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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Let's remember though the woman writing that article in particular is a lawyer and partner at a VC firm. I've seen Eric Weinstein talk about this stuff a lot, he's managing director at Thiel Capital.

We're not talking about factory workers being cancelled by the communist party for not spying on their neighbours, we're talking about a bunch of upper-class professionals being cast out of the intelligentsia, which annoys them a lot. As the saying goes, "the conflict is so fierce because the stakes are so low". But this is not the Soviet Union. Not even as a metaphor.

The entire cancel culture debate is in itself extremely limited to the kind of people who are overly online. Nobody who is flipping burgers or driving Uber is being cancelled, because they don't have an audience, or the time to waste and probably the good judgement to waste their time like we do

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It's not about the professionals themselves, it's what this cancel culture run amok does to the climate of intellectual debate. We want powerful people to be meaningfully engaged with civil society, and they aren't going to do that if they expect that they'll be treated unfairly. If the meaningful alternative to being "cast out of the intelligentsia" is to start exerting arbitrary power yourself... well, we can guess the outcome and it isn't pretty.

I think underlying the disagreement here is really a different estimation of how much this stuff matters. To many people these sort of debates between intellectuals appear very important, they have this idea that culture sort of flows down from the 'elites' and so on. Hence say, Jordan Peterson being very panicked about universities, and the university students being very panicked about Peterson.

I don't think it actually matters at all, it's like the Seattle autonomous anarchists. It's all simulated outrage. Ezra Klein points out in his book on polarization that the US was much, much more violent during the 60s and 70s, when there was very little polarization or cancel culture. Just count the number of political assassinations or compare riots then to today.

Today is peaceful by comparison. Reactionaries haven't turned around acceptance of gay rights yet, cancel culture hasn't cancelled the conservative judiciary yet and ushered in the red guard. Very little has materially changed, it's almost all pure spectacle, if anything a distraction for actual change. You see how much Zucc cares about being cancelled? Anyone remember occupy Wall Street? Maybe cancelling is at an all time high because of how little it actually does.

> Ezra Klein points out in his book on polarization that the US was much, much more violent during the 60s and 70s, when there was very little polarization or cancel culture.

Well, obviously the Internet wasn't a thing yet in the 1960s and 1970s, but I'm not confident about your claim that there was no political polarization back then. And fringe radical culture wasn't entirely unknown, either. The controversial cancel culture of today has its own roots in the political agitation of the 1960s and 1970s - which in turn was drawing much inspiration from the Maoist "cancel culture" of sorts in the PRC.

> I don't think it actually matters at all, it's like the Seattle autonomous anarchists. It's all simulated outrage.

Perhaps not the best example. Two people have been shot and killed in the CHAZ, one of them a 16 year old boy who was killed by CHAZ 'security forces'.

I completely agree that people getting fired from their jobs is not the same as getting shot in Soviet Union.

On the other hand, you are minimising the problem here. Getting "cancelled" is just one possible consequence of the... let's call it Twitter PC Mob Culture. Other frequent consequence is people getting fired from their jobs -- and that can easily happen to a burger flipper or Uber driver.

Both are essentially the same thing: attacking someone's livelihood as a revenge for expressing an unorthodox opinion. It's just, if someone's sole source of income is their paycheck, you get them fired; and if they also make some extra money by giving lectures, you also get those lectures cancelled. Sure, if you only focus on the part about cancelling lectures, then yes, that part only happens to those who give lectures, of course.

How high are the stake of losing one's job? Depends; some people find a new job easier than others. If something like that happened to me now, it would be quite inconvenient. But suppose I would be lucky and find a new job overnight; would it mean that getting me fired was no big deal?

If we talk about individual victims, of course we are likely to mention the famous ones. If I tried to name a cancer victim other people know, I would probably say Steve Jobs -- not because he is a typical cancer victim, but because he is a cancer victim I expect other people to know about. Also, him being famous is precisely why I know about this fact. So, if we try to discuss victims of Twitter PC Mob Culture, of course someone like Eric Weinstein is very likely to be mentioned. But that doesn't mean that the threat is limited to people like Eric Weinstein. It just means that if the same thing happens to me tomorrow, you will probably never hear about it.

A working class man in the UK, and his girlfriend, were both fired for organising the flight of a “white lives matter” banner from a plane.

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