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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

I'm unsure where we as a society go from here. The left's cancel culture resulted in the firing of private citizens from their jobs, or at least some reprimand. The right's cancel culture is the full weight of the federal government brought down against opposition, in stark violation of the First Amendment; that is, until the Supreme Court can find some new carve-out for why this isn't protected speech.

Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

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There's no comparison here. The left's "cancel culture" doesn't exist and is literally free speech in action. This is the destruction of free speech. I think you have to participate in social media to understand what the left's cancel culture is because it's just a bunch of individuals expressing their opinions. Hence many are out of the loop. I wouldn't refer to authoritarian regimes as "cancel culture".

I'm 100% against what's happening rn with Trump's fascism, but let's not pretend that there was no cancel culture on the left and pressure on companies. Example: Disney itself fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian because of comments she made. There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse -- but there was a fear (valid or otherwise) of blowback/ratings/whatever.

> There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse

That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney.

And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds.

Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.

Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine.

If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of.

By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't.

So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).

> the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.

We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided.

The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies.

But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.

It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.

All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.

A small number of extremely wealthy individuals have a vested interest in fomenting that division, because the solutions to those 80% issues happens to conflict with their business interests.

Its not like the US hasn't done big ambitious things before: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Hell didn't they help develop some of the social programs for Post WWII Europe/Japan etc?

Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.

>Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal.

Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since.

Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected.

As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize.

Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA.

If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules.

If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do.

This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.

>healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.

Funny you imagine there is consensus with any of that. The right doesn't want government healthcare. They don't want government sponsored childcare. They could care less about higher education. They want no gun laws. And they don't want black people to benefit from infrastructure.

There is no forming consensus with that position.

Outside of the 24hr news bubble, I believe the reality is that there is a lot of common ground on these supposed hot button issues, for example on the guns issue alone there is broad support for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban:

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/07/25/poll-majority--supp...

But it's hard to make it happen when Fox paints any kind of gun measure as crazy leftist tyranny and then deep-pocketed fringe organizations like the NRA vow to punish any Republican who collaborates on compromise measures.

About the only thing there is consensus on between the parties, vs americans at large, is banning gun sales to the mentally ill. In terms of assault weapons ban there is a substantial divide between republicans and democrats. Your source shows this too.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...

Statistically almost everyone who is a “conservative” supports Trump whatever he does, though? With very little real infighting

The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

I see we are forgetting the period of time from the end of 2019 to 2022...

Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and laptops. That was not being done to benefit the political rights.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762

I'm not very aware of this subject, but from my understanding "the laptop" is the files that were extracted from a person's laptop by a man who was supposed to repair it. Then the files were released in public and included nude images. I would expect any company to pull those documents down to limit their own liability and for common decency. Again, I'm not very informed on the subject.

So there was that example.

Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:

No, they were blocking links to the news story from the NY Post, including users from sending private messages...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798

>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."

https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...

Edit: URL was malformed due to copy paste error...

I have no idea what you're referencing honestly. Private companies can make whatever business decisions they want.

You second link is 404 and I have no idea what you're talking about. The subject is what used to be the United States. A concept that no longer exists because we're too shitty.

Thanks, URL was messed up due to copy paste error.

I googled Alex as I didn't know who that was. The government has an interest in public health. 1.2 million Americans (likely many more) died as a result of covid. There were refrigerator trucks filled with bodies in places. It was hell. People who spread misinformation literally kill people and themselves. It seems like the government back then actually worked with companies to craft guidance rather than threatening their licenses, suing, etc. There's no comparison at all to the current time. America was founded to rid ourselves of royalty and the first amendment is proof of that. Now America is gone.

You don't have to tell me it was hell, I was there.

People, the government and scientists were all spreading misinformation depending on what the official messaging was at the time.

Case in point: Early on, the government was saying "Masks are not effective at stopping COVID-19" due to them wanting to control supply. When that happened, there was a large number of studies that came out showing just that. When you looked at the methodology, it was "Mask over mouth, cough into Petri dish" and see if any COVID was detectable in dish. Also "Virus particle size is much smaller than openings on mask"

When the government changed it's stance, all of those were retracted. It took the WHO 2 YEARS to change their stance and say that COVID-19 was airborne:

>In the spring of 2020, as covid-19 took hold, confusion reigned among scientists, doctors, public health experts, and others. Many insisted the spread of the new virus was through the air, yet the World Health Organization refused to use the terms “airborne” or “aerosol”1 in the context of covid-19 until 2021.2 This had repercussions as the world debated mask wearing (and what types of masks were suitable) and whether indoor spaces were a factor in infection.

