Accountability is just vengeance on stilts. People should behave better. That's a plus-sum solution to their having behaved badly. Everything else takes without getting, punishes without reforming.

If we want to analogize social misconduct to crimes, we need to deal with the problem of ex post facto laws and statutes of limitations. Was Sex and the City "problematic"? Or IS it NOW "problematic"? (Can we please lose that awful word, which many of us recognize as a sure sign of performative and pedestrian thinking? EVERYTHING in life since Eden has come with problems.) Do we really want to professionally behead a woman for obnoxious tweets made when she was a teenager?

I agree with much of this post, but cancel culture is indeed a thing. It's the latest version of American puritanism. Different rules, same intolerance of non-conformity. People who ridicule the Hollywood Production Code think nothing of applying the exact same mindset to today's productions. The taboos are new, but the smugness is the same. Instead of protecting the weak-willed from immorality, we now protect the thin-skinned from reality. Plus ça change,...