Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

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Justine Sacco didn't suffer a "devastating online lynching". She got a ton of nasty tweets and emails, and she got fired from her job. She found a new job (one she likes) and the internet fury eventually blew over. Unpleasant? Certainly. A lynching? Heck no.

There are people who do get beaten or killed for who they are. Transgender people regularly fear for their physical safety. Minorities get abused and even killed by the police on a daily basis. So when people protest this sort of injustice online or in real life you'd expect the author to be supportive of this. Except no, she apparently considers this horrifying mob-like behavior of social justice warriors.

It's the lazy stance where she supports social justice activism in theory, but when it comes down to actually protesting abuses of power (which can include rioting and other mob-like behavior) she considers it unacceptable. Never mind that historically speaking large scale public protests (= mobs) have often brought meaningful social progress. I wonder if democracy can even function without it, because people must have a way to make their voices heard when the official channels are closed to them.

Don't get me wrong. Mobs are blunt instruments and without question scary. However, they're not uniquely or especially scary. So when I hear something like "[mobs] are the thing that frighten me most in the world" I have to roll my eyes. Other political issues are scarier by several orders of magnitude. Nuclear war. Global warming. NSA spying. Democracy getting hijacked. Perpetual war. Not on this list: Internet rage directed at Sacco.

Sacco was home-bound for a year and now carries a stain on her character that will be with her for her entire life. All for a badly executed joke that was liberal in its intent.

Sure, plenty of people have it worse in this world, but that does not mean what happened to her was "fine" and that she was/is totally "fine".

Nuclear war. Global warming. NSA spying. Democracy getting hijacked. Perpetual war.

All these issues depend on level-headed, reasoned debate. Mass hysteria will only make it more likely that we succumb to these threats.

What happened to Sacco was without question unjust. And nowhere did I suggest it was fine. Mobs are a morally neutral instrument that can be used for good or evil.

If people just wanted to make the point that it's unacceptable to attack an unknown person based on a single tweet (regardless of how bad the tweet is), then that's fine. Except people extrapolate from the Sacco incident to make sweeping claims about political correctness and mob behavior.

Level-headed debate is just one part of the puzzle. There's no point in having a debate if the outcome of the debate doesn't matter because the people who are having the debate are disenfranchised. At that point protests are needed. This isn't "mass hysteria". People protest because it works.

No-one disputes that protests like those seen in the Indian independence movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Iraq War opposition, the Arab Spring, the gay rights movement etc are extremely valuable and necessary.

Where people object is where justifiable protest switches to ugly mob behaviour, including things like looting of innocent business operators, indiscriminate violence and vandalism, etc , just like what happened in Tottenham.

Mob behaviour, by definition, is where people stop thinking critically about issues and blindly follow whatever their peers are doing. This can never be beneficial. Independent, critical thought is essential for positive change to be effected.

The problem with the modern Social Justice Warrior movement is that it is counter to the interests of true social justice, as the people who need the most protection are the smallest minorities, and these are the people who lose out the most when everyone is banding together in mobs and deliberately shutting silencing debate and individual expression. Meanwhile, the "social justice warriors" are far too busy focusing on how moral they seem rather than how much real social justice they're achieving.

If your response is - as I would hope - that true campaigners for social justice are not like this, then that's ok - they're not the ones being criticised.

Looting and rioting is critical component of a public protest, and it's morally justified. I draw the line at hurting people, which is never justified. I'm not outraged at property damage when people protest racism or police brutality, because I value people more than I value things.

As for your claim that rioting and the like can never be beneficial, that's plainly wrong.

Take for instance the Curaçao uprising in 1969 [1]. Workers protested wage discrimination and it turned into a mob that burned down 43 businesses and 10 other buildings, primarily those owned by white people. Guess what? The protest was a complete success, they got the wage they asked for and they got new democratic elections to boot.

I reiterate: people protest and riot because it works.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Cura%C3%A7ao_uprising

"Looting and rioting is critical component of a public protest, and it's morally justified."

No, it really isn't. Quite aside from the immoral way you have just cheerfully sacrificed strangers' homes and livelihoods in the name of your transient political goals, looting and rioting leads to businesses and productive citizens leaving and a collapse of the local economy. Go to Detroit if you want to see how that works out in the long run.

Incidentally, even if somehow rioting is okay as long as just people of the appropriate skin color are the ones being harmed, perhaps you should keep in mind that the folks who start businesses in low-income areas of American cities tend to be either local black people or immigrants. That's who suffers when buildings get burned down in the name of "justice."

Yeah I'm with you.

But you know sometimes people protest because they're upper-middle class brats with a raging sense of entitlement, and they see some middle-ranking international trade conference with an agenda they know nothing about, as an excuse to rip down street signs and smash them through shop windows, or roll ballbearings under the hooves of police horses, just because they can.

The irony here. You write a comment to put things in perspective with respect to herd mentality (yes it was not a lynching, but it was an over-the-top reaction), and the mere act of putting things into perspective gets downvoted exactly because of this herd mentality.

It was actually a well-executed joke. Quite acerbic.

Unfortunately many click-bait "journalists" were simply too thick to understand the satire.

"Justine Sacco didn't suffer a "devastating online lynching". She got a ton of nasty tweets and emails, and she got fired from her job. "

you can't be serious. clearly the term lynching was not literal, and that seems as close to a description of an "online lynching" as something can be.

It's funny how the tweets directed at Sacco constitute a lynching, but the killing of Mark Duggan, a person of color, by the police in the next sentence is whitewashed in morally neutral terms as "the death of a young man in Tottenham". The protest that followed is condemned as "looting and destruction", the racial aspect not even deserving a mention.

Tweets directed at a white woman: Lynching.

Killing of a person of color: "death of a young man".

The point is that if the primary concern of all the protestors was about the killing of the young man, the targets of the protest would have been confined to the police and the government. Such a protest could have been conducted in such a way that united all people in protest against the injustice. Instead, thanks to the mob instinct, the killing was used to justify indiscriminate violence, theft and destruction. Thus the real issue - the killing of the young man - was diminished in importance thanks to the mob behaviour, and the opportunity for that incident to be a catalyst for real social change was lost.

> and she got fired from her job.

Can I fire anyone with tweets I disagree with? Lets say SJW-s?

Losing a job over speech done outside of the employment is wrong.

The fact that it was caused by "our" guys - in two years when the pendulum has swung back - they will be the ones that will be victims of the mob.

Yeah, the way some people target people's employers to get people fired is a horrible thing. As is how a lot of said employers will happily kick someone to the curb because their 'reputation' apparently matters more than being fair to their employees.

Still, it can get even worse than that. I've seen cases where people have basically been blacklisted from an industry based on what they said online or their political views. It's horrible, likely illegal in many places, but there's definitely a crowd that wishes they can block people with 'unpopular' political opinions from various industries.

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