Hi Benchies, we hope you're doing well. This week I had the absolute pleasure of having internet princess, real-life activists and music journalist, rain, fish, or quan on the pod.

We had a beautiful nuanced conversation about online activism, cancel culture, the dirt bag left, and more.

So if you'd like to hear the full episode, please visit patreon.com slash bench topia.

Once again, that is patreon.com slash bench topia.

She talks about cancel culture or any kind of like a retributive framework of justice is actually not something that serves the victims of abuse and of harm.

Which is interesting and something that kind of connects with that is how she describes this like cancel culture as a form of like hopelessness and as a form of kind of giving up on the redemptive nature and the fluid nature of human beings.

And she talks about too is like as social animals like the number one form of violence we can do to each other is to cast somebody out of a community or out of resources or out of any type of social group.

And something she says on page 37 is we want to grow but at the same time some of us don't believe we all we will all get there or get anywhere better in time that we can't and won't put forth the effort.

And that really resonated with me because cancel culture really does feel like such a grim, grim process by which we're like this person will never get better and they do not have a shot at redemption and for that reason we need to remove them from society.

And you know as again you were talking about it is very different with people who have a habitual pattern of harm or abuse specifically towards marginalized people who's safety and joy and freedom needs to be prioritized first and foremost in any type of leftist space.

But you know as as Brown says it gets abuse and harm get collapsed with misunderstandings and with other things like that.

Yeah, there's another line that I really liked from page 58 that says knee jerk call out say those who cause harm and mess up or disagree with us cannot change and cannot belong.

They must be eradicated the bad things in the world cannot change.

We must disappear the bad until there is one good left but one layer under that what I hear is we cannot change.

Yeah, and it's so true like that is the basis of this culture and you know I think that I talked about this in an essay that I wrote recently where I said that it is a great injustice that the right has developed an ideological monopoly on discussions of cancel culture.

Yeah, to the point where like it feels right wing to be discussing it at all like I feel I haven't hit in my stomach when I say the word cancel culture because it has been monopolized by the right as like you know this leftist moral system is punishing those around us but you know

cancel culture this culture of sort of punitive retribution is most dangerous and most commonly actually leveraged against leftist like against against journalists who are fired for supporting Palestine and against you know racialized organizers who are outcasts from their community is an ostracized from the community is and against you know abolitionist academics who are blacklisted from you know academic office.

It's like a and and my fear and my worry and brown references this in the text to is that this is sort of a this this punitive culture is being trojan horse into our cultural consciousness it's being like yeah it's where we are being taught that this is a righteous thing and that this is a good thing and we're becoming accustomed to it and we are learning to accept it when 100% of the time when this is most dangerous it is going to be leveraged by the right against us.