Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Our failure to have a serious discussion about defining “cancel culture” encourages this.

Can we please just define it so we can move on as a society? I'm equally tired of this game where snarky writers try to pretend it doesn't exist. The first amendment doesn't protect against secret blacklists or mobs but we can still agree they are "bad things" and could agree on at least some new set of common courtesy.

All sorts of examples come to mind of unfair public shaming spectacles against largely undeserving targets:

John Roderick losing all sorts of shows and bookings for the "bean dad" episode: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/bean-dad-john-rode...

"So You've Been Publicly Shamed" is full of examples. Here's an excerpt where the offender and the offendee where BOTH fired in retributions: https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/news/a7933/exclusive-extr...

A recounting of a former blogger who ended up on a secret industry blacklist: https://miketunison.substack.com/p/fun-with-drew-magary

And it's not just a far off issue, this kind of stuff is happening in my area! To normal people! https://pdx.eater.com/2017/5/22/15677760/portland-kooks-burr...

Popehat did, I think, an excellent job of it, even though he doesn't believe this is synonymous with cancel culture:

> some responses to speech are disproportionate and outside norms of decency

I feel like he just kicked the can down the road and introduced additional ambiguities by invoking the concepts of norms and decency. Both of which are very contextual and highly variable.

I largely agree. But this is an awful lot of faff to ultimately agree with their concept but complain about their scope.

We can all agree there is a problem. Why wait for your political opposition to give you the correct parameters before you start solving it?

Because "solving it" can look radically different depending on the definition or group trying to do the "solving." Platforms enforcing their terms of service to ban, say, holocaust deniers, is not what I consider "cancel culture," but a lot of people on the right would disagree.

Similarly, I think that David Shor was unfairly maligned and fired over hugely disingenuous misreadings of his work, but how do you solve that in any meaningful way? I don't think we should make "twitter user" a protected class, but I fail to see how else you can realistically prevent businesses from responding (read: caving in) to bad PR.

Some are disproportionately harsh. Some are disproportionately lenient. Some are just right. Popehat has discovered that human perception is subjective and imperfect. Wait until he discovers this applies to literally everything.

It doesn't have a definition and doesn't need one. It's liberally applied to all forms of "people being offended". It exists in the space between behavior that is legal yet morally unacceptable. Like abject racism. The actual quality of offending is purely subjective and always has been. Someone can be considered "cancelled" when a critical mass of people agree and refuse to support them. This is how every society has existed forever.

In my mind it's just a colloquialism for a certain kind of illiberalism:

> "Cancel culture" is the belief that certain beliefs about race, gender, and equality are so utterly indefensible that anyone holding them is necessarily acting in bad faith and consequently deserving of punishment.

In practice, this means moral condemnation in place of consideration and argumentation, which is precisely illiberalism.

What distinguishes "cancel culture" from, say, the conservative hatred of communism, is the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from the use of mob rule to enforce what are ostensibly academic positions, and the frequent reference to inclusivity as a justification of social exclusion.

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