8 ms·

Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish gui

by umvi 6y ago

Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish guilt. Now is just seems like internet bullies can just bypass democratic processes and do anything they want to shout down, browbeat, hound, or destroy the people/companies they don't like. And they can get away with it as long as it has a thin veneer of the current moral issue...

dx87 6y ago
Pretty much. I've started seeing a lot of people saying "innocent until proven guilty only applies to courts" as an excuse for mob justice. It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship".
- monocasa 6y ago
  So what, people don't get freedom of association unless they file for a court order?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    People should absolutely be free to stop associating with others for bad reasons. That doesn't mean we can't encourage people not to, or talk about the badness of the reasons.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      But there's tons of reasons why someone might find their behavior abhorrent that don't and shouldn't pass the bar for illegality, and want to inform their employer that the employee's behavior reflects negatively enough on the employer that they would stop doing business with them. There's all sorts of acts that are never going to be proven guilty, because they're not illegal in the first place. Generally because making it illegal would conflict with the first amendment.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I disagree. I think there are very few actions so abhorrent that you should be fired for doing them in your personal life, and the vast majority of Twitter firings I've seen aren't over the line. Society isn't going to work under a standard where people who do bad things can't have jobs anymore.
        monocasa 6y ago
        > I disagree. I think there are very few actions so abhorrent that you should be fired for doing them in your personal life, and the vast majority of Twitter firings I've seen aren't over the line. That's cool for you, but others obviously disagree with you. > Society isn't going to work under a standard where people who do bad things can't have jobs anymore. Or people will change their actions since they want to keep being members of society.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I don't understand why you keep returning to people disagreeing with me as though it's a counterpoint. I know people disagree! That's why I'm posting; I hope to convince them that they're wrong. Society is double not going to work under a standard where we don't consider bad people members of society anymore.
        monocasa 6y ago
        > I don't understand why you keep returning to people disagreeing with me as though it's a counterpoint. I know people disagree! Because you're trying to enforce your standard of conduct. That's cool that only technically illegal actions are the standard for you, but it's totally valid for that not to be other's standards. > Society is double not going to work under a standard where we don't consider bad people members of society anymore. That's an argument against freedom of association. Why do people get to be free from consequences of not to the point of being illegal actions? Like that's the nonviolent method of enacting change. If you don't allow it you end up with far worse.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      It used to be that people were taught: there is the law, and there is the moral principle underlying the law. So while freedom of speech is a thing protected by the Constitution, it exists outside the Constitution as a principle that instructs us that it is not legitimate to attempt to silence people for expressing an opinion you dislike, with whatever means you have at your disposal (shunning, character assassination, etc.), simply because you dislike it. You are still free to shun people with opinions you dislike, it just may not be the right thing to do. Today, people are taught that laws are arbitrary and are made and used by the oppressor class to oppress the oppressed classes, and it is the moral mission of the oppressed classes to rise up and seize power so that the laws won't oppress then anymore. Which means that the moral principles are lost, and any weapon that finds its way in the hands of the immiserated proletariat can be legitimately used in the struggle to determine which class writes the laws.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  You'll notice that this is people on both sides - only when it benefits them. > It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship". This is a different issue and is a lot trickier logically. But it essentially is true.
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    If you look up the word "constitution" in the dictionary you will find that it is taken to mean "that which we are made of." So if we as a society do not value freedom of speech, then by definition it is not in our constitution, regardless of what a piece of paper says.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  I mean, those are both really important to remember - while society needs to find its balance and have respectful, intelligent conversation about tough issues, there is no obligation to give clearly bad people the benefit of the doubt within the community, nor is there an obligation to give objectively horrible people a social media platform with which to spread hate.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Who shall decide who are bad/horrible people? Such things seem far from clear to me, in no small part due to the massive number of variables involved, coupled with the unfortunate reality that people's perception of reality tends to be so fundamentally error-prone, and no error correcting mechanism seems to exist.
  - froasty 6y ago
