“Canceling” is a way to make sure that bad people do not have a platform fromwhich to say bad things.
Canceling can be accomplished by shouting down speakers on college campuses and at other public forums, encouraging censorship and self-censorship in news media, denying the canceled access to social media, eliminating their appearance on TV or in movies, protesting their presence in person in their private lives, and by generally demanding that people who aren’t young, hip, with-it, and “woke” should shut up. Having once been young, hip, with-it, and the 1960's equivalent of woke, I sympathize... No doubt cancel culture is a vital element in the battle against systemic and interstitial bigotry, structural bias, cisgender normative prejudice, white male privilege, LBGTQ+ oppression, cultural appropriation, and several other terrible things that I’m probably forgetting because I’m an old dead white male (or getting close to being one). And let me stipulate – lest I be canceled – that this battle is being fought with the kind of high-minded idealism that we are always encouraging young people to have. In which case, cancel culture has not gone far enough... To date, canceling has been limited to people – sometimes for what they’ve done but mostly for what they’ve said. And what these canceled people say are just words. Cancel culture needs to go beyond words. Words are simply one way to express ideas, but other modes of expression exist. Ideas can be expressed with mathematics. Cancel culture needs to start canceling numbers .
Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. To date, canceling has been limited to people – sometimes for what they’ve done but mostly for what they’ve said. And what these canceled people say are just words. I suggest beginning with the number 9. Personally, it’s the number that I dislike the most. This is because, in 4th grade, it was the “9-times” part of the multiplication table that tripped me up. I was fine all the way through 8 X 10 = 80. But when I got to the 9s I fell apart. To this day when I see 9 X 9 I want the result to be 99, and I suffer a feeling of exclusion and powerlessness and a need to go to a safe place when I’m told by the people who hold power in our society that the answer is otherwise. As any woke person will tell you, “The personal is the political.” And this is true 9 times out of 10, so to speak. Therefore, with righteous indignation, I demand that 9s be banned. 9/11 is Islamophobic. 911 undermines police defunding. “Possession is 9/10ths of the law” encourages capitalistic exploitation. Capitalism exploits workers from 9-to-5. And to be “dressed to the 9s” signals membership in the exploitative capitalist class. Speaking of which, San Francisco 49ers is an offensive name for a sports team. The
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American Consequences
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