The Merciless Ugliness Of The Mob Joiners
There's a note at the top of the piece at the UK site, The Critic: "Nick Buckley was sacked in July 2020 as the head of the charity Mancunian Way, after describing BLM as 'post-modern, neo-Marxists' who were 'call[ing] for the destruction of Western Democracy and our way of life.' He was later restored to his job after support from the Free Speech Union."
The piece is by Buckley himself, looking at those who behind his sacking. It started when he was cleaning out his email inbox:
The subject title of one I stumbled upon made my heart sink: Petition To Remove Nick Buckley CEO. All the old feelings I've wrestled with for the past year returned in an instant. It was from the person who set up the online petition demanding my sacking. It was to one of the charity's trustees who had been acting as CEO since my dismissal. Which was a good job to have at £1000 a week with no experience required....I clicked the next attachment to see what it contained. I froze. It was a list of names and geographical locations of everyone who had signed the online petition to have me sacked in June 2020. I moved the cursor to the close button. No good would come from looking at the names of the people who tried to destroy my life but curiosity got the better of me. Again, how could it not? What would you have done if you had had such a document in front of you? A denunciation designed to ruin your life, detailed down to a ward level. I am human. I am flawed. I started to scroll through and names I recognised popped up on the screen. The list had been downloaded from change.org, on a template to show how much support the petition had gained. The only good news was not one person I would call a friend signed the petition. But people I knew had.
Several years ago, the then Chair of my charity introduced me to one of his friends who needed advice on a career change. He wanted to move back into the charity sector away from a job he hated. He had previously been involved with a large Manchester charity as a trustee and I spent an evening in a pub with him discussing ideas and going through his options. Over several months he realised he didn't have the experience to move careers without taking a salary hit. I offered him a position on the board of my charity to help him gain more experience and hopefully act as a springboard into a new career. He was not a trustee for long. Halfway down the list, I found his name.
What sort of person calls for another to be sacked, I wondered? Such a total and complete solution to what was surely always going to be a partial problem at most. Where is the compassion, the tolerance and the understanding from the people who default sentence is employment death for all alleged offences? Naturally these people believe that they are morally superior and can pass judgement. For only they have the intelligence and understanding. They instinctively know who should be dispatched to social Siberia. Yet as my and so many other cases amply demonstrate, their tolerance and compassion have the stench of fear and servitude.
...How do you mentally get to a place where you call for the sacking of someone you don't know? Let alone of a man who you did know, who gave you his time to help you explore a new potential career. A man who welcomed you into his charity to give you new skills and experience.
What have we become? What's the road we have followed where so many of us are willing not only to see people out in the stocks, but to chuck as much rotten fruit at them as they can? Except it's not even momentary humiliation, it's lives ruined, careers destroyed, things wrecked, and all because some people are frightened of other people sounding off online. Gratitude, decency, nuance, respect: these are the things which should make up real life, between friends, families and at work. But what do we get from the online furies? Just a childish belief that life comes down to cartoonish good and evil. It's easy to be outraged and resort to pack mentality. Not least because there's no need for personal responsibility then: just let the pack do what it will.
It doesn't have to be like this of course. Disagreement does not have to lead to betrayal, or even just to rejection and denunciation. My heart sagged at what I read in my emails, I can hardly deny that. But just as a real life is more complicated, and less in need of audience participation than panto villains are, so too am I. So too are you. If my experience is worth anything to anyone else, it's just this: stand up to your bullies, for if you don't, no one else will. But if you do, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the courage that spreads infectiously. There are better people out there than you know.
Here's another disruption from woke zombies targeting Bret Weinstein. He's already had his career essentially derailed by woke madness.
It's difficult to share the optimism Buckley describes above.
People who know more European history than I do, which most everyone, might soon be making comparisons to the French Revolution… Which was (IIUC) an experiment wherein a thriving culture cut all the smart people's heads off to see what would happen.
(Game show hosts in executive government offices seem like part of this same pattern.)
Crid at February 28, 2021 10:36 PM
“where is the compassion, the tolerance, the understanding . . . .”
No good deed goes . . .
Wfjag at March 1, 2021 3:11 AM
Much 'woke' behavior is motivated by the dark pleasure of being able to exercise cruelty toward designated targets...while feeling virtuous about it and feeling a sense of bonding with the other Virtuous People.