    It never ceases to flabbergast me that American civics has failed so utterly, for decades, to produce nominally functional adults that can somehow think that "clearly bad" and "objectively horrible" are Real Things That Exist and then say in the next breath, without a shred of self-awareness, things like True Objectivity Doesn't Exist or All Things Are Political. Is everyone in America so ignorant that they don't know what happens when informal social standards become justifications for political suppression based on who the "public" and not the law deems to be "clearly bad" and "objectively horrible" people? You get lynchings and pogroms. You get informal show trials and massacres. You carve the stick that the next batch of self-righteous authoritarians stick up their ass to justify being inhuman, indecent, monsters. I can already hear the response forming: "But we know that these people exist, are evil, and are harming people now! We have evidence!" Yeah. That's what they always say. I could list every group targeted throughout by self-righteous authoritarians through just Western history--Christians, Jews, Manicheans, heretics, lepers, Catholics, Protestants, witches, blacks, anarchists, communists, thugs, Muslims--and always find a justification that began with some variant of "But we have evidence that they were Clearly Bad People!" All those other Devils were ridiculous, made-up nonsense. But not yours. Your Devil is real.
    - 6y ago
malandrew 6y ago
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
barrkel 6y ago
You'll get short shrift trying to defend unsympathetic targets, though. Many - if not most - people think those who appear to be guilty don't need a fair trial. There's a gap between what the state can enforce, and what the people on their own can enforce. Within that gap, justice may or may not occur, but procedure is generally absent.
monocasa 6y ago
Or there's a whole host of reasons why you may not want to associate with, or associate with the employer of someone who doesn't break any crimes but who's behavior is still abhorrent.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  If it is abhorrent, we must make a law to make it illegal. Otherwise, anyone that think that you make something that is abhorrent can pressure your employer to fire you.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    No we shouldn't and our country is based on the idea that we shouldn't. I think we can agree that marching through the streets chanting nazi slogans is abhorrent, but making it illegal would be a first amendment violation. Our society relies on association choices instead of leaving all abhorrent behavior either illegal or free from social consequences.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish guilt. No, people have never, as a general rule, been protected from social consequences of actual or perceived wrongdoing until proven guilty in a trial, only (and this mostly recently, historically, and adhering to far-from-universal principals of restraint) from certain (generally not all) government-imposed consequences.
- umvi 6y ago
  Well the internet has certainly made far easier than it was before to inflict "social consequences" onto total strangers. Before, if you were a enough of a jerk, the townspeople would boycott your shop. Now, if you said the wrong thing in the past decade (or voted for the wrong candidate, or supported/didn't support the wrong/right bill/proposition/amendment), a mob composed of thousands of people from various locations thousands of miles away will call for your company to be boycotted, for you to be fired, etc. or else.
  - kangnkodos 6y ago
    Here's an example. Brendan Eich became CEO of Mozilla. Someone tweeted that he donated money to the side fighting against gay marriage. The internet mob did their thing. Brendan Eich was forced to resign. I disagree with his political choice. But I defend his right to make a political choice, and not be fired because of it. You shouldn't get fired from any job for your political choices.
closeparen 6y ago
Standard retort: if a boss suspects a minimum wage worker of underperforming for the capitalist machine, he can just fire her, no questions asked. Having our burgers flipped correctly is important enough to us that we accept collateral damage there. Now when her boss is accused of being a sexist pig, we suddenly have to be 100% sure. Why? Are women less important to us than burgers? Or is "due process" just a concern troll that powerful people throw around to protect each other? Either way, bad look. I don't think this is right, but countering it takes some thought.
- astine 6y ago
  Attacking at-will employment whenever danger of Internet hate mobs is pointed out is a bit of a whataboutism. Not everyone worried about Internet hate mobs is otherwise a supporter of at-will employment. But that's really a distraction from the core issue. The thing about at-will employment is the it presumes that the employment relationship is largely between the employer and the employee. That assumption breaks down in the face of an Internet mob. This is part of the reason why the proof standard for how you treat complete strangers is different than the proof standard for how you treat people you know, including employees. Furthermore, in the theory that underpins American capitalism, employment is an economic relationship. For example, if a burger flipper is sufficiently bad at flipping burgers, he shouldn't be a burger flipper, because her status as a burger flipper is predicated on her ability to do that job. Even in the most socialist systems that I'm aware of, basic competence is considered a prerequisite for holding a job. Moral qualities are usually considered less important unless they impact the job. In the American system, people are theoretically hired and fired primarily based on their ability to do their job, but Internet mobs change this equation thoroughly. Now, your political opinions affect your employability as well. I think that this has profound implications for democracy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notSupplied 6y ago
  This is a really great point. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to come up with a thoughtful rebuttal to this, and when you're done, you'll likely end up with a wall of text that gets TLDR'd. This is why reason loses on Twitter, it takes a Paul Graham level essay to counter even the most basic immflamatory logic.

