Hacker News Reader

Comment by ladyattis | Hacker News Reader

You all keep calling things being cancelled when they're just plain old social ostracism of the past. Why can't you all just admit you don't like it when someone else does the social ostracizing instead of giving it a new fancy word to distance yourselves from the same behavior you all do?

View on HN

Concerted campaigns to discredit someone for mundane “offenses” (which are well within the overton window) especially by coercing employers to terminate the target is not “plain social ostracism” and indeed the people who engaged in this in the past were themselves socially ostracized for their bad behavior.

To be clear, we’re talking about signing a letter endorsing free-speech ideals or Tweeting research on the efficacy of non-violent protest or saying a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like a racial slur.

Further, the term “cancelled” is not a term that the critics of cancel culture invented, but rather it was invented by the early participants of cancel culture.

It seems so obvious that cancel culture and social ostracism are different things that I don’t understand how anyone could confuse them in good faith.

Should I take this comment to mean that you are not against the sort of blackballing that happens to people with criminal histories? I mean, it's just social ostracism, right? Why would we have a problem with people not being able to find a place to live or work?

You should read my other comments. But for clarity sake, no I don't support blackballing, at-will employment, and the like. I just want to point out that supposed cancelling hasn't done a blessed thing in the instances that celebrities who say actual bad things publicly. The closest thing I can recall that cancelling has done anything is what happened to James Gunn and Kathy Griffin for their supposed misdeeds (cringe-worthy nonsense but nothing I'd care about even in the worse of times). But over all supposed cancel culture hasn't done much other than annoy celebs who are chronically online (they need to get use to the jeering in the peanut gallery rather than pretend that social media is a polite society).

> I just want to point out that supposed cancelling hasn't done a blessed thing in the instances that celebrities who say actual bad things publicly.

Huh?! Gina Carano was fired by Disney earlier this year because she had the audacity to draw a parallel between today's political vitriol and the Holocaust [1]. This happened precisely because of the power of the current outrage mob.

If you don't see the effects that the outrage mob is having on the rest of us, it's because you aren't looking [2].

[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/supernumberfireginac...

[2]: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-th...

Gina Carano was fired because it was a gross and offensive parallel to make that republicans of today are treated anywhere nearly as wrongly as Jewish people in Nazi Germany. There is a nuance.

This also says nothing of Gina Carano's history of transphobic comments, which Disney didn't care about because they didn't make as much press but still says much about her character.

> Gina Carano was fired because it was a gross and offensive parallel to make

So you think it is OK for employers to enforce conformity of thought? I suppose that _your_ thoughts will never become problematic, right?

> republicans of today are treated anywhere nearly as wrongly as Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

The point isn't that they are. The point is that _this is where it starts_. It's a warning about where we're going if political vitriol continues. Perhaps review the ten stages of genocide [1] and see if you can draw any parallels.

> This also says nothing of Gina Carano's history of transphobic comments

What specific things did she say that were "transphobic"?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_stages_of_genocide

Is Gina homeless as a result of such action? She seems to be quite fine to me. I don't weep for the rich.

What about the dude who was fired for Tweeting about the efficacy of nonviolent protests or the reporter who was pushed out because he interviewed a black person with opinions that his employer/colleagues didn’t feel black people should have? Or the professor suspended for using a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like an English slur? Or the utility company employee who was canned for accidentally making the “ok” gesture? Or the kid who was accosted by a group of black nationalists and subjected to defamation by every media outlet in the country to the effect that he received death threats and threats of violence even from celebrities? These are literally just examples off the top of my head, but I can go on.

Viral ostracism is quite different from the local-scale shunning of the past. Having a torrent of people shunning you for someone disagreeing with you is unjust.

Well too bad, it's totally legal, normal, and part of human society. Now if you want to talk about the effects like blackballing/listing and other things that ought to be banned then I'm all ears. But if you're going to start forcing association between private individuals and private groups then you're gonna have to show me case law that says people gotta associate with each other. It's like saying that folks gotta associate with racists in their families just cause.

Also, I'm all ears on abolishing at-will (so-called right to work) employment laws. If you abolish the laws that make social ostracism through social media so bad then it don't really do much. Plus, I've yet to see a celebrity that's been 'cancelled' actually physically or psychologically suffer. The worse I've seen is Alan Dershowitz not being invited to some old friend's dinner parties in Martha's Vineyard (how horrible! /s).

"Having a torrent of people shunning you for someone disagreeing with you" is the same reductionist self-pity that people have used for ages to defend themselves from ostracism, which may be just or unjust, more subjectively or less subjectively. Sure, the internet amplified it, like everything else with a social component, but I think you're wrong to imply they are qualitatively different.

Quantatively is the difference. Reasonable or not, the more people agree on something, the more it tends to be viewed as true.

If scale doesn't matter, then there is no difference between individual officers observing a person of interest and a city-wide network of traffic cameras observing that person.

Hopefully you can now see why your objection is weak.

Ostracism was democratic process, there was a vote and majority decided. "Cancellation" is nothing like that.

That's completely wrong. How is it democratic or anti when people online choose to not associate with you? Is it when they do it on a social media platform? When they make a hashtag or group? Again, that's more spontaneous action that no one has any legal nor moral authority to stop. Next, you'll tell me it's okay for evangelicals to boycott of some company that visibly supports LGBT rights then tell me it's bad when some random kids just mocking and jeering someone else online.

>Ostracism was democratic process

Please go on? If people want to "cancel", even if I think they are doing it for a bad reason or mislead then that's their right. Why is it such a big issue?

How is the 'cancellation' any less democratic?

It seems more democratic than a majority deciding for everyone, if each person decides for themselves whether to avoid or not.

Cancellation suffers from social pressure. If the mob cancelled someone then you have to, too, otherwise you're canceled next.

At least with a ballot, your vote is a secret.

A mob has a reverse synergy: the more it grows, the lower their common sense, until they can't regulate themselves. At least democracy tries to put some balances to prevent runaway demagogy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com