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Comment by mifeng | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance in the US.

On the other hand, it's clear, especially to young people, that traditional liberalism has failed at actually addressing inequality, racism, and other systemic problems that the US faces. A big part of what people refer to as "cancel culture" is frustration over the ineffectiveness of traditional liberalism, especially when the far right seems to play by a different set of rules.

I'm definitely concerned about far left zealotry, but I don't think that's what I'd happening in the US.

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I understand why you would not think it is a problem. Unfortunately the only evidence for something like this is anecdotes, so unless you personally experience cancellation or are a member of a community where someone is cancelled, you won't notice. The lack of concern about the cancellation narrative makes sense in this respect.

Beyond "random people being fired", there are a number of notable examples in the programming community, like James Damore, Stallman, and Donglegate. After CoCs were added to open source projects, there are a handful of accounts of people being removed for their views expressed outside of the open source community.

In the wider world, things like the Harper's Magazine letter criticizing cancel culture (signed by many notable individuals, including Noam Chomsky), Obama's criticism of the "circular firing squad", leading philosophy researchers decrying sanctions for expressing ideas [1], the Joe Rogan discussion between Twitter Exec and Tim Pool on online censorship, the Evergreen College fiasco, and the rioting of Berkeley students into a Ben Shapiro lecture, paint the picture of a worrying trend: some subset of people on the left respond to argument not with argument, but with censorship, boycotts, and sometimes violence.

Hell, one from a few days ago: https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal...

[1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers...

“ JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans“

And where is the evidence for this assertion?

Apologies for the amp link. I would recommend looking at Twitter replies to the Harper's Mag letter about her being a signer, and then other discussions on it.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/j-k-ro...

Turns out that we aren't electing a counsel composed of the liberals most active on twitter.

Lets look at the situation clearly.

I don't think JK Rowling is a bigot and yet and the internet hate machine is sure going full steam but her detractors are a smaller group than her fans and the woman is worth almost a billion dollars. She could burn dollar bills for warmth in her house for warmth for the rest of her life if she wanted. A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.

Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues.

"A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.

Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."

Not true at all.

It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.

She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.

The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.

'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.

I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.

Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.

'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement. This is inexcusable.

The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.

It's a fairly existential problem right now.

A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.

JK Rowling's views on trans people are also nearly the perfect demonstration that pg's "aggressive conformism" analysis is spot on. See, not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people. They were being used to succesfully lobby for laws that did things like effectively deny trans women access to rape counselling and domestic violence services, and justify pretty awful campaigns of online harassment against any openly trans woman - not by JK Rowling, who seemed quite happy to just quietly hold her opinions, but by others. The reason you didn't hear much about this is because when these views actually had power, the loud, aggressive, well-connected warriors for social justice kind of supported them.

Now, it wasn't quite mandatory to hold these views back when I started following things about a decade, decade-and-a-half ago (though I remember Shit Reddit Says, the group trying to force Reddit to police its content based on their ideological demands, got quite close). What was mandatory was covering for them, shutting up about the laws they passed and the harm they did and pressuring everyone else to do so with allegations of misogyny. The arguments used to do this were quite reminiscent of present-day claims that "cancel culture" doesn't matter and people only object to it because they're bigots, now I think about it - supposedly the people pushing this didn't hold any power, and therefore the only reason for trans women to spend effort objecting to them rather than fighting non-feminist men, who by definition were the ones with real power, was because they had a misogynistic hatred of women. It was only when those views actually lost their power and relevance that the loud, aggressive, well-connected online activists switched from covering for them to demanding that everyone support beating up elderly lesbians for merely existing in public whilst holding transphobic views. (I am unfortunately not exaggerating, this actually happened - and yes, it was definitely the same people. pg's remark about "an exclamation point after a variable" is an extreme understatement.) This shift was quite recent too - maybe around 2016 or so?

There were of course actually non-conformist people with moral views that didn't just follow the crowd and various levels of aggressiveness who balked at this at the time. They just ended up being effectively irrelevant - too far from the status quo for its supporters, but so throughly and aggressively labeled as evil supporters of it by its organised, orthodox self-proclaimed challengers that few people seeking to challenge it would listen to the non-conformists.

"not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people"

I understand what you are saying, but there's a pretty big concern right there in the conflation of 'intellectual position' vs. 'ammunition supporting specific movements'.

That some systems take another persons nuanced views, possibly out of context, and use them to promote their agenda, should not in any way stop people from being able to have public discourse about them.

The fact of the matter is, JK's views are not anti-trans, even if they could be used by others as such.

However much we can decry other parties for using her words in a manner in which we do not agree, the same thing applies in the other direction: we don't get to shut her down because she doesn't 'toe the line' on the current, 'new' orthodoxy.

JK's views are reasonable.

It doesn't matter that 'some other organisation using those words to do this or that'. It's relavent, but not to the extent of censoring her.

Now - if we're talking about crude, casual bigotry from 'powerful voices' and the public effects of that, i.e. a 'Famous Person' tweeting 'bad things' - then yes, this is just populism.

But anyone willing to make a serious point within the boundaries of civility needs to be able to make it, full stop.

People can debate with JK, they can even ask her to not make her statements public 'because bad people will use it as ammunition' - but there's no way her words cross the thresholds of uncivil, and she should be able to make them without fear of being banned.

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