Yes. "Cancel culture" is, apparently, the result of a combination of the observation of mass unfairness, and the public voicing of reactions to bad behavior. Both of these things are natural and do not represent a change in culture - what's changed is the social internet's inherent (i.e. it would happen regardless of any bias) effect of making both things hyper-visibile (which multiplies, since more visibility of the former produces more instances of the latter, which in turn are also more visible).
The reaction to cancel culture is mostly a dissatisfaction with this completely natural problem, but which attempts to paint it as a whole-cloth invention of their political enemies, and uses highly cherry-picked examples of bad outcomes to falsely represent the whole massive phenomenon.
In short, when hundreds of millions of people's voices are public by default, every opinion, thought, or emotion looks like a "mob".
I flag them because they're bait for this sort of resentful complaining.
Normally I hide them rather than look at the comments, too, but I went "maybe this one is better?". And it's not. Standard cancel-culture hand-wringing about literally nothing, by an author whose claim to fame is finding increasingly nasty things to say and claiming that no, it is everyone else who is mean.
It's tiresome, HN doesn't need it, flag and move on.
> I flag them because they're bait for this sort of resentful complaining.
That's an interesting perspective. Personally, the stuff about not being able to get a lawyer to represent one is deeply concerning (to me, at least). I'd much prefer if this didn't happen, because innocent until proven guilty is an incredibly important feature of our society.
Can you clarify what exactly you feel like the resentful complaining is?
Considering the article directly discusses how professors and professionals are self-censoring because of the woke community threatening their livelihoods, I have to say you are quantitatively wrong.
I would agree, except that flamebait is whatever goes against the consensus opinion, regardless of whether the article or post is well sourced discussions and rational.
So I have sympathy are there really aren't many options for those who are frustrated with the narrow views around here, and where even daring to suggest that this is the case, means that they stand to be accused of flamebait.
Even if you're right, there are degrees of inflammation and it's important to avoid the hotter ones.
> the narrow views around here
Hmm, I'd be careful about such generalizations—they usually come from a much smaller set of data points than it feels like they do, resulting in false feelings of generality. People who go down that path mostly end up feeling like "around here" is dominated by the views they most dislike, which is usually neither a pleasant nor an accurate perception.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html