The punishment befits the situation. There's a profound difference between a normal worker supporting anti-gay-marriage causes with a donation and the CEO doing the same thing, since the CEO is near the top of the org chart and a large number of employees are under his org tree. The CEO's views reflect poorly on the organization and hiring practices to a more significant extent than any normal non-management worker
I don't think any CEO (bigoted or not) can retaliate against their employees for their sexual orientation - it's illegal. While it reflects poorly on him, it seems to be the norm in the U.S. to donate to lobbies.
It wasn’t illegal in all states until the recent Supreme Court decision.
I wouldn’t want someone in a position of power that went to Klan rallies on the weekend either. They aren’t going to outright say they are discriminating against you. They are going to say the person isn’t a “culture fit”.
When the donation was made when a super majority of United Statians opposed allowing same gender marriage. That said I've come to agree that leadership should be held to a higher standard. And IIRC Eich did not, and still has not, publicly expressed support for such marriages.
I'm thinking about this and am wondering, does this mean that in an ideal scenario (where CEOs of every company maximally considers the larger impact of their personal actions reflecting upon the company they're helming), they must all support the same things?
I can imagine two CEO's of companies A and B (which each own exactly 50% of an industry and are precisely equivalent in public visibility and internal policy). The CEOs are also identical in every way except that one supports a opinion M and the other supports a opinion M'
Assuming that they both make public their support, which one would get executed in the court of public opinion? Would it be fair for (any)one of them to get expelled from his/her post just because the masses collapsed the narrative to uphold either only M or M'? (I'm assuming that whether M or M' is the majority opinion is irrelevant)
The only solution I can see is that both CEOs collude and decide to either not support anything, or support the same, agreed-upon thing.
Assuming that is so, what if we extend this past 2 companies, and into 2000?
----
I'm not convinced that the punishment does befit the situation.
The leadership is expected to reflect and uphold company values, which may differ from company to company. Incidentally, we have a perfect case study with CFA and its COO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people refresher)
CFA's entire organization is built around family values and good Christian values. It starts from the ground level -- you can't become a manager without the company checking your friends and family. So that type of sentiment pervades the organization. The comments and donations were mostly in line with company culture. This isn't to say every CFA employee was anti-gay-marriage, but they value family enough that it is plausible that the employees would support the COO.
Mozilla is the opposite situation, emphasizing diversity and trying to cater to the (generally more socially liberal) tech community at large. Eich's donations flew in the face not only of the values Mozilla were trying to espouse, but also directly affecting a nontrivial number of its employees.
If Mozilla had the culture of CFA, Eich wouldn't have been removed. In order to uphold their image, Mozilla couldn't have kept him.
That there was 'punishment' for expressing an opinion that is not aligned with a particular world view, by donating money to support something that was in the majority world view less than a decade before ... should be terrifying. To everyone.
That someone supports the concept of "punishment" for expressing a view different from what you (and some collection of people) arbitrarily believe should be a widely held view ... is ... unconscionable. And quite frightening.
There's literally a science fiction short story about this. And it doesn't end well. I have to look up the title, haven't read it in 35 years or so.
The 'punishment' involved people saying they don't want to:
a. work for you
b. use your products
unless the guy goes.
That's a free action by free individuals. And the idea that we would force individuals to work for people they don't like or that we'd force individuals to use products from people they don't like is authoritarian.
Freedom to choose to work with someone also involves the freedom to choose to not work. Freedom of speech gives you the ability to say you like things and also say you don't like things.
"Eich donated $1,000 in 2008 in support of California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in June."
So he supported a ballot proposition which won. That was a majority political position.
I've worked at a company where every single meeting I had with a certain set of engineers started and rapidly devolved into a political narrative of how bad certain groups where.
I smiled and ignored them. I subconsciously made sure to avoid their input on important things.
The narrative was in-your-face progressive activist SJW to the max. Many people I privately spoke with in the company were sick of this idiocy, but couldn't see themselves speaking up, as they needed the job. They couldn't risk being fired by the company.
Imagine if you had to live that life.
Companies should not have political opinions or leanings.
Women and minorities have had to do exactly that. For decades. Which is where the backlash right now is coming from. Not just in one meeting but in most meetings. Talk to them, they almost all have hours of stories and examples.
Why do you assume that I am not a minority or that I have not experienced such discrimination? I am a religious minority and have experienced this my entire life.
Overt in school and grad school. Less overt but still there in professional life.
My family including my wife and daughter are minority and multiracial.
We don't get to fire anyone because we don't run the company. But if you want to say "I won't use this product anymore because I think they're bigots", then I will defend to the death your right to say that because Freedom of Speech is a beautiful thing.
Yes yes and being pro-slavery was at one point a majority political position too. Whether or not you agree with Eichs firing, the argument you're making to defend him is a remarkably bad one
Do you think that your current views will be acceptable by the standards of society 20 years from now? 50 years from now? If not, you are basically guaranteeing that on a long enough time scale, you (along with everyone else) will be cancelled.
I could see future societies tearing down statues of anyone who ate meat. Or anyone who opposed the legalization of cannabis. Society's morals drift in unpredictable ways. If we choose to judge everyone (past and present) by our current views, we'll never stop tearing down statues and renaming things.
The only way to prevent this is to recognize that people are products of the societies they grow up in. If either of us were born in the 1700s, we'd probably think slavery was acceptable. In general, people back then weren't evil, they were mistaken. And you don't punish mistakes by ruining someone's life and legacy, especially if the society around them is the reason for those mistakes. The same should be true for us today.
The year that Brendan Eich donated for the proposition against gay marriage (6 years before he was fired), 52% of Californian voters and the president (Barack Obama) agreed with him. This is why anonymous voting is important, so that it is harder to retroactively punish the other 7 million people that supported the proposition, many of whom have probably changed their mind since then.
Also, "big-government bigoted shit" would have to describe literally every government in human history before the year 2001 when the Netherlands formally recognized same-sex marriage as equivalent to opposite-sex marriage.
That's right. And the Chinese Exclusion Act was generally popular too. Also big-government bigoted shit.
That's the funny thing about bigotry. It doesn't matter how big your posse is. You can still be bigoted. For instance, oppression of the Uighur community is generally tolerated in China. The support is greater than the 52%. Still bigotry.
Yes, that is something you could always do. But are you going to hold it against every single individual Chinese who supports such oppression? How about ever Chinese who “supports” such oppression? The environment you’re in has a huge effect on the views you have; should you be allowed to rethink those?
I think it would be fair to hold it against anyone who believes it's acceptable. I'm pretty forgiving of those under a regime merely trying to survive, but if then they voluntarily gave 1000 RMB to a "Let's keep the Uighurs Oppressed" charity which tries to convince the Politburo that more attacks are better than fewer attacks, I think I'm going to judge them for using the instrument of the state as a weapon against people, yeah. And because my society is free, I get to judge. And because my society is free, I get to speak my mind. And because my society is free, I get to say, "I won't use this product".
And because my society is free, you get to say, "Oh okay, I'll do what you want" or you can say "Fine, don't use the product". We're just people interacting freely. And thank god for liberty.
Regardless of whether people agree with that decision or not, it is not the same as what is being talked about in the article. The article talks about mob justice rapidly impacting peoples' lives even though everything they did would be seen as extremely reasonable.
In the case of Mozilla, he wasn't only accused of supporting gay marriage, he donated money to groups whose goals were to get people to vote against gay marriage. There weren't actions taken due to misunderstandings as far as I know.
Also I think strong opposition to him as a CEO came from the employees, not outside partners cutting ties to avoid being associated.
He can believe what he wants, but I also have the legal right not to want a person in power who wants to discriminate against someone because he thinks an invisible being is going to reign hellfire and damnation in the country if you let gay people get married.
These are the same type of people who a generation earlier supported laws against interracial marriage.
The article was about people who were accused of beliefs they didn't hold, so this example is different.
Also, if lots of your employees threaten to quit, your company has a big problem. The examples in the article were about individual employees, two of which had employers that said the employees were fired for other reasons. In the example of mozilla, separate from agreeing with the decisions, the actions were known and done for known reasons. No one lied about why they did what they did.
> The article was about people who were accused of beliefs they didn't hold, so this example is different.
Is it?
I may be misremembering, but my impression was that Eich was pushed out because people interpreted his political donation as being indicative of a larger belief. I don’t recall Eich ever making a statement on the issue.
I’m not defending him here, so please don’t get me wrong. I’m only pointing out that there seems to be some level of inferring someone’s “true beliefs” in both cases. There’s a lot more of it in the article, granted, but it leads me to ask: where is the bar?
I think he donated his own money to an organization lobbying against gay marriage, so it doesn't seem like a huge leap. In any event, the article was about people who had much more abstract and ambiguous actions interpreted by an internet mob as them having ingrained bigoted beliefs, so I think there is a very wide gap.
I really can't believe we're still talking about this. He could easily have moved past what he did by making a short statement and a donation to an LGBTQ+-friendly cause. Instead, he was apparently completely unprepared for something that had been brought up internally at Moz many times and made a blundery, offensive non-response. That is what was disqualifying for the position of CEO.
That is not a counterargument to me -- I simply explained one of many ways that he could easily have kept the job (the easiest would have not to have been a bigot in the first place, but hey).
It's that he had no communication plan for an easily-foreseeable controversy that was disqualifying, not his views specifically.
Edit: Originally had Obama's stated opposition to gay marriage in the 2008 campaign but people keep trying to defend him in particular and that's not the point.
They're mostly all going to want to walk it back these days, but did we give Brendan Eich that opportunity? Is it available to everyone? Or should we cancel all of them too?
FWIW Obama was likely opposing it for expediency. The switch was made by a strategic Biden "gaffe" that allowed Obama to change sides while looking like his hand was forced. The same way that Bush-2.0 disclosed his cocaine use by a "betrayal" of an old friend.
Just to correct the record, the Mozilla guy controversy seems like it was about Prop 8 and that they were worried they were losing users due to the controversy.
The Obama admin's opposition and Justices appointed by Obama (and favored by Senate Dems) led the way to marriage equality.
Whether to 'cancel' is an entirely different issue, but I think you're being dishonest here. There was concrete action these Democrats took that defeated terrible discrimination.
I don't think the people who think gay marriage isn't a defensible position are particularly fond of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. At least they shouldn't be, for the reasons you cited and a myriad of others.
This is human nature. We need social movements like metoo and BLM because they are vehicles of change for the better. But eventually the outragers and virtue signalers will get into the game, and innocents will be taken down since they make easy targets for people looking to do some damage or boost their prestige. Your best bet when the tornado comes is to keep a low profile and guard your privacy like it was latinum.
Seeing as going to war and accepting civilian casualties has only been acceptable for the entirety of human history up to and including the present, I’m not so sure.
Tell that to all of the foreign countries we destroy trying to “bring democracy”. I guess people are okay with destroying property in other countries just not in their backyard.
What are you going to do? Charge the person who dredged up the info? Charge the people who express outrage over it? Charge the employer for bowing to public pressure? Things get complicated pretty fast once the shit starts flying. If you're the CEO and the company under your watch is at risk of being boycotted into bankruptcy while the mob outside is baying for blood, what do you do?
Is there really anything that the government should do if the mob is only boycotting?
No one is required to continue with their past buying habits once their mind has changed.
