Tom Morris stood down over comments in group chat

[stui magpie]

If I don't see the relevance of the points you think you were making, it's because you were doing a poor job of making them.

I should have the courtesy to realise that the lack of understanding your incoherent imbecilic ramblings is not attributable to your inability to construct a coherent paragraph that isn't hanging with sarcasm or arrogance. Right.

You are the early leader in the inaugural TOTHO Awards.

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies4shaw]

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

Thing thing that has clearly offended her, and rightly so, isn't the descriptions of her attractiveness but the crude description of how she's changed to same sex relationships when she hadn't yet chosen to be public about that.

[#26]

"Tom Morris has issued a grovelling apology after a series of 'disgusting and disgraceful' messages were leaked in a WhatsApp conversation"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10626405/Fox-Sport-reporter-Tom-Morris-SACKED-following-leaked-WhatsApp-audio-chats.html

An apology isn't enough for some people these days. I guess redemption is something that takes time. Although I doubt he'll be a public figure again.

[David]

[think positive]

100 % agree


gees im making a habit of it!!

[stui magpie]

[Pies4shaw]

And we have Barthes to thank, of course, for one of the classic sentences of the 20th century - 'I don't understand, therefore you are idiots.'

[stui magpie]

And there you go again.

How about you try harder to not be a cnut and I'll try harder to not have a short temper?

[Pies4shaw]

That's the whole point, though. I'm not.

The only way a person could not see the link that I was drawing between the shunning and mass hysteria of the New England Witch Trials, on the one hand, and what you refer to as "cancel culture", on the other hand, would be if they knew nothing at all about Salem. By knowing "nothing at all about Salem", I do not mean studying it - I mean not even understand it's pop-culture significance. It's not obscure. It's not irrelevant. If I say "It's just a witch-hunt", it's so obvious what I mean that it could not require explanation. Why you would get wild at me about a reference to the most famous of all of them, I don't know. It just doesn't strike me as something to be fractious about.

Seriously, don't we refer to such things as "witch-hunts" because it's a shared cultural reference? Before "modern" (ie, particularly backwards and back-woods) conservative politics came along and stripped words of meaning and substituted slogans, we didn't need "Woke Progressive" and "cancel culture" and all these other content-free and merely political labels. We all knew what a witch-hunt was and if someone asserted that such and such was "just a witch-hunt" we all knew what that meant and could assess whether it was or wasn't a witch-hunt ourselves. We might have variously reached different positions on whether it was or wasn't, according to our own lights, but we all understood the question. Yes, it was just shorthand but it wasn't wholly content-free shorthand like "cancel culture" and "Woke Progressive" that only speaks to a tiny fraction of people who agree with particular political opinions. So, if someone were to say "Christian Porter was the subject of a witch-hunt", you and I would both know precisely what's being said, although it is quite possible you would say "yes" and I would say "no".

When I said you provided a description, rather than an explanation, I wasn't having a go at you. I was simply saying that, while you were accurately describing the organzational dilemma that might lead to a sacking decision in that context, that was missing the bigger point that the organizational dilemma is created by the particular way such "social issues" play out in our culture. These events all have an innate sameness about them. Obviously our culture is different from Salem in 1692 in a variety of quite fundamental ways that mean one has to be careful about parallels but I do smell the whiff of burning witch in the air whenever someone is sacked for saying a bad thing, rather than doing a bad thing (although, to complicate matters, sometimes the saying of a bad thing is so bad that it actually becomes the doing of a bad thing, of itself - isn't Tom Morris' situation and his employer's response really posing the question where that line should sensibly be drawn?)

The explanation for what's happening here lies surely in anthropology, not in slogans like "cancel culture". Tom Morris isn't in trouble because there are "Woke Progressives", he is in trouble because there always seem to be some orangutangs that want to toss their faeces at the other orangutangs.

[stui magpie]

I disagree both with your premise and your denial, I do agree that where the line should be is currently gray.

From my view, there was no witch hunt and minimal hysteria, simply because Fox acted so quickly it never had time to grow. As such, your Salem reference was wrong and misplaced.

The comments about the female journo's appearance, if isolated, would not have resulted in his termination, it was the disparaging crack about her recently "discovered" sexuality that did it. The same comment you saw fit to delete from my post. As a sports reporter, covering AFLW with a high number of Lesbians in the playing ranks, his position was clearly untenable. The racist comments were the icing on the cake.

I referenced Cancel Culture deliberately. If they hadn't acted promptly, the Twitterati would have quickly gathered force and as an organisation that relies on advertising as much as subscriptions, delay would have allowed momentum to gather. They acted quickly and defused it.

Do I agree that someone should be sacked for private comments? Generally No, but in this case you have a reasonably high profile media person on a common law contract without access to unfair dismissal who, once the comments became public, was buggered. Not a single AFLW player would have given him time of day, neither would many of the men and that's just footy. This would not happen to the average schmuck.

The sharing of a private conversation that you participated in, a year or more after the event, at a time when a party to that conversation is in the headlines, is a different topic.