Monthly Archives: May 2021

While the current trend in Europe appears to be censoring social media content, the Czech Republic is considering the opposite.

Czech MPs have passed the first reading of a legal amendment that would criminalise social media firms if they ban content that is deemed to be in the public interest.

It's being seen as an attempt by the Czech right-wing to fight back against the so-called cancel culture seen elsewhere in Europe.

The motion was brought forward to the lower house of parliament by Vaclav Klaus Jr, the son of a former prime minister and founder of the small right-wing Trikolora party, as well by MPs from various other political parties.

If passed, the amendment to the country's criminal code could lead to social media operators or administrators facing a three-year prison sentence, a temporary ban on activities or a hefty fine if they censor content that is either in the public interest or does not violate domestic criminal law or international treaties.

Czech MPs appear to be cutting their own path as other European legislatures introduce laws that require social media firms to remove content when demanded by national regulators.

Last May, France introduced a new government-sponsored law to compel social media operators to take down hateful content flagged by users within 24 hours. But the French Constitutional Council a month later struck down most provisions of the law as they were deemed unconstitutional, for violating freedom of speech.

In Germany, the 2017 Network Enforcement Act that requires social networks to remove content that infringes on hate and defamatory speech in the German Criminal Code has caught on elsewhere on the continent.

If ratified, the EUs long-planned Digital Services Act, a draft for which was released by the European Commission last December, will greatly empower social media operators to choose what content they deem permissible or not through notice-and-action mechanisms.

Klaus Jr has proposed such a change to the law since at least 2018 and the amendment was first tabled in the Czech parliament in January 2019.

The coalition government opposes the measure. So, too, does the Pirate Party, the parliament's second-largest opposition group.

The amendment was co-sponsored by Radim Fiala, vice-president of the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD). Some members of the ruling ANO party, of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, also supported the amendment, as did lawmakers from the centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS), the largest opposition party.

Proponents of the amendment argue that not only does censorship by social media firms violate the EUs Charter of Fundamental Rights, there are also currently no laws that stop the firms from deleting content posted on their platforms. The amendment has now been sent to parliaments constitutional and legal committee for review.

Miroslav Mares, a Czech political scientist and expert on right-wing politics at Masaryk University, reckons there is a chance that MPs could adopt the amendment but its almost certain to be rejected by the Senate, parliament's upper house, or the Constitutional Court.

But even if it is eventually rejected, Mares added, the issue of free speech may become important on the political rights campaign trail ahead of Octobers general election, which is expected to be tightly fought and could see a number of far-right parties hold sway over which of the larger parties forms the next government.

According to a survey published in 2017 by global monitoring agency vpnMentor, the Czech Republic had one of the lowest rates of internet censorship in the world. But Mares said the issue of free speech is becoming divided between two competing narratives in Czech politics.

For some, Mares noted, the issue of free speech is tied to liberal democracy and the legacy of Vaclav Havel, an anti-communist figurehead who defined the Czech Republics liberal establishment when he became the first president of the country after the fall of communism in 1989.

In direct opposition, Mares added, are those who see the fight for freedom of speech as a rejection of Western progressivism", a loose label by which they mean current debates surrounding cancel culture, political correctness and the limits of offensiveness.

It means that traditional prejudices and expressions towards various entities are protected by these people, mostly from the nationalist spectrum around President [Milos] Zeman and Klaus, said Mares.

Klaus Jrs father, Vaclav Klaus Sr, was a major political figure in the 1990s, serving as prime minister between 1993 and 1998, and a nationalist whose politics were in direct contrast to Havels liberalism. Klausism became an epithet for a national conservatism commingled with economic liberalism.

Last year, President Zeman sparked controversy when he lashed out at the Black Lives Matter movement for being racist, since all lives matter.

Expecting a public backlash over what he saw as political correctness, he added: I do not need any new Big Brothers; I do not need any new opinion leaders.

In his speech to parliament when introducing the amendment, Klaus Jr railed against what he called the new left, a label he and other politicians from the political right often use to describe the Pirate Party, which tends to champion progressive issues.

I want to defend freedom of speech and democracy and not let the attacks of the new left grow, Klaus Jr stated.

They distinguish between Hate Speech and Fair Speech, between evil statements and correct ones... This is, of course, devastating for the society in which we live, he went on, adding that the new left wants to destroy freedom of speech.

