Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

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> In the past, boycotts were aimed at corporations. Not buying or consuming a specific product, or protesting that company. Cancel culture is more aimed at individuals.

This isn't remotely new, though. For one very visible example in our industry, Lynn Conway got fired for coming out as transgender. Similarly, Turing was canceled for being gay. Politicians have been getting canceled for marital infidelity for most of my life (and, wow, Trump really modernized the Republican party on that one). Not to mention the McCarthy era, where people got canceled over suspected affiliation with leftists.

There's a huge panic about how cancel culture is destroying the world... but the difference is that people today are getting canceled for exhibiting intolerance and bigotry, instead of getting canceled by the intolerance and bigotry of those in power. And, yes. There are certainly cases where the cancellation is disproportionate to the offense. But compared to Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King, and many many others canceled in the past... there's nothing new here, and historically speaking, this sort of cancellation is pretty soft.

And those things were all bad!

"We have some power so we're gonna do it now, why you so mad" is pure antisocial behavior.

Any movement based on diversity, celebrating differences etc cannot afford that look.

To add to your examples, Dixie Chicks got cancelled for being against the War in Iraq.

Turing wasn't 'canceled' for being gay. He was prosecuted by the government according to the laws of the time, by police. Cancel culture is extra-legal and does not involve the use of laws or police.

Cancel culture is also distinct from politicians and infidelity because cancel culture targets non-public individuals. Of course politicians and celebrities were always subject to public opinion; the modern era now means that everyone can be targeted this way, even if they weren't known at all before (Justine Sacco is a simple example).

The McCarthy era was again a matter of government action through government processes with at least some level of transparency, democratic representation, and accountability. It was not spontaneous mobs of individuals without leaders or any kind of accountability. (They also targeted communists, not just 'leftists').

It's ironic you say casually that "people today are getting canceled for exhibiting intolerance and bigotry", when cancel culture is itself intolerance and bigotry. The standard definition of bigotry is "extreme intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own." [0]

[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bigotry

It's also always disturbing to encounter people like you who are openly clear that cancel culture is just like historical persecution, but you're totally fine with it because you (wrongly) think it only happens to bad people. As though only people you like deserve to have human rights.

You’re point about cancel culture being against _private_ individuals is new to me.

Where I think of people who have been cancelled I only think about celebrities.

Reading about Justine Sacco’s story was interesting. Do you know where I can learn more about private individuals being cancelled? (Googling only brings up celebs)

Emmanuel Cafferty is one (extreme) example that springs to mind:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

Also any number of academics, who wouldn't normally be considered celebrities or politicians:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...

Someone on HN once linked this Twitter thread and I made a point of jotting it down.

https://mobile.twitter.com/sooppressed/status/12824046471609...

I feel a real urge to say, for the record, that I don’t consider myself strongly “anti-cancel culture” or whatever, just that I understand the skepticism towards it and think that it’s referring to something that exists and at the very least has amped up since the end of the Bush administration. Although, truth be told, I doubt that’d be enough if my turn comes, and maybe all that just proves the anti-CC people’s point.

This is a good thread, thanks.

I'm reading through the articles now, and have concerns that the author is over editorializing at least some of them.

I know for a fact Kindness Yoga is doing fine, I walk past there daily.

The targets of cancel culture don't always get completely buried, just like attempts at murder don't always succeed. That doesn't mean it wasn't an attempted murder or an attempted cancelling.

Sure, but my point is that the thread author said:

> 2. A yoga studio that was so woke they had gender-neutral bathrooms and person-of-color yoga nights where “white friends and allies” were asked to “respectfully refrain from attending” has closed down due to racial accusations.

That was a lie. Kindness Yoga didn’t close down. So I’d advise others to take the thread author’s words with a grain of salt.

Calling it a lie might be a bit unfair.

The news article from June 29th it links to says that they'd be shutting down, and the tweet was less than two weeks on. I found another news story from July 10th [1] - two days before the tweet went out - repeating the intention to shut down permanently, and another from August [2] that affirms that a shutdown happened. So at the time the author of the thread was in good faith relaying the truth.

I can't find any news stories indicating that it reopened, so unless you expect the author to live in Denver or be following closely every single example he provides months after the fact, I don't think this is a reasonable criticism.

ETA: Actually, their social media appears dead since June; Yelp shows many locations closed, and the locations it doesn't show as closed have, uh, poems written in memory of them...so I'm wondering if it actually did shutdown and you're not just mistakenly thinking of/talking about a different yoga studio entirely.

[1] https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/07/10/denver-yoga-studio...

[2] https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/08/07/courageous-yoga-bi...

