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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior.

For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.

Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.

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If the argument is that it's not a big deal because it doesn't even work, then why collectively are we even bothering? Either it works and is something for reactionaries to fear and is effective social pressure, or it's a bunch of ineffective sound and fury that gives cover to your right wing aunt to tell stories about how "someone she knows" got fired for telling a joke. If it works, then let's own it completely, with all its flaws. If it doesn't work, then why bother at all? If it doesn't even work, then why try to defend the practice? Do we want it to work? Do we want it to be an effective form of social control?

In the past decade, the left got so cancel-happy that "cancellation" by the left-wing activist crowd lost pretty much all of its weight among anyone who isn't an ideologue. In 2016-2018, if you got canceled, you would have a very hard time finding any white-collar job afterward.

Well what did they do to get called out?

This is called "victim blaming".

If a bigot acts like a bigot then gets outed, that's their own fault. They're not victims.

We’re talking about people having their lives judged by thousands of people online based on a 5-second video from someone with an agenda.

There’s no way for them to clarify, no way for them to “have their day in court,” apologizing just makes the mob smell blood. The only point is revenge and sadism, there’s no redemption, no point other than pain, pure and simple.

People are complicated and I don’t want a video of me on a bad day edited and then posted online for everyone to see.

You're assuming bigot. This is where you're going wrong. It could be anyone for anything, even if the thing was fine to do 5 years ago - and maybe is fine again now - and it was done 15 years ago.

Precociously exclaiming "Well, personally I don't like horrible people!" isn't likely to be relevant above quite a young age.

I say the same to people who assume everyone going to an El Salvadorean jail is guilty. They're the same person as you, just in the other tribe.

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