Your Fave is Problematic

I'll say it now, cancel culture is sometimes not good. In theory it is a good idea to go after people with repeated cases of sexual harassment, and sometimes it is very deserved, such as the case of Harvey Weinstein, but some of the people that are hunted made me feel like people are just looking for someone to be angry at.
 
Chucktshoes said:
That’s exactly the position being taken with regards to critique of the actions (or lack thereof) taken by the victims. “The men were powerful and the victims didn’t have any choice.” That’s frankly a load of bullshit. It removes any and all agency from the targets of these assholes.

I did not make this argument and neither did anybody on here. People are saying that to say that a person "should" do something in a certain situation implies that it is there fault that they did not react in a way to get out of the situation. You are exaggerating peoples arguments to fit your viewpoint and experiences in life. The reality of humans is some freeze up and some don't and that depends a lot on their experiences in life. Can they learn to change that, of course. but saying things like "should" does not put them on that path.

You can call my position simplistic, but I don’t care. You, me, and every other non-mentally deficient adult are 100% morally responsible and liable for the consequences of our choices. I don’t care if you had a shitty childhood (I did). I don’t care if you were molested (I was). I don’t care if you had substance abuse issues (I did). I don’t care if you are broke and homeless (been there too).

Great, you have come through a difficult journey and you are one of the few that was able to cope with all these traumatic experiences. However, each one of these experiences made it more and more likely that you wouldn't have a successful and fulfilling life.

I don’t give a damn what is wrong with your life, you are 100% responsible for the choices you make and things you do. The sooner folks realize that, the better off their life will be.

What I am saying and what you are saying are not mutually exclusive. I agree with the above statement or I wouldn't be a counselor. However, each traumatic experience make is less and less likely that a individual will make the choices to get healthy.

The biggest thing we can do to fuck up kids and set them on the path to destruction is to tell them the lie that they are a victim of their circumstances. Folks who do that should not only not be allowed around children, they should be strung up like pedos because they’re no less harmful to them.


A universal and constant truth is that life is shitty, but how you deal with that fact is entirely up to you.
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Comments in bold
 
If you make your points while minimizing someone else’s experience because it doesn’t mirror your own, you’ve reached a point in life where being right trumps all. And no matter how eloquent you are speaking your mind, you’ve become white noise to the ears that mattered. In other words, you’re just preaching to your own choir. Trauma is real and it affects everyone differently. To paint your own experiences on someone else and think they should act accordingly is wrong.

If you’re capable of detaching the actions of an artist from their art and continuing to support them, that’s fine. If you read accusations and subsequent responses and decide it’s no big deal, that’s your prerogative. But you don’t need to blame their victims in the process. You don’t need to openly pine for the days when powerful men were acting like monsters with no accountability. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this moral quandary with an artist we followed, and made our own decisions. But when you are your own judge and jury, you should probably acknowledge the fact that a) your decision was biased, b) has no bearing on how others should act, and most importantly c) consider how your words might affect others before you exonerate whomever for whatever. It’s also okay - and maybe encouraged - to not chime in at all in these scenarios.

So in a thread dedicated to such things, I’d ask that people be mindful of this sort of thing. Writing a monologue about something that is both nuanced and potentially harmful to those with trauma, will only hurt individuals and damage your own argument in the process. These subjects should always remain a dialogue. No matter what you think, you can’t relate to the victim of any of these scenarios. YOU CAN’T. We are all our own three dimensional being that responds to things in unique ways. And for the love of continuing any discussion on this topic, remove all victim blaming from your questions, points, etc. It’s cruel and destructive.
 
MikeyP said:
If you’re capable of detaching the actions of an artist from their art and continuing to support them, that’s fine. If you read accusations and subsequent responses and decide it’s no big deal, that’s your prerogative. But you don’t need to blame their victims in the process.
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This times 1000. I don't think I'd ever be listening to someone like XXXTENTACION unless it was a joke or something, but I'm not going to go hate on anyone that does listen to him.

