Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

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> Sorry, I'm not reading all of that. I stopped at the second paragraph.

Then, you aren't actually interested in rigorous debate, challenging your ideas? Why are you even here? You have an opportunity here, someone that might have completely different ideas from you, and repeatedly engages with you in good faith in spite of your insults, and your answer is "tldr." Forgive me if I doubt your commitment to the spirit of the value MIT claims to espouse regarding the importance of having these kinds of conversations.

> , then define cancelled as "the thing that happened to Dorian Abbot"

Great! Nothing really bad happened to Dorian Abbot. He got to give his speech and now has defined his career around opposing affirmative action. So, why were you using him as an example earlier as a counter point to me as the negative potentials of not tolerating the intolerant?

> The thing that should be getting discussed is whether or not what happened to him should have happened to him.

But nothing bad happened to him.

Your video link is my favorite ever instance of irony I've ever encountered on this site. In it, Feynman says "you know all the names for that bird, but you know nothing about that bird... People tell me 'did you hear about Jackson Fleugrn experiment?' well no, what's that, can you explain it? I get in trouble cause I never learn the names of things."

You've been asked, what does "cancelled" mean, you answered, "Whatever happened to that guy." Yeah, what happened to that guy? "He got cancelled!"

Posting such a response is attempting to impose upon me time that I am not willing to spend on you. It's disrespectful.

The argument you're trying to formulate here is that being uninvited as a speaker at the grammy's isn't a big deal because the person was able to give their speech somewhere else in front of a completely different audience eventually. That's not how that works, the talk he was uninvited from is considered an honor in his profession.

Then you try to imply he benefited from it, so why is everyone opposed to it? That's akin to arguing that the reasons for naming a boy Sue is valid parenting advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gbtm-93oqE&t=146s

2:26 timestamp

listen to the end to understand the point fully.

per the link about naming, I'm not surprised you misunderstood what Feynman was saying, but that's not my problem.

> Posting such a response is attempting to impose upon me time that I am not willing to spend on you.

You’re willing to spend the time to write 12 replies, but you’re too busy to define the terms you use? Defining terms (especially when they are highly politically charged) allows everyone to get on the same page. Playing games with your terminology to the point you admit they are tautological is the definition of disingenuous discourse.

What you quoted was me explaining why I won't spend and hour on a novel-length response.

If you're going to try and bring me to task, atleast be accurate.

No one was asking you for a novel-length response. Took me 2 minutes to read lol. If you don’t want to read something, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to respond to someone who has taken the time to respond to you, don’t. But taking time to reply only to say you don’t have time to reply is a lie. You want to reply, and you have plenty of time. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t reply. If you had better things to do, you’d be doing them.

Just define the terms you use; that you don’t allows you to slip around the debate. You’ve spent far more time dodging questions and rationalizing your dodges than it would have taken to just define the terms you use.

Very hard for you to explain how someone was “cancelled” when they are standing on a soapbox and their message is getting out to a huge audience. Really cuts against your argument, so it’s not a surprise you want to hand-wave your way through that (“it’s tautological!”).

What I said:

> Sorry, I'm not reading all of that.

What you think I said

> But taking time to reply only to say you don’t have time to reply is a lie.

I'll buy 'Shit that makes no sense' for 500 Alex.

Lets paraphrase your comment here.

"How can you claim someone tried to prevent him from speaking when they failed due to the Streisand Effect!".

ummmmmm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

> Attempts to hide, remove, or censor information often have the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information via the Internet.

Oh, and we did define it. We defined it as "that which happened to Dorian Abbot". You gotta keep up.

> I'll buy 'Shit that makes no sense' for 500 Alex.

What you’re saying here still doesn’t make sense because you obviously do have the time to read a few paragraphs of text (not a novel), or else you wouldn’t be here still responding in a day-old thread. Instead, of making up a lie that you don’t have time, just admit you don’t want to engage with the arguments made whatsoever.

> We defined it as "that which happened to Dorian Abbot".

And is that something you made up to win an internet argument, or something that you could support through some external citation? Usually definitions aren’t personal feelings.

Regardless, if I am to take your personal definition of “canceling” at face value, it doesn’t seem to prove your original point in bringing up the term. As far as I can tell, you’re just retreating to this position because it’s the only way to keep your argument consistent. If you were to attempt an actual definition of “cancel”, you’d be forced to admit that nothing really bad comes of it (unless you can bring up more examples, but you seem to only cite the one).

I'm wondering how long before we get to the part where you tell me you're a troll who has been misconstruing everything I say to keep me going to ultimately win by wasting my time after I claimed not to want to waste it?

Not to be _too_ cliche, but are we there yet?

> If you were to attempt an actual definition of “cancel”, you’d be forced to admit that nothing really bad comes of it (unless you can bring up more examples, but you seem to only cite the one).

What's happening here is I and others are demonstrating that the concept of "woke mobs cancelling people" is essentially a totally fabricated non-issue that is being used as reactionary fear-mongering to oppose progressivism. It's a way to maintain inequitable hierarchies and disparities, through various rhetorical strategies, such as claiming the very act of trying to dismantle said hierarchies is creating them ("cancelling" conservative viewpoints, accusations of thought-crime, etc).

What you're blatantly failing to do is demonstrate that our accusation that this is all made-up fear mongering is incorrect. You simply can't defend "cancelled," you can't point to more examples, to use your terminology, you've well "lost" this conversation. I don't like that framing though because I'm not here to "win arguments," I do that in my head in the shower every day lol, I'm here to hone my own values and viewpoints against people that genuinely disagree with me.

I actually did want you to provide a real definition of cancel and what you're concerned about because to be honest I'm not going to go out of my way to research the potential negative side effects on rich successful white men of not being allowed to be openly misogynistic or racist or supportive of unjust power structures, and so if there actually are unexpected outcomes, I want to know, and see how these things that are my values (lifting up minorities etc) can be improved. Normally that means talking with people who want to throw my values out with the bathwater, but that's fine and expected. What's frustrating is when they throw their own values out with the bathwater. At least with you, quite happily, that hasn't ended in an anti-semitic or racist rant, which is how it usually goes.

I'm not actually misconstruing everything you say, now am I? I misunderstood initially what you were saying in your back-and-forth but I think we've gotten past that by now, because no matter how you slice it (whether it was about reading a reply or writing reply), you obviously do have time.

Now back to the meat of the discussion and the questions you dodged: I was wondering if you had any references to support your assertion about the tautological definition of "cancelling" someone, which read to me as "you know it when you see it", which seems overly broad to me. Did you have a citation for this definition?

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