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For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades
- lapcat 1y agoSee the documentary film "Tickling Giants" about Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoIs that the dude the knowing he was lying tried to push the narrative that Israel killed Charlie Kirk purely to try and sour the Right's opinion of Israel?
- Paradigm2020 1y agoAny proof that he knew he was lying / that he was lying ? I see him as "the dude" that did the best interview on the whole ongoing israeli slaughter with piers morgan (part 1 and 2) using actual facts...
- tim333 1y agoI think he said as a comedian, he was joking.
- seydor 1y ago[flagged]
- defrost 1y agoMcCarthy was a leftist? Seriously now, I'm not USAian and even I know cancel culture goes back a long way in US history.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoWait... It's the left's fault that the right is turning authoritarian? Trying to remember which Democratic president threatened broadcast licenses if someone wasn't fired... I can't place it.
- deadbabe 1y agoNeither the left or right ever truly cared about free speech, they just wanted speech they approved.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe left will never take responsibility for the casualties of their culture wars. They got high silencing people they didn’t like with righteous fury, all the while never taking time to think what would happen if the same behavior was turned on them. Now we are under a fascist regime where you can only speak in government approved language.
- nickpeterson 1y agoBut the casualties of prior cancel culture were usually public figures who did racist or sexist things, not people who criticized the administration? I can’t believe you don’t understand this distinction.
- deadbabe 1y agoIt literally doesn’t matter, it’s not illegal to be racist or sexist. You are free to not interact with those people, but it’s not illegal. You may not be able to practice discrimination legally, but in your heart and mind you can be whatever you want. When you take that away from people, they no longer feel free, and they will retaliate like a caged animal.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoSo... Other people used their freedom of speech to call out racism or whatever, but that was wrong. Only the racists get freedom of speech I guess.
- nickpeterson 1y agoYou’re right, but would you also agree there is a difference between a bunch of people in social media saying, “we don’t like this racist person, you should fire them.” And a government official saying, “we don’t like what our critics say, we’re going to revoke their ability to broadcast unless they fire their employee”.
- deadbabe 1y ago
- OKRainbowKid 1y agoAh yes, the left is to blame for the right's actions.
- jackstraw42 1y agoAs is tradition. The right is always blameless and right.
- cap11235 1y ago"Look at what you made me do!"
- krapp 1y ago"stop hitting yourself! stop hitting yourself!"
- nickpeterson 1y agoYeah remember that time Obama threatened to take Fox News pundits off the air by using government coercion?
- valiant55 1y agoIt's one thing to get deplatformed by a private company for advocating for the genocide of a minority group or because you think r*pe is funny, but it's completely different when the government stamps out dissent.
- seydor 1y agoWhile the government is involved in this , certainly this will be coming from private companies in the future, as more and more of them are turning to kiss the ring. It's an attempted cultural change that encompasses everything
- PunchTornado 1y agoThey are not equally bad, but they are both bad. Cancel culture was a very bad idea.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago"Cancel culture" is also free speech though. I'm not sure how it could be different. People are allowed to criticize other people's speech. How else could you have free debate?
- seydor 1y agoGetting fired for expressing an opinion outside of work and which does not affect work , is not 'criticism'
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoRight. Blame the spineless boss who fired them! Not the people who called out their racism or whatever.
- krapp 1y ago"the left" didn't create "cancellation culture." McCarthyism, HUAC, prejudice against youth culture and anything deviating from Christian norms, the Satanic Panic, homophobia and the AIDS crisis, redlining, book banning and moral panics over "groomers," Dixie Chicks, Sinead O'Connor, Kaepernick, boycotting Nike, boycotting Starbucks, boycotting Target, boycotting NASCAR, boycotting Gillette, boycotting Keurig, boycotting Bud Light, boycotting Disney. The right was cancelling long before the term "cancel culture" even existed.
- seydor 1y agoWe are talking about the recent wave which peaked in the 2010s. Most of us remember the libertarian approach to speech in the 90s, the inappropriate jokes and all. And how it all got overturned
- krapp 1y agoYou're cherry picking. I understand you have an agenda and a narrative to push but it's still just cherry picking.
- defrost 1y ago> We There is no "we", it's you and your opinion- own it. > i m surprised this isn't taken as common knowledge, but yes everything about cancellation culture started from leftist causes. I struggle to remember someone being cancelled for expressing "too progressive" ideas until recently. We get it. Not everybody is a UNIX coder of the 70s with clear memories of the 1960s and your limited world view is based on your own personal near term recollection and, seemingly, no actual reading of US history. You might be interested to learn about the House Un-American Activities Committee and their attitude wrt cancelling progressives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
- nickpeterson 1y agoThis will probably not live long on hacker news because people here are basically distracting themselves from the constant barrage of American politics, but it’s pretty clear this regime doesn’t care about the first amendment.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- siva7 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoThis submission was flagged by HN users. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a couple minutes ago. Not sure if this makes me more or less "complicit" (except insofar as such perceptions are monotonic, so can only become more, never less), but I have to agree with the flaggers here. OP is an opinion piece about a Major Ongoing Topic that is so major and so ongoing that the bar for Significant New Information is too high for most opinion pieces to clear. If that convoluted sentence doesn't make sense, it's probably because I'm using HN moderation jargon—but there are many explanations available: major ongoing topics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20major%20ongoing%20topic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... significant new information: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... how we handle stories with political overlap: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- cherry_tree 1y ago>This submission was flagged by HN users. But don’t you control who is allowed to flag a post? Don’t you control who is allowed to vouch for a post? Don’t you review the flags that users add and remove them when a submission is inappropriately flagged?
- ahartmetz 1y agoThere's a popular aphorism (awkwardly translated French -> German -> English) that I hate: "Laughter is a power that even the world's most powerful figures must bow down to" ...is that so, after all?!
