How do you end 'cancel culture'?

[cardgame]

It's one thing to claim that, it's another to demonstrate it.

Would you mind demonstrating how AOC is astroturf?

 

[NinjaCow64]

I was going to say more on this but I shall keep it brief - accusing someone of being in a hugbox is disgusting ad hominem garbage and refusing to engage with someone’s argument because of who they are is still a disgusting example of the genetic fallacy.

Unless you are willing to concede that someone’s past behaviour is something that should be discussed alongside their current opinions. I do not believe you believe this as you have accused people for committing ad hominem attacks when the things that they were commenting on were relevant to the topic at hand.

A post can manage to be (or not be) something that manages basic discussion.

No it can’t, in the same way a voice or words can manage basic discussion. The person speaking or writing the words can manage basic discussion (or fail to do so).

In contrast to systemic racism, yes. You don't need to rely on correlation and self-inconsistent assertions to conclude fire is hot.

Systemic racism is as self-evident as fire being hot.

It's one thing to claim that, it's another to demonstrate it.

I was merely explaining to Modder_Mode what would one would need to prove something is racist.

Laws did change though. Slavery ended > 100 years ago, and the civil rights reforms in the 1960's ended most legal means to discriminate directly based on race (excepting affirmative action, which is an actual example of systemic racism).

Something being illegal =/= something does not happen. Murder is illegal yet people get murdered all the time. Also, this is ignoring the massive loopholes in anti-discrimination legislation. For example, an employer would have to be very stupid (i.e get caught on camera or have in writing that they are firing someone because they are part of a protected class) to get in trouble for firing a member of a protected class in an at-will employment state. And affirmative action is not systematic racism, as explained by me previously:

Also so-called "reverse racism" doesn't count because those programs (e.g affirmative action) are explicitly designed to counteract the racism perpetuated by other parts of the system.

More on topic, there is some market correction for cancel culture, so it probably won't last forever: https://www.unwoke.hr/

How does this address so-called "Cancel Culture"? All this appears to do is provide a platform for right-wing ideologues to advertise jobs to other right-wing ideologues in an attempt to make workplaces where dissenting opinions are not tolerated. Which is what right-wingers regularly accuse Liberals and Leftists of doing.

Also Patreon's woke practices might bankrupt them, they have a lot of arbitrations to answer .

I doubt that we have seen the end of the process of that legislation. There will be suits, countersuits and appeals out the wazoo before we see a conclusion to that saga. Also I doubt that any sane judge would rule that a website can't enforce its TOS. Conservatives who push to make websites unable to kick off people for posting unsavory political opinions seem to not understand the can of worms that they are opening, considering that sites like Twitter regularly nuke ISIS propaganda from orbit.

The "go woke go broke" frustrates me because the corporations are not going woke and nor are they going broke. Conservatives seem to believe that corporations have an agenda other than making money when this is clearly not the case. The form of wokeness that these corporations go for is always extremely performative and deeply unsatisfying (look at Disney's ninth billion "first LGBT character" that says one line and is trotted off stage extremely quickly so the scene can be redubbed or cut in China and Russia). If this performative "wokeness" actually made a corporation lose money then they wouldn't do it, it is that simple.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I was going to say more on this but I shall keep it brief - accusing someone of being in a hugbox is disgusting ad hominem garbage and refusing to engage with someone’s argument because of who they are is still a disgusting example of the genetic fallacy.

??? The reason given for refusing to engage with some posters further was due to their behavior and I stated as such. Why do you keep bringing up genetics? Where is that coming from?

Do you know what hugbox means? It implies tangible actions that were taken, specifically like chaining pure insult posts and non-sequitur arguments against statements nobody said in this case/consistently backing each other on that trash.

I do not believe you believe this as you have accused people for committing ad hominem attacks when the things that they were commenting on were relevant to the topic at hand.

Might as well be claiming that touching fire with reduce my hand to 10 degrees Kelvin, instantly, given how consistent quoted is with reality. This isn't relevant btw. Let's get back to the topic.

No it can’t, in the same way a voice or words can manage basic discussion.

Quoted response doesn't make sense compared to what it quoted.

Systemic racism is as self-evident as fire being hot.

