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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

Am I? I personally haven't met a single left-leaning adult who doesn't think Twitter's "cancel culture" has gotten out of hand. However, I've never lived in the bay area, where I understand things may be different.

Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?

Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".

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People on the right participate in cancel culture all the time. It is truly deafening to hear them complain about things they do from their pulpits at FOX, Congress, and Senate.

Anyone who watched TV in the late 90s and early 2000s should be very familiar with how right-wing[0] cancel culture works thanks to organizations like the AFA.

[0] Religious-right, anyway

The religious right barely exists anymore.

It wasn't such a partisan thing in the 90s. Democrats let their right-leaning members get away with it all the time. Remember Tipper Gore?

“cancel culture” isn't an actual thing, it's just the new term the Right has come up with for replace “political correctness” to make, almost word for word, the exact same complaints they've been making since the 1980s about the left doing...exactly the same thing the right has always done as much as it can get away with to everyone who publicly disagrees with them.

How many people since the 1980s have lost their jobs because a mob decided that they weren't politically correct enough?

How many?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

edit: I've re-read your comment, and I'm no longer sure which "side" of this you fall on, I think my point stands alone anyway, so I'll leave it:

You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.

There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.

In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.

I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.

> You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.

Your position is the same as the ones he's met. That was his point.

Indeed. My point is that "cancel culture" is a problem on Twitter, since Twitter intentionally amplifies the voices of the people who participate. So, "cancel culture" on Twitter is not representative of how real people on "the left" (or "the right") feel about current events.

For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.

So it is simultaneously true that:

* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples

* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager

Yes, large portions of the company I work for fall into this category. 4 out of 7 in our team fit the description.

> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.

That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.

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