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Comment by _carbyau_ | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, a whole bunch of people have spent their formative years in a cancel-culture world and this now shapes their actions.

But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

Realising:

- everyone has performed good and bad actions

- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.

: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.

View on HN

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.

This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework.

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

People have always told me I'm too hard on myself.

Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself.

If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.

As someone who has been quite hard on myself too:

To err is to be human. If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). If you make a mistake, learn from it and try to be better. None of us are born with the skill and knowledge to do the right thing all the time, and sometimes there is no right thing, just different tradeoffs with different costs.

> If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family).

Mind expanding on that?

I'm not the commenter, but I interpret it as:

The benefit that others get by you reaching your potential is greater than the risk to others of you making space for yourself to reach your potential.

This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space.

That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.

Moral distance is an interesting concept, because it implies two acts are comparable at some level.

If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?

It depends on if your question is about legality, morality, social stability, privilege of some sort, or perhaps something else.

If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.

I think it's different to the trolley problem in terms of trying to measure the outcome.

If we make decisions based on what will have the best outcome, well the trolley problem is trivial; minimise the negative outcome.

In the scenario of murder for the cancer cure, you're still left with someone who was murdered. My take is that this isn't any less bad than someone who was murdered for something other than the cure for cancer, which in turn means I would stop this murder even if it meant not curing cancer.

> you're still left with someone who was murdered

You've lost me. Isn't that also the case in any trolley problem? The trolley is a sort of satirical analogy. The thing actually being considered is "I get this good thing but I'm also left with this bad thing as a direct result".

I guess a key difference is before versus after the fact. Agreeing to the outcome to "pay" for what you want is different than deliberating over an act committed by the same person after the fact in the absence of any prior agreement. But if the only issue is the lack of an agreement then it's less a matter of "murder non-fungible" and more a matter of enforcing legal procedure for the sake of social stability. The state needs to maintain its monopoly on violence I guess.

It would be a pretty classic ethical dilemma if they couldn't develop a cure for cancer if you deny them murdering anyone. In the other case it would only be correct to try them for murder since it would be an independent act.

No? I don't see how you arrived at that, it seems entirely non-sequitur. I guess you deeply misunderstood what I meant by "moral distance." I'm simply trying to give a name to the idea that there isn't just a binary good vs. bad, and that some things are vastly worse than others. You might choose to represent it on a simple scale where bad is in the negative and good in the positive. In such a case, moral distance would be the distance between the two points on that scale. That's all. This representation would have no impact on whether a single individual can do things that exist on polar opposites of such a scale.

In the context of my comment the point is more about the distance between saying something rude and killing someone, it would be a large distance despite both being negative, and the tolerance levels would likely start somewhere in the negative side of the scale, though in reality you're going to be dealing with much more complex perceptions of good vs. bad behavior and social tolerance of it. But when you compare to the law that's going to have more of a concrete boundary. But it's still not 0 on this scale.

Being a purely good being is impossible for any human and this fact should be clear by reading entry level literature by those that put a few more thoughts into it. Babies have narcissistic tendencies until they develop morality. But even in the case of ethics in contrast to personal morals there is ample literature that a purely reasonable and logical approach to ethics is insufficient.

Demanding people being pure and good, denying their egoistical sides can lead to quite terrible outcomes. The art is to deal with these character sides as well.

I don't have a huge group of friends but all of them have flaws like me. If you can forgive yourself, people start to believe that you can forgive others too and maybe you would make friends. Generally people that only point the finger at the smallest flaws are called self-righteous for a reason. And no, they often do not have many friends.

forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.

That's not true though, no one "Has their life ruined forever" because of one off-hand comment. Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering.

Great way of avoiding 99% of the harm with that, is literally getting off social media, if that ever happens to you. Most people around you in real-life won't know about it, nor recognize you, or anything else, unless you had a pattern of bad behavior for a longer period of time.

But you can still make mistakes, even online, and eventually people forget about it.

>> Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering.

That's only true if you fade with your misdeeds. Try doing anything that raises your profile and watch them jump back to the surface.