Mares, of Masaryk University, said that the new left label is an attempt by certain parties to present the Pirate Party as a vanguard of Western neo-Marxism, a term that is commonly used across Europe and North America to refer to progressives.

Tomas Martinek, an MP for the Pirates, admonished the amendment as being vaguely worded and almost impossible to enforce, as well as hypocritical, alleging that Klaus Jr regularly blocks people and deletes content on his social media pages.

Pavel Havlicek, a research fellow at the Prague-based Association for International Affairs, said the amendment is more a question of far-right fringe parties against the political mainstream, along the lines of the traditional populist agenda of anti-elitist, anti-mainstream logic.

Klaus Jrs Trikolora party -- which he formed in 2019 after being expelled from the centre-right ODS -- has been endorsed by and likened to Nigel Farages Brexit Party in the UK and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbans Fidesz.

At the time of its formation, Klaus Jnr was ranked the most trusted Czech politician, after a survey by local pollster CVVM. He resigned as the party leader in March, citing personal issues but retained his seat in parliament. It remains unclear whether hell retake the mantle ahead of Octobers general election.

The agenda of the far-right parties, like Trikolora and the SPD, said Havlicek, is to argue that some [imaginary] powers are trying to silence them, which is not the case.

However, it may not be an unpopular idea in Czech society. Last September, dozens of personalities, including game developer Daniel Vavra, musician Pavel Fajt and writer David Zabransky, signed a petition calling on the government to impose legislation to oppose censorship on social media.

Political parties including the Trikolora and the SPD have been at the foreground of anti-lockdown protests since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which they have argued that government-enforced restrictions on freedom of movement are comparable to a paternalistic limit on free speech for the sake of political correctness.

The Czech publics trust in their government and parliament has fallen to the lowest in the EU, according to the latest Eurobarometer report, released last week. The share of the Czech population who trust their government fell from 40% to 19% since early 2020. Confidence in the Czech Parliament dropped 10 percentage points to 15%

The latest survey by Kantar CZ, a local pollster, puts the new Pirates and Mayors coalition - formed late last year by the Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independents party - in the lead if Octobers general election was held today, with 27% of the popular vote.

ANO, the main party in the current ruling coalition, has lost considerable support since the beginning of the pandemic and enjoys just a 20% vote share, according to Kantar CZ. The Social Democrats (CSSD), ANOs junior coalition partner, is widely tipped to lose most of its parliamentary seats come October.

The governing coalition also last month lost the support of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), whose 15 lawmakers Prime Minister Babis minority government had depended upon to get legislation through parliament.

Because neither the Pirates and Mayors coalition nor ANO are likely to win enough seats to form a government by themselves, and if ANO cannot rely on its current Social Democrat ally, both groups will likely have to find new partners if they want to form the next government.

Up until now, Babis has vowed not to ally with the far-right SPD, which currently holds 20 seats in parliament and is predicted to be the fourth largest political group after the general election, according to Kantar CZ polls. However, in October the far-right could become kingmakers.

Every weekday, Uncovering Europe brings you a European story that goes beyond the headlines. Download the Euronews app to get a daily alert for this and other breaking news notifications. It's available on Apple and Android devices.

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How the right-wing is fighting back against 'cancel culture' in the Czech Republic - Euronews

A student in Berlin conjugates a verb for class. (Scherhaufer/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

This report focuses on attitudes in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK about what it takes to be truly part of the countrys nationality. It also includes questions about the importance of tradition and national pride, among other issues.

For this analysis, we use data from nationally representative telephone surveys of 4,069 adults from Nov. 10 to Dec. 23, 2020, in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK. In addition to the survey, Pew Research Center conducted focus groups from Aug. 19 to Nov. 20, 2019, in cities across the U.S. and UK (see here for more information about how the groups were conducted). We draw upon these discussions in this report.

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and the survey methodology.

As issues about culture and identity continue to be at the center of heated political debates in the United States and Europe, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trumps presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language.

People in all four nations have also become more likely to believe that immigrants want to adopt the customs and ways of life in their countries. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) now hold this opinion, up from 54% in 2018, and the share of the public expressing this view in Germany has jumped from 33% to 51% over the same time period.

The survey also finds that more people think their countries will be better off in the future if they are open to changes regarding traditional ways of life. Still, this issue is divisive, as a substantial minority in every country prefer to stick to traditions.

