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My sister said something about 'accountability creep' that's been stuck in my head for days.
We were talking about that old comedian who got dropped from a festival last week, and I was going on my usual rant about how people just can't take a joke anymore. She's usually quiet on this stuff, but she looked at me and said, 'I don't know, I think the real problem is when we start holding everyone to the same standard as the actual bad guys.' She pointed out that a mean tweet from a decade ago is now treated with the same finality as a criminal charge, and that the punishment is always the same: total silence. It hit different because she wasn't defending the worst behavior, she was worried about the scale sliding so far that we lose any sense of proportion. It made me realize I've been so focused on defending free speech that I didn't see how the goalposts for 'cancellable' keep moving. Now I'm second-guessing every time I see a new name trending for something dumb they said in 2012. Has anyone else felt like the rules for what gets someone 'cancelled' keep changing without anyone agreeing on them first?
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piper_reed6mo ago
My college roommate lost an internship over a dumb Myspace joke.
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