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If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It?

118 points by andrenth 6y ago

buboard 6y ago
I wish Freud was alive today. I can't help but think that the hysterics manifested in mainstream or social media are not actually real, that people wouldn't make such illogical steps if they were alone in an island. Instead they seem to be reactions , rooted in something deeper somewhere that's causing mass hysterias and delusions. It does manifest in the shifting ways of life too, the lack of sex, the lack of humor and the limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations. I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter
- orwin 6y ago
  Freud was wrong with almost everything he said. He had merit from a philosophical point of view, he coined terms extremely well, but he is definitely not a scientific, was dangerous for his patients and his theories are still dangerous (your child is an autist because you, poor mother, did not pay enough attention to him! and other rubbish about children rape fantasy and other). Lacan, at least, was not as dangerous (but still a pseudoscientific). Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz. > limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations If this is really a thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this should be wrong.
bluehazed 6y ago
dear god who cares move on with your lives
duxup 6y ago
>This is an excerpt of a longer article about the Harper’s letter I guess that makes sense then why I felt like I didn't get anything out of it. >To read the entire post and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year. Oh I see... that's disappointing. At least with the WSJ right up front I know I'm not going to get anything out of it without a subscription.
- Justsignedup 6y ago
  basically. there's no argument here other than some platitudes. Definitely not worth a post on HN
  - duxup 6y ago
    I certainly felt like I got a couple words of meaning at most out of those paragraphs. Lots of volume and platitude as you say... I wasn't getting much beyond that... but then it asked me for $5.
touchngthevodka 6y ago
It's accountability culture.
wait_a_minute 6y ago
It is undoubtedly cancel culture. But some people will deny it because they benefit from it and/or agree with it. It is a trend that must be stopped before we irreparably damage the free movement of ideas that has enabled America and the rest of the world to flourish. If you cannot speak against the orthodoxy without fear of being forced into poverty, then the orthodoxy will grow unchallenged into a monster that eats even the people who helped create it.
- helixhelix 6y ago
  But we're seeing the opposite. Speaking against counter-culture and being cancelled.
  - wait_a_minute 6y ago
    That is not the opposite. That is just the beginnings of what I said - the monster eating the very people who helped create it. Both left and right need to agree that hitting working individuals in the pocketbook over political disagreement is not okay, even if someone says something that is "offensive" to someone else. Obviously there are lines that have to be drawn in the work place, but the intellectuals signing the Harper letter weren't concerned by non-toxic workplaces. They were talking about something much worse that we can all agree is vile and dangerous.
    - helixhelix 6y ago
      Lines must be drawn with cancel culture. To avoid any slippery slopes, will eliminating or demoting this person hurt the project? In case of Linus taking a forced holiday to "psychology rehab" and Dr. Stallman being pushed to resign by someone admittedly too frustrated to do her job, meritocracy seems to be a good start. Too late, since a posse of wolves in sheep's wool (or XY-chromosomed persons in female-gendered clothing), is fixing to end meritocracy in favor of inclusivity. Would you agree to such a sacrifice?
- femiagbabiaka 6y ago
  I’m in support of a movement for truly free speech. If we were to achieve that, it would be the first time in modern history where that would be the case.
wannabesrevenge 6y ago
Why is this article on ycombinator? It's not nuanced or inciteful in anyway. It's yet another "our generation did it better" article with different words.
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  As per the guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Give them a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - wannabesrevenge 6y ago
    Sure, but this isn't intellectual, lol. It's trite and shallow
    - purerandomness 6y ago
      You had this opportunity to add insightfulness and enrich the debate with your comment.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - soulofmischief 6y ago
      As per the guidelines: Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. ... Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. Give them a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- purerandomness 6y ago
  It's highly relevant to Tech, culture and the current Zeitgeist. If you follow the current controversy around tech thought leaders like Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob, you can't ignore the current debate, no matter which position you take. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it never did.
ggregoire 6y ago
For the other non U.S. readers: > The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the term "callout culture"), describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner is boycotted. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_cancellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_c...
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Usually I hear this term in context to attempts to doxx or have someone fired, and while the cancellation of celebrities garners more press, it's due to the notoriety of the victim--probably many more non-celebrities are canceled (and usually with worse consequences unless good and decent people intervene). It's the climate of fear, not the criticism, that people take issue with (we're not talking about "criticism culture" after all).
  - iron0013 6y ago
    Yeah, but the “climate of fear” arises only because powerful people with prominent platforms are afraid of being criticized. And criticism is protected speech.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      This is utterly disingenuous. 1. Cancelling targets anyone who fails to adequately toe the progressive party line. Sometimes those people are "powerful" relative to any individual mob constituent, but often they are not (for example, the hispanic worker at the California utility company who was fired for making the "ok" gesture without realizing that it offends progressives). 2. Cancelling isn't criticism, it's harassment, usually by doxxing or trying to get someone fired. Criticism is perfectly fine, cancelling goes beyond criticism. 3. Focusing solely on the power dynamics minimizes the moral issue, which is that slander, harassment, and bullying are abhorrent irrespective of power dynamics (although yes, being 'powerful' means you're better capable to weather the injustice). 4. Not only is cancellation wrong on an individual level, in aggregate it creates a climate of fear which affects everyone whose views are unapproved (although as the mob realizes its power, it increasingly goes after its own for astonishingly trivial offenses). For those lovers of "power dynamics", it should be noted that this climate of fear disproportionately affects the powerless (who could have predicted that an angry mob would be more invested in its own destructive catharsis than the people it purports to care about?).
xyzal 6y ago
This post from Taibbi is in my opinion also worth a read: On “White Fragility”, A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
- charia 6y ago
  Taibbi's been on a roll with his writing recently. His breakdown of the current state of the American press is also quite illuminating. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
aqme28 6y ago
It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days than if there's _too much_ accountability for op-ed writers. Anyways, this article doesn't even try to say anything other than that Kids These Days are different than they used to be.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  >It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days Not even a red herring, but just gesturing at red herrings somewhere.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> It [the woke revolution] spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it. Man, does this resonate. The woke message is just uninspiring and the word play and circular reasoning are just tedious. I've never met a philosophy that depended so strongly on appropriating existing, morally-weighty words.