People will talk about it, but how much does it really matter? Many actors and other figures credibly accused of sex crimes or whatever just wait a few years and then start getting work again. Kevin Spacey seems to be going alright as an example.

The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.

No, it's true if you want to remain a normal person, instead of becoming a celebrity or "celebrity-lite" or whatever we call them today. But yeah, if you try to become a "public figure" or similar, then people will try to find skeletons in your closet, but it's always been like that, and very different from "you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever" which was the initial claim.

Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.

How would you compare the two? I think no matter what the good was, you're still left with "yeah, but x happened".

Quick aside - you can also do the inverse, excusing whatever bad because "x good thing still happened." That framing probably feels more obviously incorrect to you, because of your outlook.

One metric is just by if people still want to hang out with you. Sure, you made a mistake and hurt their feelings before. But they're still your friends, and still talk to you because they, on balance, predict that interacting you will be good for them. Said less cynically - they genuinely like you. Or - if the "you" is too difficult to accept (as it often is with mental health issues), you can see it in relationships of people around you.

Human beings are messy, and relationships (of all types) even more so. We all have brought both joy and sadness to those important to us. Trying to avoid harm above all else, will necessarily also reduce the joy you bring to others - you become withdrawn, isolated, cautious in all interactions.

Separately - hurting another person is not always a sign of a moral sin. Accidents and misunderstandings happen, no person can predict every result of their actions, and also - sometimes two people are genuinely in conflict, and there won't be a happy end to it.

In the eyes of the law, it clearly does.

Are you sure? Judges and juries consider the perpetrator's character beyond the bad deed all the time, both to reduce or increase the penalty.

Yes, pretty sure, there are repeat offenders of up to 30 times that get exactly the same punishment as they did the first time.

Sadly, I no longer have access to that dataset.

> I've struggled with this point of view

Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.

It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

There is no line. Killing one person while saving a thousand is just as bad as killing one person.

By that metric, doctors doing triage at a disaster site should be jailed.

This is even more out of touch of the comment you are answering to.

This is a failure to think, disguised as moral judgment.

If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.

To be fair, though, some moral frameworks (not mine) proscribe that any killing is bad, even to save oneself or others.

I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.

There is a clear difference between "I had to kill someone to save 50 lives" and "I saved 50 lives, so I'm allowed to murder one person as payment"

There is no answer to this. The universe does not provide any mechanisms for moral decision making or evaluation. Rather, morality exists in human minds, not in the external world.

We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.

The lack of moral universality is how it is, not a failure. And it never ends: there are no right answers, although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.

And that's exactly the thing about cancel culture - it seeks to elevate one particular moral judgement above all others and punish not just those that go against it but also those that advocate for or even just consider any other morality.

Firstly, its not even clear to me that "cancel culture" is anything more than a soundbite.

But even if it is, in fact, a thing - it's clearly not backed by "one particular moral judgement", as it is commonly portrayed. Lots of people face disapproval and punishment for a diversity of chosen moral stance, including people who could be categorised as "liberal" and who are typically considered to be those doing the "cancelling".

Supporers of the abolition of slavery or apartheid, or of human rights for minority communities, were for many years "cancelled" in the US, and in Europe, for example. Today, in the US, supporters of social equality and diversity are being "cancelled".

So I suspect that "cancel culture" is what you get when one moral/political group (of any persuasion) only sees part of the bigger picture, and uses that to manufacture a grievance.

'cancel culture' used to be called 'calling out assholes' before we entered the current period of fetishizing cruelty.

Now, the worst and slimiest amoung us are crawling up on the cross and weeping and gnashing their teeth because people won't buy their book or watch their movie. It's almost always the most powerful who claim to be 'cancelled'.

Calling out assholes is a good and useful function and we should continue to do it.

Where are you drawing the line? It's relatively easy to have a black & white ideological framework regarding murder - but what about lesser crimes, like beating someone up and causing serious, but not life-threatening injuries? What about being a witness to a crime but never reporting it? Does the motivation ever come into play? Can people who commit a crime never "redeem" themselves by performing positive deeds going forward? Isn't that the point of rehabilitation?

