Canceling | ContraPoints on HackerTube: recommended by 7 Hacker News commenters across 6 separate months, 2020–2025.
commentary · evergreen
A long video essay by Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints on cancel culture, drawing on her own experience of being pile-on targeted by other leftists. It is theatrical and discursive, mixing argument with performance.
HN commenters recommend it as a more thoughtful, balanced and personal take on cancel culture than usual discussion.
“I think that it’s useful to hear a balanced take on cancel culture”
11 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
▶ this video I think that it’s useful to hear a balanced take on cancel culture from someone that’s not, frankly, some Hollywood figure making dumb “cancel culture” jokes because they’re secretly pooping their pants over when it’s going to happen to them.
in “Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday” · View on HN
Yep; to say nothing of the psychological effects of being told that the whole world hates you. That sounds really traumatic. I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter: ▶ this video Or the TED talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" from 2015: [link] We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back. I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
in “Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books” · View on HN
The fact that you are not witnessing the consequences a lot of people on the left are subjected to is part of the problem. Social media works better when it is able to isolate people into their own bubble, and to see the other as the source of all that is bad in the world. I wish you good luck, getting out of there is difficult. Here's a video about how it was to feel cancellation of a leftist (from people also on the left!). It's long but you might find it entertaining. ▶ this video
in “Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon” · View on HN
Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shucks." Natalie Wynn talks about this on Contrapoints, worth watching as well - ▶ this video
in “What it's like to be cancelled” · View on HN
He is not talking about cancel culture. He is taking this very overloaded term as premise, as self-evident "fact" for the degeneration of academia and "the public discourse", to pave the way for injecting his super deep ideology about salvation by Love, Elon and Ayn Rand. I am not sure, if you are familiar with Joscha Bach, but he once said something about something, and people think he's super intelligent! None of these podcasts talking critical about cancel culture. There is a far, far better (critical) take on it within "marxist" culture, e.g. from Natalie Wynn. If Lex wants to talk cancel culture, why not invite her for example? She is an academic, smart and wrote and talked extensively about it. But that would be a little too open-minded wouldn't it? [§] ▶ this video [$] [link]
in “Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]” · View on HN
Well that was a really biased article. The more toxic parts of cancel culture are a problem yes, but to blame the left for Netflix deciding to remove episodes they shouldn't have removed is just silly, especially when the vast majority of people on the left don't agree with Netflix in those cases. I'd argue that the part complaining about "the liberal media" is even more applicable to right-wing media. What she's complaining about has been done by Fox News and Murdoch owned tabloids for ages now. And I have a very hard time taking anyone who recommends PragerU seriously. PragerU is an awful and dishonest propaganda outlet and should be treated as such. The fact that someone who claims to be pro choice, pro LGBTQ, and pro environmental issues would even claim that PragerU is "rational" makes me seriously doubt that person's judgment. Honestly, the idea of abandoning your social political viewpoints just because you think that some people on the left are mean is a really dumb way to go about deciding your political opinions and who to vote for. It's reactionary and inevitably leads to putting more shitty people in positions of power. You should stand for your beliefs even if that means having to agree with some dumb-asses. --- For a view on cancelling from someone on the left , and talk about experiences with it, I can recommend Contrapoints' video on the subject [1]. It's long but worth a watch if you want to hear someone talk about it who doesn't just suggest that people aban
in “Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech” · View on HN
I honestly have no idea what "cancel culture" is. I've been fired, expelled, shushed, shunned, ghosted, excluded, ignored, plagiarized, mocked, insulted, attacked, divorced, blocked. Publicly and privately. Such is the life of the rebel, the truthsayer. Every nail that sticks up is gonna get pounded down. Daring to point out the emperor is naked is an unforgivable offense. This is normal. Receiving criticism generally means you're saying something interesting. I'd hate to be so boring that I'm not even worth criticizing. FYI, Socrates was "canceled", and we're still talking about him. Further, society should "cancel" the trolls, heathens, hate mongers. That's what society is for. Filters are important. -- Edit: Counterpoint's "Canceling" is a much smarter, useful, timely treatise ▶ this video
in “The Fourth of July” · View on HN
> While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you. This conception of "cancelling" has little relation to how it actually happens, where the offending messages are often spread as far as possible first. If the goal is not to listen to someone, muting/blocking is almost always an option. Cancelling is trying to convince everyone else to shun the person as well often with misleading or reductive narratives about what they said/did and use of guilt by association. My favourite example is Contrapoints getting cancelled for featuring a short VoiceOver by a controversial trans person[1] in a video. [1] ▶ this video
in “TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale” · View on HN
Well, quite a lot of people have committed suicide. cf. ▶ this video Not everyone has The Comedy Store stage to relieve their depression.
in “Maids trafficked and sold to wealthy Saudis on black market” · View on HN
The argument "I haven't met a single..." is equally as strong as an unqualified "You are misinformed.", which I was responding to. Note that I asked for clarification :) Since I have you here, would you mind elaborating a bit more about your stance on "cancel culture"? I'll also elaborate a bit more on my stance. I think most people would agree that mobs by definition have no united agenda. It's a bunch of disorganized people with their own goals and motivations who all briefly get fired up about the same topic. Twitter mobs are a tornado of confirmation bias, where people in echo chambers spin up hot takes of current events to confirm their own worldview. The amount of meaningful debate that can be had in 280-character chunks is negligible. When people talk about "cancel culture", my impression is not that they think there is any sort of coordinated attack on right-leaning figures by prominent left-leaning figures -- only fringe conspiracy theorists believe that George Soros is sending out weekly lists of names that should be "cancelled" this week. It's that they believe Twitter is a place which has developed a culture of criticizing and ridiculing other users, public figures especially. I think it's undeniable that any time a public figure missteps, a vocal minority of people (e.g. angsty teenagers) on Twitter calls for the person to be fired or otherwise deplatformed, even before they have a chance to respond. Some people also receive death threats. So, I don't think it's
in “GitHub, fuck your name change” · View on HN
I think your post is a good way to split up some of the ideas in the article. I really think #2 is a good point, but I get frustrated at many arguments for #1. People are emotional beings and will seek out fights, but that doesn't mean all fights are arbitrary. People that talk too long about the Culture War on a meta level, without ever considering specifics and painting it all as pointlessly arbitrary, strike me like "both sides are the same"-type centrists, lacking any interesting positions or even understanding, and are just focused on feeling superior to both sides. Maybe the issue is I see concerns that we can address bigotry in media and harassment in other environments as the core of the "Culture War", and the worst instances of "cancel culture"[0] as weird outliers to it that can be fixed, but some others think of the worst instances of cancel culture as what the Culture War is about, and the saner conversations are weird unimportant outliers. But as long as we're taking the hundred-foot view of talking vaguely about "Culture War" and treating it as arbitrary arguments, we're not going to realize we're not even talking about the same thing, and it's just posturing around how we already felt about the phrase. [0] When I refer to the worst instances of cancel culture, I'm not referring to cases of celebrities just not getting renewed after publicly being bigots, but the cases where the backlash gets personal and mismatched for the issue. ContraPoint's video ▶ this video tal
in “The Internet of Beefs” · View on HN