- watwut 6y ago
  Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. Mostly because he is good at finding funny sounding insulting but still right below line sentence. He is good at emotional level, but less good with actual rational arguing.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    > Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. That's what "resonates" means. I agree though that he's putting words to collective frustrations and not arguing in a persuasive form. I wish he did more of the latter, but nevertheless, this excerpt resonated for me.
  - calmlynarczyk 6y ago
    The logical fallacies with many modern examples of "cancelling" have already been pointed out far and wide. Not every bit of writing needs to be a statistical analysis (and considering the value of quantitative data is overrated, I'm inclined to agree that a well-written passioned analysis is just as welcome). Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.
    - watwut 6y ago
      Funny thing, I did not said whether he is wrong or right. I said what literally all his articles are, regardless of whether he is wrong or right. The only one that I think he really really should not write was one about civility and discourse. And I am not asking for statistical analysis either. All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.
Barrin92 6y ago
More interesting than the article which says nothing original is the emerging "anti-cancel-culture" - industrial complex which appears to be a flourishing industry of people constantly blogging about how cancelled they are. There really is something incredibly whiny about people who are prominent writers, have large audiences, but somehow manage to turn themselves into victims. On the topic itself, I don't even understand the concept of cancel culture. All culture is cancel culture, that simply what culture is. A culture is defined by its delineations, what's inside of it and what's outside of it. All cultures, in all places cancel, all communities decide who is in and who is out, that's what defines a community, if nobody's excluded you don't have one. What I suspect is not that the glorious past had a wider spectrum of opinion or no cancel culture, it's that people are mad that their opinion happens to be at the unpopular end these days.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  I’m not a high profile writer, so no whines from my side. But I don’t like Cancel Culture. I don’t like mob justice, I don’t like it being ok for people to express outrage and dismissal of other people’s opinions, even controversial ones, when they are respectfully posed. To me, key to polite debate is to accept a very wide range of opinions, so long as they are phrased with respect for other people, in particular those who disagree. This is precisely what is missing when you “cancel” someone. At best, it is counterproductive, at worst, actually damaging to societal debate.
  - happytoexplain 6y ago
    >when they are respectfully posed. This is quite a caveat.
- calmlynarczyk 6y ago
  People are mad because their livelihoods are being ruined with drive-by character attacks from people whose sole purpose is tilling the data landscape for any scrap they can latch onto to accuse a person of a heinous moral crime. It's as simple as going out and branding someone with the R-word without consequence; even if you're just making shit up you stand to lose nothing whereas even the label towards a person can destroy a person's life. You don't have to demonstrate any sort of credibility or saintly behavior; just toss an oppression monicker at someone and stand back while the mob handles the rest for you.
fernandotakai 6y ago
there's currently out on the internet a letter that basically says "cancel culture doesn't exist". it's signed by some ~160 people, mostly from left-wing backgrounds (i don't know all of them to say they are all from left-wing backgrounds). a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is: >Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter. if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?
deleted 6y ago
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Kapura 6y ago
>If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It? Accountability culture. The argument that "these people came up during the 60's! they're hip!" holds zero sway with me. I would recommend the author (or folks who agree with him) read responses to the Harper's letter. [1] [2] [1] https://gen.medium.com/cancel-culture-is-how-the-powerful-play-victim-e840fa55ad49 https://gen.medium.com/cancel-culture-is-how-the-powerful-pl... [2] https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1280924457884884994 https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1280924457884884994
- buzzert 6y ago
  I find it impossible to take any position seriously when someone tweets “the system is rigged”.
  - happytoexplain 6y ago
    That's unfortunate. Of all the conspiracy one-liners, this is one of the least dramatic, and most often true (whether due to insight or broken-clock style).
    - buzzert 6y ago
      The problem is that it's such a defeatist attitude. How are we expected to fix anything if "the system" is "rigged"? If I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I would say that those in power would love it if people kept speaking of things really abstractly like that, because it guarantees nobody would actually do anything about it.
- xyzal 6y ago
  I opine that "accountability culture" is becoming quite hyperthrophied, and support my opinion with an excerpt from Taibbi`s other article: "A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago."
1propionyl 6y ago
A friendly reminder: the "flag" button is not a super-downvote.
api 6y ago
The meat of this article is its last paragraph or two, and particularly in the observation that modern "woke" culture is humorless and incapable of parsing sarcasm. I disagree however that this is peculiar to "woke" culture. Literalism and humorlessness are everywhere. We are living in a profoundly conservative era whose deep conservatism is masked by the triumph of certain select socially liberal causes such as partial drug decriminalization and LGBT rights. IMHO those few specific victories are on the inertia of a previous era. I am referring to the 60s through the 90s, the era that created modern rock and roll, techno, hip hop, burning man, and rave culture, some of which is now decidedly retro. Very little culture of this sort -- or of any sort really -- is being created today. Ours is an era of sterility. You can really see this in how the "alt-right" was able to look hip and edgy with nothing more than shitty memes and ideas like "alternate reality gaming" appropriated from old 90s issues of Mondo 2000. Everything else is so damn sterile and dull that the sorts of aesthetically tone deaf CHUDs that hang out on 4chan /pol could sort of look cool. It doesn't take much color to grab attention in a monochromatic world. I'm not really that pessimistic. This stuff is very cyclic and the pendulum will swing yet again. I'm thinking COVID marks the end of the post-9/11 era and things will start getting interesting again in the mid-2020s. COVID has also crashed the Trump train, which is significant.
- visarga 6y ago
  Dig deeper, there are still excellent music and works being published. Maybe they are hard to find because they are flooded with junk, commercial stuff and misinformation, but they exist and grow faster than in the past.
deleted 6y ago
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lordleft 6y ago
I generally favor free expression. I'd rather an ugly, obnoxious and pernicious idea be expressed - so I can or others can be free to dismantle it in the arena of ideas. Obviously there are tremendous shades of nuance here. Free Speech does not mean free speech on private platforms. Still, if most or all major platforms constrain what can be expressed, what we end up with is a functional chilling of speech. Part of what makes the current debate over cancel culture so difficult is that most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention. As much as I believe a University should be a space where intellectual debate is welcomed, I don't think any University should give a platform to, say, a holocaust denier. We all draw the line somewhere. Permuting where that line gets drawn is very, very difficult. Especially because morality evolves, and our convictions about certain things are constantly changing the light of new evidence, new understandings, especially re: traditionally disenfranchised peoples. The real danger of "cancel culture" is rhetorical, I think. People need to be persuaded of an idea to really accept it. They cannot be hectored into acceptance. You can shove them out of platforms, but they will hold their beliefs, and externalize them at the ballot-box, or elsewhere. Moral development takes time, and it takes suasion. There's a lot more to unpack here. A part of me wonders if cancel culture is just another expression of a kind of acrimoniousness that has always accompanied political life. Or maybe not. I don't have all the answers. But on balance, I still believe in favoring a space for debate.