- tialaramex 1y agoKimmel and Colbert both illustrate a big problem. The Trump regime didn't have to arrest Colbert or throw Kimmel in prison, or turn up with troops and dismantle their studios - some faceless executive who is about as funny as cancer made a decision to bow to Trump because it was at least temporarily in their interest and the consequences flow from there. Satire needs independent grass roots funding. If the satirist you love costs $10M per year, well, people who love satire better be putting $10M per year on the table to pay for that, because if it's just (for example) a Disney product then to Disney $10M of satire which annoys the God Emperor is a bad deal, lets buy $10M of police procedural or whatever instead. To be clear: It is very possible that an independently funded satirist just means in six months or six years God Emperor Trump decides he's entitled to shut that down and they do get arrested or whatever, this is not a magic solution, but I think a critical weakness in the US is that so much of this is actually funded by giant corporations and thus psychopaths. It's choosing to fight with one arm tied behind your back.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoOr it's like having one of your arms intentionally tied behind your back by a long running conspiracy to place all media in the hands of, at best, faceless corporate bean counters who are amenable at the merest hint of a threat, or worse, active regime loyalists?
- merman 1y agoThe problem with extreme polarization in a 2 party system is that each party doesn’t police itself, doesn’t rein itself in, and when the other finally gets back in power, it pushes through awful retaliatory measures. The 2 parties are happy with this state of affairs because they’re pretty much guaranteed 50% of the time to be the one in power, in control. Vote 3rd party to break this cycle
- tromp 1y agoHard to break the cycle with the broken first-past-the-post voting system.
- lapcat 1y ago> Vote 3rd party to break this cycle Will that break the cycle? Power corrupts, and attracts the corrupt. After a 3rd party attains power, it will become as corrupt as the other two. The reason that 3rd parties look better right now is precisely because they have no power or money.
- merman 1y agoI’m not saying many parties would fix human nature I’m saying it would break this specific cycle
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoThe way voting in the US works, voting 3rd party has the same real effect as not voting at all. If you want to build a third party, you have to start at the bottom, with local races, and work your way up. You can't do it starting with national races.
- carefulfungi 1y agoThat Trump tweeted after Colbert's show was not-renewed that Kimmel would be next - and then gets Kimmel cancelled, said to reporters that licensed broadcasters aren't "allowed" to criticize him, and tweeted after Kimmel that Seth Meyers would be next - and yet still has the support of a majority of republicans, astounds me. There is no authoritarian line he can cross that turns away his apologists. They pretend that Biden or Obama were somehow worse (which, even if true, is an illogical argument for democratic norms), pretend that these are private decisions not coerced by the state power, or cheer for "retribution" against their idealogical opponents while embracing a diminishing of democratic freedoms. They have no red lines for Trump. He can deny established science; deny access to life saving vaccines; control the media; accept billions in personal investments from foreign governments in return for US policy; kill people in international waters without oversight... that's just this month's list! It's not a phenomena I could have truly internalized without experiencing it first hand. It has changed me even as a late-middled-aged adult. I wonder what it must be like for those younger, who are assembling the foundations of their political and social opinions.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoIt's truly gut wrenching what has happened to the Republican party. The people who seriously warned against Trump are either out, or have done a complete 180 and are now licking his boots.
- jaybrendansmith 1y agoI have been completely radicalized. I used to be a boring moderate; was a liberal when it came to social issues, but somewhat conservative fiscally. Now I find I am just an American, and it is no longer about left or right, it is about what is moral and immoral. I never would have believed so many in my country would have zero self-reflection and ignorance, but here we are. I suppose they have always been here, I just did not want to believe it.
- squishington 1y agoThe left and right have more in common with each other than they realise. Many of the distinctions become irrelevant when you realise it's really workers against the power of massive capital.
- derelicta 1y agoFun fact: free speech never existed in the US. In the 50s, one had the right to proclaim oneself a nazi, but bearing a communist card meant the State Dept could suspend your passport anytime.
- RickJWagner 1y agoI think it is wrong for Kimmel to be silenced, as wrong as it was for the Biden administration to encourage social media platforms to silence candidate Donald Trump. Now that we are here, we need bipartisan cool heads to establish good rules.
- 5555624 1y agoJust because someone is a comedian doesn't mean everything they say is a joke. If Kimmel's comment on Monday were a joke,m someone needs to explain it to me, because I didn't get it. What I did hear was some "facts" that did not seem to line up with things I heard in the news. I just assumed he ignored his staff of "fact checkers" -- see Kimmel's comments when he had the dust up with Aaron Rogers -- and was just on another of his anti-Trump rants. While his show isn't all that bad, his monologues are political and have gotten old. Stick to jokes.
- huloopaloo 1y ago> What I did hear was some "facts" that did not seem to line up with things I heard in the news. Perhaps this should encourage you to look inward and acknowledge the “news” you listen to is interested in something other than facts. Everything Kimmel said was factually true. If you would like to quote the part you are struggling with, and include an explanation about why you feel his statement lacks truth, I can point you to supporting sources.
- grumio 1y agoKimmel said that Trump fans were trying to distance themselves from the shooter... that is a fact. Could you please share what you mean? edit to add: also, saying a lie isn't a reason to have FCC license taken away. see: Fox News.
- defrost 1y agoI agree with your points, I point out for edification that broadcast licenses that regulate use of the EM spectrum don't apply to cable news networks such as the Fox News Channel (FNC) - the terms and conditions differ; things can be legally 'broadcast' on cable channels that are illegal to broadcast on a TV spectrum channel. No drama, it's just not a "see: example" you should use in discussions such as this.
- grumio 1y agoInteresting, thanks.
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