>Now, four years later and after two years of deliberation by experts,3 WHO has altered its definition of the “airborne” spread of infectious pathogens in the hope of avoiding the confusion and miscommunication that characterised the first year of the pandemic—and threatened attempts to control the virus’s spread.

https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q985

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22280304

I don't get what your point is. We agree covid is bad and difficult for people to deal with.

There are several top level comments here acting like this is the first time the government has done something like this. It's not.

The previous administration was doing the same thing; Publicly saying that they wanted to change laws, that these companies were killing people etc. At the same time, they were also asking the companies to remove people for their speech. The threat was implicit.

I don't like that the current republican administration is doing it now, I didn't like it when the previous democrat administration was doing it then.

The only way to keep it from happening is for everyone to speak up, for that to happen you also need to recognize when your team is doing the same thing and call them out. Look at the comments saying "I bet we won't hear from the freeze peach crowd", of course you won't see them. Not because they don't care however but because their disagreement of the government action is getting lost in the noise of your crowds.

It's the first time the government in the US has done this. 100%.

I see. You're trying to pretend that intentionally subverting public health measures should be free speech and that the Biden administration did something like what the authoritarians are doing now. I disagree, though I'm not super familiar with the government intervention or lack of during covid. I have no desire to discuss it as it has no relevance to this context.

You're lying by creating a false equivalence and don't deserve replies.

Free speech is free speech, it doesn't come with qualifiers about public health crisis or anything else. The old canard "You can't shout fire in a crowded theater" can from a Supreme Court case in which the government was prosecuting someone for an anti-war speech(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States). That was 1919, so maybe a bit before 2024.

The Supreme Court has been walking that back ever since(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio).

>There is no clearly established public health exception among the 43 judicially recognized exceptions to the First Amendment. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/ronald-kl-collins-first-a...

Please don't accuse me of lying, it's rude. Especially if you are also saying you are not familiar with what happened at that time.

It is a shame that you are unable to look at a situation where high level officials from one administration were asking why someone was allowed to express their views and that the administration was looking into how to hold them accountable and see how it is the mirror.

"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts" - White House press secretary Jen Psaki

"Shouldn't they(Facebook and Twitter) be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?" - MSNBC "Certainly, they should be held accountable, You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem." - White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” - FCC Chair Brendan Carr

You're spouting nonsense to conflate the contexts. Here we had the FCC guy directly threaten people, they immediately cancelled the show and I assume hundreds of people's jobs. Why? Because the authoritarian was displeased with how he was characterized. This is precisely why we formed America and the 1st Amendment.

You have an extreme point of view. You literally lead with it should be okay to scream fire in a theatre. That's absurd. There was a fire, more than a million folks died, many rules were altered including operation warp speed. There's no real reason to even reply to this insanity. Good job troll.

So can you remind me who was president in 2020?

These cases were taken to the courts, and for the covid issue I am aware that the firms were never forced, and were able to ignore government instructions and do their own thing.

The exact opposite of what has happened here.

The same will be the situation with laptops.

> "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID

COVID was completely different because the government was essentially mandating certain measures in order to contain a widespread epidemic (which killed a million people by the way), and so calls to disregard those measures were extremely problematic to public health.

Can't believe you're equating it with what happened here.

Laptops: not sure what that is.

Society's failure was taking gamergaters seriously. It was the beginning, slippery slope into full on totalitarian censorship but because basic human respect was framed as oppression it served as invitation for tit for tat retaliation. This tactic has been ridiculously successful in turning extremest ideas mainstream, and it was obvious to many people even back then, however because it exploits human nature it's hard to fight. You can find the most ridiculous crazies that present as "other side" and use it to justify whatever you want, and if you keep repeating "this is totally normal" some people just start to believe. If you are interested in finding the peaceful way to oppose this, I invite you to try and come up with the answer to this "totalitarian ratchet" because no one so far figured it out and it is a foundational part of modern authoritarian playbook.

> Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."

As with all authoritarian regimes, their assumption is that this is the end of history and those in power today will be in power forever. You're also right that they believe liberals will never do what they're doing now.

But the old guard is dying. Trump, Bush, Biden, Clinton, Obama are all boomers+ who will be dead sooner rather than later. The younger generation realizes the pendulum is about to swing, power will be ours to take, and you can be damn sure we will not behave like our parents and grandparents did.

So me personally, when I see them take Kimmel off the air for "not serving the public interest", all I hear is permission for the first progressive millennial president to shut down all of right wing AM talk radio on that same basis. And you know who else sees it that way? Right wing AM talk radio hosts, who have been the only ones on the right asking MAGA to pump the brakes on what they're doing (see: Tucker Carlson).

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