Other cultural issues also divide these publics. For example, when it comes to issues of political correctness, at least four-in-ten in every country say people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others even while around half or more in every country but Germany say people today are too easily offended by what others say.

Outside of France, more people say its a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.

Depending on the country, people are also divided over which groups are facing discrimination in society today. In the U.S., for example, nearly half say Christians face at least some discrimination, though fewer than a third say the same in the European countries surveyed. Similarly, in France, the public is somewhat evenly divided over whether Jews face discrimination. In every country surveyed, though, a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.

All of these issues are also ideologically divisive. In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.

Those on the right are also more likely to say each factor asked about being born in the country, adopting its customs and traditions, speaking the dominant language and being Christian are very important for being part of the citizenry.

Even issues of national pride have become ideologically tinged in the U.S. and UK. In every country, around four-in-ten say they are proud of their country most of the time, one-in-ten or fewer say they are ashamed of their country most of the time, and the balance say they are both proud and ashamed. But, while those on the left and right are equally likely to say they are proud most of the time in both France and Germany, in the U.S. and UK, those on the right are more than three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than those on the left (or conservatives are about three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than liberals, in American parlance). In these two countries, those on the left are equally likely to describe themselves as ashamed most of the time as to say they tend to be proud.

Focus groups conducted in the U.S. and UK during the fall of 2019 shed light on which issues were points of pride and shame for Americans and Britons in their countries, respectively. Most notably, issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.

Why would you be ashamed of history? Woman, 55, Birmingham, Right Remainer

Although its an impressive feat to expand the empire as far as it went, that came with quite a lot of shameful things. Man, 34, Newcastle, Right Leaver

In the U.S., too, whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride.

Themes of pride and shame were also present in focus group discussions in these two countries regarding what it means to be British or American, respectively. These conversations revealed that national identities are changing, driven in part by globalization and multiculturalism. Quotations from the focus groups appear throughout this report to provide context for the survey findings. They do not represent the opinion of all Americans or Britons on any given topic. They have been edited lightly for grammar and clarity.

Pew Research Center conducted 26 focus groups from Aug. 19 to Nov. 20, 2019, in cities across the U.S. and UK (for details on how the groups were stratified, see the methodology). All groups followed a discussion guide designed by Pew Research Center and were asked questions about their local communities, national identities and globalization by a trained moderator.

This report draws from those discussions, and we have included quotations which have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity. Quotations are chosen to provide context for the survey findings and do not necessarily represent the majority opinion in any particular group or country.

I think [America] was better [in the past], pre-cancel culture, which is the weaponization of difference, basically Now that politics is so divided, to be blunt, the left, myself included, have just been like no, if you are not living up to my ideals, I dont need to interact with you. I think it has become problematic and that is why you have this polarity and extremism.

Man, 34, Seattle, Democrat

While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed. For example, on whether the country will be better off in the future if it sticks to its traditions and way of life, the gap between the left and right in the U.S. is 59 percentage points more than twice the gap found in any other country (the UK is the next most divided country, at 28 points). The ideological divide in the U.S. is also around two times larger than that in any other country when it comes to whether people today are too easily offended by what others say (a 44-point liberal-conservative gap in the U.S.) and whether it is a bigger problem for the country today that people see discrimination where it does not exist (a 53-point liberal-conservative gap).

The ideological gap between liberals and conservatives has also widened in recent years over what it takes to be truly American. While liberals and conservatives are equally less likely today to say being Christian is important for being truly American compared to the past, on each of the other criteria asked about, liberals have shifted significantly more than conservatives. For example, 54% of liberals now say its important to speak English to be truly American, down from 86% who said the same in 2016. But among conservatives, 91% say its important to speak English, largely unchanged from the previous 97%. Still, conservative opinions have shifted markedly on the issue of whether its important to have been born in the U.S. and whether immigrants want to adopt the countrys customs. For more on how the U.S. stands out ideologically, see Ideological divisions over cultural issues are far wider in the U.S. than in the UK, France and Germany.

These are among the findings of a new Pew Research Center survey conducted from Nov. 10 to Dec. 23, 2020, among 4,069 adults in the France, Germany, the UK and the U.S.This report also includes findings from 26 focus groups conducted in 2019 in the U.S. and UK. In addition to ideological divisions, the survey also finds that cultural attitudes split along other dimensions including age, populist party support and religion. For example:

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National Identity Becoming More Inclusive in U.S., UK, France and Germany - Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project

Three years ago my wife came to me with a stack of papers and some textbooks. Can you believe this? she asked. They are calling women birthing people. She explained that in the curriculum for her certification as a birth doula it was now de rigueur to refer to mothers with this ridiculous-sounding neologism. Itll never catch on, I told her. She disagreed.

