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.
There's totally a difference, but you honestly think that this is a new thing that never used to happen?
Apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comedy_television_seri...
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.
And your claim is that this sort of thing just started happening in the last decade or two?
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.
The underlying mechanism has not really changed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their appeal lost in the UK just last week.
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?