The word 'mob' implies unregulated violence, usually based on emotion and not reason. And the vast majority protesting racism appear to be peaceful and thoughtful.
> The word 'mob' implies unregulated violence, usually based on emotion and not reason. And the vast majority protesting racism appear to be peaceful and thoughtful.
That is correct but it’s not relevant to the specific scenario brought up here, which is if you’re on the wrong side of a group that is not peaceful and thoughtful. Those who are in such a position often receive death threats. The outrage of the internet that has latched on to something it wants to believe can lead to remarkably mob-like behavior, though with less physical violence usually.
He should definitely sue the person who dredged up the info. He was intentionally trying to destroy the life of this person.
I I were the CEO I would have helped this person into suing him, and mounted a communication campaign around all of this.
Or look at how other countries are running their internal affairs and perhaps learn from them. (Qatar, UAE, Oman, etc.) yes, they have issues pertaining to labor rights, but it doesn't mean they don't have solutions the US can't learn from, especially when it comes to SJW.
Was there a real risk that everyone tweeting about Emmanuel Cafferty were going to cancel their gas and electric service from San Diego Gas & Electric?
If a person shares a fake story to their friends and family, they should be at least slightly responsible for its accuracy. There should be a burden to at least research it before pressing share. Otherwise it’s legitimately libel
How would that work? A social norm against cancel culture might be a solution (though it's not clear how we would get there from here), but "organized mobs outraged at cancel culture"? I don't really understand what the intended effects would be -- canceling the cancellers? That doesn't seem like it would be against cancel culture, but only picking new criteria for cancellation.
The cancellers can be cancelled; this very article is an example. Show the public the chain of events that occurred, show the victims, and show the identities of the cancellers and the mean-spiritedness and illogic involved. And show, like Obama did[0], that cancel-culture progressivism is not what the the American left stands for.
We can (we must!) turn the left against cancel culture if the left is to regain the moral high ground and the trust of the voters. And, ironically, we'll make more progress that way on the issues that progressives care about than by using their methods.
The only solution is labor unions. You need a CONTRACT that determines what happens when a company wants to discipline or fire an employee. So firing is still possible, but it's a process that's negotiated and agreed to beforehand by two sides and generally not the first step (minus certain circumstances).
The truth is, people are fired for arbitrary and unfair reasons constantly. I'd imagine 1 out of a million times someone is fired for unfair reasons it has something to do with cancel culture.
Police unions are very different from ordinary labour unions. So, that is not a counter point, really.
(You could argue that I'm engaging in a "True Scotchman", but see this article [1]:
> Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
Really like public sector unions in general. When the other side of the bargaining table isn't capital but the representatives of the people, and those representatives are often beholden to the unions to get elected, the union isn't representing the workers against capital, it's representing the bureaucracy against the citizens and capturing the people's representatives to do it.
In some countries (e.g: in the EU) getting fired over a tweet would result in a lawsuit which the company would almost certainly lose and they would be forced to hire back the former employee.
The issue in the US is that the labour market is incredibly unjust towards employees and they have almost no rights.
Because the UK still has full EU law in its statute books, and it's home to a guy who was just fired for flying a airplane banner saying "White lives matter". Oh, they didn't just fire him, his girlfriend was also fired (from a different company) ... just for good measure.
But if he can sue and force them to rehire him I'd be very surprised. The problem is not merely what the law says, but that the institutions that enforce employment law are just as corrupted as everywhere else.
Unions are a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
The problem is that corporations are too large.
If a company wants to fire you over nonsense but there are 30 others in the same city who pay the same salary for the same work, they're doing you a favor. You don't want to work for a company like that anyway, when there are better alternatives.
When they're the only employer who will hire you without having to move your kids to another school district or take a salary cut by changing fields, you need them more than they need you and getting fired over nonsense is a major problem.
Make corporations smaller and more numerous and you don't need unions. This also happens to have major benefits for competition on the consumer side, so everybody wins.
I don't know about mobs, but I do know I'd never tie my livelihood (whether working for or taking contracts) with a company that I knew knee-jerked into reactionary SJW action based on context-free social media hearsay, because who wants that hanging over their head 24/7? That doesn't even really need a mob. People can individually decide to work for these groups or not and reap what they sow.
That's a little distinct from cancel culture overall, though, since there's still the question of boycotting people/organizations who demonstrably have done unethical things or hold unethical views. I tend to compartmentalize the work from the person more than some, but I don't begrudge people wanting to distance themselves from that - only when they do so without evidence of actual wrongdoing.
I’m seeing rumblings of this in some circles. They were not talking about “doxxing” in retaliation, though - they were talking about literally hunting them down.
I’m not old enough to have experienced when this sort of thing happened historically, but it certainly feels like we’re inexorably marching toward a violent breakdown of our society. It’s scary.
In two of these cases the obvious solution is labour laws. In Europe you can't get fired just because your employer wants to fire you. They have to have a legitimate reason.
- It is not the only solution and I definitely don't want anyone to go there.
- ... but the way things are happening right now it seems like a very possible that it might happen.
This is sad: I see so much hate even here. Why can't 2nd amendment people realize that banning E2E encryption is just another way to make ordinary people powerless? And why can't we see that there are legitimate reasons why the second amendment is there?
Why do we people here have to brag about how much they hate their relatives? It is sickening! We surely don't have to agree with our parents, siblings and other relatives in everything, and I certainly dont agree with HN in everything either but finding common ground seems important to me.
Never has the compartmentalization of personality (online and off) been more relevant. I only wish it wasn't under such ridiculous circumstances.
It's a different feeling to require a different set of emotions, opinions, and accounts, just to feel ease within a group (civilians) who may or may not have their own agenda to ruin your life for personal gain, as opposed to a corrupt government bent on silencing dissidence.
> Never has the compartmentalization of personality (online and off) been more relevant.
I assume that you aren't LGBT. Because we've been getting fired and murdered over failures to compartmentalize since time immemorial; our right to employment was only confirmed by the supreme court this month.
Huh? I'm directly addressing the point of the article.
Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied. It's unfortunate that while just in the aggregate social pressure is occasionally unjust in the specific, but that's what you get when you deny justice systemically.
> Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied.
This is 100% backwards; structural, institutional problems demand structural, institutional solutions. Want to end structural racism in the U.S.? Start from the clearest near-term goal, viz. reforming criminal justice. Then move on to the next most visible problem.
It's a kind of philosophical issue at root. Parallels can be seen in the both the Death Penalty in the US vs. UK and more generally in Innocent Until Proven Guilty in both legal systems.
In the UK the death penalty was abolished because it is untenable that one innocent is killed accidentally. Innocent until proven guilty (and I might be mistaking the actual thing here) means that it is indeed better for 10 guilty people to walk free than 1 innocent person be imprisoned.
If we reject some of these fundamentals for how we run our societies then we might repeat of the Terror during the French revolution. During the Terror they said "well, the mob cant be controlled, but it generally did good." Political philosophy and History can teach us many things.
It seems to me that we're in the middle of a witch hunt. The actual existence of witches (racists) is not necessary. Keeping the hunt on and amping it up is what's most important. If we can't find any real witches, we'll just have to make some up and assume the worst about them.
I wonder how the last witch hunt ended, and if that might be applicable here.
I also fully expect to see comments demanding that the article author, Yascha Mounk, be fired for daring to imply that something else might be of comparable importance to the witch hunt.
It seems to me as well -- we are in a witch hunt run amok. You do not need truth, you do not need actual witches, just keep raising fear. Once the fear is high enough, even those who do not support such causeless insta-firings would vote for it out of fear that if they do not participate in a witch hunt they may end up on a target list.
Personally, I work in a great place (large R&D lab), enjoy a lot of respect and an almost complete technical freedom to pursue interesting projects, good salary (not FAANG-level, but plenty for a comfortable life), etc. and I am seriously considering bugging out, at least for a year or two, exactly because of witch hunts. Our management is sane, but should I end up in a wrong bucket (and I will not participate in a witch hunt and will speak for a friend if he is attacked, so it is possible) no one would be able to save my ass.
A couple of friends that work in small companies (20 ppl or less) generally report a much saner environment, with no company-level witch hunts. I wonder if this is true overall -- smaller companies focus less on external politics and more on technical tasks, allowing employees to participate in politics, or not, in their free time.
Is this really typical? Or are we more aware of these “edge case” stories nowadays given social media?
Just seems we’re in the perfect storm for cherry picking outrage these days. But it’s hard to know if there’s a new or statistically novel pattern occurring.
It's true that he got a lot of attention after he appeared on FOX, but there's more to the story. You can read about it (and many other examples of cancel culture) in the controversial book "The Coddling of the American Mind": https://www.thecoddling.com/
Well, has he been proven wrong in his assessment of the situation thus far? I found myself supporting his side during the original debacle but also kind of wrote him off as a bit of a crank because he went on a sort of national tour about this supposed problem. Today, though? It's pretty damn clear he was calling it correctly. See the ACA5 vote in California today, for a very timely example.
In a culture, where appearances dominate, this is the end result. Look at any work place, it is all about appearances: appearance of doing the great job, appearance of managers' helping the company goals, appearance of being busy, appearance of product novelty, appearance that company X cares about African Americans, etc.
Extend this game of appearance to personal life, as others can capture your personal life and post it on twitter; then look at the consequences: losing the livelihood.
The United States (and perhaps other countries?) decent into mob "justice" has been breathtaking. Many people I've known for over half my life and known to be fairly reasonable people now routinely repost "make this person famous" posts pointing out a variety of behaviors deemed unacceptable without any evidence other than what's posted in an image. If you question the evidence or whether shaming someone as punishment is an appropriate response you're instantly vilified.
I have little doubt that I could pick a stranger at random, create a social media post with some baseless accusations and fabricated screenshots and get it shared extensively.
I really hope our society can find a way out of this, but I honestly don't see it.
It's been mob justice all along — just institutionalized and directed at minorities.
I agree that we are unlikely to find our way out of it any time soon, because the dominant majority is entirely unwilling to give up its institutionalized advantages.
And the strategy is to do that by... outing and destroying people who are demonstrably not racist?
Those of us who want real change here should have a strong interest in preventing the stories described in the article. You're right that we need people to want to change, and I'm afraid that these incidents give more ammunition to racists than they galvanize anti-racists. They certainly don't help to convince anyone in the middle to join our side.
Majority backlash, grievance and resentment is inevitable. Encouraging that sense of grievance by weighting one majority life over countless minority lives is counterproductive. Instead, keep perspective by maintaining a sense of proportion of the aggregate injustice. One guy getting fired is a drop in the bucket.
As a sort of “net suffering absolutist,” I find that to be somewhat ethically compelling (though many won’t).
As someone who wants to see these problems fixed - permanently - I’m just not sure that this approach gets us closer.
If it’s a drop in the bucket that discourages a large number of people from throwing their weight behind the solutions offered, then it’s no longer a drop in the bucket.
The attitude that "the wrongs done to me justify wrongs done to someone else" is exactly how every war and racial conflict has gone in the past. Even though momentum is currently on the side that you think is right, the precedent that is being set WILL come back to haunt you.
The way to resolve and defuse conflicts is to treat others better than they deserve to be treated. This is also more effective politically. See the second example in the article where research indicated that peaceful protests promoted by MLK were more effective than race riots later.
