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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, Bradbury likes to tell people that Fahrenheit 451 isn't about the thing it was obviously supposed to be about (censorship) because he now wants it to have been a metaphor for cancel culture.

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he's been dead for a decade so I doubt he now wants the meaning to be anything. besides that he also never said anything about cancel culture he said it's about how tv turns you into a moron.

https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the...

> In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."

They had cancel culture in the 90s too.

Cancel culture is vigilante political correctness.

Next comes legalized, then deputized, then militarized...

> you can’t say certain things

So he sees it as another form of censorship

Cancel culture is censorship?

One of those involves fulltime professionals backed by state violence and the other is when people on social media are mad at you.

> when people on social media are mad at you

It's about more than that - many people have lost their jobs, been de-banked, or even been arrested (especially in countries like the UK and Germany) for expressing their opinion publicly when that opinion was merely (a) what most people in their country believed in the recent past (< 50 years ago), and (b) a politically incorrect opinion.

Isn't the only difference whether the censors are in or out of government power?

Few now respect the wisdom of 'should not' even when 'can'

That difference is so big it makes it an entirely different thing.

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