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I'm unsure where we as a society go from here. The left's cancel culture resulted in the firing of private citizens from their jobs, or at least some reprimand.

I'm unsure where we as a society go from here. The left's cancel culture resulted in the firing of private citizens from their jobs, or at least some reprimand. The right's cancel culture is the full weight of the federal government brought down against opposition, in stark violation of the First Amendment; that is, until the Supreme Court can find some new carve-out for why this isn't protected speech. Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

moogly 1y ago
> the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly." Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.
JohnFen 1y ago
We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided. The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies. But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments. All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.
  - mrtesthah 1y ago
    A small number of extremely wealthy individuals have a vested interest in fomenting that division, because the solutions to those 80% issues happens to conflict with their business interests.
  - nebula8804 1y ago
    Its not like the US hasn't done big ambitious things before: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Hell didn't they help develop some of the social programs for Post WWII Europe/Japan etc? Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      >Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal. Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since. Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected. As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize. Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA. If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules. If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do. This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.
- krisboyz781 1y ago
  [dead]
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  Statistically almost everyone who is a “conservative” supports Trump whatever he does, though? With very little real infighting The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).
slumberlust 1y ago
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
themaninthedark 1y ago
I see we are forgetting the period of time from the end of 2019 to 2022... Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and laptops. That was not being done to benefit the political rights. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762
- UmGuys 1y ago
  I'm not very aware of this subject, but from my understanding "the laptop" is the files that were extracted from a person's laptop by a man who was supposed to repair it. Then the files were released in public and included nude images. I would expect any company to pull those documents down to limit their own liability and for common decency. Again, I'm not very informed on the subject. So there was that example. Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:
  - themaninthedark 1y ago
    No, they were blocking links to the news story from the NY Post, including users from sending private messages... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 >In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform." https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/ https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-... Edit: URL was malformed due to copy paste error...
    - UmGuys 1y ago
      I have no idea what you're referencing honestly. Private companies can make whatever business decisions they want. You second link is 404 and I have no idea what you're talking about. The subject is what used to be the United States. A concept that no longer exists because we're too shitty.
UmGuys 1y ago
There's no comparison here. The left's "cancel culture" doesn't exist and is literally free speech in action. This is the destruction of free speech. I think you have to participate in social media to understand what the left's cancel culture is because it's just a bunch of individuals expressing their opinions. Hence many are out of the loop. I wouldn't refer to authoritarian regimes as "cancel culture".
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  I'm 100% against what's happening rn with Trump's fascism, but let's not pretend that there was no cancel culture on the left and pressure on companies. Example: Disney itself fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian because of comments she made. There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse -- but there was a fear (valid or otherwise) of blowback/ratings/whatever.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    > There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney. And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds. Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.
    - insane_dreamer 1y ago
      Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine. If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of. By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't. So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).
ModernMech 1y ago
> Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly." As with all authoritarian regimes, their assumption is that this is the end of history and those in power today will be in power forever. You're also right that they believe liberals will never do what they're doing now. But the old guard is dying. Trump, Bush, Biden, Clinton, Obama are all boomers+ who will be dead sooner rather than later. The younger generation realizes the pendulum is about to swing, power will be ours to take, and you can be damn sure we will not behave like our parents and grandparents did. So me personally, when I see them take Kimmel off the air for "not serving the public interest", all I hear is permission for the first progressive millennial president to shut down all of right wing AM talk radio on that same basis. And you know who else sees it that way? Right wing AM talk radio hosts, who have been the only ones on the right asking MAGA to pump the brakes on what they're doing (see: Tucker Carlson).
actualwitch 1y ago
Society's failure was taking gamergaters seriously. It was the beginning, slippery slope into full on totalitarian censorship but because basic human respect was framed as oppression it served as invitation for tit for tat retaliation. This tactic has been ridiculously successful in turning extremest ideas mainstream, and it was obvious to many people even back then, however because it exploits human nature it's hard to fight. You can find the most ridiculous crazies that present as "other side" and use it to justify whatever you want, and if you keep repeating "this is totally normal" some people just start to believe. If you are interested in finding the peaceful way to oppose this, I invite you to try and come up with the answer to this "totalitarian ratchet" because no one so far figured it out and it is a foundational part of modern authoritarian playbook.

moogly 1y ago

> the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly." Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.

