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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

I like this trend of cancel-culture people cancelling themselves instead of others.

If enough artists that I listen to leave Spotify, I would begrudgingly cancel my subscription and follow them to a different platform. I hope that doesn’t happen but imagine if Taylor Swift removes herself from spotify again :/

I’d just shake it off, shake it off.

"cancel culture" is a dumb euphemism for "consequences for your actions." If you use your soapbox to cause harm to others, people are free do decide how to respond to you and vote with their IP and money.

Does not really apply to woke-mobs bringing down statues or burning books.

> "cancel culture" is a dumb euphemism for "consequences for your actions."

If by "actions" you mean "saying things you disagree with" and by "consequences" you mean "trying your hardest to permanently deprive them of their livelihood", then sure.

Being banned from a service is not an attempt to permanently deprive anyone of their livelihood. No one has ever starved to death in the street because their Twitter account was closed.

Cancel culture is more than just getting people banned from Twitter. Consider this example of when the cancel mob got somebody fired, and then when he found another company that was willing to hire him, the mob immediately turned on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-20/vmware-st...

And now he's destitute and living under a park bench, a pariah shunned by society?

He seems to be doing just fine. The article you posted doesn't even say his new employers refused to hire him because of "the mob." You're not exactly proving cancel culture to be the life-destroying force you made it out to be earlier.

> The article you posted doesn't even say his new employers refused to hire him because of "the mob."

Sure, maybe his new employer stood up to the cancel mob. But if the cancel mob got what they wanted, then he would be "destitute and living under a park bench, a pariah shunned by society". Their goals don't stop being evil just because they failed to complete them.

> You're not exactly proving cancel culture to be the life-destroying force you made it out to be earlier.

It's not life-destroying because they "just" succeeded at getting him fired from one job, and weren't successful at getting him immediately fired from his new one?

>It's not life-destroying because they "just" succeeded at getting him fired from one job, and weren't successful at getting him immediately fired from his new one?

It's not life-destroying because, as far as I'm aware, no one's life - including his - has ever been destroyed by it.

Your claims and the hyperbole of your rhetoric just aren't borne out by reality.

It was an attempt to be life-destroying, and this attempt just (thankfully) failed.

So it's fine as long as the mob is ultimately unsuccessful?

Cancel culture is rather more specific than that. It's not descriptive of getting arrested for a crime, stubbing your toe for being careless, or getting dumped for mistreating your SO. It's a quite specific response (Twitter mobs, contacting the person's employer, making it a sin to enjoy the offender's art/works) that has a lot more to do with what the responders choose to do than what the offender chose to do.

Cancel culture doesn’t mean people deciding to stop listening to you. It means people actively attacking your reputation so that others are less likely to hear you. It often involves intimidation tactics that mess with your real life, e.g. finding out where you work and creating bad PR that will go away if your employer fires you, or PM’ing your associates to suggest they distance themselves from you publicly if they don’t want to get tangled up in this themselves. Hopefully the people doing this will always make the right decision and only do it to people who really deserve it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

"cancel culture" talks about people being"cancelled" that is losing their job, scholarship, or other means of livelihood. For saying something, usually innoculous, that had nothing to do with their job or school or livelihood. It is even worse when the thing was said years ago. Consequences should be proportionate to the actions. Not "you should starve to death because I don't like what you said." Which is essentially what cancel culture boils down to.

"Cancel culture" is not a simple boycott as you put it, and it's kind of disingenuous to portray it as such.

I like this trend of cancel-"cancel culture" activists attempting to compel speech and showing their hand that this was never really about "free speech."

Imagine that a private company bought an entire city. Should we take away people's right to protest in that city, since doing otherwise would be compelling speech by the company?

I like this trend of conservatives discovering the concept of monopoly and advocating anti-trust.

Of course I assume this will only apply to narrow issues such as right wingers being deplatformed. For any other issue they'll go back to a maximalist interpretation of corporate property rights.

> Of course I assume this will only apply to narrow issues such as right wingers being deplatformed.

This argument goes both ways. Don't most people who think Big Tech should be allowed to keep censoring people because of the First Amendment, also think that the First Amendment shouldn't apply to corporations when it comes to Citizens United?

Perhaps but it's a bit more complicated. Citizens United is more about money than speech per se. You can't prevent members of corporations from speaking whatever they want as they are people, but corporations acting as corporations can bankroll political campaigns and push propaganda in ways very few individuals can afford.

It gets even worse when you consider that many corporations are international entities whose interests may not be aligned at all with those of US voters. It's a bit like letting people overseas come into the US and contribute to campaigns and run political ads without limit. In fact it more or less allows this since it's trivial for a foreign individual (or state actor) to use a corporation as a front.

Personally I think Citizens United is a threat to national security. If we were still in the Cold War you'd have the USSR contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to PACs and DC think tanks after laundering it through byzantine financial relationships with US front companies.

I'm just referring to the hypocrisy of right wingers suddenly discovering the issues with monopolies (and narrow oligopolies) when it affects them. You'd be hearing nothing about big tech from the right if they hadn't deplatformed people on the right.

So this actually a historial thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

I couldn't find anything about protests but people did go on strike in Pullman-Lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#Pullman_lesson

> Should we take away people's right to protest in that city, since doing otherwise would be compelling speech by the company?

I guess, if they didn't like the protesters, they would just say any protesters are on their property and they have the right to eject them or never even let them in. Whilst it was never built (for other reasons) a good example is the Garden Bridge in London. [1]

Despite this looking like publib infra:

"All groups of eight or more visitors would be required to contact the Garden Bridge Trust to request a formal visit to the bridge,” states Lambeth council’s planning report to its committee, which recommends conditional planning. “This policy would not only assist visitor management but also would discourage protest groups from trying to access the bridge.” [2]

Obviously this hasn't been tested at the city level, but the direction of travel ain't great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Bridge [2] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design...

Makes me want to cancel Neil Young for a good while, even though he makes great music.

The Corona vaccine works well, but being critical of the vaccine is a healthy thing.

Thankfully we are moving towards treating the flu and Corona virus the same way. Omicron has made that transition a lot easier.

> Makes me want to cancel Neil Young for a good while, even though he makes great music.

If you do this, you've stooped to their level. Don't do this. Be better than them.

You are quite right of course, i do think Neil Young is making a big mistake here.

Am looking forward to seeing a lot less COVID stories, there are bigger issues that humanity needs to deal with.

I understand that view, but Joe Rogan did a lot more than just criticise the vaccine.

The problem is that joe rogan is actively undermining the public health mission, not that he is being intellgently critical of vaccines in a healthy way.

The public health mission did an end-run around public discourse. The turbulence caused by that is absolutely the fault of the public health authority.

For a worthy cause people were willing to give their lives. A couple of naysayers can not affect it in any meaningful way. If you can undermine a mission with one measly podcast, that might mean your mission is not in a good place to begin with.

Rogan routinely hosts people with very diverse views. Why wouldn't NY and JM go to Rogan's program and debate him? Why don't YOU go to his program and debate him if you are so certain you have a strong position? If you ask me, I'd say it's very sus, almost like they know they got nothing to say

What is the public health mission and how is Rogan undermining it?

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