> What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.

That's completely different from one day taking over a plane and landing it safely because the pilot was out of action, and the next day shooting down a plane for fun.

You can't save up to murder your wife by giving to the homeless.

> Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.

That's a bad example (because all 99 will die anyway if you don't do something, so you're not really killing 49 to save 50), but ignoring that, I don't think you can trivially answer such questions. They have been discussed by many philosophers for the last few thousands of years and we don't seem to have a common agreement about ethics and morality.

Would you change your answer if the building was a prison for 50 child abusers, and the plane carried 48 newborn babies (plus the pilot)? Why? A human is a human, right?

It really isn't complicated. For the first example the principal of least harm applies - the only hard part about that is the practical calculation of that - which can obviously be a matter of judgement - but the principal is clear.

And you are also missing the point of the comment - the key thing is the principal of least harm only applies if the things are directly linked.

I suspect you'd find it hard to find a philosopher over the last few thousands of years who thought that the concept of saving up societal credit so you can kill you spouse is somehow a valid one.

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.

You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others.

But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.

> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.

If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.

The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.

Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.

Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.

> because it just consumes anything positive.

I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.

Life is a complex thing.

? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven.

But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing.

The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person.

Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.

First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.

> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.

I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".

Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.

We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd.

> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.

Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.

For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?

I wouldn't agree with this change. And I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.

> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.

This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).

And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.

So we agree that it's possible to reject a behavior without legislating against it.

You conveniently left out the part about mob mentality there. I don't think anyone was ever objecting to people expressing their disapproval of something in and of itself. Certainly I wasn't.

I'm not sure what partisan complaints are supposed to add to the discussion. I don't think it matters if one, both, or neither "team" are engaging in the behavior. The behavior is bad regardless.

> I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.

That's a boycott but I don't believe it qualifies as "cancelling". Identifying YC associated businesses and telling people not to patronize them due to the association might qualify. Trying to get people who continued to use HN after the policy change fired would qualify.

I fully agree about not needing legislation.

What if HN was a group about celebrating the abusing of kids, and the people who used HN were daycare workers? Would you just say that since it happens outside of work no one has the right to report it?

The right? I never questioned anyone's right to do anything. I objected to instigation of others. To mob mentality. I don't object to going about your life and dealing with things on an individual basis as they come up.

The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?

Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.

> The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?

Celebrating a crime isn't conspiracy to commit one.

> Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.

Why wouldn't it? You've just constructed your bar, and that's great. I'm glad you'd never want to react on scale based on someone or some organizations postings. If Google's CEO posted that he "personally" thought that selling information to governments was fine if you didn't get caught, you wouldn't suggest to your friends to not use Google because it was just his viewpoint?

At the end of the day the community will decide if an argument to boycott at scale makes sense. If I go around saying to boycott Google because a guy there doesn't like anime probably will make me look more a fool than anyone else.

Your example is off base again. If a rank and file employee gets a DUI and Google refuses to fire them over it yeah it's wrong to try to organize a lynch mob against Google for that.

I didn't construct some arbitrary personal bar. I simply acknowledged that edge cases exist that reasonable people might feel necessitate community action as a matter of self preservation. That doesn't undermine the general principle.

At the end of the day we're discussing social standards so there aren't going to be any airtight logical arguments and the edges will inevitably be blurry. If you adopt an extremist mindset you'll be able to rationalize just about anything. That doesn't mean you're actually in the right though.

My point isn't that edge cases exist or not. It's that what's an edge case to you may not be to others. The culture will dictate what is extreme or not. Now you can argue that this can result in some mob mentality taking down people who aren't deserving. True, but in society we see that we've tended to get better over time at making this determination, even if there are blips along the way. To quote Theodore Parker, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Now, it's our job, when we see the arc not bending the right way (or fast enough) to do something, but I think to avoid allowing the arc to have levers is not doing ourselves any favors.

