I'm a leftist and all the leftists I hang out with have some grubby-ass humour that wouldn't fly anywhere 'civil'. We just don't make racist/transphobic/etc jokes. It's honestly not that hard and this idea of the oversensitive progressive is overplayed and not grounded in reality.
Social exclusion is an overused form of punishment. It eliminates any chance of education or understanding on either side. Done often enough, and it polarizes everyone.
I think it's a vicious cycle. If you harshly punish people for saying certain things, you create taboos. That causes people to avoid discussing these taboo topics. Everyone knows that they're bad things, but there's none of the debate where you can practice fleshing out exactly what your objections to those ideas are.
Then when someone says those things, you have trouble articulating why they're bad, and then you fall back on the threat of social exclusion.
"Cancellation" is often used in the same way the pillory used to be - making an example of one, as a warning to the rest.
Whilst it's still bouncing around as a thing, discussions simply aren't happening. You can't query aspects of cancel culture, without fearing that you'll be next...so you type something banal.. you decide it's safer to say "N-word" even in contexts where you're directly quoting ... nope, I'm definitely not going to say it here.
It's a lot more than social exclusion. It's purposeful social polarization, functionally driven by virtue-signaling and popularity-contest dynamics. And this is just as true wrt. the "canceled" as wrt. the "cancelers" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Question is if it's a bad thing or not. I mean, people with questionable morals or worldview have been hanging out for all of human history. We could complain that ostracizing people who became members of the Klan makes the Klan happen, but at least then they're over there being racist at Klan rallies and not in the middle of the public square.
Who gets to decide what a questionable moral is?
The offenses in the article seem to be a whole lot less severe than being a member of the KKK.
Where is the line? If I make a donation to the Republican party, does that mean I have questionable morals? Roughly half the country is Republican, do they all have no morals?
That is what the article is trying to grapple with.
Demonizing people who have a different upbringing, culture, and worldview as being wrong just because they don't share a set of values with you is to be part of the problem.
It's a modern analog of a European explorer viewing native Africans as savages because they don't have the same culture and values that you do.
I grew up in a socially conservative Republican family, and became liberal in my late teens. And that's exactly why I am against ostracizing people who hold conservative Republican views.
I became a liberal today because liberals took the time to have civil conversations me about my intolerance, and I realized that liberals were right. I am grateful to the people who did that for me, and I want to extend the same courtesy to others.
Pragmatically, if liberals had ostracized me or "canceled" me, it's quite likely that I would still hold those intolerant views today. By taking the stance that "we don't talk to Republicans", liberals are cutting off the only mechanism by which Republicans become liberals. And those people who you alienate instead of converting become angry, and that anger motivates them to go to the polls. Do you want Trump to get re-elected? Because what you're doing is contributing to Trump getting re-elected.
> It's obvious half the country has questionable morals
Just because someone disagrees with you or has different priorities or ideals doesn't make them bad people. If anything, this says more about you than it does about them.
I'm no trump supporter, but that's a straw man. Not every person who voted for trump believes those things. It seems like you're the intolerant one here, who pigeon holes people into neat little buckets.
The problem here is that the popular perception of which ideologies are considered "radical" is swiftly expanding.
The Westboro Baptist Church has been held up as an example of the "radical" Christian right for over 10 years. They know that they are reviled and play it up to keep getting attention. Meanwhile, if you read the stuff that Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal wrote (both are mentioned in this article) - it's clear that they both thought they were not taking positions that are out of the mainstream liberal view of acceptability. And if you talk to people who would not consider themselves "woke" they would find their writings to be very tame as well. This is why this situation is so interesting - these so-called "radicals" didn't begin to consider themselves different until they were suddenly isolated for expressing things that didn't seem very radical at all.
If you think that Klan members were ostracized from society (rather than being local centers of power) and that all they did was harmlessly rally outside of public places, you seem not to know the first thing about the Klan.
Even if that was just a hastily/poorly chosen analogy, there's still a point to be made: groups of powerful, immoral people do not stay on the sidelines of society for long.