Victim blaming is the very reason people don't want to come forward against these influential figures and that's a legitimate issue.
 
Dtknuckles said:
Comments in bold
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To say that it’s not allowed to critique the actions of one party is to say that they are wholly innocent. It also prevents an honest accounting of what happened. In this case it includes recognizing that different choices could have led to different outcomes or admitting some of the victims, weren’t. None of that excuses creepy, shitty, predatory behavior. Nail the fuckers to the wall for what they’ve done, but don’t pretend that their behavior was an unforeseeable circumstance.

To say that someone should have done one thing or another in a certain situation isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about analyzing what happened, and determining how to reach a different outcome. Those are valuable lessons for the victimized party in the future, and also for anyone else who wishes to prepare themselves for what to do if faced with a similar situation. Folks freeze up because they are not adequately prepared for the circumstances they find themselves in. People don’t rise to the occasion, they default to their level of ingrained training.

You are right in that every one of those experiences did make it less likely that I would choose a healthy path for my life. For many years they did. In fact I’d say that some of the harmful behaviors I still engage in could likely be traced to those traumas. Doesn’t change the fact that I am wholly responsible for my actions or excuse me from the negative consequences of them. That understanding is what helped me choose a healthier path and still helps me not return to the more self destructive instincts.

Victimhood is a choice. One chooses to be defined by the terrible things that happened to them, or they choose better paths. It’s not easy to choose the latter. It’s a hard row to hoe and is likely to be a perpetually ongoing process. That makes it no less of a choice.

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My approach to analyzing these stories is through the eyes of a father. My job as a father is to prepare my children for the world that exists, not the one I wish existed for them. That means for my daughter I have to prepare her to recognize dangerous situations like this so that she can avoid them. For my sons it’s lessons of how to treat other people (i. e. don’t think you have an entitlement to the bodies of others). Of course if you want to get technical about it, those lessons apply equally to all of them, just manifested in slightly different ways.
 
Chucktshoes said:
To say that it’s not allowed to critique the actions of one party is to say that they are wholly innocent. It also prevents an honest accounting of what happened. In this case it includes recognizing that different choices could have led to different outcomes or admitting some of the victims, weren’t. None of that excuses creepy, shitty, predatory behavior. Nail the fuckers to the wall for what they’ve done, but don’t pretend that their behavior was an unforeseeable circumstance.

To say that someone should have done one thing or another in a certain situation isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about analyzing what happened, and determining how to reach a different outcome. Those are valuable lessons for the victimized party in the future, and also for anyone else who wishes to prepare themselves for what to do if faced with a similar situation. Folks freeze up because they are not adequately prepared for the circumstances they find themselves in. People don’t rise to the occasion, they default to their level of ingrained training.

You are right in that every one of those experiences did make it less likely that I would choose a healthy path for my life. For many years they did. In fact I’d say that some of the harmful behaviors I still engage in could likely be traced to those traumas. Doesn’t change the fact that I am wholly responsible for my actions or excuse me from the negative consequences of them. That understanding is what helped me choose a healthier path and still helps me not return to the more self destructive instincts.

Victimhood is a choice. One chooses to be defined by the terrible things that happened to them, or they choose better paths. It’s not easy to choose the latter. It’s a hard row to hoe and is likely to be a perpetually ongoing process. That makes it no less of a choice.

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My approach to analyzing these stories is through the eyes of a father. My job as a father is to prepare my children for the world that exists, not the one I wish existed for them. That means for my daughter I have to prepare her to recognize dangerous situations like this so that she can avoid them. For my sons it’s lessons of how to treat other people (i. e. don’t think you have an entitlement to the bodies of others). Of course if you want to get technical about it, those lessons apply equally to all of them, just manifested in slightly different ways.
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There's a lot to process here and I will state now that I personally disagree with you. Im just going to caveat that everything I am about to say is my own opinion and, of course, you are entitled to your own.