by umvi 6y ago

dx87 6y ago

Pretty much. I've started seeing a lot of people saying "innocent until proven guilty only applies to courts" as an excuse for mob justice. It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship".

monocasa 6y ago
So what, people don't get freedom of association unless they file for a court order?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  People should absolutely be free to stop associating with others for bad reasons. That doesn't mean we can't encourage people not to, or talk about the badness of the reasons.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    But there's tons of reasons why someone might find their behavior abhorrent that don't and shouldn't pass the bar for illegality, and want to inform their employer that the employee's behavior reflects negatively enough on the employer that they would stop doing business with them. There's all sorts of acts that are never going to be proven guilty, because they're not illegal in the first place. Generally because making it illegal would conflict with the first amendment.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I disagree. I think there are very few actions so abhorrent that you should be fired for doing them in your personal life, and the vast majority of Twitter firings I've seen aren't over the line. Society isn't going to work under a standard where people who do bad things can't have jobs anymore.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        > I disagree. I think there are very few actions so abhorrent that you should be fired for doing them in your personal life, and the vast majority of Twitter firings I've seen aren't over the line. That's cool for you, but others obviously disagree with you. > Society isn't going to work under a standard where people who do bad things can't have jobs anymore. Or people will change their actions since they want to keep being members of society.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I don't understand why you keep returning to people disagreeing with me as though it's a counterpoint. I know people disagree! That's why I'm posting; I hope to convince them that they're wrong. Society is double not going to work under a standard where we don't consider bad people members of society anymore.
        monocasa 6y ago
        > I don't understand why you keep returning to people disagreeing with me as though it's a counterpoint. I know people disagree! Because you're trying to enforce your standard of conduct. That's cool that only technically illegal actions are the standard for you, but it's totally valid for that not to be other's standards. > Society is double not going to work under a standard where we don't consider bad people members of society anymore. That's an argument against freedom of association. Why do people get to be free from consequences of not to the point of being illegal actions? Like that's the nonviolent method of enacting change. If you don't allow it you end up with far worse.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    It used to be that people were taught: there is the law, and there is the moral principle underlying the law. So while freedom of speech is a thing protected by the Constitution, it exists outside the Constitution as a principle that instructs us that it is not legitimate to attempt to silence people for expressing an opinion you dislike, with whatever means you have at your disposal (shunning, character assassination, etc.), simply because you dislike it. You are still free to shun people with opinions you dislike, it just may not be the right thing to do. Today, people are taught that laws are arbitrary and are made and used by the oppressor class to oppress the oppressed classes, and it is the moral mission of the oppressed classes to rise up and seize power so that the laws won't oppress then anymore. Which means that the moral principles are lost, and any weapon that finds its way in the hands of the immiserated proletariat can be legitimately used in the struggle to determine which class writes the laws.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
You'll notice that this is people on both sides - only when it benefits them. > It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship". This is a different issue and is a lot trickier logically. But it essentially is true.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  If you look up the word "constitution" in the dictionary you will find that it is taken to mean "that which we are made of." So if we as a society do not value freedom of speech, then by definition it is not in our constitution, regardless of what a piece of paper says.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
unethical_ban 6y ago
I mean, those are both really important to remember - while society needs to find its balance and have respectful, intelligent conversation about tough issues, there is no obligation to give clearly bad people the benefit of the doubt within the community, nor is there an obligation to give objectively horrible people a social media platform with which to spread hate.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Who shall decide who are bad/horrible people? Such things seem far from clear to me, in no small part due to the massive number of variables involved, coupled with the unfortunate reality that people's perception of reality tends to be so fundamentally error-prone, and no error correcting mechanism seems to exist.
- froasty 6y ago
  It never ceases to flabbergast me that American civics has failed so utterly, for decades, to produce nominally functional adults that can somehow think that "clearly bad" and "objectively horrible" are Real Things That Exist and then say in the next breath, without a shred of self-awareness, things like True Objectivity Doesn't Exist or All Things Are Political. Is everyone in America so ignorant that they don't know what happens when informal social standards become justifications for political suppression based on who the "public" and not the law deems to be "clearly bad" and "objectively horrible" people? You get lynchings and pogroms. You get informal show trials and massacres. You carve the stick that the next batch of self-righteous authoritarians stick up their ass to justify being inhuman, indecent, monsters. I can already hear the response forming: "But we know that these people exist, are evil, and are harming people now! We have evidence!" Yeah. That's what they always say. I could list every group targeted throughout by self-righteous authoritarians through just Western history--Christians, Jews, Manicheans, heretics, lepers, Catholics, Protestants, witches, blacks, anarchists, communists, thugs, Muslims--and always find a justification that began with some variant of "But we have evidence that they were Clearly Bad People!" All those other Devils were ridiculous, made-up nonsense. But not yours. Your Devil is real.
  - 6y ago

