My friend and I had cringed through a few moments like these throughout the evening, not wanting it to dampen our enthusiasm or opinion of this beloved author, but the framing of his answer illuminated his idea of “cancellation,” as it were, is something created out of thin air, determined by an anonymous “woke mob,”

> I would posit that "anonymous" and "mob-like" are two of the closest adjectives to reality when describing the current state of culture focused on identity politics and racial justice

.....and not, in reality, consequences of real events that had been swept under the surface coming to light.

> Can't it be both? Cancel culture originates out of just desire to hold people to consequnces, true, but it's also indiscriminate, dangerously wrong in some cases, far less efficient than the judicial system and makes us worse as people, in my opinion

Of course one can do something about it, I thought. You can not be an asshole. Like, for example, mocking someone who was sensitive in making sure they weren’t accidentally misgendering you.

>That's one consequence is that someone's feeling were hurt, but it's also effective satire, which is a valuable tool for getting people to reframe and argue points. There are people out there calling trans people "f-gs" or similar derogatory terms. Another problem with cancel culture is it's, as I said previously, randomly indiscriminate. Take up as much word space on every person voting Republican and who has harsher views on the LGBT community, and then you would be ethically justified in taking down David Sedaris

Sedaris pointed to his friend Blake Bailey as an example of someone who had been “cancelled…hard.”

>>Again, both things can be true. You can feel bad for Bailey's potential victims, but even prisoners and people who have done wrong deserve compassion and friends. Associating and being friends with someone who did someone in the woke mob who's been cancelled is not an endorsement of them, and I see no evidence that the world would be better or worse from a utilitarian perspective if say, Roseanne Barr or Louise CK, suffered the abandonment of their entire social circles.

The noise of cancellation is life-affecting enough that there is no doubt cancelled stars are aware that their life choice is being met with a heavy enough disapproval that if they were motivated to change their ways, one or two confidantes/friends isn't going to get them to change. Therefore, trying to cancel someone by association is more about over-judging the cancelled for his friend choices than anything productive.

THAT BEING SAID, friends should let their friends know about bad actions; so it does seems pretty enabling if the charges are true and you might have a point there.

Indeed, there are multiple allegations against Bailey concerning sexual assault, abuse and harassment spanning several years, but Sedaris noted with a shrug that he “hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

>>

Why isn't this a reasonable degree of doubt? You might not hold the view (and I agree that multiple accusations does make your view more reasonable), but have you considered that Sedaris might reasonably look at those answers and come to a different conclusion and can you respect him for that? I'm not suggesting I have the answer to that question, but it's worth asking yourself.

Sedaris pointed to a misunderstanding of his own work that blew up on Twitter almost exactly one year ago, as if the scope and scale of these two events are related.

>>Another fallacy of woke thinking. Sedaris's implication that two events are related in scale is valid if he actually specifically says this. You're stretching in this interpretation and that is not morally without sin. It's like the fake controversy around that women who won the Oscar for best director because she dared to compare her struggle to two coddled tennis players who "happened to be black"

You would think such an outspoken liberal gay man would understand and sympathize with the power structures at play between Bailey and his accusers and the difficulties of alleged victims (especially women) to be heard, believed and have any legal standing in such situations:

>>Admit it. You're disappointed because he's a "disenfranchised person" and he doesn't think the way you want him to think. Woke thinking is based around putting people in boxes and defining/limiting them by your own white visions of progress, even if it includes the people you're trying to help which is why woke people are similarly furious if a Black person doesn't conform to your vision of progress like Michael Che, Senator Tim Scott, or Dave Chapelle.

>> Instead, he mentioned Bailey is currently writing something on the subject and that he is looking forward to seeing what he has to say.

Yes, that's a great thing. Listening to people's sides of the story? Remember what our legal system used to be around 20 years ago?

Now, I know Sedaris understands the concept of punching up — a comedy principle where the joke is on the person in power, versus the disenfranchised, in order to hold that power accountable.

>>But how do you determine disenfranchised? Are Tiger Woods or OJ Simpson disenfranchised or Serena and Venus?

See I think privilege can simultaneously come in different forms and intersect in ways that aren't necessarily favorable to the "Blacks and LGBT people are precious morality pets view." Yes, a Black person is disenfranchised in many ways, but whenever a high profile Black person is insulted, there are a million white writers rushing to write think pieces (even if the race wasn't the source of the insult) in an effort to cancel the person. That's something in which satirization can occur because in the era of White people caring about their feelings, there is an imbalance in that directions even if it goes in other directions.

In an essay he read about witnessing and participating in a few Black Lives Matter marches in New York City last summer, he noted his own racial missteps and reckonings as a privileged white man. He also remarked that occasionally someone will catch him “trying to get away with something” by telling an off-color joke on tour and he’ll fix it. He is not afraid of admitting when he is wrong. But on the other hand, why wait to get called out for trying to get away with something in the first place?

>> Because the standard changes at such a rapid pace that no reasonable person of Sedaris's age range would be able to live a public life without a course

Why put someone of less power in a position to tell a millionaire best-selling author with a publicist that their words — already spoken or printed to a wide audience — are harmful?

>>It's reasonable that there are barriers where people might find it difficult to speak up. But any anonymous jerk can call him out on twitter or report him to his agent. The burden of society for someone to speak up when their feelings are hurt is something is still on you. If you're too triggered or traumatized to take that step, I'm not sure if you're fit to participate in a functioning society

And there were jokes at the expense of the marginalized (granted, they all came from the forthcoming book so are not yet in print). In a piece about “Yelp Reviews of Christmas,” a female character glibly talks about getting an abortion to make an ex-boyfriend mad. Knowing that women in the U.S. are already dying due to lack of access to safe abortion, and we’re currently waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will rule in a case that could result in half the country losing access, hearing abortion thrown into a humor story for shock value that punches down on the woman and only furthers harmful stereotypes about the type of person who seeks this life-saving health care and the reasons why they do, didn’t sit right with me.

>>You're free to interpret his work however you want, but you are making an attack on an artist here ("he's making jokes at the expense of the marginalized") so you should be held accountable for how thin that attack is that you are similarly putting in print (Hello pot? It's the kettle) that you know will affect his reputation. Having hot button issues as characteristics of characters shouldn't qualify as offensive and art is stifled by your argument that people should only portray positive stereotypes of margianlized people. If this was the most visible work about someone having an abortion, you might have a point, but enough hesitant pregnant women are out there, that he has no obligation to make his character virtuous.

I was willing to let it go until Sedaris teased another beat of the same piece he was working on, about a man who has to guess what his wife might like for Christmas, and ends up getting her tampons.

That’s not to say the evening wasn’t enjoyable. It was. Especially when Sedaris shared stories of hijinks old and new alongside equally famous sister Amy. Sedaris says it best when he talks about family. And as for the rest? Well, his words can speak for themselves.

-It's for this reason that I don't think this is the worst piece from the woke school of thought I ever read. Just like you respect Sedaris's enough to call it enjoyable, I wouldn't say your writing wasn't without merit. But, hey I just felt like this one was a good one to riff off of. Clearly, you and I are in different schools of thought, hopefully you can respect that