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Comment by livinginfear | Hacker News Reader

Likening modern 'woke' mob outrage on Twitter to Maoist China is the correct analogy. The purpose of being 'cancelled' is not any kind of real social justice. It's the enforcement of an ideological orthodoxy.

Never apologise to the mob. Even a superficial understanding of game theory shows you that you have nothing to gain from the self-flagellation involved in a public apology. Remember, You'll never be forgiven. I've never seen an example where the mob has pursued entirely altruistic goals. It's the witch-trials of the 21st century. Nothing more.

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As I repeatedly said, the woke should really learn a bit history. Ignoring facts and promoting intolerance will eventually hurt even the woke. How many innocent people were beheaded by Robespierre? How many reg guards thought they were the reddest of the reddest yet were labeled "counter-revolutionary" or "Five Black Categories"? How many Russians or East Germans thought they were the most loyal to the revolution yet got executed? How many Cubans died of poverty and political persecution? How many Cambodians got killed in the name of cleansing the society? And we think those bloody histories all started with evil intention?

> Likening modern 'woke' mob outrage on Twitter to Maoist China is the correct analogy.

I would personally rather be cancelled on social media, than having my breathing cancelled.

It's should be possible to disagree and criticize without analogies to various atrocities involving mass murder.

Drawing such parallels is a form of cancelling, as it effectively prevents any defense or discourse on the subject.

Whatever "cancelling" that's going around is not all that new.

> I would personally rather be cancelled on social media, than having my breathing cancelled.

Yes, I think all agree with your preference and share it.

But they are both bad, undesirable things.

If I had to choose between assault and murder, I’d rather be assaulted. But I work to reduce assaults AND murders in society.

Drawing parallels between similarly negative things is appropriate to reduce negative things.

> I would personally rather be cancelled on social media, than having my breathing cancelled.

Perhaps you don't fully grasp how communists operate, then.

Maoist struggle sessions in which you were still permitted to breathe preceded your execution by a period of time, sometimes years.

Before Pol Pot sent intellectuals and their families to the killing fields, they were merely fired from their jobs.

Communists may be evil, but they are not stupid. They know that you purge your enemies by boiling the frog slowly enough that the useful idiots defend your actions every questionable step of the way.

weird days. a lot of complainy people conflating government authoritarianism with the activity of private entities/personal citizens. this is mirrored in the right's complaints about private services "censoring" them, as if we are citizen's under their power & protection. similarly a bunch of people lambasting you online being conflated with government/state use of power against you... wild days.

They are absolutely not complaining about private citizens lambasting them online. It's entrenched monopolies in cooperation with the state itself that work to ruin right-wing (and left-wing in the case of TERFs, Deep Greens, etc.) dissidents' lives and deny their ability to speak. For instance, banks are closing their accounts for opposing the status quo. Banking is so strictly regulated, incestuous, and intertwined with the state that innovation is notoriously difficult; and innovation from an explicitly adversarial entity with no institutional support is nearly impossible.

What's more, if one lives in a red state surrounded by people similar to them on the political spectrum, they'll still have their employers harassed to keep them from holding down a job. It's not their peers "cancelling" them; it's a minority of people with wildly different worldviews from wildly different parts of the country. It's not all that different from swatting.

The scale of these problems seems way way way out of line with how concerned people are about it, to me. I simply do not think this is a widescale problem. I think people want to be outraged.

> It's entrenched monopolies

Agreed, huge huge problem here. Anti-trust is way way way way over-due. I also think without Competitive (inter)Compatibility (comcom) rules, it is unlikely to be effective at allowing new things to get going.

> in cooperation with the state

Uhhhh I see zero evidence of this at all. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Not a single thing.

Where there are witch-trials, there will be those in power who seek to manipulate the mob, for their own personal gains over everyone else's detriment.

modern 'woke' mob outrage

I can't help noticing that the media figures who are most upset about this alleged issue are the exact same people that spent years complaining there was a 'war on Christmas', setting fire to football jerseys, asserting he criminality of public figures with no evidence etc. etc.

Perhaps these physicians of society's ills should heal themselves first.

It’s unfortunate that “woke” has become a talking point because it’s a serious and actual problem. It’s eroding our ability to live together and it’s doing so at an alarming pace.

I hate that everything has to be hijacked for politics in the US.

This is a few years old now, but demonstrates (most clearly in figure 3) that the process of political meiosis began in the mid-1980s. Political scientists are undecided on the driving factors, but the accessibility of cable TV and the internet were probably accelerating factors since they facilitated the emergence of media and social silos.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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