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First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway. > The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-c

by pkulak 9mo ago

First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway. > The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing. No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers. John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.

specialist 9mo ago
I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.
fc417fc802 9mo ago
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob. > I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers. GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
- kenjackson 9mo ago
  Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd. > w/o also not greatly limiting free speech. Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal. For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
    - ryan_lane 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - almosthere 9mo ago
        It's funny that exact same thing was said in another thread but it was talking about far left groups doing it ...
        account42 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        AlexeyBelov 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 9mo ago
        Please don't hound people like this on HN. It's not acceptable to say “I remember you doing exactly that in many, many threads before” and “you're always trying to protect unsavory characters”. It's hyperbolic and unfalsifiable, and not the kind of discourse that HN is intended for. Commenters have the right to have their comments evaluated as they are in the thread, and not coloured by wild allegations of conduct in unspecified historical threads. The purpose of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Plenty of users are doing a good job of discussing this difficult topic curiously. We want this to be a site where difficult topics can be discussed, and that can only happen if people are committed to curious conversation rather than ideological battle. If you want to participate on HN, we need you, like everyone, to respect the guidelines, no matter how difficult and activating the topic is. These lines from the guidelines are particularly relevant here: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - account42 9mo ago
    It's pretty simple to deal with cancel culture without limiting speech: First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem. Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.
    - kenjackson 9mo ago
      > First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture. So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
  - throw10920 9mo ago
    I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim. If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference. There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
- JackYoustra 9mo ago
  > The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob. what would your alternative be?
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    Why do we need an alternative? Why should behavior driven by a mob mentality be desirable?
    - JackYoustra 9mo ago
      Because white supremacists are, from some abstract level, undesirable? And some have white supremacist tendencies, so there has to be some way of, at the very least, ignoring them and ensuring that its possible to ignore them.
xp84 9mo ago
> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said. Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them. If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
- femiagbabiaka 9mo ago
  > Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said. Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil. > Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them. Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words. > If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different. The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
  - rustystump 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - femiagbabiaka 9mo ago
      I could say what it makes you but I'm trying not to get banned.
      - 9mo ago
elemdos 9mo ago
Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?
- rexpop 9mo ago
  No one is entitled to being rich or famous.
  - _carbyau_ 9mo ago
    True, but it is an effect.
  - account42 9mo ago
    That doesn't mean we should accept that people censor themselves for fear of having their livelihood ruined because someone takes a statement out of context. I'd rather live in a world where people feel safe in being honest with their opinions so that we can work out differences before they become an issue.
    - rexpop 9mo ago
      I agree, but that's an issue of our economic system: financial precarity. Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.
  - Throaway1982 9mo ago
    It's also not against the law to be a racist. Only discrimination itself is.
taneq 9mo ago
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
serf 9mo ago
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming. cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier. shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow. You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back. You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.
- text0404 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - spiderfarmer 9mo ago
    I won’t miss Scott Adams. I won’t shed a tear for anyone who is racist and misogynistic, no matter the size of their platform. We need less racists and in this case nature canceled him. If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
    - enraged_camel 9mo ago
      >> If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh. Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726 https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
      - account42 9mo ago
        [flagged]
safety1st 9mo ago
I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas. Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important. I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus). Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life. Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life. If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized. We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
- abm53 9mo ago
  > They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade. I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
Amezarak 9mo ago
> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.

by pkulak 9mo ago

specialist 9mo ago

I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.

fc417fc802 9mo ago

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob. > I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers. GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".

kenjackson 9mo ago
Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd. > w/o also not greatly limiting free speech. Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal. For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
  - ryan_lane 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - almosthere 9mo ago
      It's funny that exact same thing was said in another thread but it was talking about far left groups doing it ...
      - account42 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        AlexeyBelov 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 9mo ago
        Please don't hound people like this on HN. It's not acceptable to say “I remember you doing exactly that in many, many threads before” and “you're always trying to protect unsavory characters”. It's hyperbolic and unfalsifiable, and not the kind of discourse that HN is intended for. Commenters have the right to have their comments evaluated as they are in the thread, and not coloured by wild allegations of conduct in unspecified historical threads. The purpose of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Plenty of users are doing a good job of discussing this difficult topic curiously. We want this to be a site where difficult topics can be discussed, and that can only happen if people are committed to curious conversation rather than ideological battle. If you want to participate on HN, we need you, like everyone, to respect the guidelines, no matter how difficult and activating the topic is. These lines from the guidelines are particularly relevant here: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- account42 9mo ago
  It's pretty simple to deal with cancel culture without limiting speech: First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem. Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.
  - kenjackson 9mo ago
    > First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture. So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
- throw10920 9mo ago
  I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim. If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference. There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
JackYoustra 9mo ago
> The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob. what would your alternative be?
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  Why do we need an alternative? Why should behavior driven by a mob mentality be desirable?
  - JackYoustra 9mo ago
    Because white supremacists are, from some abstract level, undesirable? And some have white supremacist tendencies, so there has to be some way of, at the very least, ignoring them and ensuring that its possible to ignore them.

xp84 9mo ago

> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said. Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them. If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.

femiagbabiaka 9mo ago
> Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said. Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil. > Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them. Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words. > If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different. The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
- rustystump 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - femiagbabiaka 9mo ago
    I could say what it makes you but I'm trying not to get banned.
    - 9mo ago

elemdos 9mo ago

Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?

rexpop 9mo ago
No one is entitled to being rich or famous.
- _carbyau_ 9mo ago
  True, but it is an effect.
- account42 9mo ago
  That doesn't mean we should accept that people censor themselves for fear of having their livelihood ruined because someone takes a statement out of context. I'd rather live in a world where people feel safe in being honest with their opinions so that we can work out differences before they become an issue.
  - rexpop 9mo ago
    I agree, but that's an issue of our economic system: financial precarity. Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.
- Throaway1982 9mo ago
  It's also not against the law to be a racist. Only discrimination itself is.

taneq 9mo ago

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.

serf 9mo ago

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming. cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier. shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow. You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back. You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.

text0404 9mo ago
[flagged]
- spiderfarmer 9mo ago
  I won’t miss Scott Adams. I won’t shed a tear for anyone who is racist and misogynistic, no matter the size of their platform. We need less racists and in this case nature canceled him. If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
  - enraged_camel 9mo ago
    >> If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh. Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726 https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
    - account42 9mo ago
      [flagged]

safety1st 9mo ago

I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas. Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important. I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus). Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life. Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life. If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized. We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.

abm53 9mo ago
> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade. I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.

Amezarak 9mo ago

> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.