My sister's dog can bench press the moon almost as well as I can, and I can do it 10 times.

I was merely explaining to Modder_Mode what would one would need to prove something is racist.

What I quoted was not even close to a full explanation though. Similar to stating "a wizard did it", it's a simple phrase but it doesn't explain what tangible effects the wizard had on reality, or what it was.

Something being illegal =/= something does not happen. Murder is illegal yet people get murdered all the time.

Yet murder happening is not indicative of government/other organizations causing murder. What makes racist actions different?

Also, this is ignoring the massive loopholes in anti-discrimination legislation. For example, an employer would have to be very stupid (i.e get caught on camera or have in writing that they are firing someone because they are part of a protected class) to get in trouble for firing a member of a protected class in an at-will employment state.

People can be fired for any reason, some good some bad. That the person in question was hired does give a (small) amount of evidence against racism/"protected classes", but doesn't prove it doesn't exist.

Also "protected classes" vs firing someone because they have different video game preferences/other non-work related stuff is a similar class of mistake.

And affirmative action is not systematic racism, as explained by me previously:

Making a false claim of racism is not a reasonable excuse to engage in deliberate, traceable, causally-determined racism openly. It's like punching someone in the face and then claiming the victim to be the aggressor.

How does this address so-called "Cancel Culture"? All this appears to do is provide a platform for right-wing ideologues to advertise jobs to other right-wing ideologues in an attempt to make workplaces where dissenting opinions are not tolerated. Which is what right-wingers regularly accuse Liberals and Leftists of doing.

Critical reading skills of what the website says suggest otherwise. What are you reading that leads to this quote's conclusion? Also this is the rare site that doesn't ask for your race and might actually hire on merits alone. This site was created because people who had "dissenting opinions" got fired for stating those opinions, even outside the context of their work. On the face, including "free thinkers" among the categories encouraged suggests against your assertion.

Either way, it's something available to victims of cancel culture which is nice.

I doubt that we have seen the end of the process of that legislation. There will be suits, countersuits and appeals out the wazoo before we see a conclusion to that saga. Also I doubt that any sane judge would rule that a website can't enforce its TOS.

That's the problem, and why Patreon is probably screwed. Patreon's ToS at time of suit mandated arbitration exactly how the people in question filed. It tried to change them *after the fact* to deny people from doing this. The judge's take on that was rightfully scathing. They can't retrospectively apply ToS to actions/agreements that happened prior to the new ToS being put in effect.

In other words, they CAN enforce their ToS, and they are being held to the ToS they + patrons actually accepted during the relevant timeframe in question...

Conservatives who push to make websites unable to kick off people for posting unsavory political opinions seem to not understand the can of worms that they are opening, considering that sites like Twitter regularly nuke ISIS propaganda from orbit.

The problem is when the corporations are claiming something and then not doing that something. That is fraud, and prosecuting fraud is not new. There is also a lot of bad faith action, aka only enforcing the rules sometimes for some people, which is more legally grey.

I'm also not sure about Patreon's claiming ToS violations for actions that take place off their platform/unrelated to platform and whether that can be legally valid. In this particular case, however, that's irrelevant.

The "go woke go broke" frustrates me because the corporations are not going woke and nor are they going broke.

Some do both. Establishing a direct casual relationship for that is non-trivial, however, and unlike the "systemic racism" "rationale" earlier I'm not going to sit here and claim that relationship is self-evident without basis.

Anecdotally, "woke" movies and entertainment media doesn't seem to perform well, but even that has bias in that said media where politics is the defining feature while the movie is ostensibly not about politics tend to be bad no matter which stance is taken. Even in this case I'm more inclined to conclude that the people making them simply lacked talent and failed on that basis rather than any woke agenda, and would have failed the same way if they picked any other random agenda.

If this performative "wokeness" actually made a corporation lose money then they wouldn't do it, it is that simple.

Some companies/industries have lost money over it though. Most don't commit to that though as you say, and instead just say whatever they think will give them the least blowback then act as usual.

Would you mind demonstrating how AOC is astroturf?

