We've always had local forms of cancel culture. But we've never had the digital weaponized mob mentality like we do with twitter/facebook/instagram/etc.
Now we have the ability to point to one incident which was recorded forever and can't be removed. Some things really should die out over time. The comments "most" people make should just, fade away after a while only being recalled in memory and allowing people to grow and get better over time.
Instead we have quotes from a 16 year old derailing their efforts to be a better human being as an adult.
We even get a similar kind of force here on HN, when a website gets blasted by being featured here. Website owners talk about being able to see that traffic.
Humans love seeing Karma in action and this seems to be evolution of that.
So not all politicians get cancelled for blackface.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-ph...
Heck, we've already forgotten the certain prime minister of a Northern American country who escaped that fate, for similar reasons!
No one reasonable is going to run for office knowing there's a great chance their dirty laundry will be used to fuel the news cycle. It's not worth the risk; the possible damage to their family; and so on.
This is why so many of today's elected officials are as inspiring as the colour beige. No offense to beige of course ;)
Yes, Trump is an exception. But I said reasonable people ;)
I would imagine it's relatively affordable and easy for someone to scrape social media and store it all, forever.
Amen! Peter Thiel used to talk a lot on this subject. We’ve built a country upon the illusion of freedom. We are getting towards the War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength stage in society.
The scariest part is that the nation who will take the reigns next has no desire for free speech or diversity of opinion. Just as Rome crumbled from within we are doing the exact same.
I implore you all: when you vote this fall, vote them out. Put some fresh faces in offices. (1)Regardless of party. Send a message that the status quo is unacceptable.
Not only that: stand in the way of cancel culture.
Commit to being an anger dampener.
Don't share outrage porn on social media, and flag it when you see it -- from either side.
Do like Monty Python. Whenever somebody you know starts chanting "Burn the witch!", don't outright disagree, and don't try to argue with facts and figures. Instead, ask them how they know she's a witch. Add nuance. Ask them to imagine how they would want to be treated if they were accused of witchcraft. And so on.
Reach out, in-person, to others, and encourage them to do the same.
Talk to people, in-person, with strong political views, and present counter-arguments to help them moderate.
Yes, this carries reputational risk.
Not doing so carries existential risk.
Free speech? Free thought isn't PC any more.
I think it always has been. :)
You are offering the other person a chance to convince you that they are right.
Maybe they even have a good argument! And you'd never hear it if you don't open yourself up to that possibility.
Just as importantly: you can't expect somebody else to be open to changing their mind, if you aren't open to changing yours.
I don't always succeed in this, and sometimes end up chasing rabbits -- did so elsewhere here, in fact. Other than getting in a bit of writing practice, it was wholly unproductive.
> People are so wrapped up in their echo chambers that _anything_ not in line with those "norms" is considered unacceptable.
True, but like Clausewitz said, war is politics continued by alternate means.
It's worth offending people and taking risks to avoid those alternate means.
I didn't see the questions are offensive patrern by keeping my mouth shut :)
This seems to be a strawman argument but even if this is unfair, I still have to wonder: "how do you regulate opinion?"
Opinion is not automatically speech, but it seems that even under the current 1st amendment notions if one expresses this opinion that it is "ok to kill people" then they are running afoul of the 'harm to others' condition.
I have never been to find a true absolutist on the matter of free speech -- I do not think they exist.
Wasn't that the main reason people voted last time? The status quo = the swamp.
Do they get out of hand? Of course.
Are we there now in the US? Compared to things like the French Revolution or the English Civil Wars; oh heck no. Compared to a gossipy Mennonite sewing circle; it's getting there.
Obviously we all want the crazy to go away and to get back to the business of living. How to do that though?
Don't feed the cycle.
Let the falling bobbin roll, do not try to catch the string and pull it out further.
Calm down.
I know that's hard. I know that the 'wrong' people keep on saying 'wrong' things. Easy for you to say 'calm down', Mr. Comfortable, your life wasn't just ruined. They destroy livelihoods and lives with their words. They deserve what they have coming for them, damnit! Justice!
There may be time for that in the future, but for now, we need to not inflame things. Shouting back is a whole lot better than shooting back, of course. But shouting tends to turn the cortex off and turn the brainstem on, so to speak.