Your comment of 'don’t pretend that their behavior was an unforeseeable circumstances' is quite a depressing way of viewing the world. You are literally saying that we should treat people as being guilty of something prior to it happening. Louis CK has been mentioned a few times as an example, are you saying that the women that went to his dressing room should have assumed he was going to want to perform a sexual act from them? If a colleague invited me into their office I wouldn't deny it on the off chance they were going to perform an unwanted sexual act.

'Victimhood is a choice.' is something I COMPLETELY disagree with im afraid. A statement like that completely transfers the blame to the victim. Its a potentially harmful comment, and one that is likely to be the cause of people not wanting to come forward when abusers have physically or mentally hurt them.
 
Selaws said:
There's a lot to process here and I will state now that I personally disagree with you. Im just going to caveat that everything I am about to say is my own opinion and, of course, you are entitled to your own.

Your comment of 'don’t pretend that their behavior was an unforeseeable circumstances' is quite a depressing way of viewing the world. You are literally saying that we should treat people as being guilty of something prior to it happening. Louis CK has been mentioned a few times as an example, are you saying that the women that went to his dressing room should have assumed he was going to want to perform a sexual act from them? If a colleague invited me into their office I wouldn't deny it on the off chance they were going to perform an unwanted sexual act.

'Victimhood is a choice.' is something I COMPLETELY disagree with im afraid. A statement like that completely transfers the blame to the victim. Its a potentially harmful comment, and one that is likely to be the cause of people not wanting to come forward when abusers have physically or mentally hurt them.
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It may be a depressing way to view the world, but it is also an accurate one. I am not saying you should treat people as guilty of something that that haven’t done, I am saying that you should be prepared to encounter bad people who do bad things. I don’t know someone is a shitty person until they do something shitty, so I don’t treat them as a shitty person until then either. At the same time, I don’t run around pretending shitty people don’t exist or that I won’t encounter them. You can understand the world that is and act accordingly, or you can believe the world to be something it isn’t. One is a much better path to a happier life than the other.

Did you stop reading after the word “choice”? The entire paragraph breaks down what I mean by that and it in no way places transfers the blame for a traumatic situation to the person who was on the receiving end. It is all about how someone deals with that trauma after the fact. One can choose to take on the identity of a victim, or one can choose to put in the work (by getting the necessary help) to move past the trauma. The second path is the harder one, no doubt. But it is still a choice.
 
Chucktshoes said:
It may be a depressing way to view the world, but it is also an accurate one. I am not saying you should treat people as guilty of something that that haven’t done, I am saying that you should be prepared to encounter bad people who do bad things. I don’t know someone is a shitty person until they do something shitty, so I don’t treat them as a shitty person until then either. At the same time, I don’t run around pretending shitty people don’t exist or that I won’t encounter them. You can understand the world that is and act accordingly, or you can believe the world to be something it isn’t. One is a much better path to a happier life than the other.

Did you stop reading after the word “choice”? The entire paragraph breaks down what I mean by that and it in no way places transfers the blame for a traumatic situation to the person who was on the receiving end. It is all about how someone deals with that trauma after the fact. One can choose to take on the identity of a victim, or one can choose to put in the work (by getting the necessary help) to move past the trauma. The second path is the harder one, no doubt. But it is still a choice.
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I guess my issue with the ‘victimhood is a choice’ comment is that it implies the victim is in complete control of their emotions and how they feel about the incident which caused them to be a victim.

If someone bumps into me I can easily shake it off, I’m still the victim in that situation but my emotions towards it is manageable. In extreme situations it wouldn’t be as easy to just dismiss the event and move past it, however much you may want to. It’s in those situations where I would find the ‘victimhood is a choice’ comment to be harmful, as it’s not something I can fix.
 
Selaws said:
Louis CK has been mentioned a few times as an example, are you saying that the women that went to his dressing room should have assumed he was going to want to perform a sexual act from them? If a colleague invited me into their office I wouldn't deny it on the off chance they were going to perform an unwanted sexual act.
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-I didn’t mean to skip this part-

Assuming that something is going to happen with a specific person and being generally prepared for a situation are not the same thing.