This result should not be a surprise. MLK promoted peaceful protests exactly on the theory that they would be more effective, based among other things on the experience of Ghandhi in India. Those lessons were copied a generation later and played a critical part in bringing down the Iron Curtain.
Violence begets violence. Forgiveness begets peace. Going out of your way to treat people with fairness is not just the right thing to do, it is also more effective.
If you're willing to ruin innocent lives to further your cause, then I cannot comprehend how it makes you morally superior to _them_ (whoever _they_ might be)
Are you keeping the score somewhere? Something like: "Today, we got 11 majority people fired for petty reasons, but it's Ok as it will improve the lives of 18 minority people"
> If you're willing to ruin innocent lives to further your cause,
No, I am not "willing to ruin innocent lives". I regard these cases as deplorable but inevitable statistical anomalies being highlighted inappropriately.
> Are you keeping the score somewhere?
I suppose that in a broad sense, I am. I don't believe that innocent people are being unjustly ruined as racists for no reason en masse. I think there's a handful of these cases.
In contrast, consider the ridiculous incarceration rates for Black Americans: 1 in 3 Black men will spend time behind bars in their lifetimes, while the rate for all US men is 1 in 17. That's millions of lives ruined.
So I will get worked up for each one of these cases in isolation. But I'm not going to allocate my outrage disproportionately to the tiny minority while ignoring the vast majority.
It's not a zero-sum conflict. When the bonds of ethnic loyalty are weakened and the bonds of cosmopolitan amity are strengthened, we all win, and our lives are all enriched.
As for "acceptable casualties": I certainly would not go along with such injustices as the three anecdotes described in the article if they were playing out before me. Outside of my own limited sphere of influence, I am not cursed with the responsibility of making judgment calls as to what is "acceptable" — yet I can still aspire to weigh the suffering of all parties.
And the strategy is to do that by... outing and destroying people who are demonstrably not racist?
Outing and destroying people who are not racist makes examples of them. Examples that are to be hoped to make people too afraid to speak out against the agenda.
As http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html points out, this strategy is used by groups that believe that they have power..but only barely. The problem is that if they prove to have less power than they think, the resulting backlash hurts them.
Mark my words. That kind of backlash is part of what allowed Trump to get elected the first time. And if conflict intensifies, it will help his prospects of getting re-elected. And this is not just any election year. 2020 is census year - the state legislatures elected this year will redraw Congressional districts. We have been suffering for the last 10 years because the 2010 elections were dominated by opponents of Barack Obama and their districts favor Republicans. Do we really want the 2020s to be similarly suffering the fallout against overreach by the BLM movement?
> Outing and destroying people who are not racist makes examples of them. Examples that are to be hoped to make people too afraid to speak out against the agenda.
There will always be such examples. Eradicating them entirely is a statistical impossibility. No social movement is perfect. No matter how much effort you put into perfecting it, the opposition will find fault with it.
But we're not talking about the opposition. We're talking about people who are ON YOUR SIDE but committed some trivial heresy, and getting burned at the stake for it.
Does that sound like a winning movement formula to you?
I don't believe that a morality-based movement will win the day, no. After a brief blip, the police will retrench and go back to being untouchable just as they have for many decades. Fighting that I think is a Sisyphean (but worthwhile) effort because people are by-and-large not persuadable when their interests as members of the privileged majority are at stake. If there is change, it will arrive because of demographic trends (as in California).
And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Sooo since it's not easy to change policing, let's hang a few people that we CAN get as a substitute? That doesn't sound like a moral movement to me, it sounds like bloodthirst.
Again, it is not in the interest of anti-racism to have people unjustly fired for no reason. Suggesting that such outliers represent "bloodthirst" in the wider movement is a great example of fear-mongering and blowing things out of proportion.
Every time you get it wrong, the other side gets to use it against you. The more you get it wrong, the more ammunition they have. You can give them less even if you can't give them none.
Your own side should condemn cases like those mentioned in this article far more than your "opposition".
Even though you don't care about these people nor about any other collateral casualty, pretending to care will at least give the signal to those on the fence that there's the possibility that the mobs might stop doing this crap, at least eventually.
If those on the fence realize that you don't care about them, they might stop caring about you and anything you might have to say.
> And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Those who were part of the mobs that ruined these people's lives cared enough to, well, ruin their lives, so the "not in anyone's interest" part is already false from the get go.
But there's something far more worrying here than the falsehood. Let's assume these are edge cases—even though we all know these are three examples among many—what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"? Something awful was done to these people and some of us are talking about it.
Should we... Not talk about it? What exactly is the point here?
> Suggesting that such outliers represent "bloodthirst" in the wider movement is a great example of fear-mongering and blowing things out of proportion.
These are examples of blood thirst. Again, should we just ignore them? Why?
Not that you'll believe me, but of course I care about the injustices done to these individuals. Even if they are only three among millions suffering, each tragedy is experienced individually and the overwhelming agony is borne individually. Every single injustice is hard to witness.
For what it's worth I don't expect to persuade anybody of anything. I think that's unrealistic, even if learning from each other is not.
> what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"?
These events occupy a tiny corner of a much larger picture of human suffering. Talking about them in isolation, as if the rest of the picture doesn't exist, is wrong.
In 2020, how could you show that someone was "demonstrably not racist"? Arguing that a particular person (especially oneself) is not racist is an activity that shows racism.
Yes I realize that Clinton and Biden were the architects of the “War on Crime” in the 90s - AKA “The War on Black Folks” along with profiling during stop and frisk.
Reminds me of the cultural revolution in China. Get the people whipped up and it’s pretty self-sustaining when people think they’re doing the right thing.
This time is different. At least cultural revolution was a bottom-up movement backed by only a few elites in power. The movement was terminated quickly by moderates after Mao died. The whole nation has ever since been reflecting on the movement and on how to prevent it from happening.
This time in US is different. This time the elites, the scholars and especially the scholars, the media... They collectively endorsed and encouraged the mob justice and the cancel culture. I'm pretty pessimistic this time. I think this is the future of the US since people who do have a platform do not speak out and will not speak out.
> The whole nation has ever since been reflecting on the movement and on how to prevent it from happening.
That's false. In fact, attempting 反思历史 is the quickest way to get into serious trouble with the party, and one will find oneself soon be "drinking tea" with the authorities, or have one's livelihood taken away, or worse.
The "mob justice" we have now isn't remotely as bad as it used to be, so it's not accurate to characterize it as a "descent". We really are on a long steady upslope (still with more room for improvement).
Hell, it wasn't even that many decades ago that lynchings were commonplace. And that's a much worse form of mob justice than outraged tweet brigades that occasionally get someone fired.
> and tbh your argument reads a little bit like "well now its our turn"
I'm not sure who "our" is, here, but I don't read it with that tone regardless.
> There have been plenty of videos circling showing mobs during the recent riots beating people half and fully to death.
Unless you're talking about police officers doing the beating, which doesn't seem the case given your "left" remark, can you substantiate this claim? If so, how?
I believe your comment is out of sync with reality, but sincerely welcome quantitative data to adjust my views.
You really should make an attempt to reply to comments as they are, rather than insisting on quoting sentences removed.
Here is some video evidence to assist in adjusting your views as requested.
Personally, I advise you (and other readers) not to watch them; this sort of thing isn't psychologically healthy. But it exists and its as appalling as the police brutality - but you don't seem to see so much of this in the mainstream media for some reason.
> You really should make an attempt to reply to comments as they are, rather than insisting on quoting sentences removed.
I did. At the time I began my reply, it was in there. One of the reasons I replied was that sentence – it modifies the context of the rest of your words. I think that sentence was pretty messed up. Perhaps that's why you removed it.
I skimmed each video in the threads you posted. Of them, two of the first (adults) and none of the second (with kids) appear to potentially take place in the recent riots. I'm not saying that violence doesn't occur there – it certainly does, but your original quote was: > There have been plenty of videos circling showing mobs during the recent riots beating people half and fully to death. (emphasis mine).
The videos you posted of racial violence are tragic, and I don't question their authenticity. But they don't substantiate your earlier claim about the frequency of violence from rioters.
This is the last I'm going to say about it – I regret replying in the first place. This wasn't productive. My bad.
Lynchings were never commonplace. There were 3446 recorded lynchings of blacks in 1882-1968 [1]. That is 40 per year. We don't know how many were not recorded, but lets say only 1 in 5 was, for a total of 200 per year. That's thirteen times less than the 2018 black-on-black homicide rate, and less than half of the black-on-white homicide rate [2].
In fact I trust them so little I quintupled them for my analysis.
And despite the Black suicide rate being 2.5x lower than the white suicide rate [1], you would still expect an average of 2 Blacks (and 24 whites) to commit suicide by suffocation/hanging per day [2].
So 600 black suicides by hanging a year out of ~38 million black americans, or a 0.0016% chance of an individual black american dying a year by suicidal hanging.
So when it clusters around black activists, that's pretty telling.
And to be clear, lynching is a power thing, not a genocide thing. The point isn't to kill all blacks but to make an example of the ones that 'don't know their place'. To 'hammer down the nails that stick out'.
Using HN primarily for ideological battle (e.g. race war) is excluded by the site guidelines regardless of how many statistical arguments you come with. Please don't do this here.
Modern mob justice means the rest of your life is ruined. It's not just a firing; you can't get a new job from then on. Internet oustings will likely last forever. And when the evidence is a photo or video, with inaccurate context, innocents are getting steamrolled.
This is a problem.
And even if it was less of a problem than it was a decade ago -- and I don't think it is -- we should still look for ways to fix it.
Can you name a person who has been "cancelled" for illegitimate reasons, and unable to find a new job in a reasonable time?
James Damore is gainfully employed. Steve Hsu is still a tenured professor, Justine Sacco had a new job within a month, George Zimmerman is able to make a better living than most by selling murder memorabilia.
He has been defamed as a pedophile by a stalker, and has been denied several six figure paying jobs 3-4 interviews into the hiring process explicitly because one guy decided to cancel him. The stalker says he monitors court records to prevent Josh from restarting his career by changing his name. Josh is now unemployable and living in Serbia.
Bio on the stalker:
Samuel Collingwood Smith is a yellow journalist who specializes in defamation and stalking. After a brief stint as a British council member, he publicly embarrassed himself by claiming his political enemies were sexual abusers of children. Without a job, he indulged in an obsession with Evanescence and attempted to become ring leader of Internet fan clubs about Amy Lee. In his quest to become her #1 fan, he would bully, harass, and stalk underage girls who held forum moderator positions above him. More than five years later, he threatens them legally if they speak on what abuse he submitted them to. After a falling out with Evanescence staff, he accused the band of being child pornographers and was forced into a permanent contract which requires he never speak of Amy Lee or Evanescence again. Despite parliamentary petitions to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement, he is legally bound to this day.
Since then, Samuel Collingwood Smith has trailblazed the Internet leaving behind countless smear campaigns purporting anyone he does not like to be involved in child pornography somehow. An emotionally unstable adult-child who focuses much of his time on GamerGate and relevant topics, he is well known as a public menace to local constables and courts. Writing under multiple pen names, including Vordrak and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, he romanticizes the English witch hunter by the same name. He hides behind this intimidating Internet persona and openly calls himself a terrorist. His mission statement is "to expose corruption and terrorise the guilty without worrying too much about due process."