If you want to be 'right', that's fine. But if you want to fix things and try to make things better, I would suggest listening more than writing screeds on people's FB walls. We know by now that does not work.
Are you talking about Kapernick being cancelled from the NFL by conservative cancel culture and the Vice President's staged NFL walkout to support conservative cancel culture?
it may detract from your central point, but it also explanis why one side of the spectrum won't be willing to contribute to an armistice
(Though I am not sure that the right wing dominates societal discourse like you say.)
[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/07/02/harvard-grad-claira-janover-fi...
Her anger is the problem.
She was going to work with Deloitte, where she will represent her organization in front of clients that regularly sign off on invoices that resemble less a major purchase and more the GDP of a small country.
Imagine that you have a business.
Would you hire such an angry, callous, and impulsive person to represent you in front of clients?
Unless the name of your business starts with "B" and ends with "ank of America", the answer is probably "no".
Folks on the right are saying that she called for stabbing conservatives.
I don't think that's true.
She was using metaphor -- comparing being stabbed to having a paper cut -- and just did it exceedingly poorly.
The metaphor doesn't become clear unless you watch until the end of the video, and I don't know a lot of people, conservative or liberal, that are all that interested in watching the entirety of a video where they are being offered a complementary stabbing, just so that they can get the punchline.
If you post a video of you start off by repeating, over and over, "I am going to $VERB you", then don't be surprised when people interpret your message as, "I am going to $VERB you".
Finally: imagine that we flip her political orientation, and that she recored an angry video where she used a metaphor in which she talks about shooting BLM supporters.
She would likely be in jail.
There is a political difference in how both threats and actual violence are treated in the United States, and it favors the Left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism seem like the obvious counterexamples.
I think the progression is:
1. Make a political statement against an injustice (hashtags, kneeling, etc)
2. Making a lack of support a form of complicity with injustice.
3. Narrowly define what support looks like.
Exact quote from #ShutDownStem website: >> Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it. [0]
Kapernick made a political statement as his place of work
He ruined that 2010-14 dynasty and got his coaching staff and front office sacked. And then he goes for petty provocational crap like representing police as pigs on his socks. This is a guy who grew up in the lap of upper middle class luxury and wanted for nothing.
You can be a reprehensible human being and still have NFL success if you are top-level talent, but not if you are reprehensible and you suck.
Fantastic point. And I would hope those in favor of democracy can accept it. If you choose to support a political party publicly, you can reasonably expect people to engage with you about it. But nobody should be able to coerce you to support any particular party or candidate.
What we are seeing now, is not the freedom to choose a particular stance or cause. We are seeing the mob react with force to a lack of opinion.
You must have an opinion. And it must be the right one.
well, nobody is able to coerce you for not doing anything, but people can still judge you for it, and that may be perfectly reasonable.
Inaction can be as devastating as action. Withdrawing in the face of some injustice is as much of a choice as participating on either front.
It's an overused quote but really all that is necessary for evil to triumph is good people doing nothing. Of course today sometimes the causes are hyperbolic, but nothing is wrong with the principle. If someone is the victim of racism say, and people look away rather than stepping up, that's a failure.
It can be but rarely is.
In the case racism, it isn't. Sitting in my house doing nothing isn't as bad as attacking blacklivesmatter protesters.
The call against inaction is an exaggeration to shame people into action for their side. It's the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" repackaged for the woke.
Just one example:
"I wore these socks, in the past, because the rogue cops that are allowed to hold positions in police departments, not only put the community in danger, but also put the cops that have the right intentions in danger by creating an environment of tension and mistrust. I have two uncles and friends who are police officers and work to protect and serve ALL people. So before these socks, which were worn before I took my public stance, are used to distract from the real issues, I wanted to address this immediately."
I do not support what happened to Kapernick, I don't think cancel culture is any better when disguised as something else. But the scale at which things are happening now is insane.
He does not deserve to be fired for making a political statement. Full stop.
At the same time, he did leverage his employer's platform (the NFL) to make a political statement.
Some sort of disciplinary action in response to that behavior is a legitimate course of action for an employer.
Imagine Kapernick as an engineer working for, say, Instagram.
Imagine that he Tweeted a bunch of pro-Biden memes on his personal Twitter. That seems fine to me.
Now imagine that he wrote, without consulting management, a feature which put a Biden banner at the top of the Instagram website.
