“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...

Goes to show the fear that everyone shows about this topic is almost always overblown. Assuming you aren't actually Harvey Weinstein and didn't do anything criminal, the worst that happens in every other case is you get the same job or even better for a different company a few years later. Brendan Eich and Mel Gibson still have no trouble finding work. Cancellation doesn't ever seem to be a life sentence.

James Damore seems to be doing fine, just not at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-damore-b277b62b/ (interesting that he doesn't name the startup, though).

I don't believe "they'll recover eventually" is in any way an excuse for "let's ruin this person's life [temporarily] for fun". They got fired and are likely unable to have a stable life for a year. I sure wouldn't like to get fired and have the paparazzi in front of my house for the next month.

> Goes to show that the fear everyone shows about this topic is almost always overblown.

Sounds like the right amount of fear to me. Some people don't have the privilege to go without a job for a year. Some people don't have the mental fortitude to deal with the crap that ensues.

People shouldn't need to worry about getting fired because the people of social media didn't agree with what they said.

You're being somewhat generous here.

Yes.

> She posted a joke on Twitter mocking the idea that white people couldn't get AIDS.

Even if you believe the subsequent backtracking, that's still a profoundly stupid thing to be doing in that circumstance, and it shows a complete lack of any critical thought as to how your actions and words are perceived.

Of course I believe the subsequent backtracking. Have you read the New York Times article? Most people aren't racists.

> ... a complete lack of critical thought as to how your actions and words are perceived.

A lot of people have times when they don't think about how their words will be perceived. I sure have, and I'm sure you have too. However, I do not believe such minor stupidity should result in immediate loss of job, without warning.

Too be honest, that depends entirely on the joke and her role, doesn’t it?

However, the term "canceled" itself is more typically about a specific and recent set of peers and biases - people on the right who are angry that people on the left are telling them to stop using the f-g or n-word, etc or angry that guys are getting outed for doing exactly the rape-y crap they themselves did and normalized and probably celebrated when they were in college.

Now, I honestly don't know if Louis CK should have had his career ended because he was pervy (pulled his junk out a lot, right? I get these stories confused), but that is more a function of social media being a huge, new megaphone for ostracizing people, not that the left is on some spectacular cancel rampage as it is normally characterized. We do need to grapple with how to deal with this new megaphone, I agree.

However, again, mostly this angst is not about a genuine desire to be good citizens and calling out dangerous corner cases. If it were, we'd be having a very different and much more constructive conversation. Most of this angst is really about the right wanting to keep being the right and going back to good old days, defensively dismissing the way the good old days were actually pretty terrible for a lot of people and we've learned a lot about how to be better humans. Of course there are cherry picked examples (in a population of 7B you can probably found thousands). But those examples don't change the underlying dynamics and motivations of what is going on here on average*.

If I see something I disagree with on the Internet, maybe a joke gone wrong, I do not necessarily have to like it. But I will, nonetheless, celebrate that they are able to post what they have without facing potentially career-ending repercussions from the other side.