And with all the talk of cancel culture (not government action, but just all private citizen action), I've actually seen very few examples of it resulting in something that I consider unacceptable. Note, I'd consider physical threats outside the bounds of cancel culture -- those are just physical threats.

And here's an example of something worse than cancel culture -- government officials using official state power to do what you disagree with ordinary citizens doing. I don't even consider this cancel culture, but the headline of the article shows that people conflate the two:

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2026/01/15/culture-warrio...

It's pretty simple to deal with cancel culture without limiting speech:

First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem.

Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.

> First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it.

Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.

So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?

I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim.

If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.

There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.

> The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

what would your alternative be?

Why do we need an alternative? Why should behavior driven by a mob mentality be desirable?

Because white supremacists are, from some abstract level, undesirable? And some have white supremacist tendencies, so there has to be some way of, at the very least, ignoring them and ensuring that its possible to ignore them.

> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest.

Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.

Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.

If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.

> Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.

Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.

> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.

Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.

> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.

The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?

It seems that you're not very familiar with what actually happened. The phrase "It's okay to be white" had become associated with white supremacists, And black people's responses to the pole had nothing to do with their opinions of white people as a whole. You, as well as Scott Adams, decided to misinterpret it. Scott Adams took things a step further and decided that he wanted nothing to do with black people on the simple basis of this poll, which is absolutely wild.

I wonder who gets to decide when something is "associated" with something else in a way that makes any and all uses of that thing a cancelable offense.

This mechanism sounds more dangerous than useful.

If that’s the ‘only’ thing he was canceled for, then how do you explain content of the comics he started making after he was called out, once the mask came off?

Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’

Being cancelled for saying "it's really scary that half of all black people don't agree it's ok to be white" would radicalize anyone. The fact itself radicalizes people, the hysterical reaction of the left radicalizes people even more.

But where does this self-indulgent excuse ends? You can argue BLM itself got radicalized into extreme positions by the radicalized mistreatment of black people, and so on.

At some point, if Scott Adams behaved like a bigot, we should stop making excuses for him. Becoming "radicalized" through life's hardships is not an excuse, unless we also grant this excuse to BLM et al. Otherwise it's selective slack-cutting.

The BLM movement hasn't suffered any hardships. They were the opposite of cancelled: BLM were donated over $90M.

(they embezzled large parts of it. one of them just got charged with wire fraud and money laundering https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/executive-director-blac...)

So BLM just sprouted out of thin air, without prior history of cop violence against black people?

Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?

No one is entitled to being rich or famous.

True, but it is an effect.

That doesn't mean we should accept that people censor themselves for fear of having their livelihood ruined because someone takes a statement out of context. I'd rather live in a world where people feel safe in being honest with their opinions so that we can work out differences before they become an issue.

I agree, but that's an issue of our economic system: financial precarity.

Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.

It's also not against the law to be a racist. Only discrimination itself is.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist

I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.

cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.

shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.

You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.

You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.

> cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.

> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.

Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.

Blackballing, in Victorian English society, strictly meant to vote against a proposed member joining a club (above the working classes club memberships carried great weight wrt social standing).

It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.

It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.

Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.

If we are looking for synonyms with related effects we should include banished, excommunicated, shunned and interdicted.

They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.

I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.

Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.

I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).

Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.

Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.

If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.

We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.

> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech.

I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.

I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.

I've seen it in person once with a former coworker, everything created anxiety, everything was problematic, she spent her entire time looking for a reason to be offended (especially tenuously on behalf of someone else). It was exhausting trying to work with her. She took so much time off too, at very short notice, as she just couldn't cope with working that day.

Yeah I have come across it too, I have also met examples like the woman you describe. But we don't really have to rely on personal anecdotes. The rise of anxiety in young people over the last 20 years is well documented. Someone who's really determined to pick holes in this will say that doesn't prove causality, it could be multivariate or it could be other things completely, and they're right, we're probably not going to find a gold standard scientific study proving my point. But if someone thinks this increase in anxiety is not tied to how people react to speech, online and off, or if they try to handwave it away as unconnected to the broader social change I'm describing, they're being obstinate or they're trying to protect their sacred cows... for another example we have many many people of all political leanings (including apolitical) these days talking about how they've disappeared from public social media and retreated into private chat groups because the public discourse is just too dangerous. That is cancel culture. It is real. It has had precisely the deleterious effect on society which I described.

