Those People We Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Too true. And they don't have a clue.
"Cancellation" is often used in the same way the pillory used to be - making an example of one, as a warning to the rest.
Whilst it's still bouncing around as a thing, discussions simply aren't happening. You can't query aspects of cancel culture, without fearing that you'll be next...so you type something banal.. you decide it's safer to say "N-word" even in contexts where you're directly quoting ... nope, I'm definitely not going to say it here.
Then when someone says those things, you have trouble articulating why they're bad, and then you fall back on the threat of social exclusion.
Even if that was just a hastily/poorly chosen analogy, there's still a point to be made: groups of powerful, immoral people do not stay on the sidelines of society for long.
(You know you have a problem when even Barack Obama is stepping up and criticizing "woke" people: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50239261)
And then they go on to ignore his advice because he is insufficiently left. Which ironically proves how prescient his advice is.
I mean, he's not particularly leftist, is he? If anything he represents a pretty centrist liberal (as in Liberalism) position?
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/events/unfollow-deradicalization...
I would say that isolating people definitely does not work.
The Westboro Baptist Church has been held up as an example of the "radical" Christian right for over 10 years. They know that they are reviled and play it up to keep getting attention. Meanwhile, if you read the stuff that Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal wrote (both are mentioned in this article) - it's clear that they both thought they were not taking positions that are out of the mainstream liberal view of acceptability. And if you talk to people who would not consider themselves "woke" they would find their writings to be very tame as well. This is why this situation is so interesting - these so-called "radicals" didn't begin to consider themselves different until they were suddenly isolated for expressing things that didn't seem very radical at all.
Where is the line? If I make a donation to the Republican party, does that mean I have questionable morals? Roughly half the country is Republican, do they all have no morals?
That is what the article is trying to grapple with.
It's obvious half the country has questionable morals (or at least values or sense). A little under half the voters elected Donald Trump president.
It's a modern analog of a European explorer viewing native Africans as savages because they don't have the same culture and values that you do.
I became a liberal today because liberals took the time to have civil conversations me about my intolerance, and I realized that liberals were right. I am grateful to the people who did that for me, and I want to extend the same courtesy to others.
Pragmatically, if liberals had ostracized me or "canceled" me, it's quite likely that I would still hold those intolerant views today. By taking the stance that "we don't talk to Republicans", liberals are cutting off the only mechanism by which Republicans become liberals. And those people who you alienate instead of converting become angry, and that anger motivates them to go to the polls. Do you want Trump to get re-elected? Because what you're doing is contributing to Trump getting re-elected.
My guess is that ~80% of the US believes that this is true.
Just because someone disagrees with you or has different priorities or ideals doesn't make them bad people. If anything, this says more about you than it does about them.
Now it's major stories in the paper of record, such as this one.
Another unintended side effect of the internet.
Neither side has it. The people with money have it, as always. Follow the money, and you can predict who gets cancelled and who doesn't.
Though there is an argument to be made for companies vastly overestimating the short-term negative financial impact of "offending" the various tiny, non-conformist factions in society due to how loud they are, and underestimating the long-term loss of faith caused by acting in league with those small factions against the majority of the population due to the "silent" in "silent majority".
There are many people in here not discussing this topic in good faith, and one person in particular who is flooding the comments with intentionally inflammatory and low-effort comments.
I wish HN could have an adult conversation on this topic too, but it's not going that way so far. Maybe someone can re-post this on a weekday so we don't ruin Saturday for one of our mods.
At a minimum HN should separate blocking comments from delisting posts..
Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the same way. If the mods are around, they can sometimes step in early enough to encourage good dialogue and nip the bad actors early on. But when that doesn't happen, these threads will usually be dominated early-on with bad content from ideologues, and end up even worse because those comments end up shaping the dialogue into a flame war.
So many HN readers just flag the whole post when it's obvious that the comments have strayed too far outside of the HN guidelines for discourse. I don't do that myself or condone it, but it's not uncommon.
Sometimes the article will end up being re-posted with greater mod oversight to prevent both agenda-flagging (when people really do flag on-topic articles to prevent others from seeing it) and to fix the problem caused by lousy comments where the good replies need to be de-coupled from low-effort parent comments. This thread clearly needs moderation for both of those issues, but it may not happen today.
Quoting from the guidelines, what to submit:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
[1] https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...
When reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate the problem moved around for a little bit, but it promptly died. Or when the white nationalists were forced to move to Voat, their numbers dwindled.
I don't buy this. Do you have any actual evidence for this?
That study does not show that bigots simply disappeared or became less bigoted. Nothing in that paper indicates that the bigots didn't simply move to other online communities (i.e. Voat), or take their bigoted conversations offline.
They will publish anything well-argued.
What are you talking about? Is grepthisab or the article saying Quillette is a white nationalist publication?