If you Google Joshua moon, the second hit is kiwi farms wiki (edit: Wikipedia) page.
> The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users
And he thinks that a stalker is why he gets dropped at the background check phase?
That page was created by the stalker. It heavily cites the stalker's own blog. He writes under the name "Matthew Hopkins". His real name is Samuel Collingwood Smith. Check the bio I posted above.
No, the stalker is presenting outright untrue and misleading information is an encyclopedic context to give it an air of legitimacy. It's all sourced to his own blog. There's a reason Wikipedia doesn't allow blogs as sources.
Among the lies, is a quote attributed to Josh that someone added to his Encyclopedia Dramatica page, which the person later removed with the reason: ""sorry, I made this up".
None of the sources on Wikipedia are blogs. None are attributed to this guy you keep bringing up. You're claims are false, please don't peddle falsehoods.
Are you arguing that the central claim: that kiwi farms doxxes and harasses people is untrue?
You are literally participating in the canceling of someone because you believe this article without any actual evidence. Don't you see that this is wrong? Maybe you should look at the fact that you are willing to believe this with no real evidence. I would hope that the next time something comes along, you remember this, and before you believe an evidence free post, you do some research, or just remain skeptical. Maybe that's the way we can get out of the mob justice, by trying to trim the mob down.
I'm not sure what you mean. Ive heard of kiwi farms before and know about it. It's an awful site and shouldn't exist.
Josh moon built a site that actively encourages harassment of innocent people online. That's unquestionably true. It's no wonder people don't want to employ him. He continues to work to improve the site and associate with it and actively engage in the harassment in some cases.
Using a throwaway account for this because Kiwi Farms but it is remarkably disingenuous to see people use Josh as an example of cancel culture run amok when he runs a site that is essentially the worst possible example of cancel culture.
It's a site which hosts a bunch of stalkers, doxxers and people whose sole purpose is to harass and ruin the lives of others. Anyone defending it is massively suspect to say the least. He wasn't 'cancelled' for wrongthink, he's been ostracized because he actively involves himself in making others people's lives worse.
In my opinion, you have to present at least a minimum level of decency towards society in order to take part in society, of which being employable is one facet. By running Kiwi Farms, Mr Moon simply doesn't reach this level imho.
Rational Wiki is known for running hitpieces on people disguised as encyclopedic content. I had a look at some of the sources on that page.
It claims Josh is an anti-semite. What does it cite to back this up? It cites a picture of a tweet hosted on the website on Mathew Hopkins, Moon's stalker.
Richard Stallman was ousted from his position at the Free Software Foundation based on several hit pieces perpetuated by people wildly misrepresenting his communications on the CSAIL mailing list in which he called for people not to be hasty with judgement until the facts all come out.
Other folks have gotten the same treatment as well. The stories come up from time to time if you pay attention.
I keep track of most of those stories. Can you explain the career consequences to Stallman losing is position at the FSF? We're talking real consequences here, not losing out on your figurehead status. (note also that I'm not even going to approach the question of whether or not his actions deserved his removal, but clearly the opinion of many people is that they did).
I think your problem is that you're looking at very high-profile cases.
Most cases never make it that far. You have just enough that if any employer Googles someone before hiring, they don't get the job. If you have a half-dozen angry blog posts, or a local newspaper article or two, or a bunch of Twitter posts accusing you of something nasty, that's enough.
You're hiring someone for your team. If you have a choice between two job candidates, one where you see a half-dozen articles claiming they're racist, and one without, whom do you pick?
I know the choice I'd make. I don't want to deal with potential management problems.
Heck, even if you've sued a former employer (with good and legitimate reasons), why would someone pick you, knowing you're the sort of person who sues? Especially given I have no way to evaluate if the law suit was reasonable? Or if you've been involved in some conflict. Do I really want to sort out that mess? Or do I just give your resume a yellow flag, and pick someone without any yellow flags, if available.
In an up economy, where labor is scarce, you'll do fine. In a down economy where jobs are scarce, if you've got bad things about you on the internet, or even potentially yellow flags (e.g. some visible law suit or conflict), you've got a problem.
And yes, I can think of a couple of cases off the top of my head who have been through this, but I don't want to go Streisand Effect on people who'd much rather have normal, private lives.
This article calls out the dangers of corporate virtue signalling. I have many friends and acquaintances that do the personal version of this, and are part of the problem.
Honestly, I think the only way to combat this is to make taking these actions expensive for those who do that. The twitter rage/grievance machine is running on all cylinders.
That and making sure that companies that succumb to the mob, are roundly and publicly held to account for that. If they can't be bothered to make rational choices, then find alternatives to patronize.
Simple. Friendship transcends posturing and virtue signalling, at least for me. Dropping someone as a friend because we disagree, at a deep and fundamental level over something important, doesn't preclude us from having other common ground we can enjoy together.
I disagree, sometimes deeply, with some of my friends. I also don't like echo chambers, as no original thought occurs there. Just an attempt to negate the "other". Which is completely counterproductive to having a rational dialog.
Something else very disturbing is that Twitter lets people do it with selective enforcement of their rules. Report someone for doxxing (full address, phone number etc.) and then a week later they get a 12 hour suspension. I have reported dozens of posts and maybe half of them even get punished at all
It's even more than that. I always thought we should fight for justice to make a better world for us to live in, and we should not hurt any group of ordinary people in the name of justice. Then, how is it right for a professor to tweet that "white lives don't matter"? I mean, the lives of hundreds of millions of people don't matter? They are all privileged? They are all sinned? They are all evil? They should all perish? They should all suffer injustice? Their skin color, which they can't change, makes them so despicable that their lives don't matter? Isn't this the very definition of racism? Yet the professor is lauded as a true hero.
> Then, how is it right for a professor to tweet that "white lives don't matter"?
This sort of stuff used to be called "flame bait" back in the day. Don't take the bait. It's just not worth caring about, no matter if it's a professor doing it or a basement dweller.
I don't think your society will find a way out of this, because the root causes are systemic and have been developing for decades: lack of a social safety net, weak worker's rights, incredibly large difference in wealth between social classes, overpowered companies and corporations, etc.
Adding to the above, the current administration has proved time and again that they're not up to the job.
And finally, the wave of (out)rage currently unfolding in the US, celebrated by many as a good thing is in reality a terrible thing - the problem of racism in the US is so complex that it is impossible to solve it by using force (condemnations, firings, banishment, verbal and physical violence). This also applies to sexism and other -isms: it takes brains and willingness to spend the time (years to decades).
Those events are yet another social flare-up that will take its course and then fizzle out.
I've seen some corners of twitter start to slowly realize and acknowledge that cancel culture is bad. I think when the number of people caught in the maelstrom gets high enough, general awareness will increase. The danger is when there's an ingroup/outgroup filter where nobody in the ingroup ever gets ousted, so it always feels like it's still just "those bad people over there". But it's getting to a point where even those boundaries are breaking down, which is probably for the best in the long run.
>Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power”; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.
I am so tired of watching journalists repeat this irresponsible lie. The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism. I challenge anyone to find a legitimate link explaining the relationship between the symbol and white supremacy that doesn't ultimately lead to a journal article sourced from cherry picked Twitter threads.
Journalism died when ideologues normalized activist journalism. We are in the midst of a mass hysteria and media outlets are fully culpable. 70 years ago we called it McCarthyism.
>The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism.
If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the media took the bait?
The media knew well it was a fake, but anything these days that can polarize people more ("You won't believe the secret symbol the alt-right uses! Click here to learn about it") it's a gold mine for them.
Unfortunately, the type of people who think it's a good idea to go around trying to invent racist symbols to try and prove that the media is fake news also happen to be the people who are coincidentally holidaying in Charlottesville in August if you know what I mean.
There's actually quite an important difference between making an assumption about a group of people who choose to associate and those that are a group because of an imutable characterisitic. Making assumptions about black people? Probably a bad idea, because that doesn't define who they are. Making an assumption about people who hang out with that loud racist guy? Probably fair - since they're making a choice, and that choice tells us about their charateristic, which brings us back to it not being a stereotype, it's an observation. People who hang out with wildly unhigned racists spreading conspiracy theories, are in fact, probably wildly unhinged racists.
It's also objectively wrong. It wasn't a '4chan hoax', people had been using the OK symbol as a link to Trump long before they made claims of making it all up. The fact that much of the media took the 'it was all a psyop' seriously is embarrassing.
This was around the same time they also tried to take credit for the Steele dossier, claiming they had made it all up and what not. In either case, when people started ironically using it to troll, others started using it unironically as a dogwhistle.
There are multiple photo examples of white supremacists in 2015 and 2016 using the OK symbol as a link to Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of them and Pepe was often shown using the OK symbol during any support of Trump. The reality is that the white supremacist supporters of Trump were already using that symbol to designate their support for him.
First, to head off the flames: yes, what happened to the people in the article is terrible. Cooler heads should’ve prevailed.
But here’s a take: cancel culture is not new, it’s just changed direction and is scaring the pants off people who previously had the luxury of ignoring it (or taking advantage). What happened to Cafferty is a shame, but the article left out another person who was cancelled over a vicious lie: Emmett Till.
"Choosing a deliberately provocative example" on an inflammatory topic is already trolling. You've broken the site guidelines by taking the thread further into ideological flamewar. Same with your comment here. Nothing good can come of this, so please don't.
I realize yours is far from the only account stoking the flamewar in this thread, but this example was noticeable even in this wretched context.
This is my thought as well. 'Cancel Culture' has existed in America for a long time. The only difference between then and now was that it was primarily minorities and women that were harassed off platforms or cancelled. It only became 'cancel culture' and pushed into the public debate when figures known for rascism, vicious lies etc were the ones cancelled instead. Otherwise people seemed to be rather quiet about the whole thing.
I mean one just needs to look at what happened during Gamergate for an example of what I'm talking about. That said, it's obvious that those same types of people are weaponizing it against otherwise innocent people which means we need to do better at fixing things that end up wrong.
It hasn't changed direction, it's metastasized: if one doesn't get cancelled for being a racist, there's still sexist, TERF, anti-gay, anti-immigrants, etc.
And since this phenomenon is affecting the income and livelihood of individuals, the only people that are safe are yet again the rich.
The middle-class are tearing themselves and the poor up for the sake of appearances.
It's pretty disgusting to compare actual murderous lynching to someone getting wrongfully terminated from their job. This style of comment reminds me of people who protest against wearing face masks using 'I can't breathe' rhetoric.
This growing societal condemnation for every sin (past, present, or associated) may be called "virtue signaling" or "cancel culture" these days, but it already had a personified name thousands of years ago - self-righteous Pharisee-ism - and it's ultimately what put Jesus on the cross. Say what you want about the resurrection, he at least lived an innocent life but was beaten and hung for execution by the shame-filled rage of the masses.
Ironically we live in a society that now claims more than ever to know what it means to "do right", but that growing moral burden of "doing right" produces an ever greater internal sense of shame (for missing the mark) that is often projected outwards onto easy targets. Outrage is what wins eyeballs in the media, because messages of shame penetrate to the core. Thanks to social media, these messages clone themselves far more easily. Acts of injustice stir up outrage via a message of shame, and the cycle often perpetuates itself with further acts of outrage/injustice.
