Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | fc417fc802's commentslogin

Isn't it the passenger's fault for failing to purchase a seat that meets their needs? The airline isn't to blame for offering a cheaper alternative for those who find it sufficient. And other passengers certainly aren't to blame for using the product that they purchased.

Your link just redirects. I think the section linked below is better. I was surprised to learn that there's at least some amount of disagreement on the details depending on the context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Singular_nouns_endi...

The same page also covers the broader subject more generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessive_apostrop...

> One would therefore say "I drank the glass's contents" to indicate drinking from one glass, but "I drank the glasses' contents" after also drinking from another glass.

Every time I stop to appreciate these details that I never really have to think about I feel sorry for those forced to pick up English as a second language. Formal latin should have remained the language of academics and international trade. We really screwed up.


> under capitalism

Not capitalism but rather in any globalized and industrialized reality I would think. Anything beyond cottage production and you very rapidly lose the ability to propagate blame.


I think home made cottage production of tech (similar to Open source) might be an interesting proposition though. Like we as a community should support small tech more favourably than big tech and I think in many cases small tech is even more price competitive (while remaining sensibly and not burning/having VC money of course) as compared to large big tech which sometimes might be profitable in short term but they lock in.

Everything combined, I feel like its the time for a movement/ genuine support towards indie web or small tech (passionate people making software that they themselves want/wanted)


Seems like quite some assumptions are being made there. Can't work be done for intrinsic reasons? Can't artists (creators more generally) be insular or even reclusive?

It depends on if your question is about legality, morality, social stability, privilege of some sort, or perhaps something else.

If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.


I think it's different to the trolley problem in terms of trying to measure the outcome.

If we make decisions based on what will have the best outcome, well the trolley problem is trivial; minimise the negative outcome.

In the scenario of murder for the cancer cure, you're still left with someone who was murdered. My take is that this isn't any less bad than someone who was murdered for something other than the cure for cancer, which in turn means I would stop this murder even if it meant not curing cancer.


> you're still left with someone who was murdered

You've lost me. Isn't that also the case in any trolley problem? The trolley is a sort of satirical analogy. The thing actually being considered is "I get this good thing but I'm also left with this bad thing as a direct result".

I guess a key difference is before versus after the fact. Agreeing to the outcome to "pay" for what you want is different than deliberating over an act committed by the same person after the fact in the absence of any prior agreement. But if the only issue is the lack of an agreement then it's less a matter of "murder non-fungible" and more a matter of enforcing legal procedure for the sake of social stability. The state needs to maintain its monopoly on violence I guess.


> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".


Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.

I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim.

If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.

There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.


We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd.

> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.

Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.

For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?


I wouldn't agree with this change. And I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.

> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.

This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).

And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.


[flagged]


It's funny that exact same thing was said in another thread but it was talking about far left groups doing it ...

[flagged]


Not even close to true. You're all over this thread posting strange takes and carrying water for this guy. Actually, I remember you doing exactly that in many, many threads before. And you're always trying to protect unsavory characters with awful views and no one else.

It's pretty simple to deal with cancel culture without limiting speech:

First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem.

Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.


> First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it.

Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.

So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?


> The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

what would your alternative be?


Why do we need an alternative? Why should behavior driven by a mob mentality be desirable?

Because white supremacists are, from some abstract level, undesirable? And some have white supremacist tendencies, so there has to be some way of, at the very least, ignoring them and ensuring that its possible to ignore them.

Can you use those terms in polite company though?

It's strange. Clearly at some point society at large came to believe that the current crop of terms at the time was undesirable. Yet various modern analogues are treated differently.


Depends on what you mean by polite company, I think. I'm sure there are a lot of conversations among men, who are polite to each other, talking about women being on their periods or hysterical or whatever. Is that no longer the norm? My friend group doesn't do it but given the rhetoric we've seen on HN and elsewhere "locker room talk" is still a thing.

I don't think you'd need to be similarly selective about the phrase "toxic masculinity" at least on average. Hopefully you see the point I'm trying to make?

Of course it's also possible that I live in a slightly different bubble than you do.


If you replaced "males" in that sentence with ... well, let's be honest here, pretty much any other category, the statement would likely be deemed entirely unacceptable and the comment censored (ie [flagged][dead]) in short order.

Regardless of how the statistics for that specific set of behaviors break down my personal experience is that both the application and acceptance of such terminology (ie referring to various sets of behaviors which it might make sense to group together based on whatever metric) is highly selective in a manner that's convenient for the party expressing it. The statement is often true but the grouping superfluous, included only (seemingly) to push an agenda.


It's not just pop stoicism. For years now it seems to me that a lot of memes regarding personal conduct spread on social media that essentially try to dress up toxic behavior in a positive light and encourage it.

I'm aware that society had these same sorts of issues prior to social media but it's still depressing watching it play out.


Conversely, why should they matter? I'm not saying they shouldn't but I think it's worth pondering.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: