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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'.

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