She makes false claims about environment, gender pay gap, somehow meshes those two, and recently claimed that an alleged jerk comment against her specifically somehow represented broad misogyny, as if it's not possible that people happen to dislike her specifically or something. Fake stuff.

Or if you want to go with "not grassroots", her policies are not widely popular and her top political backers are her own city, University of California, and a bunch of tech giants.

 

[Lexicus]

Or if you want to go with "not grassroots", her policies are not widely popular and her top political backers are her own city, University of California, and a bunch of tech giants.

Most of her policies do enjoy wide support (the fact that you don't support her policies does not mean other people don't), her backing overwhelmingly (close to an 80-20 split) comes from individual donations under $200, and I cannot find anything about "tech giants" (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple?) supporting her at all. There is video of her tearing into Mark Zuckerberg in those hearings though and you can see that she's on-board with Elizabeth Warren's plan to break up Facebook, which tends to suggest she isn't a puppet of Big Tech.

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your blind hatred. BTW "her top political backers are her own city"??? Is that supposed to be some sort of insult? Her top political backers are...the people in her district...who elected her...to represent them...only a conservative could find something "astroturf" in this picture...

 

[Patine]

Cancel culture is literally just boycotting, which is an act of free speech...

So, too, "on paper," and "legally speaking," was "Blacklisting," in the HUAC/McCarthy/Red Scare days. In fact, other than whom they tend to target, and on behalf of whom, "Cancel Culture," of today and "Blacklisting," back then are disturbingly similar as phenomena.

 

[Crezth]

Most of her policies do enjoy wide support (the fact that you don't support her policies does not mean other people don't), her backing overwhelmingly (close to an 80-20 split) comes from individual donations under $200, and I cannot find anything about "tech giants" (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple?) supporting her at all. There is video of her tearing into Mark Zuckerberg in those hearings though and you can see that she's on-board with Elizabeth Warren's plan to break up Facebook, which tends to suggest she isn't a puppet of Big Tech.

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your blind hatred. BTW "her top political backers are her own city"??? Is that supposed to be some sort of insult? Her top political backers are...the people in her district...who elected her...to represent them...only a conservative could find something "astroturf" in this picture...

She has been one of those calling for breaking up the monopolies lol the "Big Tech" thing is just a flat-out lie.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Why are you still bothering discussing ANYTHING with @TheMeInTeam or granting him the benefit of the doubt?

He's a conservative reactionary who is pathologically inclined to defend the status quo, he's shown us who he is.

He thinks minorities should only have rights if they happen to intersect with the majority

He thinks structural and societal racism is a thing of the past

He thinks AOC is astroturfed in by "tech giants" even though she literally supports breaking them up and threatening their comfy status quo

Like come on...

 

[EnglishEdward]

Would you mind demonstrating how AOC is astroturf?

Now let me see.

This is AOC


and this is Astroturf.



Well neither are dark matter or frozen stars.

 

[Lexicus]

She has been one of those calling for breaking up the monopolies lol the "Big Tech" thing is just a flat-out lie.

I think the right-wing media have the whole "big tech companies are Maoist" meme pretty cemented...not sure there is anything more to the idea than that.

 

[Senethro]

I’d not thought about it in these terms before, but someone denying racism in US is as stupid/malicious as someone denying climate change. With a reasonable person you could have disagreements over the size of the systemic racism effect, the mechanisms through which it acts, the change in their contributions over time.

But anyone outright denying is just a straight up clown.

 

[Modder_Mode]

When that something is solely caused by unfair treatment of an already disadvantaged racial minority.

The problem is how is it measurable, as I've said before things can have racial impacts on different groups within a community, but it doesn't necessarily mean something racist is going on, obviously laws and systems in the past existed that could have a socioeconomic impact on someone today, but that's not what you are claiming here. Why is it that you think unfair treatment of disadvantaged people indicates racism and why only a racial minority, presumably you're talking about black people, if disadvantaged white people also suffer unfair treatment is this a form of racism? The problem with the terminology of "systemic racism" is that you can throw anything under its umbrella that you think is racist and not even really provide evidence for its existence, "racism must just be out there somewhere because we see a racial impact".

Cool, so Sowell cherrypicks a handful of examples of schools that do/did well despite being underfunded, while ignoring the many studies that show how school funding and educational outcome are intrinsically tied.

