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Comment by c06n | Hacker News Reader

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats.

So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

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Half a century ago, in Japan, someone wrote a fictional story critical of the Emperor, and someone broke into the publishers house and murdered their housekeeper and severely injured their wife. [0]

In response to the murder, the writer was pretty much universally condemned and the a bill was introduced in the legislature to ban writings of that sort.

The fact that so many have convinced themselves that somehow we're in some new illiberal age is comical.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimanaka_incident

Well, peoples' expectations have changed in America since we declared independence from Japan.

I am curious what era of US history do you think was free of this stuff?

For right-leaning, racist, sexist White male elites? Most of it.

Which is why that's where most of the whining that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon is coming from.

Heck, the government hyperfocus on rooting out Communism began almost immediately after the suggestion of turning the same apparatus against the KKK was rebuffed because of that organizations loyalty and patriotism.

I erroneously thought the critic in the article was Japanese, although the "sir" should have been an obvious giveaway.

In the states, just off the top of my head: the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident

I guessed as much :)

> the McCarthy era, the reaction to the 1968 Olympic raised fist incident

Aren't those examples of the kinds of things we want to stop doing?

So you are agreeing Cancel Culture is bad and we should find better ways to peacefully disagree with each other?

I think the point is this had been around for a while, and what people are calling "cancel culture" is the same old-same old, but with (hopefully) less prison/death.

There's nothing new about receiving negative feedback for having and expressing unpopular opinions. That's really common in pretty much every single social group I've been in, including on HN.

People are upset now that the current is shifting and you get shunned for being racist, rather than being shunned for not speaking properly or whatever the heck.

The underlying mechanism has not really changed.

It's specifically about speaking properly.

Nobody gives a shit when Uber classifies their drivers as independent contractors to stiff them on benefits, but everybody cares about the propriety of master/slave replication terminology. We're dealing with police violence by capitalizing Black in our style guides. Etc etc etc.

> Nobody gives a shit when Uber classifies their drivers as independent contractors to stiff them on benefits,

I think quite a few people gave a shit? I think you're attacking a straw man, it is perfectly possible to have opinions on small stylistic issues (like master vs main) while also thinking that there are fundamental economic things that need to change.

Uber's referendum won in California.

I'm sure that people 'care', and I suppose I'm straw-manning those people.. I'm not straw-manning the system. Time and again, challenges to monetary order aren't permitted but puritanical word-propriety is encouraged. It's an energy outlet.

> Time and again, challenges to monetary order aren't permitted but puritanical word-propriety is encouraged. It's an energy outlet.

I agree very much with this statement, but somehow have reached the opposite conclusion about whether "cancel culture" is a big problem that we need to spend a lot of time addressing. To me, that seems to be playing into the same issue you identified.

Glad we agree on the shape of things :)

I was more being descriptive than prescriptive, I'm just posting here.. but it's a problem that all of the energy and outrage go into stylistic and cultural bullshit. In a perfect world we could channel that energy into community organizing, electoralism, or other forms of people getting out there and interacting with the groups they claim to speak for.

> Uber's referendum won in California.

Their appeal lost in the UK just last week.

No one is complaining about going after actual racists. The problem is that things which aren't racist are now defined as racist and vice versa. e.g. saying that universities shouldn't admit students by race and only use grades and test scores is now "racist"

I don't think that's racist, although, personally, I do think that people holding those takes often have a myopic view of the world.

You're saying that you think that your job would be in danger if you said publicly that you thought that universities should be race-blind?

Me personally no, but I'm not so sure that I would risk saying it. On the other hand, I know I would be in no danger whatsoever stating that I favored racial admissions policies. I am sure that I would be in danger if I criticized my employer's hiring policies on that point. You set a high bar, though. The idea of getting called racist for advocating directly against racism should be no more than a bad joke.

People are upset that the definition of racist has been repurposed to apply to racially neutral positions and even anti-racism positions. If one advocates in favor of enforcing existing immigration laws, that's a quick way to get labeled a racist Nazi even though it's actually a very moderate stance. If one supports treating everyone equally regardless of race, then that explicitly anti-racism position is characterized as racist and attacked with baseless accusations of "bad faith".

There's also a difference between saying something stupid and having some people telling you to knock it off. And posting it or having it posted to Twitter with a possible consequence like a bunch of people emailing your employer demanding you be fired. Which they probably will because it's easier that way if you really did say something you shouldn't have.

If you had a gay character in a sitcom in the 70s-80s you would similarly get a bunch of people calling your employer.

There's totally a difference, but you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?

>you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?

No, but I do think it's a lot easier for someone to tweet out an inappropriate joke or get caught on video doing something obnoxious today--that have at least the potential to blow up to a greater degree than a few decades ago.

> If you had a gay character in a sitcom in the 70s-80s you would similarly get a bunch of people calling your employer.

Apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comedy_television_seri...

I think it's pretty obvious how that isn't contrary to what I said. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawatch-UK

this is common whataboutism. What about the dark ages ? What about burning witches ? If we claim to be a compassionate society we should be anti-censorship and let ideas succeed or fail through the strength of their argument.

Normal feedback is down votes and replies. Cancel culture is messaging dang and asking him to ban you.

> Cancel culture is messaging dang and asking him to ban you.

And your claim is that this sort of thing just started happening in the last decade or two?

I didn't really hear much about outrage mobs and repeated celebrity firings over unpopular political opinions 10 years ago. Hear about them all the time now.

> I didn't really hear much about outrage mobs and repeated celebrity firings over unpopular political opinions 10 years ago.

That's probably because you weren't listening, possibly because it was 30 years into the right whining about that under the label “political correctness” and everyone had learned to tune it out.

Now they've got a new label and marketing effort behind selling it as the boogeyman, and everything old is new again.

Yeah, because dang wasn't a HN moderator before that.

I had it at about 50/50 odds I would get this reply

Very little of that is new ("You'll never work in this town again" is an old statement).

What has changed is that the Internet and the associated record of a person's conduct online can make the town very, very big indeed.

I agree with your sentiment, but it wasn't that long ago that people were being brought to court in the US just for accusations of being socialist or communist. Any there wasn't even anything against the law with have different economic ideals.

Who (apart from Colin Kaepernick) has been prevented from working in their field ever again?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuCsAqKWYAkfEIF.jpg

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