- hirundo 6y ago
  > most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention I think that's the problem. Any condition beyond being not insulting and not threatening leaves a place to drive in a wedge by those opposed to free speech. They say, if you won't let this Nazi speak, you shouldn't let this person I associate with Nazi-ism speak. Instead we should let the Nazi speak. And the pedophile, human extinction advocate, anti-vaxxer, etc. We don't have to listen, but neither should we punch them, rhetorically or otherwise, as long as they follow some minimal content neutral standard of decorum.
deleted 6y ago
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softwaredoug 6y ago
A lot of the 'canceling' is legitimate expressions of speech, even if you disagree with that expression of speech! Consider a lot of what gets classified as cancel culture is: 1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy... 2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to? 3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not. I have yet to see a PoV neutral definition of 'cancel culture' that doesn't devolve to litigating whether the issues for the canceling are legit or not. [1] The Linguistics Society did NOT remove Pinker https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546 https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546
- femiagbabiaka 6y ago
  Pretty insightful, I hadn’t thought of it that way but you’re right. I guess the counter would be that cancel culture restricts others speech.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  The flaw in the "Firing" argument is that the speech is a call to action, namely to fire someone. At that point, it becomes something like a threat, which is not protected speech. While the threat is not directly aimed at the individual, law does recognize that interference in the business relationship between two parties can be a wrong, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
  - iron0013 6y ago
    Nope, calling on a company to fire someone is just as protected as any other speech.
calmlynarczyk 6y ago
The only evidence I need to see that what the author refers to is very much a serious concern for everyone is that everytime I refresh this comment section another comment agreeing with the author disappears. I used to defend the folks that participated in the doxxing and very real harassment of people they didn't agree with as misguided, but I've become convinced it's nothing more than malicious at this point. Such a grand scale of people can't lack that much self awareness.
- iron0013 6y ago
  Down voting is speech.
  - calmlynarczyk 6y ago
    Unless I'm mistaken about how this site works, downvotes shouldn't completely delete comments, just fade them. Who is stepping in and removing them entirely without a "[deleted]" marker displaying?
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      Are you saying you have "showdead" turned on?
ASTP001 6y ago
Pardon my ignorance but what is the difference between "witch hunt" and "cancel culture?" and do people who are part of "cancel culture" refer to their own actions as such?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  A witch hunt is usually characterized by 1. Either no wrongdoing, or minimal wrongdoing. 2. The ability to grant oneself absolution by implicating others The implied result is that since there isn't really any wrongful act, the only way to avoid the hunt is to accuse others. And in this way the "investigators" can go after whomever they want. There's also an implied (3) The investigation is done by someone with traditional authority. The connotation of a witch hunt is therefore a fake investigation for solely political purposes. That is used to implicate more political enemies. So cancel culture: If I had to, I'd describe this as a movement (or a collection of them) that tries to pressure powerful entities to take acts they deem to be moral by through social and economic pressure. That's really it. To people who disagree with the moral position, there can be similarities to (1), but (2) certainly isn't present, and the people pressuring for accountability/action/whatever aren't usually traditional authority figures. In fact individual movements may be entirely leaderless and decentralized (so no 3). Since moral and political lines are correlated, there can also be an appearance of similarity to the politicalized investigation aspect, but beyond the most surface level similarities, there isn't much in common.
kcplate 6y ago
I’m old enough to recall when it was skillfully practiced by the religious right in this country... It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I'm old enough to recall when people were "cancelled" by extra-judicial execution. That's even worse.
orwin 6y ago
This deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this. Twitter and the social network allowed people to have reach to explain why they're boycotting this or that, share their outrage, sometime about really dumb things, but still with their own reasons.
- moistly 6y ago
  It seems to me that the only powers we have are the ballot box, our wallets, and bullets. And in the USA, I'm not so sure about the former, what with all the corruption. Want to see real change? General strike. Shut it all down and watch the powers freak out.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Boycotting has been proposed in previous generations. In Martin Luther King's last speech before he was cancelled, he suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."
mooted1 6y ago
I appreciate so many of you are willing to crusade for free speech. But the reality is that platforming isn't free, and the process of deciding who gets platforms is political. The first amendment doesn't govern this process, nor can it—no one can reasonably consume every piece of intellectual content, from every angle, and process it. My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform. The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power. A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN. For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"? If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences. The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy all the time. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The effect is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable. The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold: 1. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed. 2. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis. 3. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous. To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices should be the job of institutions. But they're not doing the job—this is what progressives are protesting. If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today.
GoodJokes 6y ago
All of screeds against cancel culture seem extremely online. I don’t think the culture is actually that large, but the reaction to it is HUGE. The reaction paints with the same problematic broad strokes that they are railing against. I say leave this quibblers alone and let them flame out.
luord 6y ago
I've noticed that discussions about this issue never lead anywhere, and that seems almost by design (don't know if that's ironic or appropriate). The reason is that apologists of cancel culture are talking about "influential people/powerful corporations being boycotted/yelled at in twitter". Meanwhile, detractors are talking about "normal people without any kind of power or influence being harassed and/or losing their livelihoods because they cracked their knuckles". So both sides are talking about fundamentally different things, and because of this, discussion on this matter is almost always a lot of people yelling past each other.