My wife was right. When Rep. Cori Bush made headlines last week with a speech and a follow-up tweet about birthing people, the Missouri Democrat was not speaking in a vacuum. The pro-abortion group NARAL was there to explain that Bush was simply being inclusive. Nor is she the first member of Congress to refer publicly to birthing people. The ludicrous phrase is becoming ubiquitous, not just in activist circles but in the medical profession.

On the Web site of Harvard Medical School, you can read about how advancing something called maternal justice is essential for all birthing people. The National Institutes of Health, the New York State Department of Health, the apparently real California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, the Hawaii Department of Human Services and even the city of Milwaukee all present helpful information about this hitherto-unknown category of human beings. Countless state legislators across the country have introduced bills or resolutions that include the preposterous terminology.

They should all be on their toes. You never know when yesterdays woke terminology will be considered insufficiently inclusive. The Health Resources and Services Administration corrects this oversight by referring to pregnant and birthing people, in case anyone were to make the mistake of assuming that men, in addition to being unable to give birth, cannot get pregnant. (Dont even get me started on chestfeeding, which also appears in seemingly respectable medical books.)

The rise of birthing people and chestfeeding follows a well-established pattern: Universities carry the terminology from once-fringe activist groups to the professional classes during what passes for their education. Graduates bring it with them to hospitals, law firms, big business and, of course, politics. A new consensus about apparently settled questions such as the definition of motherhood is established before ordinary Americans are even aware that new terms exist, much less that the liberal establishment wants to mandate their use.

Birthing people should be a line in the sand for all decent and rational Americans. It is not a question of so-called political correctness, which is often a simple matter of politeness. The phrase is not only an insult to mothers everywhere; it is an attack on reason itself. Everyone knows that women who give birth to children are mothers. Those who suggest otherwise are either living in a fantasy world or the kind of people who get their jollies by forcing others to say that 2+2 = 5, which is the ambition of every totalitarian.

Words mean things. We already have a name for people who give birth to children. That name is mothers. If your definition of justice requires you to invent jargon to describe things for which there are already words in every language ever observed in human history, you need to find a new one.

In a few weeks, my wife will give birth to our fourth child. We pray that everything goes well and that she and baby Sylvia are happy and healthy. It is impossible to say what our little girls life will look like in 20 years, but one thing that is absolutely certain is that she will be loved by her father, her siblings and the person who gave birth to her: her mother.

That word is not a slur.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp magazine.

Twitter: @MatthewWalther

Originally posted here:

Sorry, but they're called 'mothers' not 'birthing people' - New York Post

Cancel culture, as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; its been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head.

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to cancel anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLBs federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the networks most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, political correctness, it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now its yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture accountability remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Its only been about six years since the concept of cancel culture began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgerss 1981 single Your Love Is Cancelled. As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture, the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively cancel, or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and 60s. This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019, When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, its a collective way of saying, We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] were not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.

As the logic behind wanting to cancel specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash. (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as outrage culture.) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, its also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. It is also frequently used interchangeably with woke political rhetoric, an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both wokeness and canceling are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that cancel culture is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of woke politics. So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom youre talking to.

Taken in good faith, the concept of canceling a person is really about questions of accountability about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as consequence culture.

I think its misnamed, Burton told the hosts of The View. I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they havent been ever in this country.

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone whos been canceled, and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, cancel culture becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob thats ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And its this the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting, have often framed cancel culture as mob rule.

In 2019, the New Republics Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage. In one recent survey, people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what cancel culture was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt, beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved, journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesnt wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.

You wouldnt know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject whos being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, at least 11 GOP speakers about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it. One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture, describing a trend toward erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture. Indeed, its because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

Social media is one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives] social standing have begun, Ibrahim said, thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesnt affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship, with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Timess 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers passage of a restrictive voting rights bill, Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption. And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNNs AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called America Uncanceled, the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry woke hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is, Willingham wrote. Accountability for ones actions.

CPACs swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that cancel culture is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal social justice mob has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound nearly impossible, in fact.

