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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

When you impose a decision on someone they do not like, they do not have to play the victim, they are the victim. We can discuss whether they are a victim that you sympathize with or whether you think that they deserve their treatment, but accusing them of "playing the victim" is about as profound and distracting as accusing people of "playing the race card."

edit: I need to add that it is also intellectually dishonest to dismiss arguments based on who you think the arguments have been designed to appeal to.

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That seems a weird use of the word. By that notion, every convicted criminal is a victim, because the court imposed a sentence that they, presumably, do not like. This removes practically all meaning from the word "victim". In common parlance, well-understood consequences of one's own actions occurring does not make one a victim.

> This removes practically all meaning from the word "victim".

No, it removes the personal judgement from the word "victim," where we decide whether a particular victim deserves their punishment as a preliminary to discussing their situation.

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edit: i.e. where sympathetic people who are killed are victims, and unsympathetic people are killed are being portrayed as victims. It's an attempt to distract from the material facts of a situation with arguments about language.

edit 2: In the spirit of tripling down, I'm also giving this discussion more credit than it deserves. This is about someone saying that the word "cancel" implies the word "victim." So here's the implied argument afaict.

1) Using the word "cancel" to refer to an imposition on your work means that you're implying you're a "victim."

2) A "victim" is someone who is undeserving of what has happened to them.

3) This person is deserving of what has happened to them.

4) Therefore, they are dishonest.

But your original reply didn't say "he didn't call himself a victim," it tried to argue why he was a victim. The gp to this reply was pointing out how absurd your definition of victim is. It's not making an argument about whether or not he called himself a victim, it makes an argument about what you yourself defined as a victim.

I've made that argument, and you can accept it or not. The larger point is that accusing people of playing victims is always a distraction from actual argument, and the entire thread is evidence of that. It started with irrelevance and ended nowhere.

> The larger point is that accusing people of playing victims is always a distraction from actual argume

Yes, and when they are really playing they become the victim of their own ploy.

If a court ignored the law and imposed a criminal sentence merely because it didn't like the defendant, then that would be an injustice and you would call the convicted person a victim.

Point of order: a non-domain-expert produced a thing he called a “documentary”, and then he was criticized for totally reasonable reasons by actual subject matter experts. Using the word “cancel” in this context is petty.

It is petty if it specifically avoids mention of any of the evidence, and instead invents groundless personal accusations.

Hancock is being proved right about his accusers.

It's damning evidence enough that Netflix aren't having an expert on the show, isn't it?

Might depend on whether they were invited and declined.

But inventing spurious ad hominem accusations instead of offering a plausible counter-narrative is not a good look.

What exactly are you referring to when you say “ad hominem accusations”? I don’t follow.

Calling him racist.

They don't call him racist. Read the referenced material carefully.

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/27/archaeologists-reveal-the-...

Even that article does not call the guy racist. Please point to me a sentence or phrase in there that calls the guy racist.

"But the whole theory is steeped in racism and white supremacy, so it's not just harmless entertainment."

"He will get to the edge of something, but he won't say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, 'I didn't say that,' and he didn't say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?"

How much accusation do you need?

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