118 points by andrenth 6y ago

I wish Freud was alive today. I can't help but think that the hysterics manifested in mainstream or social media are not actually real, that people wouldn't make such illogical steps if they were alone in an island. Instead they seem to be reactions , rooted in something deeper somewhere that's causing mass hysterias and delusions. It does manifest in the shifting ways of life too, the lack of sex, the lack of humor and the limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations. I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter

orwin 6y ago
Freud was wrong with almost everything he said. He had merit from a philosophical point of view, he coined terms extremely well, but he is definitely not a scientific, was dangerous for his patients and his theories are still dangerous (your child is an autist because you, poor mother, did not pay enough attention to him! and other rubbish about children rape fantasy and other). Lacan, at least, was not as dangerous (but still a pseudoscientific). Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz. > limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations If this is really a thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this should be wrong.

bluehazed 6y ago

dear god who cares move on with your lives

duxup 6y ago

>This is an excerpt of a longer article about the Harper’s letter I guess that makes sense then why I felt like I didn't get anything out of it. >To read the entire post and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year. Oh I see... that's disappointing. At least with the WSJ right up front I know I'm not going to get anything out of it without a subscription.

Justsignedup 6y ago
basically. there's no argument here other than some platitudes. Definitely not worth a post on HN
- duxup 6y ago
  I certainly felt like I got a couple words of meaning at most out of those paragraphs. Lots of volume and platitude as you say... I wasn't getting much beyond that... but then it asked me for $5.

touchngthevodka 6y ago

It's accountability culture.

wait_a_minute 6y ago

It is undoubtedly cancel culture. But some people will deny it because they benefit from it and/or agree with it. It is a trend that must be stopped before we irreparably damage the free movement of ideas that has enabled America and the rest of the world to flourish. If you cannot speak against the orthodoxy without fear of being forced into poverty, then the orthodoxy will grow unchallenged into a monster that eats even the people who helped create it.