Are you saying that because they are now open, they never closed down?

You make assertions which would require that the author was mistaken, while ungraciously and unfairly accusing them of lying. Posted elsewhere in this thread is evidence suggesting the possiblity that you may, in fact, have been mistaken. Can you provide evidence to the contrary?

You can schedule a class on their website *today*.

I'll grant that it's more likely a mistake than an outright lie.

I'd still recommend that you read what the thread author says with a grain of salt as they aren't corroborating the claims they're repeating.

If you dig into the sourcing if the Colorado Sun's article, it cites an Instagram post[1] as evidence the business is closing, but the post says no such thing.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBotnpslXVj/

> If you dig into the sourcing if the Colorado Sun's article, it cites an Instagram post[1] as evidence the business is closing, but the post says no such thing

In that post, they announced that they will be closing, with the proximal cause being a surge of cancelations immediately after the accusations. I cannot copy paste the text as its within the images.

Edit: "...I have decided to close Kindness Yoga." Previous slide uses vague, passive, avoidant language to reference the accusations.

I’m skeptical. By that logic, isn’t any voice of disapproval an attempted cancelling?

Yeah, but huge grain of salt there. Several of references in that thread are being twisted out of proportion. Also, they couldn't be bothered to find single example where someone is being "canceled" or ridiculed for being too PC, which makes me think this is an axe-grind-with-the-left issue and less decrying the practice.

There are a plethora of examples. Republicans who disagree with Trump are getting labeled "RINO" and censured by their parties.

“So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” Jon Ronson

Cancelling is patching a hole in the American government, forcing things to be democratic instead of the stupid states rights business they use to ensure laws help and protect the wealthy and influential people.

Cancelling is much more democratic than policing, or the writing of laws. Nothing forces anyone to join in, everything is voluntary, and the cancelling only works when people agree. There is also no undemocratic way to get around it. Weinstein can pay of investigators, judges, journalists, and jurors, but he can't pay off everyone on the internet.

Similarly it's transparent - cancelling comes from specific instances of stuff. Screenshots, links, videos, etc

The big thing that's different between cancelling and historical persecution is that it's targetting people that used to be able to attack single points of failure to avoid being held accountable.

They should be happy it's not like historical persecution because when mobs used to get together to attack the rich, heads used to roll. Now the mob is content with making them not rich

How is cancel culture circumventing the legal system supposed to make it more democratic?

There is no real majority of people involved in canceling someone. It’s just a mad Twitter mob with a Pareto distribution where most people are content with posting mean tweets to virtue signal, and only few who go as far as calling up people’s workplaces to get them fired. It does not involve anyone beyond the mob, and even within the mob most aren’t willing to go very far. Yet it is the actions of only a few extremists that produce most of the mob’s impact. To call that democratic shows that you don’t seem to realize a world outside of your bubble exists, or should be acknowledged.

Cancel culture is basically softcore terrorism, and fittingly, portions of your rhethoric are not unlike a justification for terrorism.

> It's ironic you say casually that "people today are getting canceled for exhibiting intolerance and bigotry", when cancel culture is itself intolerance and bigotry.

You've hit Popper's paradox right on the head. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia are examples of intolerance. Fighting those values, and criticizing/boycotting their champions, is not. This is the bright line between what the right decries as "cancel culture" of today vs the "cancel culture" of yesteryear.

> It's also always disturbing to encounter people like you...

So, you're making assertions about opinions that I hold, not based on opinions that I've stated, but upon those of "people like [me]." This is not a good-faith approach to conversation.

You're committing an extremely common mis-representation of what Popper wrote about his paradox.

As Popper wrote, his conception of 'intolerance' was not "sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia". In fact, none of these words had even been invented when he was writing!

Popper was very clear that he conceptualized 'intolerance' as people who will use violence and force and power to silence others. This he was specifically referring to intolerance of other beliefs, whether religious or political. This is exactly the kind of intolerance you are committing.

Please read what Popper actually wrote about the paradox before misrepresenting it - I see this error all the time.

>you're making assertions about opinions that I hold, not based on opinions that I've stated, but upon those of "people like [me]."

No, just about opinions you plainly stated - that you think cancel culture is cool because only people on your list are getting cancelled.

> The McCarthy era was again a matter of government action through government processes with at least some level of transparency, democratic representation, and accountability. It was not spontaneous mobs of individuals without leaders or any kind of accountability.

How were the perpetrators of McCarthyism held accountable?

Took 5 seconds to look up on Wikipedia:

"With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year,[12] McCarthy's support and popularity faded. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Censure_and_th...

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