That'd be a huge problem, and would merit disciplinary action. Not because he supported Biden, but because he leveraged the company brand and resources to do so, without the support of management.
I think this is where we draw the line, but am also open to other ideas.
As an individual, you should always have that right.
Both the New York Times and Breitbart are purveyors of propaganda for their respective political parties. They literally do nothing but make massively biased political statements, all day long.
Imagine you work there, and you disagree.
You can totally try to change that from within. Fight the system.
Work your way up. And once you have sufficient stature within the organization, you can run, say, an article praising George Washington on the front of the NYT, or a piece condemning him on Breitbart.
But, you, as a journalist, are a public face for your respective brand, and as such, you will likely face disciplinary action for going against the brand image.
It doesn't mean you can't make a statement.
But when you leverage your employer's platform to do so, there are going to be consequences.
Now, if you use your own megaphone, you absolutely deserve protection from being fired!
Build your Twitter/Instagram/Facebook following, and preach as much as you'd like. You built it. It's yours.
That's the reality of being a public figure. You are paid to be part of a brand image.
Tell me where I'm wrong on this. Or where you think we should draw the line. I'm happy to hear other opinions.
Every player standing and holding heart over hand during the anthem is doing the same.
Please read the guidelines and take the spirit of the site more to heart.
The post I was replying to was shallow.
Asking if people have rtfa is also against the guidelines. So its a bit rich to assume I havent read the guidelines.
And no, there isnt a guideline agaisnt profanity but its what bought you to my comment isn't it?
It doesn't matter what you were replying to.
There are no major fights for real progress... there's an enduring status-quo and the battlegrounds are empty and occasionally we entertain ourselves with token crisis or token fights that fizzle out as quickly as they appear - the duration of a tiktok video.
I think by 'softness' the OP was leaning more toward the idea of 'fragile' as opposed to 'weakness'.
As in: "prone to outrage" and/or "reactionary" .
FFS my roommate’s company banned custom emoji in Slack because some committee got trolled by 4chan into thinking :pepe: constitutes hate speech. I’m not making this up...
If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.
> If you have an issue with your employer, find a new job.
I used to say that too. But there's a catch. Our government sets economic policy. Economic policy governs citizens' ability to find and obtain work, ultimately their ability to prosper. If the economic policy is "anything goes" then we will see and have seen rise of economic machines that suppress freedom of expression in the service of increasing shareholder value. The questions I think we should be asking is "does this make sense?" and, "have the goals outlined in the constitution been effectively achieved?". If government has enacted policy that yields an environment where people are not actually free to express themselves, is this not a failure of government to secure those basic freedoms?
I'd be a lot more comfortable telling people not to bother with oppressive employers if, for example, we had a concept of UBI so that people could feasibly sustain themselves in absence of a private economic machine writing their paycheck.
Here is some reading on this topic: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
In short, I am aware of the status quo but I think interpretation is ripe for a modern revamp given trends over the last decade.
It’s sad that you don’t see the difference between PC culture and opinions themselves. Being literally racist is not the same thing as being « cancelled » for being unjustly called one because of some social media witch hunt.
Also a lot of corporate choices in contexts like this are marketing choices to a certain demographic.
Being literally racist is indeed not an opinion and not allowed (like in our constitution in France since more than 200 years), but this has nothing to do with PC culture (an American thing unfortunately getting traction here too).
Telling people which causes they must publicly support or else be assumed an enemy? Does that ring any bells? I swear there's another regime in human history that made you hang flags outside your house to show your clear support. This comparison is made to death so I won't name it, but the similarities - despite accusations flying in the other direction constantly - are constantly increasing.
Removing TV shows from Netflix because somebody covered their face in black paint, with no regard for context or what was being made fun of it? (hint: it wasn't black people).
"Cancelling" somebody's career because their daughter said something that might be deemed racist? "Cancelling" somebody because they said something 10 years ago that might be racist? Absurd.
I honestly think our society is getting soft. You cannot disagree with somebody without them immediately deciding whether or not they can publicly shame you or if you broke any laws in the process of hurting them. Comedy is getting less and less funny, debate is increasingly meaningless because you have to tip-toe around everything. We are making society blander and less diverse in the name of diversity.
Diversity at all costs: except diversity of opinion.