helixhelix 6y ago
But we're seeing the opposite. Speaking against counter-culture and being cancelled.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  That is not the opposite. That is just the beginnings of what I said - the monster eating the very people who helped create it. Both left and right need to agree that hitting working individuals in the pocketbook over political disagreement is not okay, even if someone says something that is "offensive" to someone else. Obviously there are lines that have to be drawn in the work place, but the intellectuals signing the Harper letter weren't concerned by non-toxic workplaces. They were talking about something much worse that we can all agree is vile and dangerous.
  - helixhelix 6y ago
    Lines must be drawn with cancel culture. To avoid any slippery slopes, will eliminating or demoting this person hurt the project? In case of Linus taking a forced holiday to "psychology rehab" and Dr. Stallman being pushed to resign by someone admittedly too frustrated to do her job, meritocracy seems to be a good start. Too late, since a posse of wolves in sheep's wool (or XY-chromosomed persons in female-gendered clothing), is fixing to end meritocracy in favor of inclusivity. Would you agree to such a sacrifice?
femiagbabiaka 6y ago
I’m in support of a movement for truly free speech. If we were to achieve that, it would be the first time in modern history where that would be the case.

wannabesrevenge 6y ago

Why is this article on ycombinator? It's not nuanced or inciteful in anyway. It's yet another "our generation did it better" article with different words.

soulofmischief 6y ago
As per the guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Give them a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wannabesrevenge 6y ago
  Sure, but this isn't intellectual, lol. It's trite and shallow
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    You had this opportunity to add insightfulness and enrich the debate with your comment.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - soulofmischief 6y ago
    As per the guidelines: Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. ... Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. Give them a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
purerandomness 6y ago
It's highly relevant to Tech, culture and the current Zeitgeist. If you follow the current controversy around tech thought leaders like Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob, you can't ignore the current debate, no matter which position you take. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it never did.

ggregoire 6y ago

For the other non U.S. readers: > The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the term "callout culture"), describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner is boycotted. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_cancellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_c...

throwaway894345 6y ago
Usually I hear this term in context to attempts to doxx or have someone fired, and while the cancellation of celebrities garners more press, it's due to the notoriety of the victim--probably many more non-celebrities are canceled (and usually with worse consequences unless good and decent people intervene). It's the climate of fear, not the criticism, that people take issue with (we're not talking about "criticism culture" after all).
- iron0013 6y ago
  Yeah, but the “climate of fear” arises only because powerful people with prominent platforms are afraid of being criticized. And criticism is protected speech.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    This is utterly disingenuous. 1. Cancelling targets anyone who fails to adequately toe the progressive party line. Sometimes those people are "powerful" relative to any individual mob constituent, but often they are not (for example, the hispanic worker at the California utility company who was fired for making the "ok" gesture without realizing that it offends progressives). 2. Cancelling isn't criticism, it's harassment, usually by doxxing or trying to get someone fired. Criticism is perfectly fine, cancelling goes beyond criticism. 3. Focusing solely on the power dynamics minimizes the moral issue, which is that slander, harassment, and bullying are abhorrent irrespective of power dynamics (although yes, being 'powerful' means you're better capable to weather the injustice). 4. Not only is cancellation wrong on an individual level, in aggregate it creates a climate of fear which affects everyone whose views are unapproved (although as the mob realizes its power, it increasingly goes after its own for astonishingly trivial offenses). For those lovers of "power dynamics", it should be noted that this climate of fear disproportionately affects the powerless (who could have predicted that an angry mob would be more invested in its own destructive catharsis than the people it purports to care about?).

xyzal 6y ago

This post from Taibbi is in my opinion also worth a read: On “White Fragility”, A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

charia 6y ago
Taibbi's been on a roll with his writing recently. His breakdown of the current state of the American press is also quite illuminating. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...

aqme28 6y ago

It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days than if there's _too much_ accountability for op-ed writers. Anyways, this article doesn't even try to say anything other than that Kids These Days are different than they used to be.

amadeuspagel 6y ago
>It really does feel like there are bigger problems these days Not even a red herring, but just gesturing at red herrings somewhere.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> It [the woke revolution] spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it. Man, does this resonate. The woke message is just uninspiring and the word play and circular reasoning are just tedious. I've never met a philosophy that depended so strongly on appropriating existing, morally-weighty words.

watwut 6y ago
Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. Mostly because he is good at finding funny sounding insulting but still right below line sentence. He is good at emotional level, but less good with actual rational arguing.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > Taibibi is good at resonating when you are predisposed to agree with him. That's what "resonates" means. I agree though that he's putting words to collective frustrations and not arguing in a persuasive form. I wish he did more of the latter, but nevertheless, this excerpt resonated for me.
- calmlynarczyk 6y ago
  The logical fallacies with many modern examples of "cancelling" have already been pointed out far and wide. Not every bit of writing needs to be a statistical analysis (and considering the value of quantitative data is overrated, I'm inclined to agree that a well-written passioned analysis is just as welcome). Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Funny thing, I did not said whether he is wrong or right. I said what literally all his articles are, regardless of whether he is wrong or right. The only one that I think he really really should not write was one about civility and discourse. And I am not asking for statistical analysis either. All I am saying is he resonates with those who agree with him, because his whole thing is insulting common ennemy while being funny.