See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57600.html
David Foster at March 1, 2021 5:02 AM
Life is complicated. Society is complicated. If you pull here something over there may unravel. Civilization is fragile and needs to be preserved and nurtured. To every problem there is a solution that is simple, satisfying, and wrong. Too many times the "wrong" aspect destroys the lives particularly of the poor. Like the min wage (originally designed to price blacks out of the workforce, not to help them--at least the progs in the old days were correct about cause and effect). We are running around destroying parts of the economic machine while clueless about how it all works. There are calls to ban all fossil fuels, as if there is a viable energy strategy without them. It would be catastrophic. The urge for political purity led to 8 months or riots and billions in damage. What could go wrong, he?
The other thing they are forgetting is that once you stir up and release the mob, they cannot be controlled. Tens of thousands died in the french revolution, and it was more peaceful that ones in china or russia or africa. And of course, not only the "bad" people died. I have a friend who grew up in one of Mao's camps and he did anything within his power not to go back to china. If lies like "russia russia russia" are allowed as political plays, no one is safe, not even the dems. If pelosi can call out the national guard (not within her legal power) what is next?
cc at March 1, 2021 12:14 PM
So far, I've only found one column by Miss Manners that specifically mentions cancel culture. As it happens, it's from November.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/advice/miss-manners-shunning-shaming-and-cancel-culture/2020/11/19/c950eae4-1feb-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html
Dear Miss Manners: It would seem that we have lost the art of social shunning.
I simply ignore and have nothing to do with bad people in public, or in my private life. As mentioned, you quickly move away in obvious horror from such people when you see or encounter them. They will eventually get it. If not, no loss to me.
Gentle Reader: Lost the art of social shunning?
On the contrary; it has spun out of control. There are two new versions: Shaming and “cancel culture.” Miss Manners congratulates you for refraining from using these weapons casually.
Yet excluding people whom one — or society — considers reprehensible is etiquette’s chief form of defense (other than setting an example of courtesy in the face of rudeness, which doesn’t always have noticeable results). While the law can administer harsh penalties when it is flouted, disapproval is the only sanction etiquette has against rudeness, and this has often been dismissed as ridiculously weak.
But for centuries, children born outside of marriage received lifetime stigmas. When bans and quotas against races or religions were legally challenged, codified bigotry persisted in private institutions, including not just clubs, but neighborhoods and schools.
And the ease of going public online has encouraged rash — and sometimes unfounded — judgments against individuals and businesses, without gradations of punishment suited to the severity of the transgression.
Vigilante rule is cruel and unjust. So: Is Miss Manners willing to surrender etiquette’s one weapon?
No.
Much atrocious behavior has been exposed. Unmistakable photographic evidence has documented actions that had otherwise been easily denied.
The old warning was, “Don’t do anything you would be ashamed to see on the front page of the paper.” Now, even shameless people should realize that there are consequences to being seen online with behavior that they used to get away with.
Miss Manners lives in hope that people will learn to care enough about their reputations to curb their offensive words and deeds. But that requires a belief in reputations, and an adjustment on the part of well-meaning society to the popular concept of being nonjudgmental.
That must be the phenomenon to which you are referring: The charitable habit of nullifying misdeeds by conferring instant forgiveness, even for the unforgivable. At its most touching, it is the bereaved forgiving the murderer. At its least charming, it is those who lionize audacious criminals.
Deeds count. Miss Manners is bewildered by the current explanation of wrongdoers: “That is not who I am.”
Well, then, who is it who did what you did? Whom do we hold accountable? And what if your doppelganger takes over again?
Miss Manners is not without mercy in viewing those accounts. She requires accusers to be sure of their facts and to keep their condemnation in proportion to the transgressions. She believes in redemption through remorse and reparations.
And she agrees with you about avoiding pointless street confrontations.
__________________________________
This one, as it happens, is from 2000:
Dear Miss Manners: As the captain of a dinner party, how do I avoid ramming an iceberg when one of my guests suddenly startles everyone by stating racist opinions? Naturally, I would prefer as few casualties as possible. (Well, maybe one.)
Gentle Reader: Miss Manners is afraid that it is the obligation of such a captain to provide life preservers for all, regardless of whether he thinks them worthy to survive.
In this case, the life preserver to be tossed is: "I don't think you realize how that sounds. I can't imagine that you really believe that, but in any case, let's talk about something else."
If the offending guest does not grab this and paddle madly back to safety, you may firmly move the ship on in another direction.
Lenona at March 1, 2021 5:25 PM
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