Its true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Kevin Spacey, who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been canceled Weinstein and Cosby because theyre now convicted criminals, Kelly because hes in prison awaiting trial, and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, hes too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet, and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where cancel culture is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace. The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneress ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 202021 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Maxs Ellens Next Great Designer.

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be stepping aside for a period of time. But while Harrison wont be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him. (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of counsel, not cancel.)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been canceled instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being canceled over a decision by the late authors publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seusss books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowlings views and calling her the target of an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media. And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the authors latest title a new childrens book called The Ickabog but praised the storys moral rectitude, with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, It made me weep with joy. It was an instant bestseller.

In light of these contradictions, its tempting to declare that the idea of canceling someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the real impact of cancel culture isnt about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, cancel culture and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

Its not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and woke politics, framing the phenomenon as people be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people and adding, Thats not activism.

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan Case Against Cancel Culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel cultures chilling effect on the non-famous. I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship, she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of cancel culture, have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice, Kovalik writes. I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.

Kovaliks worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But theyre also grounded in empathy. As Americas ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide cancel and move on approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, deep listening including respectful, non-judgmental conversations was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of cancel culture has increased but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isnt so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing ones job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term cancel culture functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls disinterpretation, in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they dont believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they dont have any substantive affiliation with. The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity to be seen as aligned with the correct ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach effectively treats public debate as a battlefield, he wrote. He continued:

Its illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... Were tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you dont stay on message then youre contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?

When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out, he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior, or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like cancel culture and culture wars, Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline. These types of cancellations can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes or, as in Falls case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences peoples perception of whats called cancel culture, Aleem said. He added that hes grown resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because its become so hard to pin down.

People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses, he observed, with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video. The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: One could argue, Aleem said, that theres now public input on issues [that wasnt available] before, and thats good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people whove never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. Theyre still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice which has historically long been silenced to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals, she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. Whats more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class, Ibrahim said. It mutates into, If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled. She pointed out that usually, the supposedly canceled individual suffers no real long-term harm particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost, she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, its probably not. Thats not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people wont continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

Read more:

What is cancel culture? How the concept has evolved to mean very different things to different people. - Vox.com

media updates Talisa Jansen van Rensburg dives into the importance of emotional correctness in the media industry.

The media has come a long way, especially when considering the type of information that should and should not be put out into the public, the infiltration of filter bubbles and the rise of fake news. But with all of these things happening, audiences are becoming more aware of the effects certain content holds.

It is no longer about what word or phrase you decide to use, it is rather about how you are going to use that phrase or word. For example, are you calling a person overly sensitive online because you want to reach out and help them, or are you saying they are overly sensitive; aka, just stating a fact and not interested in helping that person grow at all?

This all ties into your emotional correctness, and its something that all members of the media need to be wary of when distributing their content. This is not to be confused with political correctness, which is an entirely different story.

For example, when a person says that they are part of the LGBTQ+ community, it would be incorrect to assume their sexual orientation just because they support members of this group. Instead, if you are curious, the right thing to do is to be politically correct by asking, Is your partner here to join us today?

This way, you are not assuming anyones orientation and you leave it up to the person to disclose as much or as little information that would like to share.

Emotional correctness can be viewed as the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. This is according to Sally Kohn, one of the leading progressive voices in America. She had a TED Talk back in 2013 where she spoke on being emotionally correct in the media industry.

So, although a person might not be politically correct, they do need to act on and say everything out of a place of respect and love for others. This will lead to people actually listening to what media members have to say.

What this means is that there is no way to get a person involved in an important conversation if they are not listening to what you have to say. So, in the media industry, if you are trying to be politically correct by adding facts and data to your content, you should know that will not be enough to get people involved especially if they are not willing to hear you in the first place.

Members of the media need to shift their focus on emotional correctness by finding compassion for each other and they can do this by building strong and reliable relationships with the community they serve.

For example, Heart FM takes time to communicate with its listeners by asking them important questions in a subtle and respectful manner. This way, the radio hosts remain educated on how people are feeling about various topics within the media, such as asking people how it feels to get the new Covid vaccine, which can help those who are yet to experience it. Stating the question like they did allow them to be both politically correct and emotionally correct at the same.

*Image courtesy from Heart FM

It is essential that the people working in media understand that the role they play in informing the public is huge. Incorporating emotional correctness will allow for more people to actually become accustomed to the news you need to share with your audience.