Barrin92 6y ago

More interesting than the article which says nothing original is the emerging "anti-cancel-culture" - industrial complex which appears to be a flourishing industry of people constantly blogging about how cancelled they are. There really is something incredibly whiny about people who are prominent writers, have large audiences, but somehow manage to turn themselves into victims. On the topic itself, I don't even understand the concept of cancel culture. All culture is cancel culture, that simply what culture is. A culture is defined by its delineations, what's inside of it and what's outside of it. All cultures, in all places cancel, all communities decide who is in and who is out, that's what defines a community, if nobody's excluded you don't have one. What I suspect is not that the glorious past had a wider spectrum of opinion or no cancel culture, it's that people are mad that their opinion happens to be at the unpopular end these days.

rich_sasha 6y ago
I’m not a high profile writer, so no whines from my side. But I don’t like Cancel Culture. I don’t like mob justice, I don’t like it being ok for people to express outrage and dismissal of other people’s opinions, even controversial ones, when they are respectfully posed. To me, key to polite debate is to accept a very wide range of opinions, so long as they are phrased with respect for other people, in particular those who disagree. This is precisely what is missing when you “cancel” someone. At best, it is counterproductive, at worst, actually damaging to societal debate.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  >when they are respectfully posed. This is quite a caveat.
calmlynarczyk 6y ago
People are mad because their livelihoods are being ruined with drive-by character attacks from people whose sole purpose is tilling the data landscape for any scrap they can latch onto to accuse a person of a heinous moral crime. It's as simple as going out and branding someone with the R-word without consequence; even if you're just making shit up you stand to lose nothing whereas even the label towards a person can destroy a person's life. You don't have to demonstrate any sort of credibility or saintly behavior; just toss an oppression monicker at someone and stand back while the mob handles the rest for you.

fernandotakai 6y ago

there's currently out on the internet a letter that basically says "cancel culture doesn't exist". it's signed by some ~160 people, mostly from left-wing backgrounds (i don't know all of them to say they are all from left-wing backgrounds). a lot of those signatures are just "Unsigned, <affiliation>". the reasoning, according to the letter, is: >Many signatories on our list noted their institutional affiliation but not their name, fearful of professional retaliation. It is a sad fact, and in part why we wrote the letter. if you can't sign something without putting your name on it, because you fear you're going to get persecuted and fired... isn't that cancel culture?

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Kapura 6y ago

>If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It? Accountability culture. The argument that "these people came up during the 60's! they're hip!" holds zero sway with me. I would recommend the author (or folks who agree with him) read responses to the Harper's letter. [1] [2] [1] https://gen.medium.com/cancel-culture-is-how-the-powerful-play-victim-e840fa55ad49 https://gen.medium.com/cancel-culture-is-how-the-powerful-pl... [2] https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1280924457884884994 https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1280924457884884994

buzzert 6y ago
I find it impossible to take any position seriously when someone tweets “the system is rigged”.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  That's unfortunate. Of all the conspiracy one-liners, this is one of the least dramatic, and most often true (whether due to insight or broken-clock style).
  - buzzert 6y ago
    The problem is that it's such a defeatist attitude. How are we expected to fix anything if "the system" is "rigged"? If I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I would say that those in power would love it if people kept speaking of things really abstractly like that, because it guarantees nobody would actually do anything about it.
xyzal 6y ago
I opine that "accountability culture" is becoming quite hyperthrophied, and support my opinion with an excerpt from Taibbi`s other article: "A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago."

1propionyl 6y ago

A friendly reminder: the "flag" button is not a super-downvote.

api 6y ago

The meat of this article is its last paragraph or two, and particularly in the observation that modern "woke" culture is humorless and incapable of parsing sarcasm. I disagree however that this is peculiar to "woke" culture. Literalism and humorlessness are everywhere. We are living in a profoundly conservative era whose deep conservatism is masked by the triumph of certain select socially liberal causes such as partial drug decriminalization and LGBT rights. IMHO those few specific victories are on the inertia of a previous era. I am referring to the 60s through the 90s, the era that created modern rock and roll, techno, hip hop, burning man, and rave culture, some of which is now decidedly retro. Very little culture of this sort -- or of any sort really -- is being created today. Ours is an era of sterility. You can really see this in how the "alt-right" was able to look hip and edgy with nothing more than shitty memes and ideas like "alternate reality gaming" appropriated from old 90s issues of Mondo 2000. Everything else is so damn sterile and dull that the sorts of aesthetically tone deaf CHUDs that hang out on 4chan /pol could sort of look cool. It doesn't take much color to grab attention in a monochromatic world. I'm not really that pessimistic. This stuff is very cyclic and the pendulum will swing yet again. I'm thinking COVID marks the end of the post-9/11 era and things will start getting interesting again in the mid-2020s. COVID has also crashed the Trump train, which is significant.

visarga 6y ago
Dig deeper, there are still excellent music and works being published. Maybe they are hard to find because they are flooded with junk, commercial stuff and misinformation, but they exist and grow faster than in the past.

