How to Cancel "Cancel Culture" | Hacker News Reader

How to Cancel "Cancel Culture"

economist.com

The best solution is to make sure attempts to 'cancel' people don't work. Ignore the pressure to fire or get rid of employees who offend people, ignore online protests and avoid supporting companies that prioritise said views.

By doing so, they'll basically fade into irrelevance. Once people realise the effects on their businesses and lives are virtually non existent, they'll give up on trying to cancel people due to its futility.

See how almost every corporate 'boycott' just falls apart over time.

Also throwing away moral upper hand the right keeps could work.

Attack everyone asking for cancelling someone. When the people doing cancelling are cancelled themselves they are too busy to do it again.

There is always a narcissist or otherwise deranged[0] individual behind the cancellation attempt, moving the threads.

A complementary strategy would be for them to get routinely identified and prosecuted.

0. https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...

>In another story, an African-American mother tried to get her seven-year-old into a class at school. The principal said no: “That’s not the black class.” This was not a scene from the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, but from present-day America, where a growing number of “progressive” schools group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as “racial beings”, all in the name of “antiracism”.

This paragraph neatly illustrates the lack of historical context that often accompanies discussion of "cancel culture". On the one hand, we have an individual example of someone doing something stupid and arguably racist (possibly on the basis of some half-understood anti-racist philsophizing). But what should be our comparison point? The very paragraph I'm quoting mentions the Jim Crow South and yet fails to grasp the broader implications of this comparison. Wind the clock back a few decades and you could illustrate intentional racism in US schools just by gesturing to large swathes of the country. Now you have to grep /stooo*pid/ over a population of 330 million to find a good anecdote.

There's also some seriously sloppy journalism in this article. For example, how can they possibly have reliable enough stats on the number of "progressive schools" that "group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as 'racial beings'" to assert that this number is "growing"?

> how can they possibly have reliable enough stats on the number of "progressive schools" that "group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as 'racial beings'" to assert that this number is "growing"?

Polling students, teachers, and staff at educational institutions is big business. Everybody wants to know about trends in pork-barrel industries, and schools are one of the biggest opportunities. It's not at all unbelievable that the statistics exist and data has been collected.

Ok, it's not unbelievable in principle, but I'm not inclined to believe it if there's no source cited.

> I'm not inclined to believe it if there's no source cited.

Agreed. Unfortunately, most journalists seem to have gone to different schools with vastly different standards of teaching than the rest of us, and as such have never learned how to cite sources or even informally share links.

The article is a book review, so it's a little hard to tell whether the underlying material cites its source.

But the review itself does seem kind of uncritical. I can't tell the position of that anecdote in the book, but putting it front and center of the review seems pretty breathless.

Is cancel culture not a euphemism for mob rule?

Every generation has it's own example of the mob, the self-styled righteous, who exert disproportionate influence on society.

Each generation concludes this behavior should be dissuaded and all is well until the cycle starts again.

Yascha mounk’s book contains several jolting stories, which encapsulate the extreme thinking of some on the American left. When covid-19 vaccines became available, most countries dispensed them first to health workers and the elderly (who are much more vulnerable to the disease than young people). Yet America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention urged states to offer priority to 87m “essential workers”, which included package-delivery drivers and film crews. Its rationale was “racial equity”, because old people were more likely to be white...

You would think someome would have mentioned this at the time if true. Like the President, this sounds like something he would make a big deal about.

https://archive.md/u4uxm

"The post-liberal right and post-liberal left are much closer to each other than many people realise. Both are intolerant; both prioritise the power of the state over individual liberty. They “see each other as mortal enemies”, but “feed on each other”, Mr Mounk warns."

This take kind of urges to revisit once again the concept of liberalism.

It's good, but it's not for people.

I would start with disabling social media. Way too much "liberalism" spill out of there. Too much of everything. Too much of hate, too much of anger, too much of trumps and bidens in all shapes and colors... I'm tired.

While I see the necessities, I'd rather make that channels voiceless.

> This take kind of urges to revisit once again the concept of liberalism.

To clarify, whose liberalism is it and from which era?

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