The problem is when all of the progressives opponents start banding together, there might just be more of them than there are progressives and then, whoops, game over. There are a lot of centrists and liberals that the progressives have alienated.
Your "when even" isn't particularly accurate. Obama was always a relative centrist. It's just that many consider it radical to think that we should do simple things like provide most people with access to healthcare.
The "even" in "even Barack Obama" isn't about him being super far left, then "even" is about the fact a former president has to be the one telling people their tactics aren't working.
And then they go on to ignore his advice because he is insufficiently left. Which ironically proves how prescient his advice is.
> Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.
Neither side has it. The people with money have it, as always. Follow the money, and you can predict who gets cancelled and who doesn't.
Though there is an argument to be made for companies vastly overestimating the short-term negative financial impact of "offending" the various tiny, non-conformist factions in society due to how loud they are, and underestimating the long-term loss of faith caused by acting in league with those small factions against the majority of the population due to the "silent" in "silent majority".
Why was this flagged? I found this an incredibly interesting view into this 'cancel culture' that I've heard referenced vaguely, but never described explicitly. With an added bonus of getting an up-to-date view on the "things you can't say" in 2019. I would love to see the smart folks of HN discuss it.
I didn't flag it, but have you seen the comments on this thread? I don't blame whoever did flag it.
There are many people in here not discussing this topic in good faith, and one person in particular who is flooding the comments with intentionally inflammatory and low-effort comments.
I wish HN could have an adult conversation on this topic too, but it's not going that way so far. Maybe someone can re-post this on a weekday so we don't ruin Saturday for one of our mods.
Unfortunately, yes. This is not the first time I've seen this pattern play out here.
Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the same way. If the mods are around, they can sometimes step in early enough to encourage good dialogue and nip the bad actors early on. But when that doesn't happen, these threads will usually be dominated early-on with bad content from ideologues, and end up even worse because those comments end up shaping the dialogue into a flame war.
So many HN readers just flag the whole post when it's obvious that the comments have strayed too far outside of the HN guidelines for discourse. I don't do that myself or condone it, but it's not uncommon.
Sometimes the article will end up being re-posted with greater mod oversight to prevent both agenda-flagging (when people really do flag on-topic articles to prevent others from seeing it) and to fix the problem caused by lousy comments where the good replies need to be de-coupled from low-effort parent comments. This thread clearly needs moderation for both of those issues, but it may not happen today.
It's quite tiring to see people abusing the Flag link when they don't want some news seen by others. I wonder if it's the same group of people doing so over and over.
It's of interest to hackers, and it's a subject that many tech people are clearly passionately interested in. It explicitly sheds light on a cultural trend that exists and has a lot of influence, but is not obviously visible unless you are active in certain social circles. It's obviously within the HN guidelines.
Quoting from the guidelines, what to submit:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Love that this article is flagged now, too. Maybe it's ironic - an article from NY Times (liberal bastion), "cancelled" for discussing cancellation in a neutral light?
This fundamentally comes down to a difference in opinion: do you change minds by rejecting people and making them outcasts (your approach, I'd guess) or continuing a dialogue while maintaining your principles?
The former approach, um, isn't working (even if it might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside for being morally righteous).
Please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. It isn't what this site is for, it's tedious, and it destroys the intellectual curiosity that it is for. For that reason, we ban accounts that do it.
If you check my posts from the last 24 hours, they have all been downvoted and probably flagged after these posts, despite being completely unrelated to this discussion and previously upvoted.
You have a serious dogpiling and retaliatory downvoting/flagging problem on HN, and the sooner you realize it, the better. There is a definite right-libertarian bias on HN, whether you want to acknowledge that or not. Everything not toeing that line is attacked and downvoted.
Respectfully, I will post as I see fit. Website fake karma points are meaningless.
The other side thinks that HN's bias is liberal-SJW-Marxist etc. People notice most, and remember most, what they dislike. Some random examples—there are zillions like these:
Look closely and you'll find that ideological flamebait gets downvoted, flagged, and moderated on all sides here. The issue is the flames, not what color they burn.
HN has a strong US bias, which makes it tend right-wing compared to the rest of the developed world. Additionally, it also has a strong SV bias, which makes it tend libertarian.
