I'd be curious to know if the Soviet Union's target list has ever been released to the public.
793 karma · joined December 8, 2013
To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.
Well, look at it this way. If someone had killed my father, I wouldn't be satisfied with them saying "here, I'll pay for your college education and we'll call it even"; I'd want them in the electric chair. Similarly, a focus on alleged crimes of past cultures leads inevitably to angry demands for retribution for said crimes, followed by a lot of people replying -- with absolute justification! -- that they weren't responsible for these past crimes, or maybe the other guys were just as bad. Next thing you know everyone's screaming at each other and the formerly universal values have been turned into a political football. If you've got a concept that should be apolitical and universal, the last thing you want to do is prominently attach it to one side of a bitter cultural war.
Not quite. What I was getting at is this argument is usually presented in the context of blaming the West generally or the United States specifically for various atrocities, and gently eliding how the societies which were aggressed upon were usually no different from a morality standpoint: it was simply a matter of who got to who first with a bigger stick in their hand. Not "everybody does it, so it must be okay," just "everybody does it, so casting blame on a specific group is, paradoxically, unfair."
For that reason, our responsibility to properly safeguard the environment and to ensure the rights of all people cannot be dependent on one nation or culture atoning for some crime their ancestors allegedly committed in the past. That just builds a never-ending tower of recrimination and anger. It has to be simply our obligation as human beings to each other, right now, today.
Every society on Earth exists as it does because it destroyed much of the previously existing landscape and natural inhabitants, most definitely including the Native American societies. If you read Over the Edge of the World, a fascinating book about Magellan's voyage around the globe, you'll find that as he traveled the straits at the southern tip of South America -- the most miserable, cold, dreary, and awful environment that could be imagined -- he met a miserable and starving aboriginal tribe: a tribe that, it turns out, had been pushed all the way to the tip of Tierra del Fuego by succeeding waves of "native" migration across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The sin of the United States is not original with the United States: it is the sin of every society.
> But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).
You could smuggle an elephant inside that parenthetical clause. For starters, how specifically is one to "rectify past wrongs" that were committed against people who have been dead for hundreds of years? And are the remnants of those societies that still exist today also obliged to "rectify past wrongs" against the people they aggressed on even farther in the past?
...such as the relative safety of nuclear power and GMO foods? Or the potential effectiveness of missile defense?
Ideology of all stripes can, and does, frequently come hand-in-hand with flat denial of inconvenient facts.
(Of course, it's more complicated than partisans might prefer, given that the incandescent ban was supported/sponsored by at least some GOP lawmakers and that when they retook Congress the GOP's efforts to repeal the ban were pro forma at best. But it's still completely true that pushy nanny-state types, of either party, told people to get rid of their light bulbs.)
Once upon a time, only the top one percent could afford cellular telephones. Now, subsistence farmers in the poorest nations in the world have them. Markets for these sorts of things frequently start with the rich, and then expand.
Just as a for example, if you actually paid attention to what they say and how they'd behave, you'd notice that Republicans, while supporting soldiers generally, don't like deserters (and especially deserters who badmouth the Army and the U.S.) specifically, and especially didn't like the idea of trading five high-ranking Taliban commanders for such a person. Their reaction to Bergdahl is therefore not particularly surprising.
If you're interested in charting broad trends in a very large population, two million people may not be that relevant to your work. That's not any kind of moral judgement of those people or an argument to ignore their problems, it's just a statement of fact.
Which part of assassinating Lebanese politicians, kidnapping and torturing soldiers, starting a war with a nuclear-armed state, and randomly firing unguided rockets into civilian towns can be legitimately seen as defending Iran's own interests?
The problem is: what happens when the trope is criticized, and the response is "thanks for your input but it's not changing." That's when the mobs and hashtags and internet shaming campaigns come out. That's when news media takes it upon itself to carry out boycott campaigns. That's when employers are contacted and people get fired or are forced to make groveling public apologies.
If you see hostile reactions to mere criticism, it's because nowadays criticism is often a prequel to aggression.
This is a pity, as I'm open to being convinced that a more polite and pleasant environment is also better for productivity, but that well has been thoroughly poisoned by its loudest advocates.
It's been common advertising wisdom for years that the benefit of brand advertising is simply awareness. Person is in store, person doesn't know which thing to get and doesn't really care that much, brand name pops into their head because the ad had that catchy jingle or adorable cat in it, they pick up that one and go on with their lives.
Perhaps the great delusion was that most people care enough about their purchasing choices of mundane items to "engage" with brands. That's never been true and it's continued to not be true, despite the construction of a vast new internet advertising industry focused around nothing but brand engagement at all costs.
If there's an argument here at all it's for having energy prices take into account whatever externality Vox is specifically concerned about, not for forcing people to live in smaller homes.
Well, we can, it'll just suck.
A large group of people surrounding one someone and screaming at them, or barging into events and disrupting them, or spitting on people? That's mobbing and it's wrong.
> But on the whole, I still don't see any evidence of there being a problem.
Would you feel the same way if it was Tea Partiers doing the exact same things?
> To me, tradition and authority warrant no respect unless it can be justified.
These traditions are what allow people with strongly varying societal views to coexist peacefully in a large country such as this one. The only alternatives to such traditions are either segregation or civil war.
Then I don't have a beef with you. But the students in these articles are mobbing people physically, are preventing others from speaking, are chasing people out of their jobs. That is wrong.
No, it really isn't.
Here's the real backstory of "sealioning": Group A made some assertions. Group B refused to accept their assertions. Group A decided that what was called for was yet another in a long list of mechanisms for dismissing and invalidating criticism. And here we are.
You can't just wave a hand, or a rhetorical gimmick lifted from a webcomic, and make your critics go away. They will never go away. There are still people who think that the earth is flat or that vaccines cause autism or that GMOs are dangerous. If you hurl abuse at them and find tricks like the "sealioning" accusation to dismiss them, you're just sinking below their level and making them look like the rational ones. A better policy: let the fools ask their foolish questions. If you are right, you have nothing to fear, and all the fools will accomplish is inadvertently help you educate the onlookers.
What's the consequence, then? War of all against all, as the Yale students seem to want? Or we learn to coexist with people who have different fundamental moral axioms from us?
I vote for option B.
Yes. Everything can be debated. If you are unable to defend your preferred position in a debate, maybe it isn't as perfect and obvious as you thought it was.
> And many like myself now have a zero tolerance policy in debating the matter.
Great! It's a free country. You don't have to participate in any debate you don't want to. But if, rather than just bowing out of debates, you start to demand that everyone else just step in line with your position, and threaten and mob them if they don't... well. Then I'm afraid we have a problem.