Comment by stillbourne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stillbourne | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it, the religious right has perfected boycotting over the last 50 years. Starting with burning records of the Beetles because John Lennon said they're bigger than Jesus and moving to burning disco albums. In the 90s the AFA said as long as Waldenbooks sells porn we'll boycott Kmart, the then owner of Waldenbooks. They've boycotted Disney, the Dixie Chicks, Target, French Fries, the Teletubbies, JCPenny's because of Ellen, to one of their own, Rob Bell, for questioning if non-christians go to hell.

But when "them bleed'n heart liberals" do it, its called "cancel culture?" Why? Its a tactic that the right has been using for years but suddenly it bad form? This definition of cancel culture is bullshit. Everyone has always been free to choose from whom they wish to purchase goods and services, and boycotts have been weaponized by the right for practically the last century. As much as I've disagreed with many of the motivations for those boycotts, I've never disagreed with the freedom of speech they have to perform a boycott. Why is it suddenly bad just because the "radical antifa left" is doing it?

For me, there's a difference between boycotting a powerful corporation by not buying their products or services and starting an angry Twitter mob to badger someone so much that they quit a large aspect of their life to protect their friends and family.

Neither tactic is exclusive to the left or right certainly.

Boycott involves someone not consuming goods and services. The cancel thing involves yelling at private individuals in a public place to the extent they loose their livelihood. There is a clear difference between a business decision based on financial calculations to either sell or not sell porn and someone thinking a book is great or not.

The second difference is the virality. Once an idea, a meme, of someone being X is out there, nobody cares where it came from and it’s virtually impossible to reverse. One can stop the action that sparked the boycott and it will end. The person being canceled can do absolutely nothing to make it stop. Also, malicious targeting is easy: getting a meme go viral is a fairly well-understood and commercialized endeavor while convincing a significant number of people to join a boycott inevitably involves a lot of legwork and the people actually agreeing with the original premise. The latter is not true with cancelling, you just take “X is Y” for granted after a very short while

People disliked it when the religious right used to do it and they still dislike it when it's done by the "radical antifa left". I don't understand what is surprising about this?

The point apparently being, the people complaining the loudest about cancel culture seem to be the people who were most likely to do these things before the twitter mobs. RE: McCarthyism, Freedom Fries, the Satanic Panic.

Maybe so, but there are a bunch of people quietly watching the situation that absolutely hated right-wing cancellations and that find to their surprise that they also hate left-wing cancellations.

To many it seems like while bigotry used to be the best way to bully and intimidate people, now performative anti-bigotry is the best way to bully and intimidate people. So what we see is merely an evolving toolset for sociopaths.

That I can definitely agree with. Especially when the right and left wing sociopaths go off on J Random Passerby instead of each other.

This doesn't feel like that though, given just how often Ngo shows up in the right-sociopath column.

Or, as I said in another comment, Winston Marshall has picked a really weird hill to die on.

I think that with religion falling out of favor, many of the people that would be shaming others from a religious context are finding less formal systems of morality from which to cast their judgement.

I think there’s some truth to this. To me it seems like the social media amplification and pile ons take it to another level though.

Social media just makes it more visible. This kind of activity used to be social but it was hidden behind church doors, just because its more visible doesn't bring it to a new level its been at this level for a long time already.

Cancel culture beats people into the ground with words so far that they drink bleach which has literally happened. boycotts end shitty business practices.

Oh come on, you want to talk about cancel culture, lets talk about the Satanic Panic. When I was growing up it was in full effect. I personally was affected by it. How you ask? Let me link you a story I've already posted in the comments before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159399

My mother was "canceled" and actually had her life ruined because of a false confession, and a deranged group of Christian cultists. But you're upset because someone had their social media account banned because they were being an absolutely awful person. Oh no!

A lot of these accounts that are getting banned are from Q-Anon. These people are coming up with bullshit lies that affect the lives of other people. But you don't side with the people that are having their lives turned over because of these idiots spreading falsehoods, you're defending the deranged maniacs who were correctly moderated into oblivion. You're response is, oh no some of these deranged maniacs who ruin the lives of people on the internet by indulging in conspiratorial fetish might drink bleach!

I, for one, have no sympathy.

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