Sure he provided anecdotal evidence but he did provide some stats and figures on schools, he even provided evidence of different schools in the South and how poor black and white kids had the same test scores.
Nonetheless there are plenty of studies that suggest school funding isn't a good measurement of test scores and educational outcomes and that family background can be a prime indicator of educational success:

- "The Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry.

The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago."
https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/2/5/83.full


- "Public investments in repairs, modernization, and construction of schools cost billions. However, little is known about the nature of school facility investments, whether it actually changes the physical condition of public schools, and the subsequent causal impacts on student achievement. We study the achievement effects of nearly1400 capital campaigns initiated and financed by local school districts, comparing districts where school capital bonds were either narrowly approved or defeated by district voters. Overall, we find little evidence that these school capital campaigns improve student achievement."
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED566945.pdf


- "As the overall findings suggest, researchers must assess student’s family background regardless of their main research focus. Although the ongoing trend in the study of school performance suggests that the social and economic context is key in understanding school success, it is still a common practice to mention SES in the introduction and discussion sections of journal articles without actually incorporating it in the measurement model. Researchers should no longer limit themselves by discussing only the context but rather should actually measure and evaluate the social and economic context in relation to their special area of interest. In addition to these general points, this meta-analysis also provides several methodological challenges for future research in education. For example, given the finding that there is only a weak relationship between SES and academic achievement among minority students, should we continue to use SES as an important contextual indicator of school success for minority students?"
http://dl.icdst.org/pdfs/files/3197...h5tUOYF71oARfGOVo2f5T1b3PmS49ifdsWQ3FCZT5AraI

-----
We can go back and forth with articles and studies and then counter-studies and so forth or we can conclude that working class PEOPLE face a daily struggle or we can continue with this racial identity politics crusade that the left has been pushing for quite some time....

The mere fact that we are dividing people into "races" is enough to show that our society is racist.

I'm not trying to divide people into races, that's my point, I'm trying to demonstrate that class is the issue and it affects different people. It's the Democrat party policy for quite some time now that is doing most the dividing, something which I know you probably will not agree on.

If racism isn't to blame for plight of black people in America as well as the disparity they experience then what is, @Modder_Mode?

Genetics?

Come on, spell it out to us, because right now you're literally arguing against decades of established history and fact in an attempt to go down the road of "oh it isn't racism it's something else..." but you won't come out and say what it is, you'll hint at it, but you won't outright say it.

It can't be culture, because that was formed as a response to white-led racism and bigotry so that ol' chest nut is gone.

So we're kind of left with two options;

Nature; Genetics or Nurture/Environment; racism.

So which one @Modder_Mode is it? No more dancing around the topic.

You make it sound like we haven't had this discussion before Cloud_Strife, I already said in another thread that culture is a big player in the plight of black people, Professor James Flynn made the observation that after WW2 when US troops occupied Germany and both white and black American soldiers had children, these children had no differences in educational test scores, he concluded that the reason was that the children of black soldiers in Germany grew up with no black subculture and he also concluded that the same principle stands for the children of the white "rednecks" subculture in Southern states.

Why is there successful black people and why is there poor white people in a racist system that is supposedly setup to favor white people?

 

[Cloud_Strife]

You make it sound like we haven't had this discussion before Cloud_Strife, I already said in another thread that culture is a big player in the plight of black people, Professor James Flynn made the observation that after WW2 when US troops occupied Germany and both white and black American soldiers had children, these children had no differences in educational test scores, he concluded that the reason was that the children of black soldiers in Germany grew up with no black subculture and he also concluded that the same principle stands for the children of the white "rednecks" subculture in Southern states.

Why is there successful black people and why is there poor white people in a racist system that is supposedly setup to favor white people?

The existence of poor whites and rich PoC isn't a counterargument to the existence of racism and it's impact on both.

Even in explicitly racist societies there still exists a white underclass, I mean look at apartheid SA or America or nazi Germany, are you seriously suggesting the existence of poor whites in any of them is an argument against the discrimination inherent in those systems?

So let me ask again; is it racism (which includes culture and environment) or is it genetic?