> The rise of anxiety in young people over the last 20 years is well documented

Sure - but I'd argue that's due to the overall unhealthy aspects of internet use and not specifically 'cancel culture'.

The internet has become a constant stream of something that is simultaneously designed to maintain your attention and engagement ( control you ), and sell you stuff ( control you ).

> It was created by cancel culture

I think that's a far too strong. I can see how grievances can be exploited to promulgate these views, and unfair cancelling might be one of those, but I don't see that as the main driving grievance that has been exploited - what I see is the timeless 'times are hard and it's some other groups fault' grievance as the main engine.

I'd also argue that extreme right wing views are on the rise in many places in the world, and I'd argue most of them never got anywhere near the US level of cancel culture - and indeed things like positive discrimination are still just seen as discrimination.

I think it's unlikely to be one factor - but if I had to choose one, I'd say there is a better correlation between the relatively recent rise in day to day internet use and the rise in prominence of such views.

> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery.

John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

Not if you murder someone to save a thousand people ;)

(though you might still get one as you need to prove that there was no other way to save them)

You know, I think I disagree.

I didn't give Picasso the benefit of the doubt because he was an amazing artist. I did so simply because I was ignorant of how horrible he was.

Some people have trouble updating their feelings when new information arrives.

I like him -> He causes harm -> I want to continue liking him -> his harm wasn't so bad.

That's all.

Picasso made some cool stuff. I will never display any of it in my home because he was horrible.

This is kind of what I meant by good and bad actions don't cancel out.

I think people are perfectly allowed to appreciate the art while knowing he was not nice as a person. People are multifaceted, both as actors and in judgement of others.

So where to draw the line is the question.

And the answer is: this isn't linear. Context matters and is different for spaces and people. For example, you state seeing the art first, finding out he was not nice later and how that shaped your judgement.

------ Spaces

Not having Picasso art in your house is clearly fine. It's your space, your personal choice what you put there.

Demanding his art be removed from all art galleries around the world is not fine. Art galleries are mostly public spaces whose role is specifically to view artistic results largely from an artistic point of view. They are allowed to acknowledge his personal life and usually do - but that is not how you judge art.

And so we have two perfectly fine and yet contradicting choices towards housing the art of Picasso.

------ People

A victim of similar abuse as Picasso dished out may not want to see his art in the gallery due to association - this is fine.

A person who simply doesn't care for that style of art may be indifferent or also not want to see it - also fine.

A person who thinks Picasso fundamentally moved the art world forward may definitely want to see this art - also fine.

And so differing people's attitudes towards Picasso are also easily understandable and fine.

> Demanding his art be removed from all art galleries around the world...

Well, are you saying people shouldn't complain?

Certainly if an overwhelming majority think he was too horrible to display his art, you would agree that it's fine to remove his art, right?

And before that overwhelming majority is convinced, people may spend effort trying to convince them.

So where exactly is your problem with this process?

To try to make myself clear I've taken your comments and quoted them out of order. Hopefully why will make sense.

> Well, are you saying people shouldn't complain?

I don't have issue with people pointing out Picasso's faults, complaining as it were. I have an issue if they try to use those faults to erase any good actions and deny others in society the benefit of those good actions.

> And before that overwhelming majority is convinced, people may spend effort trying to convince them.

I'm fine with the societal wide debates being had and repeatedly had. Societal expectations change over time, things that were detested can become fine and vice versa. This is what we're doing now.

> So where exactly is your problem with this process?

I think my problem with this societal wide debate process is with the actions taken based on the overwhelming majority. Societal debates often (not always!) promote blunt outcomes that lack nuance because convincing large groups of people of simple outcomes is easier. The extreme of this blunt outcome promotion are things like three-word-sloganisms, "Ban the bomb!" or similar but usually it doesn't quite devolve that far. But for example, debates on social media resulted in "under 16's banned" in Australia.