America has a growing self-righteousness induced shame problem is what this is, and until we identify that source of grace [1] that can transform sin into honor, shame into dignity, and moral outrage into forgiveness, it will only continue to worsen. Yes, we are to have deep sorrow and compassion regarding acts of injustice, but grace and forgiveness are the only legitimate exits from the emotional/spiritual burdens they impose.
Thanks for posting this. Very insightful. I've come to believe lately that this sort of thing is caused, to some extent, by the decline of Christianity in the west. I'm not religious myself and used to consider that a virtue (rational man yadda yadda). These days I'm much less sure it's such a good idea.
It appears that with the decline of the Church all that's happened is people invented a new one, but a rather nasty one that sounds a lot like the religions of a couple thousand years ago: obsessed with converting heretics whether they want to be converted or not, a whole lot of destruction of pagan idols, making people into martyrs and so on.
On balance, given a choice between the kind of hate filled behaviour the article describes, or God-fearing people, I'd much rather be around the latter. And if forced to choose a tribe I guess I'd pick them too, as the modern religious seem much nicer, calmer and more accepting than the "woke".
As mostly white males here, maybe we should re-examine the sense of victimization here... the “mob justice” in US history has largely applied to lyching, slave hunting, violence against gays, and other horrific acts we’ve never had to think about. Sure it sucks when mistakes are made, but fearing saying the wrong thing in an emotionally raw time around racial issues, isn’t even close to what really has counted as “mob justice” in American history.
Edit - sometimes you get horribly downvoted, but still stand by the comment. Few downvoting really have an appreciation for how horrific US history has been. For example I encourage you to read this article on lynching
Indeed, fear itself is not mob justice, rather, the actions of the mod itself is mob justice.
> emotionally raw time ...
This was a thing before the riots too. The Stallman case happened last year for example.
> Downvotes are expected from those ignorant of history ;)
I do not think that anyone sane is doubting the historical mob justice against certain groups. It is just that just as these instances of mobbing were wrong so are the modern ones. (plus I believe that some of the people downvoting do so due to how us-centric this comment is)
The tech industry is a sloshing cesspool of privilege. When its day of reckoning arrives, you will be relieved to have distanced yourself from it by staking out unpopular opinions.
> Sure it sucks when mistakes are made, but fearing saying the wrong thing in an emotionally raw time around racial issues, isn’t even close to what really has counted as “mob justice” in American history.
This argument boils down to whataboutism if you dig down under the overly emotional packaging. This is not bringing anything to the discussion, it is an attempt to shut down the discussion. This is why you are getting downvoted.
"Dignity Culture" has been replaced with "victimhood culture" in United States[1]
>A dignity culture, according to Campbell and Manning, has moral values and behavioral norms that promote the value of every human life, encouraging achievement in its children while teaching that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
>Because victimhood culture is now claimed to confer the highest moral status on victims, Campbell and Manning argue that it “increases the incentive to publicize grievances.” Injured and offended parties who might once have thrown a punch or filed a law suit now appeal for support on social media
When white people make a mistake they lose their jobs. When black people make a mistake they aren't allowed to breathe. Both are unjust but they are far from morally equivalent.
Let's stop firing people for arbitrary reasons, rather than going through a process negotiated between the employees' union and the employer to end someone's employment.
A lot of this whining about celebrities (and sometimes others) getting canceled stinks of special exceptions in employment law being made for people who say offensive things. That's even dumber than the religious carve-outs, i.e. the rights that have been exclusively granted to people who believe things that cannot by definition be proved, and that if you fail to have beliefs that cannot by definition be proved (no matter how minority, or how discriminated against) you are excluded from.
The problem is the lack of process. I don't somehow care more about the suffering of people who have tweeted things that look racist to someone, than the suffering of others fired because they were accused of being unproductive on the job then fired with no hearing or documentation of that lack of productivity, or somebody fired because the company thought it would be cheaper to outsource their job.
The idea that random companies and academic institutions carry the authority to either define somebody as racist, or can lose that authority to credibly point out racism by unfairly exercising it is laughable. Maybe, instead, random companies shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily take away someone's living by a functional government working in the public interest.
I agree, this seems to be the biggest take away. The company fired him exceedingly quickly. This is what "at-will" employment looks like.
Seems a lot of people getting angry at ghosts/ideas("cancel culture"/"mob mentality" - a mob against "mob mentality") or people doing technically legal things(taking a picture in public, calling a business to voice a complaint). Those ghosts/people didn't actually fire the guy, his company did.
It'll be impossible to stop trolls. You can't just say "knock it off guys", nor can you ban people from taking pictures or voicing an opinion. However, you could put some restrictions around firings, but many would view that as stifling business, so this is the outcome instead. What may or may not have been a knee-jerk firing, but that's the cost of "at-will" employment.
Also, there is a devils advocate point to be made in that corrupt police unions have created difficulties with removing bad cops from the field, so this can be a double-edged sword. Overall employer/union accountability needs to be higher when it comes to who they hire and who they fire.
It's not just firing, however. The article discusses the case of the guy who owned the company, whose daughter (whom he employed) posted some bad stuff to Twitter years ago.
He fired his own daughter but this was insufficient: not only did virtually all his customers abandon him immediately but his landlord revoked his lease (how can a landlord do that? I have no idea).
So basically his entire business was destroyed overnight in response to something he didn't even do himself.
A lot of these firings are driven by fear of customer boycotts. And the customer boycotts are driven by fear of more boycotts/outrage/etc... it's a circle of destruction.
She's his daughter, a product of him, and likely to continue to influence him and receive biased treatment in the future. Familial ties are much harder to break than business ones. Had she not been his daughter, firing alone may have been sufficient. However, one of her tweets even incriminates the whole family.
"God already punished you for being black, so why would you make it worse by being gay. #shitpeopleinmyfamilysay!! Haha"
They found themselves in hot water after posting about their allegiance with BLM, which has been a marketing bandwagon as of late. This leads to people digging into how sincere these businesses are, and finding a cache of noxious racist tweets by the director of a business, who is the CEO's daughter, is basically going to sound the death knell for a small business.
Maybe before posting about your family's business' allegiance to a hot-button cause related to black people and racism, think about deleting all those racists tweets you made years ago talking about how black people should be eradicated, using the n* word with monkey emojis, and your posting of swastikas. Think about how this could impact the people around you, including your family, your customers, and other businesses who support you.
I don't blame their landlord for wanting run away from any association with her toxic tweets, and likely there is a clause within their lease agreement allowing the breaking of the lease due to certain behavior.
90s PSAs about internet usage continues to serve me well. When it comes to social media, it behooves me to act as if there's a sociopath with a grudge against me. I don't use my real name. I don't reuse usernames on different sites. I don't give out personal information of any kind. You're bound to say something that someone decides make you worthy of digital crucifixion and will stop at nothing to ruin your life. I've received a handful of death threats but they don't worry me because I refuse to give the internet a way to target my real life.
This. There is zero functional difference between Facebook or Twitter and 4chan at this point. If you can't preserve a reasonable level of privacy on either site, you should just avoid interacting altogether.
In the past, I've argued in favour of "public shaming", eg of anti-vaxxers. This makes me less sure about it.
However, what these stories seem to have in common is lack of due process: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on [1].
Maybe people should get off Twitter and put some work (or money) into actual organisations that engage in concerted political effort to change things.
It is sad to see the internet weaponized this way. I remember when the internet was at its embryonic stage; when most sites were universities, personal and few businesses. How sad.
My thinking on this has changed based on circumstances. My current thinking is that we need to shut down Twitter and Facebook for six months. World wide.
I know this is harsh. I know they do a lot of good. And I know this is difficult yet doable (they don’t own their domains, they are borrowed).
And yet the world existed just fine before Twitter and Facebook.
Things have gotten out of hand. More harm will come out of this kind of irresponsible unchecked mass communication. These companies don’t seem to care about the damage they enable through their flawed technology. They enable real white supremacists, terrorists, cancel culture warriors, child pornographers, human traffickers and all kinds of criminals to form massive groups and organize action like never before in history.
I’ve said it before, for all their technical prowess they sure have shitty algorithms, lousy rules of operation, nonexistent customer service and no accountability.
For example, How hard would it be to classify post subject matter and throttle comment rate to one per 60, 30, 10, 5 or 1 minutes?
Can’t classify reliably? 60 minutes between comments.
Groups on FB? Your content is deleted every 30 days so you can’t accumulate walls of hatred. Also, all group owners and moderators must use real names and submit identification, maybe even post a bond refundable after a period of time. Don’t like it? Go start a website.
I know a bunch of the above is crazy. Sorry. I am angry. I started with the Internet before most people knew it existed. Before that it was services like Compuserve.
There was great hope for the internet and the enlightenment it could bring to society. And, for the most part, it has done far more good than harm.
Yet there are a handful of companies, including “news” outlets who have managed to use the Internet to defecate and vomit all over society. And they don’t seem to care at all. Anything from lies to orchestrating mob attacks on individuals, businesses and institutions —even history— is fair game.
They have enabled the lowest of society to engage in mob rule in exchange for returning profits to their investors.
This is where Silicon Valley is to blame as well. For all their virtue signaling they seem perfectly fine with focusing their money and resources getting people to click on stuff. I have yet to see any of these virtuous individuals apply a significant amount of time, money and effort towards fixing the shit culture that produces companies who seem content with being the conduit for hatred and destruction.
Bravo!
Take Twitter and Facebook off air for six months. Force them to think about what they are doing and find solutions. Send a solid message to others (media/news) that being conduits for destruction and radicalization has consequences.
Maybe, just maybe, we come out of such an experience with the Internet we all thought we were going to enjoy. One that would enlighten, elevate and unite people. An internet that would erase inequality, bigotry and racism. One that would eventually even remove borders and unite all on this blue marble and move humanity towards an unimaginably great future.
If only the New York Times had interviewed the person who took the photo and spread the false narrative, we would knew who it was, and then we could go harass them...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] thread[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mozilla-ceo-resignation-i...
* Was person X bigoted?
* Was the 'punishment' befitting what they did?
Well, donating against gay marriage is some big-government bigoted shit, not gonna lie. You can still ask the second question, though.
I wouldn’t want someone in a position of power that went to Klan rallies on the weekend either. They aren’t going to outright say they are discriminating against you. They are going to say the person isn’t a “culture fit”.
I can imagine two CEO's of companies A and B (which each own exactly 50% of an industry and are precisely equivalent in public visibility and internal policy). The CEOs are also identical in every way except that one supports a opinion M and the other supports a opinion M'
Assuming that they both make public their support, which one would get executed in the court of public opinion? Would it be fair for (any)one of them to get expelled from his/her post just because the masses collapsed the narrative to uphold either only M or M'? (I'm assuming that whether M or M' is the majority opinion is irrelevant)
The only solution I can see is that both CEOs collude and decide to either not support anything, or support the same, agreed-upon thing.
Assuming that is so, what if we extend this past 2 companies, and into 2000?
----
I'm not convinced that the punishment does befit the situation.
CFA's entire organization is built around family values and good Christian values. It starts from the ground level -- you can't become a manager without the company checking your friends and family. So that type of sentiment pervades the organization. The comments and donations were mostly in line with company culture. This isn't to say every CFA employee was anti-gay-marriage, but they value family enough that it is plausible that the employees would support the COO.
