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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> That seems to be exactly what is happening.

Please cite? Need more than one, notably cases where people have lost their jobs for "offensive" language other than dehumanizing groups of people.

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It doesn't even have to be a political disagreement - could be something as simple as appearing to have fallen asleep in a zoom call: https://www.newsweek.com/petition-fire-nyc-professor-accused...

Some others:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...

https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/#hom...

https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...

Plenty more instances that have happened in the past 5 years.

I said cancel culture, not people who have lost their jobs. There are plenty of examples of people who otherwise would have lost their jobs had they not already been wealthy, so many that it is so obvious that a topic like this can be posted to HN without any prior explanation. Goya Foods is a recent example and the list goes on. They don’t seem to have done anything other than show support for Trump.

I despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, and think he has done significant damage to the office of the presidency and the country as a whole, but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.

Otherwise, I’m really not sure what your definition of ‘dehumanizing’ is. Outright racism and hatred is condemned by nearly everyone.

> Goya Foods is a recent example and the list goes on. They don’t seem to have done anything other than show support for Trump.

Context around what you're describing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/10/goya-boycot...

The boycott seems to be stemming from Trump's blatant use of bigotry against the Latinx community, so Goya is being blackballed by the Latinx community for endorsing racism.

Just because Trump is a politician doesn't mean boycotting people for endorsing him is only political. Considering Trump's generally-known and blatant bigotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump), it's no different than boycotting someone for endorsing David Duke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke)

Realistically, boycotts seems to be the only political tool you have in the US, with all major candidates could be considered varying degrees of authoritarian and sometime libertarian right[0], with no big unions like Germany. If you're not on the "right" side, this moight be your only way of speaking for yourself. Boycott is a non-violent way of saying "stop this", so if you can afford to, you should absolutely do it. Even for petty things.

[0] https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 (there is better tools but this one is Ok-ish)

> but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.

They used to call this “voting with your wallet” when I was a kid. I don’t really see what the problem is here. If I don’t like the ethics of a company, I’m free to buy beans from a company whose ethics I do like. This seems to be a critical component of capitalism. What are we supposed to do, force people to buy beans for Goya?

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