I don’t assume anybody is going to come on to me (actually quite the opposite) but I know how I will handle myself if the situation arises.

As for professional situations like joining someone in an office, I have long practiced what has become known as the “Pence Rule” by maintaining open doors or chaperones when meeting with colleagues or subordinates. It’s not so much an issue now, but was when I was in retail management.
 
Selaws said:
I guess my issue with the ‘victimhood is a choice’ comment is that it implies the victim is in complete control of their emotions and how they feel about the incident which caused them to be a victim.

If someone bumps into me I can easily shake it off, I’m still the victim in that situation but my emotions towards it is manageable. In extreme situations it wouldn’t be as easy to just dismiss the event and move past it, however much you may want to. It’s in those situations where I would find the ‘victimhood is a choice’ comment to be harmful, as it’s not something I can fix.
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But it is something you can fix*. Probably not easily, and likely not on your own. Ultimately though, it isn’t going to be dealt with until you make the decision to do so.


*I don’t really like the word “fix” here in this context, as trauma isn’t something broken that can be reassembled just as it was before. But to build off that use of the term, trauma is something that while it may leave a scar can either be point of structural weakness or be a point that is stronger than what was there before and strengthens the entire being. It all depends on how one goes about mending it.
 
Chucktshoes said:
But it is something you can fix*. Probably not easily, and likely not on your own. Ultimately though, it isn’t going to be dealt with until you make the decision to do so.


*I don’t really like the word “fix” here in this context, as trauma isn’t something broken that can be reassembled just as it was before. But to build off that use of the term, trauma is something that while it may leave a scar can either be point of structural weakness or be a point that is stronger than what was there before and strengthens the entire being. It all depends on how one goes about mending it.
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I think we all can agree that trauma is something that we can heal from. Maybe that is a better way to express this?

I get the feeling that we are all expressing the same thing, but in different ways. You use choice as your word for it, another uses fix. I know it seems a little nit picky about the language used when discussing these topics, but words do affect people differently and have generally accepted meaning. However if you want a person to heal it’s important to listen and try to understand how words and ideas make them feel. Otherwise, they will see your interactions as judgement.
 
Dtknuckles said:
I think we all can agree that trauma is something that we can heal from. Maybe that is a better way to express this?

I get the feeling that we are all expressing the same thing, but in different ways. You use choice as your word for it, another uses fix. I know it seems a little nit picky about the language used when discussing these topics, but words do affect people differently and have generally accepted meaning. However if you want a person to heal it’s important to listen and try to understand how words and ideas make them feel. Otherwise, they will see your interactions as judgement.
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On that level, yeah, I think we are expressing basically the same things, but where I’m describing the choice coming into play is before the healing/fixing/mending happens. One has to make a choice to start that process.

If I could liken it to something else, it would be addiction. Before a person can move past addiction, they have to make a choice to not let that addiction define who they are and what path their life will take. The same goes for trauma. You can either let that trauma define you and set your path, or you can choose to move in a direction of healing.

I know I’m a blunt truth kind of guy. I’m not very big on softening things up. That’s not really my forte (pronounced like “fort” apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but at a certain point I believe it becomes necessary. My gut feeling is that often by leaving out where a person’s choice comes into play in the healing process we unintentionally remove their sense of agency and help trap them in the identity of victimhood.
 
Alright I'm gonna post here one last time with my thoughts on the entirety of cancel culture. I think it's a problem. This post is about ProJared, a Youtuber who was caught in the middle of getting cancelled for alleged infidelity and sending nudes to minors. These allegations arose 3 months ago and ProJared himself has been mostly silent about them, leading to endless Internet circle-jerking about what a shitty person he is and RELENTLESS memes made about how he is essentially a cheater and a pedophile.