Mozilla is the opposite situation, emphasizing diversity and trying to cater to the (generally more socially liberal) tech community at large. Eich's donations flew in the face not only of the values Mozilla were trying to espouse, but also directly affecting a nontrivial number of its employees.
If Mozilla had the culture of CFA, Eich wouldn't have been removed. In order to uphold their image, Mozilla couldn't have kept him.
That someone supports the concept of "punishment" for expressing a view different from what you (and some collection of people) arbitrarily believe should be a widely held view ... is ... unconscionable. And quite frightening.
There's literally a science fiction short story about this. And it doesn't end well. I have to look up the title, haven't read it in 35 years or so.
a. work for you
b. use your products
unless the guy goes.
That's a free action by free individuals. And the idea that we would force individuals to work for people they don't like or that we'd force individuals to use products from people they don't like is authoritarian.
Freedom to choose to work with someone also involves the freedom to choose to not work. Freedom of speech gives you the ability to say you like things and also say you don't like things.
So he supported a ballot proposition which won. That was a majority political position.
Majority political positions can still be morally wrong.
I smiled and ignored them. I subconsciously made sure to avoid their input on important things.
The narrative was in-your-face progressive activist SJW to the max. Many people I privately spoke with in the company were sick of this idiocy, but couldn't see themselves speaking up, as they needed the job. They couldn't risk being fired by the company.
Imagine if you had to live that life.
Companies should not have political opinions or leanings.
Women and minorities have had to do exactly that. For decades. Which is where the backlash right now is coming from. Not just in one meeting but in most meetings. Talk to them, they almost all have hours of stories and examples.
Overt in school and grad school. Less overt but still there in professional life.
My family including my wife and daughter are minority and multiracial.
Stop with the whataboutism already.
I could see future societies tearing down statues of anyone who ate meat. Or anyone who opposed the legalization of cannabis. Society's morals drift in unpredictable ways. If we choose to judge everyone (past and present) by our current views, we'll never stop tearing down statues and renaming things.
The only way to prevent this is to recognize that people are products of the societies they grow up in. If either of us were born in the 1700s, we'd probably think slavery was acceptable. In general, people back then weren't evil, they were mistaken. And you don't punish mistakes by ruining someone's life and legacy, especially if the society around them is the reason for those mistakes. The same should be true for us today.
Also, "big-government bigoted shit" would have to describe literally every government in human history before the year 2001 when the Netherlands formally recognized same-sex marriage as equivalent to opposite-sex marriage.
That's the funny thing about bigotry. It doesn't matter how big your posse is. You can still be bigoted. For instance, oppression of the Uighur community is generally tolerated in China. The support is greater than the 52%. Still bigotry.
And because my society is free, you get to say, "Oh okay, I'll do what you want" or you can say "Fine, don't use the product". We're just people interacting freely. And thank god for liberty.
So freedom of speech/expression isn't when it doesn't align with group think, got it.
In the case of Mozilla, he wasn't only accused of supporting gay marriage, he donated money to groups whose goals were to get people to vote against gay marriage. There weren't actions taken due to misunderstandings as far as I know.
Also I think strong opposition to him as a CEO came from the employees, not outside partners cutting ties to avoid being associated.
These are the same type of people who a generation earlier supported laws against interracial marriage.
Also, if lots of your employees threaten to quit, your company has a big problem. The examples in the article were about individual employees, two of which had employers that said the employees were fired for other reasons. In the example of mozilla, separate from agreeing with the decisions, the actions were known and done for known reasons. No one lied about why they did what they did.
Is it?
I may be misremembering, but my impression was that Eich was pushed out because people interpreted his political donation as being indicative of a larger belief. I don’t recall Eich ever making a statement on the issue.
I’m not defending him here, so please don’t get me wrong. I’m only pointing out that there seems to be some level of inferring someone’s “true beliefs” in both cases. There’s a lot more of it in the article, granted, but it leads me to ask: where is the bar?
What if he still doesn't agree with homosexual marriage? Who are you to force him to change his view?
It's that he had no communication plan for an easily-foreseeable controversy that was disqualifying, not his views specifically.
Hillary Clinton was at one point an opponent of gay marriage:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/hillary-clin...
Edit: Originally had Obama's stated opposition to gay marriage in the 2008 campaign but people keep trying to defend him in particular and that's not the point.
Biden, voted for Defense of Marriage Act:
> https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/26/justice-de...
So did Chuck Schumer and more than a hundred other Democrats, many still in office:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1996/h316
(For the record, Lofgren and Wyden voted Nay.)
They're mostly all going to want to walk it back these days, but did we give Brendan Eich that opportunity? Is it available to everyone? Or should we cancel all of them too?
Here was Obama's position on prop 8: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/obamas-brief-agains...
The Obama admin's opposition and Justices appointed by Obama (and favored by Senate Dems) led the way to marriage equality.
Whether to 'cancel' is an entirely different issue, but I think you're being dishonest here. There was concrete action these Democrats took that defeated terrible discrimination.
Seeing as going to war and accepting civilian casualties has only been acceptable for the entirety of human history up to and including the present, I’m not so sure.
No one is required to continue with their past buying habits once their mind has changed.
The word 'mob' implies unregulated violence, usually based on emotion and not reason. And the vast majority protesting racism appear to be peaceful and thoughtful.
That is correct but it’s not relevant to the specific scenario brought up here, which is if you’re on the wrong side of a group that is not peaceful and thoughtful. Those who are in such a position often receive death threats. The outrage of the internet that has latched on to something it wants to believe can lead to remarkably mob-like behavior, though with less physical violence usually.
We can (we must!) turn the left against cancel culture if the left is to regain the moral high ground and the trust of the voters. And, ironically, we'll make more progress that way on the issues that progressives care about than by using their methods.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50239261
The truth is, people are fired for arbitrary and unfair reasons constantly. I'd imagine 1 out of a million times someone is fired for unfair reasons it has something to do with cancel culture.
(You could argue that I'm engaging in a "True Scotchman", but see this article [1]:
> Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
)
[1] https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
Like teacher's unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_centers
The issue in the US is that the labour market is incredibly unjust towards employees and they have almost no rights.
Because the UK still has full EU law in its statute books, and it's home to a guy who was just fired for flying a airplane banner saying "White lives matter". Oh, they didn't just fire him, his girlfriend was also fired (from a different company) ... just for good measure.
But if he can sue and force them to rehire him I'd be very surprised. The problem is not merely what the law says, but that the institutions that enforce employment law are just as corrupted as everywhere else.
The problem is that corporations are too large.
If a company wants to fire you over nonsense but there are 30 others in the same city who pay the same salary for the same work, they're doing you a favor. You don't want to work for a company like that anyway, when there are better alternatives.
When they're the only employer who will hire you without having to move your kids to another school district or take a salary cut by changing fields, you need them more than they need you and getting fired over nonsense is a major problem.
Make corporations smaller and more numerous and you don't need unions. This also happens to have major benefits for competition on the consumer side, so everybody wins.
Thank you for the insightful comment, I feel like this may actually change some of my own opinions.
That's a little distinct from cancel culture overall, though, since there's still the question of boycotting people/organizations who demonstrably have done unethical things or hold unethical views. I tend to compartmentalize the work from the person more than some, but I don't begrudge people wanting to distance themselves from that - only when they do so without evidence of actual wrongdoing.
I’m not old enough to have experienced when this sort of thing happened historically, but it certainly feels like we’re inexorably marching toward a violent breakdown of our society. It’s scary.
Maybe one day America will get there.
- It is not the only solution and I definitely don't want anyone to go there.
- ... but the way things are happening right now it seems like a very possible that it might happen.
This is sad: I see so much hate even here. Why can't 2nd amendment people realize that banning E2E encryption is just another way to make ordinary people powerless? And why can't we see that there are legitimate reasons why the second amendment is there?
Why do we people here have to brag about how much they hate their relatives? It is sickening! We surely don't have to agree with our parents, siblings and other relatives in everything, and I certainly dont agree with HN in everything either but finding common ground seems important to me.
It's a different feeling to require a different set of emotions, opinions, and accounts, just to feel ease within a group (civilians) who may or may not have their own agenda to ruin your life for personal gain, as opposed to a corrupt government bent on silencing dissidence.
Keep your identity small — http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
What you cannot say — http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I assume that you aren't LGBT. Because we've been getting fired and murdered over failures to compartmentalize since time immemorial; our right to employment was only confirmed by the supreme court this month.
But if even one individual is falsely accused of racism, that's untenable?
Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied. It's unfortunate that while just in the aggregate social pressure is occasionally unjust in the specific, but that's what you get when you deny justice systemically.
This is 100% backwards; structural, institutional problems demand structural, institutional solutions. Want to end structural racism in the U.S.? Start from the clearest near-term goal, viz. reforming criminal justice. Then move on to the next most visible problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...
Stalin was a monster, but history doesn't remember McCarthy and HUAC fondly either.
We don't handle crime by letting people shout "hang him" and following through.
Do we? Because a company firing workers, even their own family, to avoid being seen as racist doesn't exactly scream "acceptance" to me.
In the UK the death penalty was abolished because it is untenable that one innocent is killed accidentally. Innocent until proven guilty (and I might be mistaking the actual thing here) means that it is indeed better for 10 guilty people to walk free than 1 innocent person be imprisoned.
If we reject some of these fundamentals for how we run our societies then we might repeat of the Terror during the French revolution. During the Terror they said "well, the mob cant be controlled, but it generally did good." Political philosophy and History can teach us many things.
I wonder how the last witch hunt ended, and if that might be applicable here.
I also fully expect to see comments demanding that the article author, Yascha Mounk, be fired for daring to imply that something else might be of comparable importance to the witch hunt.
Personally, I work in a great place (large R&D lab), enjoy a lot of respect and an almost complete technical freedom to pursue interesting projects, good salary (not FAANG-level, but plenty for a comfortable life), etc. and I am seriously considering bugging out, at least for a year or two, exactly because of witch hunts. Our management is sane, but should I end up in a wrong bucket (and I will not participate in a witch hunt and will speak for a friend if he is attacked, so it is possible) no one would be able to save my ass.
A couple of friends that work in small companies (20 ppl or less) generally report a much saner environment, with no company-level witch hunts. I wonder if this is true overall -- smaller companies focus less on external politics and more on technical tasks, allowing employees to participate in politics, or not, in their free time.
Just seems we’re in the perfect storm for cherry picking outrage these days. But it’s hard to know if there’s a new or statistically novel pattern occurring.
Extend this game of appearance to personal life, as others can capture your personal life and post it on twitter; then look at the consequences: losing the livelihood.
I have little doubt that I could pick a stranger at random, create a social media post with some baseless accusations and fabricated screenshots and get it shared extensively.
I really hope our society can find a way out of this, but I honestly don't see it.
I agree that we are unlikely to find our way out of it any time soon, because the dominant majority is entirely unwilling to give up its institutionalized advantages.
Those of us who want real change here should have a strong interest in preventing the stories described in the article. You're right that we need people to want to change, and I'm afraid that these incidents give more ammunition to racists than they galvanize anti-racists. They certainly don't help to convince anyone in the middle to join our side.
As someone who wants to see these problems fixed - permanently - I’m just not sure that this approach gets us closer.
If it’s a drop in the bucket that discourages a large number of people from throwing their weight behind the solutions offered, then it’s no longer a drop in the bucket.
