JK Rowling was not cancelled in any way. Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate. "Cancel culture" to the degree that it exists as any kind of actual threat to free speech is squarely a right-wing endeavor.
> Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate.
Gawker Media wasn't cancelled; they intentionally violated a direct court order.
Maybe you should be arguing that the court should not have ruled against Gawker in the first place, or arguing that the court should not have directed Gawker to cease the publication of nonconsensual nudes, or that the court should not have brought the hammer down when Gawker continued its publication of nonconsensual nudes.
> I'm curious why you think it is okay to publish nudes of someone against their will.
I in no way stated or implied that that is OK in any way. such practices are vile and disgusting as was the outing of Thiel.
However, a "first amendment violation" , neither incident was.
"free speech" means, as we are reminded constantly by right wingers when they are denouncing "cancel culture", "speech that we despise is also free". Gawker in no way violated the first amendment. Right wing billionaires who claim to be things like "free speech absolutists" are full of it and will use any tools at their disposal to silence and "cancel" speech they don't like, including using their billions to abuse the justice system, launching torrents of frivolous lawsuits against media companies that published a story they didn't like (but had no legal basis to challenge).
Again, "a free speech violation occurred" is not my point.
my point is, billionaires saying "At last! free speech!" like PG did when he retweeted this MIT annoucement are completely full of it. They would like right-wing speech, ideas like "Black people are less intellectually capable" to be "free", which means "welcomed into the discourse without constraint", whereas any media company they don't personally like should be sued into oblivion. Gawker's fate only began when Peter Theil decided to target tens of millions of dollars at suing them into oblivion, waiting for something to stick. It quite plainly set a precedent that such actions can be taken by any billionaire whenever they want. Billionaires like Theil, PG and quite plainly Musk do not give a flying f** about "free speech". it is their speech they care about. And they should be widely challenged on this.
Gawker was not fined $140 million for violating a court order. They were sued for damages by Hulk Hogan and Hogan could have sued for the same things even if they had complied with that order, and I am not familiar with what basis there is to claim this lawsuit would not have been brought or successful if they had complied; even if unsuccessful, Theil's goal was to continue flooding Gawker with lawsuits until they went out of business, and this is most certainly an abuse of the legal system.
I did not say she was cancelled (in a successful sense), I said there were attempts to get her cancelled. Again, while her attempted cancellation wasn't successful, the fact that such an attempt even happened in the first place is mortifying. We live in the 21st century, witch hunts should not be a thing anymore.
Furthermore, I get the sense that your dismissal of JK Rowling's attempted cancellation is a thinly veiled attempt to dismiss or minimise the notion that "cancellation" is an actual phenomenon. People have their lives physically harmed and their livelihoods threatened because of this. People have committed suicide because of this (if you did actually bother to read the comment you were responding to). If that were your intent, you should take a good look as to whether you're consumed by the culture wars or not.
The notion that cancellation is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon is bollocks as well. Countless leftist academics have been successfully cancelled for their views. Oftentimes, their views were (mis)interpreted and misrepresented by their attackers in a fashion that requires the complete obliteration of reasoning. In fact, if you actually check the statistics from FIRE, 60% of the cancellation in academia came from the left, although 40% from the right is non-trivial as well. As such, the threat to free speech is indeed real, regardless of your political affiliation.
Lastly, I'm not based in the US or any part of the anglosphere. From my outsider's point of view however, the imminent threat to free speech in the "1984" sense is coming from the left. I spent two years of my time watching how Donald Trump and the republicans made a complete joke out of the US. I watched in utter shock at the atrocities and lunacy that they were capable of. In the next two years however, I observed an equivalent form of lunacy that was emerging from the left. This is no thanks to the influence of big tech, academia, and the left-wing media, whose global reach is far more prevalent than that of Fox News. From then on, I watched as more institutions in the west were ideologically captured, sacrificing their function for "social justice". While they are not the government, they are the cumulation of every power aside from the government. We've seen how big tech can rival the power held by congress. That, plus the media, academia, public and private institutions combined, is capable, and is exercising that power in a manner that is starting to look 1984-esque. What seems to be successfully driving this trend is the left's inability to discern social justice from "critical social justice". In other words, my calculus assignment easily runs circles around Robin DiAngelo's entire academic career and intellect. However, her books are selling like hotcakes. Make what you want out of what I've written.
