Hacker News Reader

Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

If someone feels that one side had a harder path to begin with due to context outside the presentation/debate itself, that can happen. To veer dangerously close to Godwinning, but I think for good reason, consider how much better a holocaust denial argument would have to be than its opponents', for you to agree with that side. You might well come away going "damn, they really did do a better job of presenting their case" while still disagreeing.

[EDIT] To be clear, I picked something extreme so it'd be easy to see that this situation could exist without getting distracted by minutia, and am not equating anti-cancel-culture with holocaust denial. I hope that was obvious, but just in case.

View on HN

The fact that you have to repeatedly and expressly clarify that you're not equating cancel culture with holocaust denial is apt given the topic at hand. No intellectually honest person reading your analogy would be able to conclude that you're equating the two topics. And yet almost all of us feel the need to include these kinds of disclaimers so we don't face backlash from anonymous strangers on a tiny message board. If we feel this way here--when we're almost all anonymous to some degree--that's an indictment as to where we are culturally.

Love this. "No intellectually honest person reading your analogy would be able to [reasonably] conclude that you're equating the two topics."

Added one word. Would like to add, the oppocite of what you state, seems to be the default behaviour in the cancel culture climate, which shuts down a lot of reasonable commentors, as in, "fuck it, I am staying out of this one"

Eh, it's standard public Web forum writing. It's a terrible style and grates on me when I read it, but one I find advisable to employ at times nonetheless. Things might have gone fine without that part, but when I re-read the post I decided to err on the side of caution in this case. More to do with preventing low-value responses than any fear of backlash, at least this time.

AFAIK this kind of redundant and absurdly explicit writing style aimed squarely at bad or inattentive readers who nonetheless find the time to post (plus, the occasional troll who looks for things to misunderstand on purpose) predates the current cultural moment we're in, by years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com