Sure, until it's you.
The way to resolve and defuse conflicts is to treat others better than they deserve to be treated. This is also more effective politically. See the second example in the article where research indicated that peaceful protests promoted by MLK were more effective than race riots later.
This result should not be a surprise. MLK promoted peaceful protests exactly on the theory that they would be more effective, based among other things on the experience of Ghandhi in India. Those lessons were copied a generation later and played a critical part in bringing down the Iron Curtain.
Violence begets violence. Forgiveness begets peace. Going out of your way to treat people with fairness is not just the right thing to do, it is also more effective.
If you're willing to ruin innocent lives to further your cause, then I cannot comprehend how it makes you morally superior to _them_ (whoever _they_ might be)
Are you keeping the score somewhere? Something like: "Today, we got 11 majority people fired for petty reasons, but it's Ok as it will improve the lives of 18 minority people"
No, I am not "willing to ruin innocent lives". I regard these cases as deplorable but inevitable statistical anomalies being highlighted inappropriately.
> Are you keeping the score somewhere?
I suppose that in a broad sense, I am. I don't believe that innocent people are being unjustly ruined as racists for no reason en masse. I think there's a handful of these cases.
In contrast, consider the ridiculous incarceration rates for Black Americans: 1 in 3 Black men will spend time behind bars in their lifetimes, while the rate for all US men is 1 in 17. That's millions of lives ruined.
So I will get worked up for each one of these cases in isolation. But I'm not going to allocate my outrage disproportionately to the tiny minority while ignoring the vast majority.
in other words, acceptable casualties in the war you're waging. nice.
It's not a zero-sum conflict. When the bonds of ethnic loyalty are weakened and the bonds of cosmopolitan amity are strengthened, we all win, and our lives are all enriched.
As for "acceptable casualties": I certainly would not go along with such injustices as the three anecdotes described in the article if they were playing out before me. Outside of my own limited sphere of influence, I am not cursed with the responsibility of making judgment calls as to what is "acceptable" — yet I can still aspire to weigh the suffering of all parties.
Outing and destroying people who are not racist makes examples of them. Examples that are to be hoped to make people too afraid to speak out against the agenda.
As http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html points out, this strategy is used by groups that believe that they have power..but only barely. The problem is that if they prove to have less power than they think, the resulting backlash hurts them.
Mark my words. That kind of backlash is part of what allowed Trump to get elected the first time. And if conflict intensifies, it will help his prospects of getting re-elected. And this is not just any election year. 2020 is census year - the state legislatures elected this year will redraw Congressional districts. We have been suffering for the last 10 years because the 2010 elections were dominated by opponents of Barack Obama and their districts favor Republicans. Do we really want the 2020s to be similarly suffering the fallout against overreach by the BLM movement?
There will always be such examples. Eradicating them entirely is a statistical impossibility. No social movement is perfect. No matter how much effort you put into perfecting it, the opposition will find fault with it.
Does that sound like a winning movement formula to you?
And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Your own side should condemn cases like those mentioned in this article far more than your "opposition".
Even though you don't care about these people nor about any other collateral casualty, pretending to care will at least give the signal to those on the fence that there's the possibility that the mobs might stop doing this crap, at least eventually.
If those on the fence realize that you don't care about them, they might stop caring about you and anything you might have to say.
> And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Those who were part of the mobs that ruined these people's lives cared enough to, well, ruin their lives, so the "not in anyone's interest" part is already false from the get go.
But there's something far more worrying here than the falsehood. Let's assume these are edge cases—even though we all know these are three examples among many—what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"? Something awful was done to these people and some of us are talking about it.
Should we... Not talk about it? What exactly is the point here?
> Suggesting that such outliers represent "bloodthirst" in the wider movement is a great example of fear-mongering and blowing things out of proportion.
These are examples of blood thirst. Again, should we just ignore them? Why?
For what it's worth I don't expect to persuade anybody of anything. I think that's unrealistic, even if learning from each other is not.
> what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"?
These events occupy a tiny corner of a much larger picture of human suffering. Talking about them in isolation, as if the rest of the picture doesn't exist, is wrong.
Conservatives always bring up the “The Three Boxes of Liberty”. Minorities took their advice - it’s time for the third box.
One minority has. Don't presume that the rest of the minorities are with them; progressives have made it clear that they are no friends of theirs. Some recent examples are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23407254 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652659 .
Yes I realize that Clinton and Biden were the architects of the “War on Crime” in the 90s - AKA “The War on Black Folks” along with profiling during stop and frisk.
This time in US is different. This time the elites, the scholars and especially the scholars, the media... They collectively endorsed and encouraged the mob justice and the cancel culture. I'm pretty pessimistic this time. I think this is the future of the US since people who do have a platform do not speak out and will not speak out.
That's false. In fact, attempting 反思历史 is the quickest way to get into serious trouble with the party, and one will find oneself soon be "drinking tea" with the authorities, or have one's livelihood taken away, or worse.
Hell, it wasn't even that many decades ago that lynchings were commonplace. And that's a much worse form of mob justice than outraged tweet brigades that occasionally get someone fired.
Mob justice needs to be condemned wherever it comes from.
That it is more a problem coming from the left at the moment does not mean its ok to let it pass.
I'm not sure who "our" is, here, but I don't read it with that tone regardless.
> There have been plenty of videos circling showing mobs during the recent riots beating people half and fully to death.
Unless you're talking about police officers doing the beating, which doesn't seem the case given your "left" remark, can you substantiate this claim? If so, how?
I believe your comment is out of sync with reality, but sincerely welcome quantitative data to adjust my views.
Here is some video evidence to assist in adjusting your views as requested.
Personally, I advise you (and other readers) not to watch them; this sort of thing isn't psychologically healthy. But it exists and its as appalling as the police brutality - but you don't seem to see so much of this in the mainstream media for some reason.
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1275104256643792901
https://twitter.com/SamParkerSenate/status/12734446560475136...
I did. At the time I began my reply, it was in there. One of the reasons I replied was that sentence – it modifies the context of the rest of your words. I think that sentence was pretty messed up. Perhaps that's why you removed it.
I skimmed each video in the threads you posted. Of them, two of the first (adults) and none of the second (with kids) appear to potentially take place in the recent riots. I'm not saying that violence doesn't occur there – it certainly does, but your original quote was: > There have been plenty of videos circling showing mobs during the recent riots beating people half and fully to death. (emphasis mine).
The videos you posted of racial violence are tragic, and I don't question their authenticity. But they don't substantiate your earlier claim about the frequency of violence from rioters.
This is the last I'm going to say about it – I regret replying in the first place. This wasn't productive. My bad.
[1] https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://www.naacp.org/latest/ferguson-black-lives-matter-act...
In fact I trust them so little I quintupled them for my analysis.
And despite the Black suicide rate being 2.5x lower than the white suicide rate [1], you would still expect an average of 2 Blacks (and 24 whites) to commit suicide by suffocation/hanging per day [2].
[1] https://www.sprc.org/scope/racial-ethnic-disparities
[2] http://www.lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics/us-methods-sui...
So when it clusters around black activists, that's pretty telling.
And to be clear, lynching is a power thing, not a genocide thing. The point isn't to kill all blacks but to make an example of the ones that 'don't know their place'. To 'hammer down the nails that stick out'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a problem.
And even if it was less of a problem than it was a decade ago -- and I don't think it is -- we should still look for ways to fix it.
James Damore is gainfully employed. Steve Hsu is still a tenured professor, Justine Sacco had a new job within a month, George Zimmerman is able to make a better living than most by selling murder memorabilia.
Read this whole thread.
He has been defamed as a pedophile by a stalker, and has been denied several six figure paying jobs 3-4 interviews into the hiring process explicitly because one guy decided to cancel him. The stalker says he monitors court records to prevent Josh from restarting his career by changing his name. Josh is now unemployable and living in Serbia.
Bio on the stalker:
Samuel Collingwood Smith is a yellow journalist who specializes in defamation and stalking. After a brief stint as a British council member, he publicly embarrassed himself by claiming his political enemies were sexual abusers of children. Without a job, he indulged in an obsession with Evanescence and attempted to become ring leader of Internet fan clubs about Amy Lee. In his quest to become her #1 fan, he would bully, harass, and stalk underage girls who held forum moderator positions above him. More than five years later, he threatens them legally if they speak on what abuse he submitted them to. After a falling out with Evanescence staff, he accused the band of being child pornographers and was forced into a permanent contract which requires he never speak of Amy Lee or Evanescence again. Despite parliamentary petitions to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement, he is legally bound to this day.
Since then, Samuel Collingwood Smith has trailblazed the Internet leaving behind countless smear campaigns purporting anyone he does not like to be involved in child pornography somehow. An emotionally unstable adult-child who focuses much of his time on GamerGate and relevant topics, he is well known as a public menace to local constables and courts. Writing under multiple pen names, including Vordrak and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, he romanticizes the English witch hunter by the same name. He hides behind this intimidating Internet persona and openly calls himself a terrorist. His mission statement is "to expose corruption and terrorise the guilty without worrying too much about due process."
> The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users
And he thinks that a stalker is why he gets dropped at the background check phase?
Among the lies, is a quote attributed to Josh that someone added to his Encyclopedia Dramatica page, which the person later removed with the reason: ""sorry, I made this up".
Are you arguing that the central claim: that kiwi farms doxxes and harasses people is untrue?
http://www.kiwifarmswiki.com/index.php?title=Joshua_Conner_M...
This is the self-referential page created by the stalker in order to defame Josh. I am not referring to the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/owner-of-christchurch-s...
Josh moon built a site that actively encourages harassment of innocent people online. That's unquestionably true. It's no wonder people don't want to employ him. He continues to work to improve the site and associate with it and actively engage in the harassment in some cases.
I cannot believe people are defending him.
It's a site which hosts a bunch of stalkers, doxxers and people whose sole purpose is to harass and ruin the lives of others. Anyone defending it is massively suspect to say the least. He wasn't 'cancelled' for wrongthink, he's been ostracized because he actively involves himself in making others people's lives worse.
In my opinion, you have to present at least a minimum level of decency towards society in order to take part in society, of which being employable is one facet. By running Kiwi Farms, Mr Moon simply doesn't reach this level imho.
It claims Josh is an anti-semite. What does it cite to back this up? It cites a picture of a tweet hosted on the website on Mathew Hopkins, Moon's stalker.
http://matthewhopkinsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Moo...
I used to follow Josh on twitter before he got banned, and that wasn't even his twitter account.
Other folks have gotten the same treatment as well. The stories come up from time to time if you pay attention.
https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html
Most cases never make it that far. You have just enough that if any employer Googles someone before hiring, they don't get the job. If you have a half-dozen angry blog posts, or a local newspaper article or two, or a bunch of Twitter posts accusing you of something nasty, that's enough.
You're hiring someone for your team. If you have a choice between two job candidates, one where you see a half-dozen articles claiming they're racist, and one without, whom do you pick?
I know the choice I'd make. I don't want to deal with potential management problems.
Heck, even if you've sued a former employer (with good and legitimate reasons), why would someone pick you, knowing you're the sort of person who sues? Especially given I have no way to evaluate if the law suit was reasonable? Or if you've been involved in some conflict. Do I really want to sort out that mess? Or do I just give your resume a yellow flag, and pick someone without any yellow flags, if available.
