‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture
In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep.  He&#x27;s the bad guy, it&#x27;s an exploration of a sick mind.<p>Not that content matters at all in this debate.  Certainly I would say if you wanted to cancel Lolita, you would have to cancel Silence of the Lambs and any other fiction about serial killers, right?  Since abusing and then killing them and then eating them is at least as bad as abusing them, but not killing them and not eating them?<p>However, I don&#x27;t think that really gets to the heart of this.  Morons have been locally banning books since books have existed.  This isn&#x27;t new at all.  I think the real &#x27;story&#x27; here is the response to it.  Any time some small confederacy of imbeciles manages to announce that something is &#x27;canceled&#x27;, the media blasts it through a loud speaker and there is a huge response.<p>The fraction of people who change their behavior in any way due to something being canceled is tiny.  Most people just don&#x27;t care.  The actual way these pressure campaigns work is to convince people that decision makers personally know, and who are not really paying attention, that some situation is vaguely &#x27;icky&#x27;.<p>For example, the whole thing with Gina Carino.  What she said was stupid and ignorant, but I doubt it would have reduced the popularity of The Mandalorian by even 1%.  However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino around.  The exec&#x27;s friends won&#x27;t know the details, all they&#x27;ll know is Disney didn&#x27;t fire someone &#x27;gross&#x27;.  It will be a topic of conversation, the execs will have to talk about the situation at parties, and it&#x27;s not easy to explain a nuanced decision.  It&#x27;s so much easier to just fire someone.  So, because these campaigns get picked up by the media and amplified, they can get people fired because it&#x27;s just the easiest way for those making the decisions wash their hands of the situation, even though maybe 0.001% of people really care about the situation at all.  (For the record, I think Gina is a horrible actress and the stuff she said was extremely ignorant, so I don&#x27;t care if she gets fired or not.  The point is, I don&#x27;t really care, if they didn&#x27;t fire her I would still watch the show.)<p>That&#x27;s why I think the content doesn&#x27;t matter at all.  Any book is equally likely to end up canceled, all it takes is a handful of people who are trying to make a name for themselves by being outraged on Twitter, and for the media to keep amplifying the phony, self serving outrage they are Tweeting.  At that point, it&#x27;s just easier for people making decisions to ban whatever content or person the fake outrage is targeting.