[oisdk]

> "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!"

You see how it comes across as a little ridiculous when you equate "being cancelled on twitter" to "being a literal political prisoner"? Especially when there are actual political prisoners, in prison, in the US right now?

[free_rms]

Losing your livelihood, in a nation famous for it's relative lack of safety net, is in fact a big deal.

Here's the thing, you don't have to pick a side so hard. It's not, either we get this dude fired for citing a study about the 1968 riots or you're in favor of the border patrol arresting citizens without due process. These things are actually highly unrelated, and both can be bad.

[oisdk]

I mean I agree with you: broadly I think things like the Yascha Mounk case are bad (I mean there are even better examples on the left: take Matt Bruenig, for instance), but like it's totally insane to say it's the main authoritarian crisis in the US today in the midst of brutal police violence.

Also, I do think that the Mounk or Bruenig case are actually a little different from "cancel culture": they seem much more like political machinations at the places those people worked. Like I think either of those things could have happened just as easily 20 or 30 years ago. When I think "cancel culture" I think more about random people getting twitter mobbed for saying something offensive.

Really I think it's an issue of emphasis. And I think identifying some social pressure to be more "woke" with threat of ridicule on social media as being the first step on the way to totalitarianism, while simultaneously insisting the police brutality is nothing of the sort, reveals quite a lot about people's lack of perspective and warped priorities.