I think there's some truth in what you say, but as a counterpoint, consider this essay Paul Graham wrote a few weeks back: http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html . Namely this part:

  The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions. It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone.

PG and the parent comment are saying the same thing. The problem is when the conventional-minded person becomes stuck in a convention that is no longer true. That doesn’t necessarily mean that said convention was _correct_, but that what _was_ conventional is no longer so.

It used to be _conventional_ to have scantily clad “booth babes” in pretty much every technical conference’s vendor room (worse at things like CES, but I remember going to a mid-2000s VMworld conference where there were some booth babes). At some point—in part because of pushback against the sexism of “booth babes”—it became embarrassing to have them. I remember discussions on various sites (IIRC, including HN) where people lamented “feminism” for the disappearance of booth babes. Ultimately, the people who lamented it couldn’t keep up with the changes in convention.

It used to be _conventional_ to be casually sexist or racist in the office. The convention changed. The people who are supposedly being “canceled” have been unable to keep up with the convention. It could be personal sexism and/or racism, or it could simply be systemic sexism and/or racism and they haven’t _quite_ caught the memo that the convention changed.

hmm maybe I've misunderstood the parent comment or the PG essay. I read them like this:

Parent comment: I haven't felt censored, therefore there is no problem.

PG essay: This isn't a good argument for the absence of censorship, since some people adopt their opinions wholesale from the dominant orthodoxy of their times, making it logically impossible for them to say anything heterodox. Such people would therefore never feel censored.

Anyway, that's my take. How do you you see them as saying the same thing? I think the PG essay does talk about conventions changing, which you did a very good job of illustrating with your booth babe example...though in the essay, he seems more interested in good opiions that run counter to current conventions rather than bad ones that convention endorses (like booth babes).

> I haven't felt chilled at work, and haven't felt any need to adjust my behavior or the things I say in any way.

I expect that's probably because you happen to be of a similar viewpoint as the majority of the folks you work with.

> I think many of those words have always been wrong

True, but many of them haven't. Over time, it's gotten to the point where expressing a liberal view at a workplace that mostly conservative, or vice versa, is likely to get your fired for being a bad person. The same is true of a lot of specific talking points. Talking politics at work has never been a great idea, but it's gotten to the point where talking about anything that politics talks about is a mine field.

The real issue is that the amount of stuff we can talk about is getting more and more limited. This also increases the chances of talking unknowingly/mistakenly about a touchy subject.

Indeed. I grew up in the USSR so I am pretty good with the whole "don't talk about this over the phone/in earshot of somebody you don't trust/outside your kitchen" game. However, the rules in the later USSR were clear as the forbidden topics have not changed every week. In the modern USA anything can become political in an instant and there is no way this is sustainable. If J.K. Rowling can get cancelled then nobody is safe. It's more resembling the early USSR, where people purging public enemies last week became the public enemies themselves this week and their accusers were purged the next week.

J.K. Rowling hasn’t been cancelled. She’s been told that her words are hurtful to a vulnerable group of people and that she’s repeating some well-refuted lies. She keeps doubling down on those lies and her hurtful comments.

But she’s still worth a stupid amount of money and she still has her publishing contracts. She’s received some pretty disgusting hateful comments _back_ (which is inexcusable), but most objections are specifically because she’s repeating toxic hate speech.

Compare this with the 22 transgender people murdered in America so far this year: 22 transgender people have been killed so far this year — almost the total toll for 2019 (https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...).

Being told that one’s words are hurtful is not the equivalent of being purged in the early USSR (such purges were quite often literal with use of bullets).

She has an opinion others don't like and she has all the money she will ever need. Same with TechLead (youtuber). So both of them are speaking out, and they can do so because they literally have more "Fuck You" money sitting in a bank than most of us can make over our lifetimes.

Her words are resonating with a lot of women, and more than that, there are many more women who are afraid to agree with her publicly. Brenden O'Neil does a great talk about Orthodoxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA

I'm not going to say what I think about her statements, but I do think she has a right to say them. Dismissing them outright is dismissing the many people who are genuinely worried about legislation changes that affect what we can and cannot say.

I have said nothing about her right to say her statements, as wrong-headed and ignorant as I think they are.

Her critics also have every right to express their disgust with her support for transphobic “thought-leaders”. The complaints about “cancel culture” are _mostly_ that people who have never had their opinions challenged are now being challenged and called out for hurtful statements.

I am sorry my message was not clear enough. I did not say that J.K.Rowling is broke or that being cancelled is as same as being sent to Siberia/executed in 1930s USSR.

All I said is that similarly to the 1930s USSR rules of what is "hate"/"counter-revolution" are changing so quickly and abruptly that even people who had been dedicated to the cause are routinely found guilty. E.g. just a couple months ago Rowling was an inspiration for women, an advocate for LGBT, feminism and other causes. Now she is being told that her words are hurtful. It's as same as some NKVD officer, who busted the counter-revolutionaries for criticizing the great ally of the USSR, Germany, get busted himself for being a German spy. And no, I don't mean that Rowling was busting somebody for criticizing Germany or is a German spy.

I don't think many people are worried they'll be told off or get into an argument, they're worried about getting fired in the middle of a joint recession/pandemic. J. K. Rowling has been getting herself into trouble supporting various people who got fired, for example.

It's also worth noting that trans people are a fraction of a percentage of the population. Most people won't know anyone personally. It's easier to hate a distant figure who you've never met, particularly when they only end up in the news for being near the Kardashians, leaking government secrets, or getting upset at a beloved children's author. Not a lot of people know who e.g. Lynn Conway is, and that's a shame.

Let’s be honest though, “liberal” workplaces are the most likely to be cancelling. A public school fired a teacher for simply tweeting that “Trump is our president.” Tweeting in support of Obama would rarely, if ever, result in any notice in most schools.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2020/07/21/...

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/12/02/texas-education-agen...

https://stream.org/this-catholic-school-teacher-was-fired-fo...

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/2/20751822/google-employee...

However, the be fair, some people have been fired by conservative companies as well:

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/12/lifelong-conservative-re...

However, you are far more likely to be “cancelled” if you don’t toe the left or far left party line. Especially at tech companies.

‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'