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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their speech/thoughts, many still defend that as 'perfectly reasonable consequences of unacceptable speech'

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This is the government doing it, which is clearly wrong because they are supposed to be protecting your speech rights.

If someone robs a corner gas station, you think “dang that’s a shame”.

If the military robs a gas station, you think “umm wtf?”

No, if someone robs me at a corner gas station, I think "my government should have done a better job protecting my rights".

Having your human rights violated is not like stubbing your toe.

I think regardless of what you think of policing speech generally it just is clearly worse when the entity controlling the police does it

The problem is hypocrisy - UK government applied pressure to universities and other institutions to stop DE platforming, but itself bans industry experts from conferences when they disagree with government ministers.

Yes, because obviously the only possible options are a state surveillance program to flag up any teaching assistants who criticise any aspect of government policy and teaching bureaucracy, or the sort of "free speech absolutism" that concludes that literally nothing a teacher could say could ever render them unsuitable for a teaching job.

No middle ground is possible.

Good to get the sarcastic straw man out of the way, so we can get back to the actual conversation.

The "actual conversation" being one based entirely on the highlighted bad faith false equivalence between private citizens exercising their right to object to offensive and discriminatory behaviour and government resources being used to compile lists of people who has expressed doubts about its policy...

These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. It's not surveillance if it's public, it's sousveillance.

> These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications.

In practice they can. The method they use isn't the force of law, but the result is the same.

Which telecom company specifically is releasing people's records?

> In practice they can.

How would a group of private citizens get a copy of all communications of an other private citizen?

Are there any documented cases of this ever happening?

But that activism is free speech itself

always funny when the free speech absolutist gets mad when people use free speech to cancel someone

Yes it’s free speech, I think the issue here is that companies care what their employees say about politics outside of work, enough to fire them if they find out.

Not really in the spirit of free speech.

It's not so much that the companies care about the individual 'wrongthinkers', they're worried about what the activists could do to the reputation of their company/brand.

The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.

People conspiring to raise up hatred of an individual, and people of the same mind in HR departments green lighting the acquiesence to that hatred, is the problem. Someone shouting a swear word at me while killing me is unpleasant, but I'll allow it. It's the killing that's the problem.

That kind of depends on the individual and what they're doing, no?

Not the individual, no. Only what they're doing.

A distinction without a difference.

I feel like if you didnt do something shameful then theres nothing to be called out for, and if you did do something shameful then being shamed is a reasonable thing to have happen. If its shameful enough that your employer saw it and would fire you for it, then you 100% deserve to be fired.

no one is getting canceled for saying something that isnt shameful

happy to help

My first objection is that any intolerant minority then becomes the arbiter of shame. By nature an intolerant minority is the last category of groups that should have that power.

Second is the question of where you draw the line. Mason Greenwood was cancelled after audio recording emerged of him raping his girlfriend. Kurt Zouma was not cancelled after recording emerged of him kicking his cat. Should he have been? Any answer you give is based on your personal values around punishment for crime and behaviour towards the defenceless. I'm anti-punishment but also anti-cruelty, so it's a head-scratcher for me. What about drink-driving? Parking tickets? You see the problem?

I'm fine with deplatforming the genuinely loathsome, given some consensus on what that is...

...but one of the early cancellation twitstorms was over some hapless male nerd making a sexual joke about USB sticks within earshot of (I'm doing my best to phrase this in a value-neutral way, and I mean no imputation beyond this specific individual) a tumblerina.

I stipulate that it's a horrible experience to be female at a very male tech conference, and that may have given her good reason to be sensitive, but AFAICT the joke in itself was merely unfunny and not inherently offensive to anyone who isn't already primed to explode. I presume that tumblerina received some genuinely bad behaviour previously at the conference, from men unnamed, but hapless nerd was the one she could name, so she did.

Aaanyway. Tech nerd got cancelled. Then tumblerina got cancelled; both of them, understandably, for becoming liabilities to their employers. And much heat was generated in twitter datacentres. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup.

So I refute your claim that "no-one is getting cancelled unless they're doing something shameful". I'd argue that neither of those two people should be ashamed - their sins are no more than common human failings that I hope Osiris would gloss over in his reckoning.

Stepping back, I'm concerned with your comment's assonance with "nothing to hide". I find that mentality deeply problematic. I accept authority only grudgingly, as I believe that organised crime is inevitable anyway, but it doesn't sit right to celebrate that some group that holds power over one, in which one has no representation, can use that power to harm one, using dogmatic justification and motivated reasoning. I really hate your position. Please soften it, so that we can have more forgiveness in the world.

> I feel like if you didnt do something shameful then theres nothing to be called out for

"Shameful" is not objective. It's moral fashion, that can change very quickly.

Everyone across the spectrum does it. It's a way of reinforcing the power of a particular political camp. There's a way to fix that though, make it very difficult to fire people. Then companies will need to be incredibly clear about what conditions they're choosing to terminate under.

>make every state a right to work state instead of at will

In the US, "right-to-work state" likely refers to the opposite of what you mean. It's "right to not join a union and not pay dues".

I changed the terminology as suggested and was immediately down voted to -4.

The United Kingdom is not a state in the United States.

Thanks to Brexit it's also becoming less "United" /s

No, that's thanks to unbalanced Devolution which grants Parliaments and self-government to everyone except the English who are still (over-)ruled by the Union Parliament in Westminster.

No, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked.

The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union.

But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it.

Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house.

Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.

I am absolutely understood understand the situation as a former vice-chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament. And describing a national law-making Parliament such as Holyrood as a "regional assembly" shows that your prejudice blinds you to the genuine issues.

I mean technically you're right. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each oversea territories of the United States instead of the UK itself being a state.

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