This way, the industry will be able to get more people to listen and engage with the really important information that is being shared with the world.

What are your thoughts on emotional correctness? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.

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The importance of emotional correctness in the media Media News - Media Update

Over one hundred years ago, two Gujaratis met in London Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Two more contrasting personalities could not be imagined and the fallout for the Indian subcontinent was contained in that epic encounter.

Some 50 years later, another set of Gujaratis would meet with consequences that were creative for Indian democracy and the Indian academy. Political scientist Rajni Kothari and sociologist Dhiru Lal Sheth came together with a few other intellectuals, to author a novel experiment that would be called The Centre (The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, CSDS) in 1964. Ashis Nandy and Giri Deshingkar would join the group later. While the sensibilities of the others were urban, Dhirubhais were distinctly rural.

In the mid-1960s Indian democracy and the Indian academy were undergoing a churning. The university system with its departmental silos was working to produceivory tower intellectuals, reproducing post-enlightenment European style knowledge and Western models, this group felt. Indian civilisation and society called for fresh understanding drawing upon its own resources.

Both Kothari and Sheth reflected on the social change that was produced in the wake of postcolonial democracy. The old picture of democracy and caste was redundant, they insisted. Louis Dumonts homo hierarchicus thesis that produced a ritual hierarchical theory of caste had given way to newer forms of exclusion. The backward castes, so called, were demonstrating a new horizontalisation of the traditional system that came from a combination of land, wealth and power. Political scientists were struggling with new characterisations. These were bullock capitalists, argued the politicial scientists Lloyd and Susan Rudolph.

Sheth argued that Indian sociology was in the grip of traditional theory and provided no room for the outcaste and the aboriginal. It had become blind to the emergence of new forms of discrimination, new refugees of development and the underclass.

The political scenario had, to begin with, been referred to as a one party dominant system by Rajni Kothari. The Congresss hegemony, however, was already eroding. The top-heavy Indian state, with its Soviet-style socialist accoutrements and dams-as-temples, was wearing thin.

Civil society was slowly coming into its own as a set of powerful non-state actors and began asking fresh questions about development and democracy. It sought to repair the rupture between knowledge and action.

Lokayan literally, dialogue of the people was launched in 1980 and brought together academics and activists, including Smitu Kothari and Vijay Pratap. It would go on to win the Right Livelihood Award, characterised as the Peoples Nobel Prize. Rajni Kothari emphasised in his acceptance speech, Lokayan operates from a basic premise arising out of its perception and understanding of the crisis of our times: that it is fundamentally an intellectual crisis, a crisis of ideas, a crisis of human knowledge, both generally but especially in the social arena.

Rajni Kothari. Photo: CSDS.in

When I joined the CSDS faculty in 2002, I was happy to become part of its old-world culture with extended lunches and discussions. Working on the steering committees of Lokayan, Lokniti and the Indian Languages Programme was an enormous learning experience. In addition, there were evening addas where real battles were fought.

Dhirubhai had an extraordinary capacity to take on political correctness. Abhay Dubey records a conversation with Dhirubhai, which refers to a visit to the Deen Dayal Research Institute in Jhandewalan the 1990s. The RSS chief was late and Dhirubhai shocked the organiser by asking where Rajinder Singh was. He deliberately used his formal name, rather than Rajju Bhayya, as the RSS leader was called by the Sangh. Further, he spoke of Golwalkar rather than Guruji and to make matters worse asked the RSS to clarify its stand on constitutional protections for minorities.

In 2010, I recall a discussion at Squire Hall, the residence of the director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study when Peter DeSouza was director and Dhirubhai was a national fellow and Gopal Guru and I were visiting fellows. The discussion began with Facebook and its addiction, with Dhirubhai insisting that this relates to pre-modern forms of community, which have been effaced by modernity.

Dhirubhai and Surabhibehn, his scholar wife and Sanskritist, asked about the love seat on which Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten were reputed to have once sat together. Gopal Guru and Dhirubhai were in good form. Dhirubhai insisted that he wanted to take D.R. Nagarajs agenda forward in showing that Dalits were using Gandhi as a red rag. Gopal Guru asserted that Dhirubhai had misread Nagarajs argument in his book The Flaming Feet. Dhirubhai countered by stating that it was Ambedkar who stood on the shoulders of Gandhi; Ambedkar was possible only because Gandhi prepared the ground. Hindus were hugely hostile to the Removal of Untouchability Act. Gandhis agenda was, of course, upper caste reform because he felt that the problem of untouchability lay there. Gopal Guru pointed out Gandhis opposition to separate electorates. To which Dhirubhai responded that Dalits benefitted from joint electorates, getting a greater share of representation than they would have got from separate electorates. This has been to their advantage to this day.

