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Comment by mkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

I bring this particular issue up anytime I hear that cancel culture was a contribution of the political left.

Boycotting is not cancel culture, IMO. It's one thing to vote with your wallet, or vocally protest against a company. It's another thing entirely to go after someone personally and attempt to ruin their life for something they've done to offend you. I suspect that's the problem most people are thinking of when they use the term 'cancel culture.' Like Justine Sacco. Totally horrid leveraging of the power of the Internet to destroy an individual.

I’ve very often heard cancel culture used to refer to “cancelling” of companies so I’m not sure I agree with that statement.

Also the line can be blurry with celebrities since they will engage in business deals.

I think there is a scale.

I think it's unacceptable to send the mob after an individual to destroy their life. I think there is more wiggle room when the target is a celebrity who signed up to be a public figure. Same with politicians. Not that it should completely unlimited, mind you, but if someone chooses to be a public figure then they are accepting that some people will be critical of them.

With companies, I don't know if there should be much, if any limit to what gets said. Companies are not people, Mitt Romney's opinion notwithstanding. To me it becomes a moral wrong when there is a human target.

State governments can and have fired people for their political speech under these laws.

Especially when Bari Weiss gets in on it. Palestinians were the first people getting "cancelled" on campus, and we would have never heard of Bari Weiss if she hadn't been trying to get her campus authorities to restrain Palestinian speech.

People have been doing cancel culture from time immemorial. It seems to be a default in human behavior unless there are ideas specially saying, “don’t do this.” These ideas used to be called “liberalism.”

What seems to have changed, from my perspective, is that liberalism has stopped being the values system championed by the left, and instead what we have are two different visions that are both more or less authoritarian.

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