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lordleft 6y ago

I generally favor free expression. I'd rather an ugly, obnoxious and pernicious idea be expressed - so I can or others can be free to dismantle it in the arena of ideas. Obviously there are tremendous shades of nuance here. Free Speech does not mean free speech on private platforms. Still, if most or all major platforms constrain what can be expressed, what we end up with is a functional chilling of speech. Part of what makes the current debate over cancel culture so difficult is that most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention. As much as I believe a University should be a space where intellectual debate is welcomed, I don't think any University should give a platform to, say, a holocaust denier. We all draw the line somewhere. Permuting where that line gets drawn is very, very difficult. Especially because morality evolves, and our convictions about certain things are constantly changing the light of new evidence, new understandings, especially re: traditionally disenfranchised peoples. The real danger of "cancel culture" is rhetorical, I think. People need to be persuaded of an idea to really accept it. They cannot be hectored into acceptance. You can shove them out of platforms, but they will hold their beliefs, and externalize them at the ballot-box, or elsewhere. Moral development takes time, and it takes suasion. There's a lot more to unpack here. A part of me wonders if cancel culture is just another expression of a kind of acrimoniousness that has always accompanied political life. Or maybe not. I don't have all the answers. But on balance, I still believe in favoring a space for debate.

hirundo 6y ago
> most of us, even those who love free expression, would not be comfortable with giving space to certain assertions even in places that are meant for intellectual contention I think that's the problem. Any condition beyond being not insulting and not threatening leaves a place to drive in a wedge by those opposed to free speech. They say, if you won't let this Nazi speak, you shouldn't let this person I associate with Nazi-ism speak. Instead we should let the Nazi speak. And the pedophile, human extinction advocate, anti-vaxxer, etc. We don't have to listen, but neither should we punch them, rhetorically or otherwise, as long as they follow some minimal content neutral standard of decorum.

deleted 6y ago

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softwaredoug 6y ago

A lot of the 'canceling' is legitimate expressions of speech, even if you disagree with that expression of speech! Consider a lot of what gets classified as cancel culture is: 1. Boycotts - OK we should be forced to purchase things (like Goya, or ads on Tucker Carlson's show) that don't share our values? No, that's crazy... 2. Organizational politics - The Pinker thing[1], and the issue with the Poetry society, has more to do with the internals of some organization. Should we restrict those advocating for changes to organizations they belong to? 3. Firing - Either organizations are able to have 'speech' or they're not... And without cultural norms, we're not going to from on high create top-down standards around which values are 'correct' or not. I have yet to see a PoV neutral definition of 'cancel culture' that doesn't devolve to litigating whether the issues for the canceling are legit or not. [1] The Linguistics Society did NOT remove Pinker https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546 https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1280950807819628546

femiagbabiaka 6y ago
Pretty insightful, I hadn’t thought of it that way but you’re right. I guess the counter would be that cancel culture restricts others speech.
deleted 6y ago
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ThrowawayR2 6y ago
The flaw in the "Firing" argument is that the speech is a call to action, namely to fire someone. At that point, it becomes something like a threat, which is not protected speech. While the threat is not directly aimed at the individual, law does recognize that interference in the business relationship between two parties can be a wrong, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
- iron0013 6y ago
  Nope, calling on a company to fire someone is just as protected as any other speech.

calmlynarczyk 6y ago

The only evidence I need to see that what the author refers to is very much a serious concern for everyone is that everytime I refresh this comment section another comment agreeing with the author disappears. I used to defend the folks that participated in the doxxing and very real harassment of people they didn't agree with as misguided, but I've become convinced it's nothing more than malicious at this point. Such a grand scale of people can't lack that much self awareness.

iron0013 6y ago
Down voting is speech.
- calmlynarczyk 6y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken about how this site works, downvotes shouldn't completely delete comments, just fade them. Who is stepping in and removing them entirely without a "[deleted]" marker displaying?
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Are you saying you have "showdead" turned on?

ASTP001 6y ago

Pardon my ignorance but what is the difference between "witch hunt" and "cancel culture?" and do people who are part of "cancel culture" refer to their own actions as such?

joshuamorton 6y ago
A witch hunt is usually characterized by 1. Either no wrongdoing, or minimal wrongdoing. 2. The ability to grant oneself absolution by implicating others The implied result is that since there isn't really any wrongful act, the only way to avoid the hunt is to accuse others. And in this way the "investigators" can go after whomever they want. There's also an implied (3) The investigation is done by someone with traditional authority. The connotation of a witch hunt is therefore a fake investigation for solely political purposes. That is used to implicate more political enemies. So cancel culture: If I had to, I'd describe this as a movement (or a collection of them) that tries to pressure powerful entities to take acts they deem to be moral by through social and economic pressure. That's really it. To people who disagree with the moral position, there can be similarities to (1), but (2) certainly isn't present, and the people pressuring for accountability/action/whatever aren't usually traditional authority figures. In fact individual movements may be entirely leaderless and decentralized (so no 3). Since moral and political lines are correlated, there can also be an appearance of similarity to the politicalized investigation aspect, but beyond the most surface level similarities, there isn't much in common.

