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> I think “a culture where social norms are enforced with repeated and vociferous public shaming” is the most useful way to define the term.
That might be the most useful way for the author to make their point, but as far as I am aware, for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. If you keep doing what you're doing while being insulted on Twitter, that's not being cancelled, that's just ... well, Twitter.
> What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing.
In no way does the tweet embedded at the top of the article imply that it's a bad thing that Louis CK is playing MSG. It's saying that if we define being cancelled not in the way the author of the article did but the way I outlined above, someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. From there it makes the pretty big leap to say that cancel culture in general is not real.
I'm not even that invested in the whole debate but this article seems completely misguided or in bad faith.
Who's counting? It's trivial to find examples of people who've lost their jobs for innocuous reasons. See: David Shor. It's bad faith to pretend this doesn't happen. Usually for proponents or those denying the phenomenon exists the goalpost shifts to effectively shrugging it off as minor. Speech that begets consequences isn't strictly limited to bigotry, as we are told.
> someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG.
He couldn't, until he could. It's not necessarily the case that public shunning lasts forever. Disingenuous to construe what happened to that man as something entirely different to what "cancellation" colloquially refers to.