In an up economy, where labor is scarce, you'll do fine. In a down economy where jobs are scarce, if you've got bad things about you on the internet, or even potentially yellow flags (e.g. some visible law suit or conflict), you've got a problem.
And yes, I can think of a couple of cases off the top of my head who have been through this, but I don't want to go Streisand Effect on people who'd much rather have normal, private lives.
What a "so". There's simultaneously so much confidence and so much innumeracy packed into it.
It's impressive how much a mere two letters can communicate.
I can kinda understand the rest but I never understood this one. It feels like an attack against critical thinking and reason.
Honestly, I think the only way to combat this is to make taking these actions expensive for those who do that. The twitter rage/grievance machine is running on all cylinders.
That and making sure that companies that succumb to the mob, are roundly and publicly held to account for that. If they can't be bothered to make rational choices, then find alternatives to patronize.
Why are they still your friends?
I disagree, sometimes deeply, with some of my friends. I also don't like echo chambers, as no original thought occurs there. Just an attempt to negate the "other". Which is completely counterproductive to having a rational dialog.
Something is horribly wrong.
This sort of stuff used to be called "flame bait" back in the day. Don't take the bait. It's just not worth caring about, no matter if it's a professor doing it or a basement dweller.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- Cardinal Richelieu
Adding to the above, the current administration has proved time and again that they're not up to the job.
And finally, the wave of (out)rage currently unfolding in the US, celebrated by many as a good thing is in reality a terrible thing - the problem of racism in the US is so complex that it is impossible to solve it by using force (condemnations, firings, banishment, verbal and physical violence). This also applies to sexism and other -isms: it takes brains and willingness to spend the time (years to decades).
Those events are yet another social flare-up that will take its course and then fizzle out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am so tired of watching journalists repeat this irresponsible lie. The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism. I challenge anyone to find a legitimate link explaining the relationship between the symbol and white supremacy that doesn't ultimately lead to a journal article sourced from cherry picked Twitter threads.
Journalism died when ideologues normalized activist journalism. We are in the midst of a mass hysteria and media outlets are fully culpable. 70 years ago we called it McCarthyism.
If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the media took the bait?
This was around the same time they also tried to take credit for the Steele dossier, claiming they had made it all up and what not. In either case, when people started ironically using it to troll, others started using it unironically as a dogwhistle.
Just like the fact that the media does occasionally report on valid news.
https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-...
https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-...
They attribute it to 4chan.
There are multiple photo examples of white supremacists in 2015 and 2016 using the OK symbol as a link to Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of them and Pepe was often shown using the OK symbol during any support of Trump. The reality is that the white supremacist supporters of Trump were already using that symbol to designate their support for him.
But here’s a take: cancel culture is not new, it’s just changed direction and is scaring the pants off people who previously had the luxury of ignoring it (or taking advantage). What happened to Cafferty is a shame, but the article left out another person who was cancelled over a vicious lie: Emmett Till.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-me...
I realize yours is far from the only account stoking the flamewar in this thread, but this example was noticeable even in this wretched context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I mean one just needs to look at what happened during Gamergate for an example of what I'm talking about. That said, it's obvious that those same types of people are weaponizing it against otherwise innocent people which means we need to do better at fixing things that end up wrong.
Or even today if you don’t “look like you belong”.
And since this phenomenon is affecting the income and livelihood of individuals, the only people that are safe are yet again the rich.
The middle-class are tearing themselves and the poor up for the sake of appearances.
Ironically we live in a society that now claims more than ever to know what it means to "do right", but that growing moral burden of "doing right" produces an ever greater internal sense of shame (for missing the mark) that is often projected outwards onto easy targets. Outrage is what wins eyeballs in the media, because messages of shame penetrate to the core. Thanks to social media, these messages clone themselves far more easily. Acts of injustice stir up outrage via a message of shame, and the cycle often perpetuates itself with further acts of outrage/injustice.
America has a growing self-righteousness induced shame problem is what this is, and until we identify that source of grace [1] that can transform sin into honor, shame into dignity, and moral outrage into forgiveness, it will only continue to worsen. Yes, we are to have deep sorrow and compassion regarding acts of injustice, but grace and forgiveness are the only legitimate exits from the emotional/spiritual burdens they impose.
[1] Romans 8:1-2
It appears that with the decline of the Church all that's happened is people invented a new one, but a rather nasty one that sounds a lot like the religions of a couple thousand years ago: obsessed with converting heretics whether they want to be converted or not, a whole lot of destruction of pagan idols, making people into martyrs and so on.
On balance, given a choice between the kind of hate filled behaviour the article describes, or God-fearing people, I'd much rather be around the latter. And if forced to choose a tribe I guess I'd pick them too, as the modern religious seem much nicer, calmer and more accepting than the "woke".
Edit - sometimes you get horribly downvoted, but still stand by the comment. Few downvoting really have an appreciation for how horrific US history has been. For example I encourage you to read this article on lynching
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-me...
Indeed, fear itself is not mob justice, rather, the actions of the mod itself is mob justice.
> emotionally raw time ...
This was a thing before the riots too. The Stallman case happened last year for example.
> Downvotes are expected from those ignorant of history ;)
I do not think that anyone sane is doubting the historical mob justice against certain groups. It is just that just as these instances of mobbing were wrong so are the modern ones. (plus I believe that some of the people downvoting do so due to how us-centric this comment is)
This argument boils down to whataboutism if you dig down under the overly emotional packaging. This is not bringing anything to the discussion, it is an attempt to shut down the discussion. This is why you are getting downvoted.
>A dignity culture, according to Campbell and Manning, has moral values and behavioral norms that promote the value of every human life, encouraging achievement in its children while teaching that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
>Because victimhood culture is now claimed to confer the highest moral status on victims, Campbell and Manning argue that it “increases the incentive to publicize grievances.” Injured and offended parties who might once have thrown a punch or filed a law suit now appeal for support on social media
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Victimhood_Culture
A lot of this whining about celebrities (and sometimes others) getting canceled stinks of special exceptions in employment law being made for people who say offensive things. That's even dumber than the religious carve-outs, i.e. the rights that have been exclusively granted to people who believe things that cannot by definition be proved, and that if you fail to have beliefs that cannot by definition be proved (no matter how minority, or how discriminated against) you are excluded from.
The problem is the lack of process. I don't somehow care more about the suffering of people who have tweeted things that look racist to someone, than the suffering of others fired because they were accused of being unproductive on the job then fired with no hearing or documentation of that lack of productivity, or somebody fired because the company thought it would be cheaper to outsource their job.
The idea that random companies and academic institutions carry the authority to either define somebody as racist, or can lose that authority to credibly point out racism by unfairly exercising it is laughable. Maybe, instead, random companies shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily take away someone's living by a functional government working in the public interest.
Seems a lot of people getting angry at ghosts/ideas("cancel culture"/"mob mentality" - a mob against "mob mentality") or people doing technically legal things(taking a picture in public, calling a business to voice a complaint). Those ghosts/people didn't actually fire the guy, his company did.
It'll be impossible to stop trolls. You can't just say "knock it off guys", nor can you ban people from taking pictures or voicing an opinion. However, you could put some restrictions around firings, but many would view that as stifling business, so this is the outcome instead. What may or may not have been a knee-jerk firing, but that's the cost of "at-will" employment.
Also, there is a devils advocate point to be made in that corrupt police unions have created difficulties with removing bad cops from the field, so this can be a double-edged sword. Overall employer/union accountability needs to be higher when it comes to who they hire and who they fire.
He fired his own daughter but this was insufficient: not only did virtually all his customers abandon him immediately but his landlord revoked his lease (how can a landlord do that? I have no idea).
So basically his entire business was destroyed overnight in response to something he didn't even do himself.
A lot of these firings are driven by fear of customer boycotts. And the customer boycotts are driven by fear of more boycotts/outrage/etc... it's a circle of destruction.
"God already punished you for being black, so why would you make it worse by being gay. #shitpeopleinmyfamilysay!! Haha"
They found themselves in hot water after posting about their allegiance with BLM, which has been a marketing bandwagon as of late. This leads to people digging into how sincere these businesses are, and finding a cache of noxious racist tweets by the director of a business, who is the CEO's daughter, is basically going to sound the death knell for a small business.
Maybe before posting about your family's business' allegiance to a hot-button cause related to black people and racism, think about deleting all those racists tweets you made years ago talking about how black people should be eradicated, using the n* word with monkey emojis, and your posting of swastikas. Think about how this could impact the people around you, including your family, your customers, and other businesses who support you.
I don't blame their landlord for wanting run away from any association with her toxic tweets, and likely there is a clause within their lease agreement allowing the breaking of the lease due to certain behavior.
However, what these stories seem to have in common is lack of due process: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on [1].
Maybe people should get off Twitter and put some work (or money) into actual organisations that engage in concerted political effort to change things.
[1] Not Mark Twain... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
My thinking on this has changed based on circumstances. My current thinking is that we need to shut down Twitter and Facebook for six months. World wide.
I know this is harsh. I know they do a lot of good. And I know this is difficult yet doable (they don’t own their domains, they are borrowed).
And yet the world existed just fine before Twitter and Facebook.
Things have gotten out of hand. More harm will come out of this kind of irresponsible unchecked mass communication. These companies don’t seem to care about the damage they enable through their flawed technology. They enable real white supremacists, terrorists, cancel culture warriors, child pornographers, human traffickers and all kinds of criminals to form massive groups and organize action like never before in history.
I’ve said it before, for all their technical prowess they sure have shitty algorithms, lousy rules of operation, nonexistent customer service and no accountability.
For example, How hard would it be to classify post subject matter and throttle comment rate to one per 60, 30, 10, 5 or 1 minutes?
Can’t classify reliably? 60 minutes between comments.
Groups on FB? Your content is deleted every 30 days so you can’t accumulate walls of hatred. Also, all group owners and moderators must use real names and submit identification, maybe even post a bond refundable after a period of time. Don’t like it? Go start a website.
I know a bunch of the above is crazy. Sorry. I am angry. I started with the Internet before most people knew it existed. Before that it was services like Compuserve.
There was great hope for the internet and the enlightenment it could bring to society. And, for the most part, it has done far more good than harm.
Yet there are a handful of companies, including “news” outlets who have managed to use the Internet to defecate and vomit all over society. And they don’t seem to care at all. Anything from lies to orchestrating mob attacks on individuals, businesses and institutions —even history— is fair game.
They have enabled the lowest of society to engage in mob rule in exchange for returning profits to their investors.
This is where Silicon Valley is to blame as well. For all their virtue signaling they seem perfectly fine with focusing their money and resources getting people to click on stuff. I have yet to see any of these virtuous individuals apply a significant amount of time, money and effort towards fixing the shit culture that produces companies who seem content with being the conduit for hatred and destruction.
Bravo!
Take Twitter and Facebook off air for six months. Force them to think about what they are doing and find solutions. Send a solid message to others (media/news) that being conduits for destruction and radicalization has consequences.
Maybe, just maybe, we come out of such an experience with the Internet we all thought we were going to enjoy. One that would enlighten, elevate and unite people. An internet that would erase inequality, bigotry and racism. One that would eventually even remove borders and unite all on this blue marble and move humanity towards an unimaginably great future.
/s