It's easy to require due process prior to anyone being deprived of freedom, and we generally see this as a positive development, compared to the alternative. Using "shame" (aka witch hunts, cyber bullying and the like) to punish unwelcome views is the opposite of due process.
Also my idea of shame doesn't include death threats let alone more extreme things like swatting.
And why not swat someone? If you're going to go after their livelihood and try to stop them from ever having a job again, you're half killing them anyway. People murder each other for less. Be honest and just have their dog shot already ;)
George Floyd shouldn’t have come into the line of fire of these systems, he was an innocent man. The fact that it was and is so difficult to prosecute the responsible officer shows how dysfunctional the system is.
Using shame as a system of justice relies on emotional charge at the point of infraction. I would argue that’s how mob justice starts, not how we end injustice.
I hear you. The shame-based system is prone to be unjust. TBH, I also think the people pioneering it are wrong about most things. I guess what I'm trying to say is that any violent regulation of expression is unjust, so even if shame-justice is on point 10% of the time it's still an improvement. And in the cases when it's wrong the consequences are less severe.
I wrote, and rewrote the rest of this comment 3 times, before I gave up, and started from the top of the thread again. Now I have decided to stop exhausting myself over what might be acceptable to an indefinable demographic (HN commenters reading this individual thread) for me to say.
This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.
There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.
In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting.
In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses
Overall there's certainly a larger discussion about the use of force, and maybe tasers contribute to that in some negative ways, but most of the time they're used everybody gets to live at the end of the day.
You get 200 people fired from their jobs and make it hard for them to get employment elsewhere, a few are going to kill themselves. (Or see if they can get revenge first.)
I guess it could be a bit difficult to see from the US where you had the first amendment forever. But the rest of the world is not like that.
On the contrary, my claim is that if you take the world as a whole there has never been more permissive attitude towards open debate than today. But even in the so-called free world... Compare the treatment of JK Rowling got to the treatment MLK got.
> If there's significantly less violence, it's a win.
Don't try and back away from your claims once you've made them.
And taking this debate from the point of view of the world as a whole is disingenuous, don't try to latch the damage done by one onto the overall good done by others and claim a net good for the first who caused the damage.
Also we aren't comparing now to the 1960s; yes now looks fabulous compared to then as does it compared to the purges in the USSR but we arent comparing those; we're discussing the recent devolution in free expression as pointed out in the blog this post is about.
Where did I say anything that can even remotely be interpreted this way?
Whether you think it's appropriate or not, I wasn't referring to the blog post. I also don't think it's what the blog post is about: Scott is worried about his patients knowing his political views interfering with his work as well as death threats, none of which has anything to do with shame.
Where I live cancel culture coexists with violent regulation of expression. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the US history but I doubt that whatever golden age you have in mind was sufficiently long even if it existed. Larry Flint was shot in '78 so that leaves 30 years max if that.
Now perhaps I overshot the gun and we could state that your interpretation of shamming tactics was something else but right now they have a very public face so you'll have to specify if you mean something else.
This blog post is a symptom of the lean towards shaming tactics over debate; the problem has evolved to the point that scott has to worry about his career being destroyed because of it.
And re times, how about the 2000s then? we built and debated online without the need to destroy one another's lives because of the POV we took on a political argument.
Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?