Cancel culture is all the rage now, so for once in my life, I’m going to be fashionable and follow suit (so to speak) by blogging the living crap out of it. Lauren Hall has a blog post at Radical Classical Liberals on the recent controversy about Adele and cultural appropriation. The post alludes to cancel culture, so what better opportunity to reiterate my objections to that concept and the discourse that surrounds it?

Scroll down to the combox for my response to Hall. But obviously, read her post first. My disagreement with her is pretty narrow. I agree with what she’s saying about the Adele controversy, and more or less agree with what she says about decontextualization (I think she goes too far, but still, I agree). But I have a worry that “cancel culture” is a pseudo-concept formed by fixating on the worst excesses of various political activists, and then gathering it all together so as to synthesize a dysfunctional “culture” to beat up on. I don’t buy it.

I have another post coming on cancel culture, by the way. Writing about cancel culture really takes the edge off of unemployment. I’m starting to enjoy it. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from a card-carrying member of unemployment benefit culture.