ContraPoints
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2020–2025
1:40:28 · 6.3M views · Jan 2, 2020
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.
11 comments from Hacker News
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
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
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.
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]
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