 

[Angst]

Wait so did TMIT just choose not to answer me because of my 'behavior'? While letting it out snidely to another poster?

 

[Traitorfish]

The existence of poor whites and rich PoC isn't a counterargument to the existence of racism and it's impact on both.

However, it is a counter-argument to the assertion that racism is the primary organising logic of a given society, which is routinely presented by American progressives.

By refusing to talk about class in substantive terms, and by dogmatically subordinating class to race in their descriptions of society, progressives have left themselves open to this sort of bad faith arguments by right-wingers. Simply highlight that those arguments are bad faith does not plug that gap, and will not convince people who are not already subscribed to the progressive commonsense.

 

[Senethro]

However, it is a counter-argument to the assertion that racism is the primary organising logic of a given society, which is routinely presented by American progressives.

By refusing to talk about class in substantive terms, and by dogmatically subordinating class to race in their descriptions of society, progressives have left themselves open to this sort of bad faith arguments by right-wingers. Simply highlight that those arguments are bad faith does not plug that gap, and will not convince people who are not already subscribed to the progressive commonsense.

I sort of agree, except... and I'm really not sure how to put this. Lets try:

The race genie has already been let out from the bottle and won't (easily?) go back in. It has been used to exploit people for centuries already. Progressives are not falling for some kind of trick by acknowledging and addressing it.

Race will be used to divide the exploited classes even if all the Progressives were to adopt only Class based language tomorrow. Countering the weapons of the enemy is not simply "playing" his game. (I hope, anyway)

 

[amadeus]

Asian-Americans people on average do earn more than white people, yes. However, that is far from the whole picture.

Firstly, lumping all immigrants and refugees from Asia into one category is extremely unhelpful statistically. There is a great deal of variation of subgroups of Asian-American populations, with Asian-Americans from communities that are well established and consisting primarily of economic immigrants and descendants of economic immigrants doing really well and with Asian-Americans from communities that are not well established and consisting primarily of refugees and descendants of refugees are doing extremely poorly. Hmong and Bangladeshi people have poverty rates that rival African-American communities, for example.

It took a while to get back to you on this, but this is kind of where I had meant to go but failed to do so in making my point about white-black wage disparities. I think you're seeing the problem that I'm seeing, which is that of methodology. I haven't seen any evidence that there is an exclusively race-based wage gap, and that pointing to one statistic (as I did, knowing full well it was flawed to use that measurement exclusively to explain some difference in incomes.)

You rightly point out that lumping all Asians in America together is bad practice, and it's equally bad practice to take all workers' wages and compare them just on the race of the worker rather than all of those other factors; geography, education, type of work, etc.

 

[Modder_Mode]

The existence of poor whites and rich PoC isn't a counterargument to the existence of racism and it's impact on both.

Even in explicitly racist societies there still exists a white underclass, I mean look at apartheid SA or America or nazi Germany, are you seriously suggesting the existence of poor whites in any of them is an argument against the discrimination inherent in those systems?

Was there a great deal of successful black people in apartheid South Africa and was there a great deal of successful black or Jewish people in Nazi Germany?

So let me ask again; is it racism (which includes culture and environment) or is it genetic?

Cloud, look how your question is structured, the premise is a setup for me, you're being naughty.

 

[Senethro]

Was there a great deal of successful black people in apartheid South Africa and was there a great deal of successful black or Jewish people in Nazi Germany?

There is no point asking these questions if you're not going to explicitly state what point/issue/statement you think they provide evidence for. It is not possible to argue against this format of question, so deliberately only ever using questions is not properly engaging with the topic.

 

[NinjaCow64]

??? The reason given for refusing to engage with some posters further was due to their behavior and I stated as such. Why do you keep bringing up genetics? Where is that coming from?

The genetic fallacy, which is a fallacy strongly related to the ad hominem fallacy. I find it surprising that you don't know what the genetic fallacy is considering how strongly you advocate for avoiding informal fallacies.

Do you know what hugbox means? It implies tangible actions that were taken, specifically like chaining pure insult posts and non-sequitur arguments against statements nobody said in this case/consistently backing each other on that trash.

