Juno News - Cancel culture needs to be cancelled

00:00:00.000 I never join calls for people to be fired, for them to step down, for them to lose things that

00:00:10.980 are valuable to them. Maybe I should in some cases, but I don't do it as a matter of principle,

00:00:15.500 even if they are people who I really disagree with, even if I don't agree with the things that

00:00:20.040 they have said. My reasons, well, there's a few of them. I think if they're public office holders,

00:00:24.560 I think that it's up to the people to just vote them out the next time around. If they are some

00:00:29.720 sort of author, television host, what have you, well, I think you can just stop listening to them.

00:00:34.800 You could ignore them. They can slowly lose their audience if what they've done is actually not

00:00:38.600 appealing to individuals. And if they've done something truly heinous, truly horrible,

00:00:42.840 it's probably illegal and the law is going to step in and do what needs to be done. I just don't like

00:00:47.940 joining the mob, but I like it even less right now because I feel like the threshold, the barometer

00:00:53.840 for what gets people axed from a position or what gets them sort of trending such that we've got to

00:00:59.400 say, oh, off with their heads and get rid of them. It's getting smaller and smaller.

00:01:04.820 A lot of times it's about taking a statement a person has said that is not an aggressively

00:01:09.300 offensive statement, but if you kind of rearrange it, if you project onto it to see what you want

00:01:13.860 to see, well, then you can determine that it's uglier than maybe the person intended it to be.

00:01:18.480 And by the way, clearly the person's intentions, we're told this day and age, don't even matter.

00:01:23.400 I think the original example was the Don Cherry incident. You'll remember with that sentence that he

00:01:28.300 said. A lot of people spent time unpacking going, well, he meant this. No, actually he meant that

00:01:32.360 and so forth. Well, if you move this word here and you move that word there, well, hold on a second.

00:01:36.520 The simple fact that we even have to debate the nuts and bolts of what he even said suggests that

00:01:41.120 he did not say something clearly out there outrageous, but I digress. That is now water under

00:01:46.440 the bridge, but we're seeing a lot of this happen right now. Almost every day, there's some sort of

00:01:50.920 public figure personality who is under siege for saying something not perfect. Look, if you've

00:01:57.580 got some Michael Richards tape out there and you are just viciously unleashing venom on people,

00:02:02.060 well, then I think you're going to get what's coming to you and you're going to get you just

00:02:05.240 desserts. But a lot of this, I think, is very small beans and it's upsetting that the threshold

00:02:11.120 is so small. It's going to make a lot of people out there reluctant to just talk to their friends,

00:02:16.500 talk to co-workers, go out and talk to a neighbor and a stranger. It's like we can no longer trust

00:02:22.200 each other. We just don't know what the new fault lines are, what the landmines are. It's going to be

00:02:26.900 unnerving for a lot of people and I think that's unfortunate. I want to cut people slack and like I

00:02:32.300 said, I do that even if I know they hold different views than me, if I know that I don't like that

00:02:36.740 person to begin with. When there's a real offense out there, when someone's done something, said

00:02:41.460 something truly awful, I mean, we all know it. It's all clear. I think we should stop trying to

00:02:47.440 destroy people's lives every opportunity we get.

Juno News - June 12, 2020