malandrew 6y ago

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

barrkel 6y ago

You'll get short shrift trying to defend unsympathetic targets, though. Many - if not most - people think those who appear to be guilty don't need a fair trial. There's a gap between what the state can enforce, and what the people on their own can enforce. Within that gap, justice may or may not occur, but procedure is generally absent.

monocasa 6y ago

Or there's a whole host of reasons why you may not want to associate with, or associate with the employer of someone who doesn't break any crimes but who's behavior is still abhorrent.

gus_massa 6y ago
If it is abhorrent, we must make a law to make it illegal. Otherwise, anyone that think that you make something that is abhorrent can pressure your employer to fire you.
- monocasa 6y ago
  No we shouldn't and our country is based on the idea that we shouldn't. I think we can agree that marching through the streets chanting nazi slogans is abhorrent, but making it illegal would be a first amendment violation. Our society relies on association choices instead of leaving all abhorrent behavior either illegal or free from social consequences.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish guilt. No, people have never, as a general rule, been protected from social consequences of actual or perceived wrongdoing until proven guilty in a trial, only (and this mostly recently, historically, and adhering to far-from-universal principals of restraint) from certain (generally not all) government-imposed consequences.

umvi 6y ago
Well the internet has certainly made far easier than it was before to inflict "social consequences" onto total strangers. Before, if you were a enough of a jerk, the townspeople would boycott your shop. Now, if you said the wrong thing in the past decade (or voted for the wrong candidate, or supported/didn't support the wrong/right bill/proposition/amendment), a mob composed of thousands of people from various locations thousands of miles away will call for your company to be boycotted, for you to be fired, etc. or else.
- kangnkodos 6y ago
  Here's an example. Brendan Eich became CEO of Mozilla. Someone tweeted that he donated money to the side fighting against gay marriage. The internet mob did their thing. Brendan Eich was forced to resign. I disagree with his political choice. But I defend his right to make a political choice, and not be fired because of it. You shouldn't get fired from any job for your political choices.

closeparen 6y ago

Standard retort: if a boss suspects a minimum wage worker of underperforming for the capitalist machine, he can just fire her, no questions asked. Having our burgers flipped correctly is important enough to us that we accept collateral damage there. Now when her boss is accused of being a sexist pig, we suddenly have to be 100% sure. Why? Are women less important to us than burgers? Or is "due process" just a concern troll that powerful people throw around to protect each other? Either way, bad look. I don't think this is right, but countering it takes some thought.

astine 6y ago
Attacking at-will employment whenever danger of Internet hate mobs is pointed out is a bit of a whataboutism. Not everyone worried about Internet hate mobs is otherwise a supporter of at-will employment. But that's really a distraction from the core issue. The thing about at-will employment is the it presumes that the employment relationship is largely between the employer and the employee. That assumption breaks down in the face of an Internet mob. This is part of the reason why the proof standard for how you treat complete strangers is different than the proof standard for how you treat people you know, including employees. Furthermore, in the theory that underpins American capitalism, employment is an economic relationship. For example, if a burger flipper is sufficiently bad at flipping burgers, he shouldn't be a burger flipper, because her status as a burger flipper is predicated on her ability to do that job. Even in the most socialist systems that I'm aware of, basic competence is considered a prerequisite for holding a job. Moral qualities are usually considered less important unless they impact the job. In the American system, people are theoretically hired and fired primarily based on their ability to do their job, but Internet mobs change this equation thoroughly. Now, your political opinions affect your employability as well. I think that this has profound implications for democracy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
notSupplied 6y ago
This is a really great point. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to come up with a thoughtful rebuttal to this, and when you're done, you'll likely end up with a wall of text that gets TLDR'd. This is why reason loses on Twitter, it takes a Paul Graham level essay to counter even the most basic immflamatory logic.