Lindsay Ellis "Cancelled" Controversy Rant

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Or the TV. Or philosophers. Or anybody else. It's not fundamentally different.

It's a platform that actually offers you choice (doesn't really help that much with finding good stuff, but that's another story). It's a matter of using it well.

Are most books not garbage anyway? I think they are.

If you are referring to HASS textbooks, or works based on superstition (i.e., astrology, ghosts, psychics, et cetera), then the answer is 'yes'.

STEM textbooks are much more reliable.

See? It's the same. Except that Youtube is all about entertainment -- or at least, if you don't want your brain to turn into sludge, it should be. The infamous "algorithm" doesn't help with the good-to-bad ratio, but, for now at least, there still is plenty of good content out there. It doesn't make much sense to equate "Youtube" with their "trending" page or whatever it's called, just like it doesn't make much sense to equate "books" with Amazon's best-sellers of the week or whatever.

As I mentioned the real problem is cultural ignorance. There's white people offended by Lindsay Ellis's comparisons who are concurrently ignorant of Asians themselves to be making such (ironically) inaccurate attributions.

Then there are Asian Americans who feel "represented" when both Airbender and Raya are totally fantasy realms whose characters seem suspiciously caucasian like a Japanese anime.

Either you do not really know YouTube, or you are deliberately trying to fool me.

How do you actually cancel someone? I guess if they were employed by someone like a newspaper you could convince their employers that continuing their employment would be harmful to their image.

But I don't think Lindsay Ellis has an employer who can fire her. The only way she could possibly be cancelled would be for Youtube to ban her account but her account is still online and she still has over a million subscribers.

It looks like she hasn't been cancelled at all. How many people actually said "we should cancel her"? How many people made a fuss about this being political correctness gone mad? If the latter number exceeds the former then the people who wanted to cancel her weren't the only ones overreacting.

Why worry about Linsday Ellis having been cancelled when she hasn't been cancelled?

I think most of the people "crowing from the rooftops" about her so called cancellation are right wingers.

They invented this fictional term (Cancel culture) as a way of stopping those of us on the left from questioning them too deeply.

Being right wing and being intellectual are incompatible. So throw labels at your enemies to discredit them before they "dare" open their mouths or put pen on paper.

The intention behind this was to sow seeds of discontent among young social activists and potential future democrats that the left cancels people.

All of this really reminds of the time the left tried to "cancel" Doom Eternal

It says video unavailable

Really? It works for me.

I started watching YouTubers like Lindsay Ellis because they were funny and made good points about movies (sometimes.) I've noticed a bit of a trend where certain people went from comedian-critics to critic-comedians to critic-political-commentators to politics politics politics politics politics politics. I have no interest in that.



To hear some of the Twitter people tell it, "Raya" and "Avatar" ARE the essence of Asian culture and by comparing the two, or really just by commenting on them as entertainment in any way, Ellis insulted all Asian people everywhere.

There's a reason that there are separate Fiction and Non-Fiction sections in libraries, but some people seem to think they're the same thing.

I once saw a discussion where some random person (not an internet-famous YouTuber) compared the plot to the then-new "Black Panther" movie to "The Lion King." As with Ellis' "Raya"/"Avatar" comparison, people in the comments were absolutely vicious to that person, on the idea that comparing two movies set in Africa was automatically offensive. (This was on that same Broadway discussion group where people regularly repeated Ellis' "not political enough = BAD" take on "Rent.")



This is a good point. I don't think I really need to worry about Ellis' career, or that I would even if it was actually in jeopardy. Just reading how harsh some of the comments were and how outlandish their reasoning was, it disturbs me to think the human brain works that way. I just imagine that if I was actually the one on the receiving end, it would be even worse. I don't like bullying in general, but it's worse to me when it's in the guise of virtue.

Part of the reason I brought it up was also the irony that this was happening to Ellis when she herself has expressed similar political views.



This is why I was reluctant to bring up which side Ellis was on and why I put the term "Cancelled" in quotes. It seems like any time a politicized term is mentioned on the internet, the discussion then becomes about whether or not the term is valid, divided along partisan lines.

"Cancelling" is not a good word for it but it is a problem if people are facing large-scale harassment for stupid reasons and saying that it doesn't matter because they're not literally cancelled or that it should be ignored because calling it out could support right-wing narratives is going to prevent more people from joining the left than the initial controversy itself. It's very important optically for we on the left who oppose this to show that we're the majority.

The problem here is the automatic assumption that Ellis is being racial before looking at the intellectual content of the comparison she made, Raya and the Last airbender actually have a lot of similarities in terms of the different earth kingdoms and the main character bringing balance to the warring factions. Infact I wonder if the producers of the Last Airbender will take Disney to court for plagiarism in that the stories are so similar (but that's another thread)



There's a danger in labelling youtube commentators left or right wing as often most of them are manipulators in the art of click bait and are chameleons. However certain ones are fairly clear in their position. There is one particularly nauseating character named Lauren Chen who is Asian and her partner is caucasian and they live in Canada but they spend 90% of their youtube content attacking African Americans. Their content is horribly cringeworthy and racist but they hide behind a facade of being attractive, articulate and college educated. Like a young more attractive female version of Jordan Petersen.