Fast forward to 4 days ago, where he released a new video called "YOU'VE BEEN LIED TO." detailing the allegations and simultaneously calling into question the allegations and the legitimacy of them. He remains respectful throughout the entire video and provides solid evidence to show legitimacy to his claims of misinformation. Something I must note as well about his video is the fact that he admits that he is not perfect. Some of the things that are brought up he admits that he can't concretely disprove, and he even leaves it up to the viewer to make a judgment call on if they think he is right or not. He even goes to the point where he says that if his fans blindly hated him due to these allegations and made jokes at his expense, without seeing his side, he forgives them, and that he only wishes to go back to making content for his channel.

I will even admit I've fallen into this trapping of, get angry now, research later. It's unfortunate that people are so unwilling to look at things and research instead of just following popular opinion and perpetuating hatred, and this is something I look to better myself on as well. This article details both the allegations and the video made with the evidence Jared provided to back up his claims. Make of Jared's situation what you will, but I feel this article gets to the crux of why I don't particularly think cancel culture is good.

www.popdust.com

How ProJared's Cancellation Exposes the Core Problem With Cancel Culture

In May 2019, gaming YouTuber Jared "ProJared" Knabenbauer became the target of public online canceling. ProJared was deemed a sexual predator. Now he's released a convincing defense video, and it looks like cancel culture might have resulted in bullying and harassing someone who didn't deserve it.
www.popdust.com www.popdust.com

Cancel culture feels like hate mob mentality on NUMEROUS occasions. We've seen numerous people affected beyond repair due to allegations brought up against them, only for them to show that there was in fact some truth to what they were saying the whole time. It's painful to see, and I feel like people need to stop trying to cancel people and calling for the mobs to attack the next victim.

Are there bad people that have been hit by cancel culture? Absolutely. I don't think that cancel culture is a good thing though. In fact I think it's an extremely dangerous trend. People's careers, jobs, and families have been ruined due to statements that ended up being false. Irreparable damage has been done, and when watching Jared's video, I could tell that he seemed off. Like he was a shell of his former self. This man's career and reputation were pretty much gone. He's been through some shit to say the least, and it shows.

We must be careful of the hatred and vitriol we send. I'm saying that we, as people, need to be more critical of what we see online, and must bring ourselves to call in to question certain things. Or as ProJared himself says towards the end of his video, we need to ask:

"WHAT'S THE OTHER SIDE?"

EDIT: I WILL SAY THAT THE VIDEO DOESN'T COMPLETELY CLEAR JARED'S NAME EITHER, BUT IT DOES HELP GIVE MORE TO HIS SIDE AND UNDERSTANDING HIS PERSPECTIVE
 
Melt Face Molly Drop said:
Apparently for-tay is the UK pronunciation. Imma keep saying it like that tho. Just like niche is NEESH and charade is sha-RAHD and homage is OH-MAHJ. Language is weird.
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Good sir, I see what you’re doing wrong here and if you don’t mind allow me to correct you.

See, you’re reading what I write and questioning it. Wrong. Then you’re finding answers to those questions from outside and <gasp> potentially credible sources. Even wrongest.

My life (and Trump’s) would be a whole lot easier if hence forth you question nothing we say and accept it (blindly) as the truth. Then you won’t have to muck about on the “internet” and with “facts”. Think of the time you’ll save yourself and the face you’ll save me.

Agreed? Agreed. Good!
 
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time for my fucking take on cancel culture

a developer of night in the woods, alec holowka, died yesterday

he was under intense allegations by zoe quinn about being a sexual harasser.. which i do believe are true, it is not known if this was a suicide because of the allegations or not, but sadly seems likely

the problem with cancel culture is not that we become more aware of harassers and we try to honestly help issues...

the problem is that we are quick to vilify and harass people instead of trying to fix these issues from the ground up (teaching people about sexual harassment better, supporting and comforting victims, etc.).. instead of go on to attack these people... from what i see knowing alecs mental issues is he was a person who needed therapy, a person who honestly needed someone to explain the issues and try to stop these bad things from happening before they started

cancel culture is not the problem

people are the problem
 
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