But the casualties of prior cancel culture were usually public figures who did racist or sexist things, not people who criticized the administration? I can’t believe you don’t understand this distinction.
You’re right, but would you also agree there is a difference between a bunch of people in social media saying, “we don’t like this racist person, you should fire them.” And a government official saying, “we don’t like what our critics say, we’re going to revoke their ability to broadcast unless they fire their employee”.
Government officials are not merely representatives of a bunch of people, they have vested power and have sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
Whereas groups of people can get together and decide to boycott whatever they want, government officials cannot direct such activities. That's the right to free association and expression protected by the first amendment. The only way you're ever going to get rid of "cancel culture" is if you remove that right. If people can't decide for themselves what they want to buy, and if they can't decide to associate with similarly minded people, there is no first amendment right to free speech.
And as bad as everyone says cancel culture is, no one has proposed a model where free speech is maintained yet cancel culture is forbidden. Most models proposed to are explicitly anti-free speech. The rest are just fascist, which incidentally that's the plan this administration is going with. So congrats, maybe you got rid of cancel culture, but you took down the first amendment with it.
This will probably not live long on hacker news because people here are basically distracting themselves from the constant barrage of American politics, but it’s pretty clear this regime doesn’t care about the first amendment.
This submission was flagged by HN users. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a couple minutes ago.
Not sure if this makes me more or less "complicit" (except insofar as such perceptions are monotonic, so can only become more, never less), but I have to agree with the flaggers here. OP is an opinion piece about a Major Ongoing Topic that is so major and so ongoing that the bar for Significant New Information is too high for most opinion pieces to clear.
If that convoluted sentence doesn't make sense, it's probably because I'm using HN moderation jargon—but there are many explanations available:
But don’t you control who is allowed to flag a post? Don’t you control who is allowed to vouch for a post? Don’t you review the flags that users add and remove them when a submission is inappropriately flagged?
Anyone with karma > 30 can flag a post or vouch for a dead post. We try to review all the flagged submissions but there are too many for us to look closely at them all.
No, that seems a fair request, I like that idea! But I can also see that it's not likely to be implemented.
Though I'd see that transparency as a step forward, it's very likely to generate flamewars and even more discussion on the topic. If I was a mod I'd probably weigh the pros and cons of that to be negative overall.
All eleven thousand words were hand-typed. No AIs are used or abused in the making of any of my blog posts. (Because I write to think, because writing is nature's way of showing me how sloppy my thinking is. So it goes...)
If you don’t mind a tangent, this is close to my way of working out thoughts as well, including with code.
When I write code, it’s as much a cognitive tool as it is a tool to make things happen in the system. It develops thoughts as much as it develops system behavior.
Involving AI changes this quite a bit, but I feel like I’m making my way to a balance where it supports rather than replaces (or worse: disrupts) my cognitive processes.
Not at all, I'm all about tangents. The blog post itself is a tangent.
Programming is writing for me. So, yes I am the same... I need to type (or sometimes write it longhand), to make progress.
I gave LLMs a fair shake, but generative mode usage overwhelms my nervous system. I could use 'em, maybe, for pattern-recognition. But using an expressive language (Clojure) means I can eyeball my source code and/or grep through it to maintain a good enough view of my system. This also applies to most third-party code I use from the Clojure ecosystem. Libraries tend to be small (a few thousand lines of code), and I can skim-read through them quick enough.
I know there is a black art to it that one is supposed to learn, in order to get useful results, but so far, the incentive isn't strong enough for me.
So, hand typing / writing it is... might as well feel satisfied using my nice keyboard and little notebook, on my way to obsolescence. No?
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