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Comment by steve_g | Hacker News Reader

I reject your rejection.

Cancel culture is terrible because the goal is to destroy people who hold unpopular beliefs. It not enough to refute the belief. The transgressor must be punished with the full fury that internet-enhanced social pressure can bring to bear. The goal is to punish and destroy.

Shaming and social opprobrium can work in a community where there's interaction between the parties. This also allows for grace and restoration. It doesn't work in the global twitter-verse.

Civilization is the ability to live in peace with people that aren't like you - you may disagree with them, disapprove of them, or dislike them, but you don't seek to destroy them. We seem to be losing it.

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Destroy, or show there are ramifications for speech?

I find the "I can say whatever I want, it's just words" to be an immature stance to hold. Words hold power, and power can be used or misused. We know words hold power; otherwise protesting wouldn't work, MLK's letters from a birmingham jail wouldn't matter, even the very constitution itself would be pointless.

So if that power is being applied to harm people, there needs to be a check on that. I fully agree it isn't the government's role to play that part; it's society's full, universal, democratic decision what to do with it.

The final result is "if you say something so upsetting that you can get a large group of people to use their own words and freedom to associate to harm you in return, then that's on you". If you don't like the worst that the so-called "cancel culture" response can bring you, then the solution is relatively simple: choose your words carefully and own them.

> it's society's full, universal, democratic decision what to do with it.

That might be fine, if that were the way it worked. In practice, though, it seems more that it's a minority forming a howling mob that brings the heat.

> "if you say something so upsetting that you can get a large group of people to use their own words and freedom to associate to harm you in return, then that's on you"

I prefer the legal system to mob "justice".

The transgressor must be punished with the full fury that internet-enhanced social pressure can bring to bear.

Which has, when you really think about it, very little power. Consider this: the nebulous "cancel culture", with all its fury, didn't cancel the Rosanne reboot. ABC execs did.

you don't seek to destroy them

Who is getting "destroyed"? Getting fired from a job is not getting destroyed.

You should be more worried about what people in positions of power are doing rather than what nobodies on Twitter are saying.

Getting fired from a job is a serious harm, especially because having your reputation shattered in this way makes future employers reluctant to hire you, since the same people will have no scruples about turning on them. We're talking about devastating life impact here. I don't think you should trivialize this as "what nobodies on Twitter are saying".

They're not being killed, of course, but I think the word destroy isn't out of proportion for having one's livelihood and reputation ruined. Otherwise you could just as easily say "Who is getting destroyed? Being put in prison for a little while is not being destroyed." That would be the natural next step, after all.

Again, if someone was fired from their job, that's their bosses prerogative. Plus, the list of people who haven't gotten work again perceptually due to "cancel culture" is hard to enumerate. Roseanne, Louie CK, Kevin Hart, etc. have all worked since they were "destroyed". Neither their livelihoods nor reputations are ruined. Hell, listen to Roseanne's interview with Joe Rogan right after her ABC cancelled the reboot. He tried his hardest into leading her into blaming "cancel culture" for her problems, but she responds that she's doing fine, living in Hawaii, near where her son goes to college and she (still) owns a Macadamia farm and has a tour lined up. That is far from a "destroyed" life.

The people who have been in prison (Cosby, Weinstein) might have had a different outcome, but that's because they were arrested and placed on trial, which is a function of the legal system, again, not the work of angry tweeters. If you're saying the justice system is at the whims of "cancel culture", you're just being silly.

That doesn't change the point that for most people getting fired from a job is serious life damage that ought not to be trivialized as "angry tweeters". A few outlier examples don't prove otherwise, losing a TV show isn't the same thing, etc. It seems to me that you're minimizing the significance of this development. There's also the fact that ostracization is traumatic for most people.

What I said about prisons was unclear, sorry. I was trying to imagine what the next escalatory step would be after getting someone fired. Perhaps it would be putting them in prison. If so, someone would be making the same argument again: it's not as if their life was destroyed just because a few angry tweeters got them jailed, they'll get out soon enough, and so on. The point is that there are degrees of harm. Just because it could be worse does not prove that harm isn't severe.

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