JohnFen 1y ago

We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided. The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies. But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.

mikepurvis 1y ago
It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments. All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.
- mrtesthah 1y ago
  A small number of extremely wealthy individuals have a vested interest in fomenting that division, because the solutions to those 80% issues happens to conflict with their business interests.
- nebula8804 1y ago
  Its not like the US hasn't done big ambitious things before: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Hell didn't they help develop some of the social programs for Post WWII Europe/Japan etc? Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    >Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal. Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since. Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected. As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize. Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA. If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules. If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do. This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.
krisboyz781 1y ago
[dead]
wqaatwt 1y ago
Statistically almost everyone who is a “conservative” supports Trump whatever he does, though? With very little real infighting The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).

slumberlust 1y ago

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

themaninthedark 1y ago

I see we are forgetting the period of time from the end of 2019 to 2022... Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and laptops. That was not being done to benefit the political rights. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762

UmGuys 1y ago
I'm not very aware of this subject, but from my understanding "the laptop" is the files that were extracted from a person's laptop by a man who was supposed to repair it. Then the files were released in public and included nude images. I would expect any company to pull those documents down to limit their own liability and for common decency. Again, I'm not very informed on the subject. So there was that example. Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:
- themaninthedark 1y ago
  No, they were blocking links to the news story from the NY Post, including users from sending private messages... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 >In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform." https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/ https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-... Edit: URL was malformed due to copy paste error...
  - UmGuys 1y ago
    I have no idea what you're referencing honestly. Private companies can make whatever business decisions they want. You second link is 404 and I have no idea what you're talking about. The subject is what used to be the United States. A concept that no longer exists because we're too shitty.

UmGuys 1y ago

There's no comparison here. The left's "cancel culture" doesn't exist and is literally free speech in action. This is the destruction of free speech. I think you have to participate in social media to understand what the left's cancel culture is because it's just a bunch of individuals expressing their opinions. Hence many are out of the loop. I wouldn't refer to authoritarian regimes as "cancel culture".

insane_dreamer 1y ago
I'm 100% against what's happening rn with Trump's fascism, but let's not pretend that there was no cancel culture on the left and pressure on companies. Example: Disney itself fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian because of comments she made. There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse -- but there was a fear (valid or otherwise) of blowback/ratings/whatever.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney. And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds. Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine. If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of. By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't. So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).

ModernMech 1y ago

> Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly." As with all authoritarian regimes, their assumption is that this is the end of history and those in power today will be in power forever. You're also right that they believe liberals will never do what they're doing now. But the old guard is dying. Trump, Bush, Biden, Clinton, Obama are all boomers+ who will be dead sooner rather than later. The younger generation realizes the pendulum is about to swing, power will be ours to take, and you can be damn sure we will not behave like our parents and grandparents did. So me personally, when I see them take Kimmel off the air for "not serving the public interest", all I hear is permission for the first progressive millennial president to shut down all of right wing AM talk radio on that same basis. And you know who else sees it that way? Right wing AM talk radio hosts, who have been the only ones on the right asking MAGA to pump the brakes on what they're doing (see: Tucker Carlson).

actualwitch 1y ago

Society's failure was taking gamergaters seriously. It was the beginning, slippery slope into full on totalitarian censorship but because basic human respect was framed as oppression it served as invitation for tit for tat retaliation. This tactic has been ridiculously successful in turning extremest ideas mainstream, and it was obvious to many people even back then, however because it exploits human nature it's hard to fight. You can find the most ridiculous crazies that present as "other side" and use it to justify whatever you want, and if you keep repeating "this is totally normal" some people just start to believe. If you are interested in finding the peaceful way to oppose this, I invite you to try and come up with the answer to this "totalitarian ratchet" because no one so far figured it out and it is a foundational part of modern authoritarian playbook.