Your picture of HN's ideological bias is an afterimage of things you notice and dislike. Those burn more into the retina. If you had opposite ideological tastes, you'd have the opposite afterimage, as many readers do. Here's one from this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976. Don't like these examples? Here are others:
FWIW, HN's community is 50% in the US and 10% in SV. I don't agree that it has a strong SV bias. SV topics are common, but how commenters feel about SV—or what they imagine SV to be—is deeply divided and somewhat on the negative side. That's a natural consequence of the topics being divisive and so little of the community being based here.
No, it's a "burned afterimage", it's a clear observation based on reading HN for many years (and later signing up to comment). I don't base it on specific cases, it's an overall trend.
Cherry picked examples aren't enough to change the fact that the dogpiling is real.
Stop deflecting from the problems with your posts using a persecution claim, which is orthogonal to the objection by dang. Puffing up your chest with self-righteousness about the "right-libertarian" bias of the news guidelines doesn't fix your bad commenting.
> Making people outcasts for their shitty opinions is a historically proven method.
Could you give a example of this method being successful? If it's a "historically proven method" surely there are some examples of it being successful.
Lets look at this in reverse. If we (liberals) were kicked off Reddit/Hacker News/Facebook, would you just give up demanding tolerance? Or would you get angry, find/create your own community, and campaign for politicians who support your ideals? If this strategy wouldn't work on you, why do you think it will work on conservatives?
The latter approach certainly hasn't worked either.
Look at the rise of white fascism in America. It grew out of the free-speech open dialogue wild west internet (4chan, 8chan etc) and became so radical that it's racked up quite a body count thus far.
I don't think cancellation is about changing the person-being-canceled's mind on a given opinion. I believe it functions entirely to signal to the rest of society and culture that such positions and actions are unacceptable.
But like, that's not working because the approach isn't being used judiciously. Weinstein was cancelled, as are YouTubers who cancel them selves. Its used when someone messes up a pronoun, and when someone is a serial abuser of women for 30 years.
So the term and the approach is broken. If everyone can be accused, without evidence, of anything and end up being cancelled, that is sending a signal. Just not the one you want.
> Look at the rise of white fascism in America. It grew out of the free-speech open dialogue wild west internet (4chan, 8chan etc) and became so radical that it's racked up quite a body count thus far.
This is incredibly misinformed. White fascism in the US predates the internet[1].
You do realize that conservatives are still allowed to be intolerant, right?
All your attitude achieves is that it ensures that intolerant people never hear real arguments against intolerance that might change their mind, so they go and vote for Trump. What you're doing is leading to Trump's re-election.
Sure, it has a conservative cast, like the New Yorker has a liberal cast. Although I'd argue that it's more libertarian than conservative most of the time; for instance, I don't think I'd ever see Breitbart publish a defense of polyamory, which Quillette did last week.
On the other hand, being forced to Gab/Quillette means these people get far less mainstream exposure. Furthermore, those on the path to radicalization often see the true spirit of the ideology when the leaders move to more extremist-accepting platform and are able to reject the beliefs.
When reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate the problem moved around for a little bit, but it promptly died. Or when the white nationalists were forced to move to Voat, their numbers dwindled.
> When reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate the problem moved around for a little bit, but it promptly died. Or when the white nationalists were forced to move to Voat, their numbers dwindled.
I don't buy this. Do you have any actual evidence for this?
That study shows that bigots didn't move from r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown to other subreddits.
That study does not show that bigots simply disappeared or became less bigoted. Nothing in that paper indicates that the bigots didn't simply move to other online communities (i.e. Voat), or take their bigoted conversations offline.
I watched and it has me convinced to a certain extent. However, he mostly looks at well known comedians/actors on TV or in movies. There are other people on YouTube that have been taken off the platform or demonetized and that is another issue. To the extent that it ruins someone life, I’m sure most people can handle being taken down or having to change their career aspirations, but it led one individual to shoot up YouTube and take their own life. Looking at several of the better scenarios doesn’t make the worst case scenario not real.
Too true. And they don't have a clue.