The friendship between Ashis Nandy and Dhirubhai was tensile enough to take on the latters political incorrectness. Your critique of nationalism, Dhirubhai told Nandy, has handed over Indian nationalism to the right.

Last year, as I drew the introduction to my forthcoming book The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism to a close, a chance encounter with Peter DeSouza guided me to his new collection of D.L. Sheths essays At Home With Democracy: A Theory of Indian Politics. Peters introduction, titled A Political Theory of Indian Democracy, I was quick to note, validated my own argument about two kinds of nationalisms but emphasises how inclusive nationalism was undermined first by the Left and then the Right.

Political Hinduism was created by the independence movement but remained on the fringes and could not get the leadership of the Hindus, Sheth argues. Hindus, in any case, did not have a political-religious identity as mokha (salvation) is individual in the Hindu world; and Hinduism has not been a congregational religion; some have argued that it has been a confederation of religions.

The idea of India Tagores famous phrase was shaped under the leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and embodied in the Congress. Gandhi was more Hindu than the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose ideas came from Europe, Sheth asserted.

He felt the inclusive idea of nationalism was undermined by Left secularists who pushed global cosmopolitanism and secularism while undermining both nationalism and religion. Sheth maintained that inclusive nationalism is vital for democracy as it offers a vision of India to the ordinary Indian that is inclusive, secular and egalitarian. The Left dominance fostered elitism and practicing Hindus developed a minority complex contrasted with the intellectual arrogance of the secularist.

With the election of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998 and again in 1999, Hindutva forces sought to capture the space occupied by the Congress, including knowledge and cultural institutions. The elections of 2014 and 2019 brought the era of anti-RSS/anti-Hindutva politics, which had prevailed after the assassination of Gandhi, to an end.

Alas, that I was not able to show you my book, dearest Dhirubhai, to show how much I have learnt from you. But let the dialogue continue.

Shail Mayaram is the author of The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism: Transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana (Cambridge University Press).

Original post:

Dhirubhai Sheth and the Political Incorrectness of Being - The Wire

[Reuters]

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the United States right now. President Joe Biden has identified the causes that gave rise to the Trump phenomenon and is trying to root them out. He is doing everything in his power to win over voters who traditionally voted Democrat but were disillusioned by a sense of social stagnancy and political neglect. He is a politician who knows how to accomplish this, the kind of man the average American could have a beer with.

Biden is pushing the envelope, by American standards. His proposals for reaping more in taxes and the suspension of the Covid vaccine patents demonstrate his determination to take risks. Some believe that he has learned from the mistakes of Barack Obama, who took few risks apart from in the area of social security. Others believe that his age is a liberating factor, making him a president who cares more about his legacy than he does about his chances of re-election, even though it is not sure he would even be able to run. It is telling that Bidens people love to compare him with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who took such an enormous risk after a major crisis and built an electoral alliance for the Democrats that stood the test of time.

It is interesting that much of what the White House is trying to accomplish now had been touted by Trump but never carried out. The overhaul of Americas infrastructure is one example; both administrations admit that much of the countrys infrastructure is unacceptably old. The projects outlined in the relevant legislation will give work to thousands of Americans and give the country a much-needed facelift. Trump had made similar promises but never carried them through.

The notion of strategic independence had also been adopted by Trump but did not get very far. The belief is that America needs to stop relying on other countries, and China in particular, for the production of certain basic goods and materials. Biden has elevated this issue to one of his top policies, relying on the same economic patriotism that Trump also sought to exploit. The overall approach to China bears similarities with the previous administration though without Trumps histrionics.

The Democratic Party had been stuck in a rut, as over-the-top political correctness alienated it culturally from a large part of the American population. Biden is trying to overcome this hurdle by providing solutions to the most vital problems faced by a working and middle class that has felt increasingly insecure for many years. Whether he will succeed is an entirely different matter.

American politics is a complex game where even the most well-intentioned efforts can be scuppered by powerful interests and lobbies.

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Biden the risk-taker and Trump - Kathimerini English Edition