Whereas the correct action often depends on context and nuance which involves a proper understanding of the issue.

To demonstrate what I mean about context and nuance I have a bunch of questions about your sentence.

> Certainly if an overwhelming majority think he was too horrible to display his art, you would agree that it's fine to remove his art, right?

"overwhelming majority" - of society? Or of Art experts/academics/researchers? Both?

"to display his art" - to display in general admissions access of an art gallery? To display in a paid admission only side gallery? To display in an advert/tv show/biographical-documentary/my-house/my-front-porch?

"to remove his art" - to what degree of societal removal? Not allowed in free public access but available at the art gallery in a paid ticket side room? Available only on request? Available only to art historians and researchers? Put in storage not to be seen for 50 years? Destroyed but current visual replicas like photos are fine. Censored outright and any replica image of any of the work is banned?

In this particular instance regarding Picasso, his personal life and his art I think society has the balance largely right today. His art is a passive content in that it requires people to go seek it out. Those who dislike Picasso's wrongdoings so much they can't dissociate it from his art won't be subjected to it. Those who view it from the art angle can gain benefit from it as they seek it out.

If Picasso was used in an ad campaign - where it is actively pushed at people - then I think questions would rightly be raised.

To try to guess where I think you were going with this in a reasonable sense: If an overwhelming majority of society was confirmed as thinking the art was too horrible for public display, it would be a clear signal to the art galleries that they won't derive visits from hosting his art. And they'll probably take it down voluntarily because they usually want visitors. But it will still be available for art dealers/historians/researchers/private individuals or the future when society may decide they're ok with seeing it publicly again. And I think that's fine.

If an overwhelming majority of society wanted the art destroyed/banned/censored then I would argue that is too far. If there is a non-harming societal benefit to his art to 1%, then why not let them have that benefit? They could buy it and stick it in their house...

To reaaaaallly stretch the example, if an overwheming majority of Art Experts argue the art is magically convincing people that blatant misogyny is fine then maybe the art should be destroyed.

Heh. I'm afraid I don't have time to read all that.

Best.

Fair enough. Suffice to say I'm largely in agreement with you.

Not from the USA so I don't know exactly how this cancel culture is working but do they have his books banned from libraries cause I have seen a list of books banned or cancelled and the organization chasing them but can not find his works and there are comics like "Maus"

There's a song called "Cancer culture" by Decapitated - I recommend

Also:

- What actions are good and bad is much more subjective than activists want you to believe.

- It's beyond absurd to discount someone simply for expressing an opinion even if you vehemently disagree with that opinion.

I generally agree with your post, but:

> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.

Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.

Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

> Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

Scott's body of work spans many years and - like music bands - the early stuff is much different to the later stuff. To say he confined himself to "expressing prejudiced views" seems to overlook a whole lot of that early work.

To say his work doesn't "match" other artists work is subjective. I got/get the occasional giggle out of Dilbert - more often in the earlier ones. I don't care for Picasso's art at all but I recognise that other people do. Who's body of work should I personally rate higher? The top comment mentions feeling like Scott was family, while acknowledging all the flaws of Scott.

This is why I mention that good and bad actions can both stand.

Picasso's art looks to me like something a deranged child might draw.

Scott's work in the 1990s (i.e. ~30 years ago) was genuinely very funny at the time for anyone who worked in an office, including myself, when I was working as an engineering intern at a company. One strip I remember in particular came out just when our company had announced some silly new initiative and gave out free sweatshirts to motivate everyone, and the Dilbert strip that Sunday was almost exactly the same thing except it was t-shirts there. The timing was eerie.

It's sad to me how Adams fell, which largely seemed to happen after the popularity of Dilbert waned and may have been a reaction to that, but his work was funny and lovable in its earlier days.

If you aren't willing to separate art from the artist, you are admitting that your bias is more important than your ability to appreciate nuance.

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