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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> The inverse of this seems to be taking hold now: that it’s socially acceptable to say things which are unreasonable, outlandish or downright factually incorrect, if they’re considered to be in service of a cause that ‘our side’ believes in.

examples?

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"Jane got black out drunk around strangers and then she--"

"Wait before you say anything more, that seems like a poor choice, but go on"

"How dare you! Victim shaming is not ok!!"

> examples?

Person A is accused of criminal act X.

Person B: "It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place."

Person C: "X-apologist!"

Stallman's resignation in a nutshell.

Are with hunts/trials really a new thing though?

"She's a witch!"

"It isn't proven yet. Allow due process to take place."

"He defends the witch, he is with the devil!" (an old-timey "witch-apologist!")

I don't know about others, but at least myself I felt there was a kind of "zeitgeist" of the 1990s/2000s-era Internet, that we're supposed to be above witch hunts and other similar stupidity. It feels as if new levels of idiocy were inserted into the Internet over the last decade.

My guess is that that's just normality setting in. Back then, the internet wasn't for everybody, you didn't do "normal stuff" on it, it was a very separate domain. Today, the internet is about as special as a side walk, everybody is on it, you can do anything on it and all the normal people and all the normal problems have come along with the change.

In society, witch hunts have been a thing for quite a while, I think the web mostly just didn't have the opportunities to show its witch hunting abilities in the early, pre-mainstream years.

That's an unintentional effect of the fact that prosecutors only tend to charge people they believe are likely to have committed a crime. Therefore, merely charging someone is to some extent prejudicial. That's partly why burden of proof standards exist. To reassure someone of the efficacy of due process after a charge has been leveled is tantamount to announcing your personal view of guilt, given the nature of the system. It's like looking at a football game between evenly-matched Teams A and B (52-7, 4th quarter, 5 minutes left) and stating that the rules allow for Team B to come back. Well, yes, but my friend would be forgiven for expressing discontent at your implicit assertion that the refereeing has been fair that game.

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