One of the things that really interests me about this discussion is the social context in which it's occurring.
'Cancel culture' became a bit of a fad issue when the George Ffloyd protests erupted across the globe.
It predates that. Censorship discussions go back as long as modern civilisation as we know it - even longer. For example, in Nth Australia, for some 40,000 years, a "good" indigenous artist, one permitted to paint on the walls of caves, was one who could perfectly imitate the accepted images, so sacred images like of the barramundi were always, for 10s of thousands of years, painted in exactly the same way, as an interesting historical example of censorship.
But it's flared up again since those protests in particular, and the toppling of (in particular) public statues celebrating historical figures that might be offensive to black people specifically (see, for example, the date that this thread was created).
So, that's the first interesting thing: 'cancel culture', as a bad thing, seems to be topical in the particular social climate of wealthy, western, white folks protecting their history.
Here in Australia, it's very stark how much that is the case, where people seem to be being outraged by the removal of public statues (on the basis that the figure represented may have been responsible for the mass slaughter of our indigenous people, or the slave trade). Similar protests in the UK have made mainstream news here, like the removal (and replacement, at least temporarily) of a historical statue in Colston.
Compare that, though, with the complete lack of media coverage of simultaneous removal of other culturally significant, publicly accessible monuments that don't make the news. The simultaneous removal of figures that are culturally significant to black people, and the lack of outrage over that (in fact - it doesn't seem to occur to many folks that that is, also, a form of 'cancel culture').
One particularly heartbreaking one that springs to mind are a row paperbark trees removed in Victoria to make way for the re-routing of a road out of Ararat. They were hundreds of years old, and said to hold spiritual significance. But, only to the local (black) indigenous community.
Was anyone particularly outraged by that?
The road didn't need to be moved. And unless you have reason to be interested in that particular topic, or lived in the area (where local indigenous people were protesting at the site) you basically had to be driving west out of Ararat to even know this was occurring.
Nor has anyone been particularly outraged by mining companies in Western Australia being routinely approved to mine sacred sites, often burial grounds. That's occurred over 400 times since 2010.
But again, the culture being destroyed isn't white culture, it's black culture.
Interesting that there seems to be a difference.
Another angle of this debate that is interesting to me (and similarly selective) is the apparent agreement that there's some kind of general consensus about things that should be censored, v's things that shouldn't.
In terms of government censorship, how many people here are able to get their hands on any recent literature written by, or songs produced by, a current resident of North Korea? And, does anyone actually have a problem that the impact of various trade tariffs and human rights embargoes is having the practical effect that present-day North Korean culture is effectively censored entirely from the rest of the world?
Because that also falls within 'censorship' and 'cancel culture'.
The third aspect of this discussion that I find interesting (but doubt there's a 'right' answer to), is the lack of distinguishing between private 'cancel culture' and government 'cancel culture' (ie. censorship).
The latter is very different to the former.
Private organisations (like Netflix, or Amazon) cancel things all the time, every day of the week, because it's hurting their bottom line.
So, when Netflix chose to stop running Gone With The Wind (which formed part of the 'cancel culture' discussions earlier on), that was a decision made in the interests of their shareholders. Cancel culture, in that respect, is simply how capitalism works. Private organisations don't have an obligation to show everything and anything - they 'censor' stuff from us as a matter of course, based on what we're choosing to consume.
Disney got on board with racial cancel culture decades ago, when they stopped running the cartoon version of the 3 Little Pigs, where the evil wolf was a stereotyped Jewish door salesman. Anyone think we're culturally deficient somehow since Disney changed the way it presents Jewish culture? Or deciding not to align Jewish culture with the evil character in their cartoons? Is that really a problem for anyone today?
An interesting topic. One that I think different social groups around the world will feel very differently about - opinions of populations not, perhaps, represented on this forum.
