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Comment by istorical | Hacker News Reader

> As a gay man, I would have been despicable for most of the past 100+ years, but the ACLU would have defended me anyway. That version of the ACLU no longer exists.

This precise thing is why it's baffling that people can suggest cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong. What is considered wrong does not always age well. Sometimes we ourselves are the baddies.

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Well, that was in the past. Mistakes were made. But now, with modern theories and Science, we, The Warriors of Light, have finally figured out what's right, once and for all. So we can throw out the caution and the epistemic humility to the wind and go punch the baddies. Doesn't it feel good?!

>people ... suggest cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong

This is an oversimplification. What you might be extrapolating from is the common sentiment that complaining about cancel culture is not substantive in cases where an individual appears to have done something wrong enough to justify the consequences. Yes, "wrong enough" is of varying subjectivity in each case, but focusing on "cancel culture" as some kind of monolithic evil instead of focusing on the details of each case is a very common source of noise, and so is commonly criticized, and that criticism may be what you're accumulating into "cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong".

The whole concept of cancel culture seems to just be used as a way to silence legitimate criticism of others as far as I can see. I'm sure it meant something at one point, but now it's just silly.

Note how you have just did exactly what you criticized ( “silence legitimate criticism of others” by dismissing those that called out cancel culture)

Cancel culture is not responding to an argument with counter-argument. Cancel culture is responding to an argument with an effort to personally destroy whoever dared to voice that argument, exclude them from the discussion and silence them. That's why it is "cancel" culture and not "debate" culture - you're not supposed to criticize somebody, you're supposed to end ("cancel") their presence in the society. In older, harsher, times, this was done by literally murdering people, but we have, thankfully, evolved past that. Now it's done by removing these people from their jobs, blocking their social media accounts, preventing them (sometimes by violent action) from speaking on any public forum and attacking (again, sometimes violently) of anybody who dares to give them support and comfort. Much more civilized!

> In older, harsher, times, this was done by literally murdering people,

In past times, nonviolent forms of 'cancelling' that would seem familiar to us today were also employed. It was/is called 'shunning.' Our modern term is just a euphemism for that.

This looks like a semantic/identity disagreement. What you call cancel culture is the most extreme minority of cases of what I call cancel culture. It's common to serve one's biases by using a well heard label to refer only to the cases in some ideological context that are "doing it right", or, on the opposite end, to refer to the worst version of cases in that ideological context. Hopefully we're both trying not to fall toward the edges.

You've missed the point entirely and the irony of your comment makes me believe little can be done to explain why.

Yeah I think it's interesting to think what people of today will be cancelled for. My best guesses are eating meat, and doing business with China.

Driving.

When you are not killing people quickly in accidents, you are killing them slowly with particulate pollution. And if that's not enough, you are also making a big contribution to global warming, an existential threat to our civilisation. It is unconscionable!

This is what people will say in the future anyway. You can make your own mind up.

Maybe, but, I figure it will be things everyone feels OK with. Meaning, if you can think of "what's wrong" today, you're already off base...

Discriminating who you’d like to be in a relationship with based on physical characteristics? It’s already somewhat controversial to reject a potential partner based on race, and I suspect things like height or weight might be considered petty attributes to judge people by in the future.

Putting people in prison for years

Letting people out of prison so they can kill some more.

I don't have an answer to the practical problems, don't know how they'll do it, but I'm completely convinced future societies (think centuries) will look back at prisons with the same disgust and bewilderment we reserve for things like slavery.

Not very many of them[1], though?

1: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

What am I supposed to learn from this?

Maybe keeping a pet? Probably carbon intensive things like taking an international flight for vacation.

I doubt it on pets. Cats serve the valuable social purpose of keeping mice in check, which reduces disease and limits damage to property. That the domestication of cats has persisted for so long is a testament to its antifragility. I could side with you on more exotic pets, however.

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