kcplate 6y ago

I’m old enough to recall when it was skillfully practiced by the religious right in this country... It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

082349872349872 6y ago
I'm old enough to recall when people were "cancelled" by extra-judicial execution. That's even worse.

orwin 6y ago

This deplatforming and this "cancel culture" is only a manifestation of what millenials heard for years: if you want change, vote with your wallet. Well, we now are able to. I'm not agreeing with everything, but boycott is the only power my generation have right now, and nobody can prevent this. Twitter and the social network allowed people to have reach to explain why they're boycotting this or that, share their outrage, sometime about really dumb things, but still with their own reasons.

moistly 6y ago
It seems to me that the only powers we have are the ballot box, our wallets, and bullets. And in the USA, I'm not so sure about the former, what with all the corruption. Want to see real change? General strike. Shut it all down and watch the powers freak out.
082349872349872 6y ago
Boycotting has been proposed in previous generations. In Martin Luther King's last speech before he was cancelled, he suggested boycotting businesses until such time as they were willing to treat all God's children fairly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414101 "All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper."

mooted1 6y ago

I appreciate so many of you are willing to crusade for free speech. But the reality is that platforming isn't free, and the process of deciding who gets platforms is political. The first amendment doesn't govern this process, nor can it—no one can reasonably consume every piece of intellectual content, from every angle, and process it. My point is, cancel culture definitely exists. There has always been, and always will be, political processes for selecting views we consider acceptable discourse. Arguments against cancel culture that don't grapple with this reality are missing the point. Canceling isn't about using the power of the state to crack down on free speech. It's about deciding who gets access to a scarce resource: their platform. The way this get decided is unavoidably political, since it's about who wields power. A good example is this website. While most posts are technical, Hacker News hosts a significant amount of discussion regarding social issues. If you read this site using hckrnews.com, which preserves posts flagged off the front page, it's easy to notice that there are political trends in how moderators and users select what posts get prominence. This post, which espouses a more centrist perspective on cancel culture, was briefly flagged, then restored. Many, many other posts espousing more progressive views are systematically downvoted or flagged (search for DEAD on hckrnews.com), many of which are far longer and more carefully developed than Taibbi's piece. Regardless of how you feel about confederate statues, I think it's hard to consider that this 538 post (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/) isn't comparable to this post in terms of quality, sophistication, and merit to be on the front page of HN. For those of you who agree with Taibbi... do you think those posts aren't "canceled"? If you think this example is contrived, because the nature of this cancellation doesn't involve a visible mob, that's because of power differences. The nature of "cancellation" against minorities looks different. Mob justice isn't necessary when people in power can just fire you. And progressives are fired or otherwise censored for advocating for inclusion, against police violence, for progressive social policy all the time. You don't see mob justice in these cases because this kind of canceling is often enforced by institutions. A mob isn't necessary. The effect is the same: people are regularly censored and excluded from mainstream prominence because their views are considered unacceptable. The reason this latest wave of (attempted) cancellations (nyt editorial, jk rowling, adam rapaport, countless people resulting from #metoo etc) have garnered attention is twofold: 1. They require popular support. Lots of people support holding rapaport, the founder of crossfit, Tucker Carlson, etc to account. No institution wanted to punish these people, so a popular movement formed. 2. They cancel views formerly considered to be within acceptable bounds. Anti-trans speech, implicitly discriminatory pay practices, military crackdowns on protestors, even if they weren't popular, are believed by many to be "newspaper publishable". It's shocking to people like Taibbi that people who share their views can get fired and singled out on social media—things that happen to people with progressive views on a regular basis. 3. Oftentimes, the people making the speech are civil and ostensibly in good faith, even if their views are onerous. To understand cancel culture, you need to define cancellation as "people whose views are censored", and you need to look at people who espouse progressive views. That "cancel culture" is prominent today means that our definition of acceptability is changing, that powerful people require mobs to be held accountable, and that we increasingly believe that how you present the argument (good intent, good faith etc) is less important than what you present. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that cancellations are sometimes off the mark. Mob justice is often unfair and harmful. It is often disproportionate (the shor incident is the best example I can think of). Holding people accountable for hate speech or discriminatory practices should be the job of institutions. But they're not doing the job—this is what progressives are protesting. If you want to stop mob culture, change institutions to fairly enforce the injustices that the mob is necessary to enforce today.

GoodJokes 6y ago

All of screeds against cancel culture seem extremely online. I don’t think the culture is actually that large, but the reaction to it is HUGE. The reaction paints with the same problematic broad strokes that they are railing against. I say leave this quibblers alone and let them flame out.

luord 6y ago

I've noticed that discussions about this issue never lead anywhere, and that seems almost by design (don't know if that's ironic or appropriate). The reason is that apologists of cancel culture are talking about "influential people/powerful corporations being boycotted/yelled at in twitter". Meanwhile, detractors are talking about "normal people without any kind of power or influence being harassed and/or losing their livelihoods because they cracked their knuckles". So both sides are talking about fundamentally different things, and because of this, discussion on this matter is almost always a lot of people yelling past each other.