(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @09:15AM
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday June 30 2020, @09:15AM (#1014434)
I'm not sure I agree unless you go back some number of centuries, at which point the modern notions of liberal and conservative lose all meaning. I mean obviously the conservatives had their brand of ignorant and bigoted self righteous hypocrisy with the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and so on. I can still remember people trying to ban Dungeons and Dragons because it was 'Satanic'.
But what we're seeing today is similar to the bigotry (and hypocrisy) of times *far* past. Digital mobs in particular are becoming increasingly reminiscent of lynch mobs. While that has a racial connotation today, people of all sorts were lynched for falling short of what the masses perceived as their social norms of the time. The largest lynching in the US was the Great Hanging at Gainsville. [wikipedia.org] 41 men were lynched for being 'suspected unionists.' The digital mobs of today are actively and purposefully doing all they can to try to destroy people's lives: getting them fired and even actively driving people to suicide. And the digital world is increasingly starting to blend with the real world where that 'digital violence' is becoming physical violence.
This is rather unprecedented at such scales. I mean can't try to step outside of this all and look back at how people are going to see all of this? For that matter, step outside of it and imagine how people in much of the rest of the world *already* see it! This is a serious problem, but people are just kind of shrugging it off, or creating incredibly spurious rationalizations for it. Mobs are stupid and dangerous. Self righteous mobs are the same only many magnitudes worse. Events of this sort are relatively new in modern times, but it's not a new story: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @09:15AM
I'm not sure I agree unless you go back some number of centuries, at which point the modern notions of liberal and conservative lose all meaning. I mean obviously the conservatives had their brand of ignorant and bigoted self righteous hypocrisy with the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and so on. I can still remember people trying to ban Dungeons and Dragons because it was 'Satanic'.
But what we're seeing today is similar to the bigotry (and hypocrisy) of times *far* past. Digital mobs in particular are becoming increasingly reminiscent of lynch mobs. While that has a racial connotation today, people of all sorts were lynched for falling short of what the masses perceived as their social norms of the time. The largest lynching in the US was the Great Hanging at Gainsville. [wikipedia.org] 41 men were lynched for being 'suspected unionists.' The digital mobs of today are actively and purposefully doing all they can to try to destroy people's lives: getting them fired and even actively driving people to suicide. And the digital world is increasingly starting to blend with the real world where that 'digital violence' is becoming physical violence.
This is rather unprecedented at such scales. I mean can't try to step outside of this all and look back at how people are going to see all of this? For that matter, step outside of it and imagine how people in much of the rest of the world *already* see it! This is a serious problem, but people are just kind of shrugging it off, or creating incredibly spurious rationalizations for it. Mobs are stupid and dangerous. Self righteous mobs are the same only many magnitudes worse. Events of this sort are relatively new in modern times, but it's not a new story: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.