I have only seen hugbox used as a synonym for "safe space", usually as a snarl word (e.g "get out of your hugbox and go out into the real word"). Your definition is far from standard.

Might as well be claiming that touching fire with reduce my hand to 10 degrees Kelvin, instantly, given how consistent quoted is with reality. This isn't relevant btw. Let's get back to the topic.

I am happy to drop this line of topic if you would answer one question for me:

Lets say I was debating the merits (or lack of merits) of a fictional substance Skub with John McGenericname, President of the anti-Skub league, an organisation known for spreading lies about Skub. In your opinion, would it be an ad hominem to mention John McGenericname's association and active involvement in an organisation that has been proven to spread lies about Skub in a debate about Skub?

Quoted response doesn't make sense compared to what it quoted.

I'm just going to agree to disagree here.

My sister's dog can bench press the moon almost as well as I can, and I can do it 10 times.

I mean if you don't understand how self-evident it is that we live in a systematically racist society then that's on you mate.

What I quoted was not even close to a full explanation though. Similar to stating "a wizard did it", it's a simple phrase but it doesn't explain what tangible effects the wizard had on reality, or what it was.

To extend you analogy, it would be like if Modder asked me "When can we determine if something is magic?" and I answered "When a wizard casts a spell on it.". A simple explanation, but an accurate one.

Yet murder happening is not indicative of government/other organizations causing murder. What makes racist actions different?

Systematic does not necessarily mean government. I am talking about societies, which encompasses a lot more than mere government. While governments are part of it (police forces in the United States are generally notoriously racist institutions and they are part of the government) it is certainly not all of it. Systematic racism is cultural (racist) ideas about race that are deeply embedded into society that negatively feed into the material conditions of racial communities. Sociology doesn't begin and end at government.

People can be fired for any reason, some good some bad. That the person in question was hired does give a (small) amount of evidence against racism/"protected classes", but doesn't prove it doesn't exist.

With many protected classes it is not always obvious (or true) to the both boss and the employee that someone is part of a protected class before they join the workplace. For instance, someone could discover they are LGBT or injure themselves on the job and become disabled and then get fired for that. Or they could join the workplace without informing their employer of their protected class status and then their boss finds out and fires them.

But even in cases where it is obvious that an employer would be hiring someone of a protected class, that does not absolve them of being racist towards that protected class. For instance a bigoted boss could hire someone of a protected class to make them look less bigoted and then ignore their opinions and fire them if they step too far out of line. Or the boss could think that he only wants to hire "the good ones" and would happily fire any woman or POC who "rocks the boat" by talking about racism or sexism too much. A particularly horrific high profile case came up recently where a corporation hired a black man to deflect (valid) accusations of racism and then had him involuntarily committed to a mental ward when he kept rocking the boat too much (warning - this is a heavy read).

Also "protected classes" vs firing someone because they have different video game preferences/other non-work related stuff is a similar class of mistake.

Protected classes are protected classes for a reason. That reason being that protected classes have faced both historical and extant discrimination against them to the point that the only to ensure that they are treated somewhat equally by society is to make a law against discriminating against them.

Making a false claim of racism is not a reasonable excuse to engage in deliberate, traceable, causally-determined racism openly. It's like punching someone in the face and then claiming the victim to be the aggressor.

Are you saying that affirmative action is unnecessary because systematic racism against black people don't real? I'm really not understanding your argument here.

Critical reading skills of what the website says suggest otherwise. What are you reading that leads to this quote's conclusion?

From the front page:

Hire courageous, free thinking and freedom loving individuals. Not ideologues whose only agenda is to weaponise your brand and business to further a radical cause.

There is a lot of political bias implicit in this quote. I am pretty sure that my definition of "free thinking" and "freedom" is completely different to what the creator of this sentence intended. And by saying that "ideologues whose only agenda is to weaponise your brand and business to further a radical cause" is a valid concern is a political opinion, one that there are currently two threads on being debated.

Also this is the rare site that doesn't ask for your race and might actually hire on merits alone.

Wait, that's legal? I don't know what it is like in the United States but I can count the number of times I've been asked for my race on an application on my left hand, and every time it was optional.

