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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

So there are no barriers to free speech, no laws to be enforced against people saying pretty much anything, but polling indicates people "feel" they "cannot" express their true beliefs.

I'm pretty sure the first amendment has nothing to say about feelings.

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The issue seems more complicated than just the first amendment, which only proscribes the restrictions of your free speech. In general I think the underlying dynamic is that culture itself has become a hostile battleground and expressing an opinion is likely to get people riled up and breathing down your neck. In short, people are flat-out shitty to each other these days. It sucks. No one wants to speak up in that environment.

But even then I'd challenge your first couple of statements. There are whole lot of consequences for defying the political leadership these days, especially when you bring evidence that they might have committed crimes. It's a nightmare right now.

For far too many, people have been "flat out shitty" to them for literally hundreds of years, with treatment vastly worse than losing your Twitter followers. Enslavement, lynchings, enforced segregation, decades of murder at the hands of unaccountable law enforcement, a multi billion dollar industry designed to industrialize their incarceration to the highest level in the world...and as parts of society begin to really try to voice this problem more substantially than ever before, other people who have implicitly benefitted from their system "feel" a little bit awkward that this is all very bewildering to them, and that they in fact are being called out for ignoring a vast system of human rights abuses that's been taking place right under their noses. How on earth can this situation be improved without these people "feeling" a little bit uncomfortable?

Yeah, especially when the first amendment gets violated on the streets of America, today, as the journalists get beaten by the government goons in direct violation of free speech and freedom of the press.

Sure, law enforcement having gone corrupt in a more obvious way is a huge problem. I live in a small town and I'm absolutely careful what I post on local Facebook groups because our neighbor across the street is a cop with radically conservative viewpoints, and I don't want to get targeted. So the idea that there's some kind of left wing "cancellation" system is just ever more BS as the state is currently favoring fascist speech, not antiracist/feminist speech.

>So the idea that there's some kind of left wing "cancellation" system is just ever more BS

Alternatively, you might consider that it could be real but a bipartisan thing, despite the term being used (and I assume coined) as though it's just the left wing.

Someone put together a long list of people Trump has tried to get cancelled, that seem to fit squarely within the usual connotations.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/politics/fact-check-trump-can...

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