to continue to associate itself with his work? Pinker would be free to carry on in life operating exactly as he has done irrespective of LSA's decision.
Likewise, the second article is literally just a fringe petition on Change.org with 8,000 signatures asking for an award to no longer be named after a man who passed away in 1962. Is that 'cancelling' him? Can you even 'cancel' a man who has been dead for 58 years? Is this really the powerful ultra-left cancel culture scything down anyone who dares not align to its morally unimpeachable standards - or is it not just about 0.001% or whatever of a population spending about 30 seconds of their time to click a few things online and request an award be named after a deceased person of their choice. I think even the tabloid press would struggle to whip up an outrage about this one.
Humankind has been around for 100,000 years. In that time, it's made incremental societal changes every few generations.
But the internet changed so much about us in terms of groupthink and tribalism in a short amount of time. Technology has outpaced our evolution and I don't think the species is capable of adapting to it quickly enough.
Cancel culture is like the Salem Witch Trials being practised on a worldwide stage. It makes the participants feel superior to the victims , it gives them a sense of belonging to a community, and it establishes their credentials amongst that community as a good person. Those are such basic needs for any human being that it's almost inevitable that this trend was going to happen.
I wish I knew what the solution was.
But the internet changed so much about us in terms of groupthink and tribalism in a short amount of time. Technology has outpaced our evolution and I don't think the species is capable of adapting to it quickly enough.
Cancel culture is like the Salem Witch Trials being practised on a worldwide stage. It makes the participants feel superior to the victims , it gives them a sense of belonging to a community, and it establishes their credentials amongst that community as a good person. Those are such basic needs for any human being that it's almost inevitable that this trend was going to happen.
I wish I knew what the solution was.
Just log off.
I'll confess something - i'm a right winger. So what i do in life is this: i pretend that "cancel culture" is a thing. I also pretend there is a war on christmas and santa. Know those leftist college kids that have debts in the order of hundred billions? I pretend they are superpowerful and are in control of the country. In the other hand, i'm never ready to challenge the economic elite. I will never fight for free college; i call it communism. I know many people die without heath care, but this is not relevant when we have this culture war thing to face. In fact i always size with the strong against the weak in the society, because pc culture is not going to force me to care about those parallel subjects.
Its not about you, OP, i dont know you. I'm talking.about me.
Its not about you, OP, i dont know you. I'm talking.about me.
There is a cancel culture, but it isn't a left wing phenomena. It's an entirely liberal construct. Actual left-wing people have been victims of this as much as those on the right.
Some of it is legitimate, as with racists, but lots of it is people leveraging statements they don't like in order to make comlpetely legitimate arguments seem politically dubious. It depends a lot on how much you really give a feck about Twitter. It's mostly a bunch of cnuts spouting idiocy imo and one more platform best left to die.
Oh, it is totally left-wing. Obviously, most of the left-wing people are not part of it* (same as how most right-wing people are not racists), but those that are in cancel culture, are almost exclusively far-left wingers.
Cause you know, they have to do stuff on their life instead of finding novel ways of getting offended and bully others in Twitter for not getting offended enough.
From what I've seen, it's liberal types who don't know the distinction between liberalism and left wing. The sort who think identity politics is somehow "left".
If it were class based, there would be no cancellations. The working class doesn't have that power within those circles.
What is the difference between liberalism and left-wing? In what way identity politics are not part of the left-wing?
Liberalism is the ancestor of liberal humanism. It's neither right nor left wing. Republicans and Democrats are both liberals to some degree. It's an ethos of equality but based on enlightenment ideals of individual liberty rather than Marxist ideals of class struggle. The Tory goverments have been liberal in their legalisation of gay marriage which is neither a left or right wing proposal. It's a liberal proposal centred on identity politics.
Left-wing politics takes class, defined economically, above individual identites. Being the broadest possible mode of unification among the same subset of disenfranchised, it seeks to build a class consciousness over and above any identity-based consciousness which it views as both liberal and factional. Hillary Clinton is a liberal, but she isn't left wing. Sanders is left wing but is also liberal. Mitch McConnell is liberal but is clearly not left wing.
The difference is subtle but can best be seen by a comparison of Labour in the 1970s with Labour as of today. One was left wing with liberal tendencies the other is liberal and sometimes has a left wing policy, like nationalising the rail industry or establishing the right of refusal for co-ops.
The main point is the right has embraced identity politics as much, maybe moreso, than the left, because it allies neatly with capitalism.
@neverdie dont fall for it. It’s a trap.
Very well put.
Cool, thanks for this explanation.
I don't necessarily agree entirely with it, but it is pretty good and different to my definitions (which probably are also what are used in the modern media). I think that on the other threads I've called your 'liberalism' as left-wing social policies or something similar (which can be different from left-wing economic/fiscal policies). In this way, yes, Hillary Clinton might be left-wing on social policies and center/right-wing on fiscal policies (though she gave at least the perception that she is left-wing on that too). Of course, you can call her liberal and also right-wing. Honestly, I think that I've seen both terms used casually from most people.
And while correlation does not imply causation, I think that most people who are liberal, also happen to be left-wing (economically speaking), and most socially conservative people happen to also be right-wing (economically speaking).