This site was created because people who had "dissenting opinions" got fired for stating those opinions, even outside the context of their work. On the face, including "free thinkers" among the categories encouraged suggests against your assertion. Either way, it's something available to victims of cancel culture which is nice.

Lets say that I got fired from a workplace for saying an opinion that was extremely unpopular in right-wing circles (a dissenting opinion, if you will) and I applied on this website. How far do you think I would get? Do you not see the hypocrisy inherent in making a political platform designed to only attract people of a certain ideological outlook to combat workplaces that only tolerate one political opinion?

That's the problem, and why Patreon is probably screwed. Patreon's ToS at time of suit mandated arbitration exactly how the people in question filed. It tried to change them *after the fact* to deny people from doing this. The judge's take on that was rightfully scathing. They can't retrospectively apply ToS to actions/agreements that happened prior to the new ToS being put in effect.

In other words, they CAN enforce their ToS, and they are being held to the ToS they + patrons actually accepted during the relevant timeframe in question...

Ah, well if they did that then that was rather silly of them.

The problem is when the corporations are claiming something and then not doing that something. That is fraud, and prosecuting fraud is not new. There is also a lot of bad faith action, aka only enforcing the rules sometimes for some people, which is more legally grey.

I mean yes and no. As I said earlier Twitter nukes pro-ISIS accounts from orbit with automatic deletion. It treats Far-Right political ideologies from the west with feather gloves comparatively.

I'm also not sure about Patreon's claiming ToS violations for actions that take place off their platform/unrelated to platform and whether that can be legally valid. In this particular case, however, that's irrelevant.

I mean Patreon's entire business model is based off of stuff that their clients do largely off of their platform. They would have a better claim than most.

Some do both. Establishing a direct casual relationship for that is non-trivial, however, and unlike the "systemic racism" "rationale" earlier I'm not going to sit here and claim that relationship is self-evident without basis.

Anecdotally, "woke" movies and entertainment media doesn't seem to perform well, but even that has bias in that said media where politics is the defining feature while the movie is ostensibly not about politics tend to be bad no matter which stance is taken. Even in this case I'm more inclined to conclude that the people making them simply lacked talent and failed on that basis rather than any woke agenda, and would have failed the same way if they picked any other random agenda.

Well that's exactly the thing. In the cases that these "woke" pieces of media are terrible its usually terrible not because they have lesbians in it or something, but because it was written by hacks. But many in the "anti-woke mob" are utterly convinced that if there weren't [insert non-cishet and/or non-white woman here] characters in the piece of media then the piece of media would magically be brilliant. But it wouldn't be, because the "wokeness" has never been the problem. Of course there also many members of the "anti-woke mob" who just generally hate women and minorities and are satisfied with even the worst pieces of trash as long as it doesn't have the hated minorities in it.

She makes false claims about environment, gender pay gap, somehow meshes those two, and recently claimed that an alleged jerk comment against her specifically somehow represented broad misogyny, as if it's not possible that people happen to dislike her specifically or something. Fake stuff.

Or if you want to go with "not grassroots", her policies are not widely popular and her top political backers are her own city, University of California, and a bunch of tech giants.

As others have noted, AOC has supported plans to break up Facebook et al, so I really doubt that she is funded by them.

 

[Traitorfish]

I sort of agree, except... and I'm really not sure how to put this. Lets try:

The race genie has already been let out from the bottle and won't (easily?) go back in. It has been used to exploit people for centuries already. Progressives are not falling for some kind of trick by acknowledging and addressing it.

Race will be used to divide the exploited classes even if all the Progressives were to adopt only Class based language tomorrow. Countering the weapons of the enemy is not simply "playing" his game. (I hope, anyway)

The current progressive message is that society is primarily structured around race; that a person's racial identity is the most important thing about them; that the contest for resources and power between races is a zero-sum game; that the advancement of one race is only achieved by the degradation of another.

How is that not playing the enemy's game?

Right-wingers say that they are sick of hearing about race and gender and sexuality, but it's all they ever want to talk about, because they think that it's an argument which they can win. They don't want to talk about class, they don't want to talk about wages or infrastructure or social services, because it takes all of about thirty second for it to become evident that they are at odds with the great majority of voters on that terrain.