#also off topic but can we repopularize the word bastard

[bingoboingobongo]

im gonna go on a real long rant here.

cancel culture in and of itself is not "bad". the main idea of cancel culture, holding people accountable who are not typically held accountable, is not a bad idea. at. all.

the problem with cancel culture is that the people partaking in it tend to act really stupidlu. like really, really stupid. i hate to say it but they are acting like idiots. cancel culture by nature is a judge of someone's character. it is an insanely nuanced conversation that frankly, social media and the people using it are not equipped to understand.

for some reason, avid social media users and cancel culture enthusiasts have this inane belief that the world is black and white. good and evil. just and unjust, but that's not how it works.

good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. someone could do something terrible in the past but be a great person now, or a they could have been a great person in the past but do a terrible thing now.

take the whole "taylor swift carbon emissions" drama that's going on now. everyone's getting so bent out of shape because somehow they've all fallen into the belief that just because she wears sustainable clothing or promotes women's rights means she's automatically a great person and can do no wrong.

or even the "will smith-chris rock" drama that happened a while ago. is it objectively bad to slap someone, yes. but does that make will smith an inherently bad person? not necessarily.

the problem with cancel culture happening almost exclusively on social medias like tiktok and twitter is that these platforms are quite literally not built for the kind of nuanced conversations you need to be having when you're judging someone's character.

you can't decide whether someone's a good or bad person in like 280 characters, and even for the people who are involved in cancel culture that do understand nuance, it's significantly harder to communicate it through text and online mediums.

not to mention that people change. im not saying that "time heals all wounds" or something like that. it is 100% valid to approach someone with a grain of salt based on what they did in the past, but the key is that you're approaching them with a grain of salt, not a whole carton of it.

one of cancel culture's favorite things to do is dig up problematic things people did in the past and then lord it over their heads and use it as an excuse to view them exclusively based on what happened in the past, but the unfortunate truth is that people can change. people can grow. and something they did when they were sixteen or whatever shouldn't be used to judge their character as a whole.

another problem is that people don't understand the extenuating circumstances that are in play when people do problematic things. one of my favorite expressions is "it's an explanation, not an excuse" and it is so true here. yes a lot of people do stupid things when they're young, but the difference is that they're not young in the same social standards as we're experiencing right now, the social standards they experienced when they were young were probably significantly more conservative and less liberal.

people don't realize that we're really living in a new age of activism, and that a lot of the stuff we see, instagram infographics, tabloid headlines, and of course, cancel culture, didn't exist or weren't widely popular when a lot of these people who are being persecuted by cancel culture were kids.

if they lived in a neighborhood or community that was predominantly one race or group of people, they didn't have as many resources as we do right now to know what is offensive and what isn't.

now this is not to say that any of the things that these people did is right in any way whatsoever. not at all. it's an explanation of why they did something they did, but not an excuse. most, if not all, of the things these people did are objectively bad things, but you can't let that be a judge of their entire character.

does this mean you can't be wary of these people? no. if i meet someone and my friend tells me they're notorious for smacking people in the face, yeah im definitely gonna protect my face around them, but it's not right for me to judge them and deem them solely as a face slapper. maybe they're a face slapper but they also have a passion for woodworking. or maybe they were just taught that slapping people in the face is how you show love.

it sucks but people are complicated. people change, circumstances change, viewpoints and opinions change, and if you're judging someone by one thing they did that doesn't make you woke or an activist, that just makes you naive and jaded.

another thing is that nine times out of ten, people partaking in cancel culture don't have all the facts. at the end of the day, you are an outsider in the lives of most celebrities. you don't know the details or the nuances of their relationships, of their thoughts, of their actions, etc. and so frankly you can't come to a just or correct conclusion when you're not dealing with all of the facts. and one of the factors of "dealing with all of the facts" is actually letting the person being canceled share their side.

the problem is that as people cancel more and more "prestigious" people, the people being canceled are less likely to see what's going on, or if they don't have social media then there's a good chance they're completely unaware of what's happening. and if the person you're "canceling" has no idea that they're being canceled or is unable to tell their side of the story or at least give an explanation than you're not canceling them. you're pretty much just trash talking them behind their back.

people on the internet are simply not capable enough and frankly shouldn't be able to play judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to judging people's characters. if you're going to have a conversation about canceling someone, please for the love of god don't do it on twitter or tiktok, and if you do then you better be prepared to have a thread of like a hundred tweets so you can properly discuss all the nuance needed in this topic.

in conclusion, the world is not black and white. you wouldn't (and really shouldn't) judge yourself in black and white, in terms of completely good or completely evil, so why should you do the same to celebrities? learn to see the grey in the world. stop living in a binary of good and evil. it's not helping us and it's definitely not helping you.