BLM and #metoo are driven by impunity: a crime is committed by people in a powerful position, and the normal justice process completely fails to deal with it until an overwhelming number of people come forward.
They are also driven by real incidents: No sane person alleges that George Floyd isn't dead, for example. Whereas with witchcraft and many of the others the alleged "harm" was vague, nonexistent, or impossible to link.
BLM and metoo are also bottom-up movements, whereas most of the others were either initiated from the authorities or were authoritarian responses to popular demands (Prohibition is probably the latter).
The paedophile scare is complicated. There do appear to be fantasists and "recovered memory" incidents, but there is also a lot of historic child abuse that was institutionalised. Magdalene laundries, for example.
Mob justice is the weapon of last resort. The best answer to mob justice is an official justice system where justice is seen to be done. This requires tackling prejudice about whose crimes are investigated, whose are exonerated, and whose evidence is taken more seriously. How many women's testimony equals one man's testimony, for example?
Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism. Or trying to publicly ruin private citizens for sharing forbidden thoughts among friends and even family. There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven. The climate we live in now is very similar to these previous purges. That you find yourself politically sympathetic to their cause only makes it easier for unscrupulous elites to use the mob to do their bidding.
You might think you're safe today, but you'd better hope that your moments of candor stay off camera, because no one lives life carefully enough to be immune to this angry mob.
> Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism
Such as?
> There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven
Such as?
Are we back to finding the worst possible examples of a cause on twitter and using it to discredit the whole cause, just like McCarthyism used one or two actual pro-Stalinists to demonise everyone asking for more equality?
There was a recent case of a Karen receiving mob justice to the point people began harassing the law firm her husband runs (granted she also works there), affecting their livelihood. We don’t want to get to a point in society where your character flaws destroy your life.
Just the other day, an out of context video embarrassed a supposed Karen on the front page of Reddit. We later learned the situation was more complex and didn’t have racial undertones. The mob still publicized a woman’s life.
#MeToo had several examples of people’s career being thrown out for offenses that were basically round objects being pushed into a square hole (Aziz Ansari, Al Franken, there were a few more).
I understand the need to use a chainsaw to cut a birthday cake, it highlights the desperation of the lack of tools to do a very basic thing. We now know, and quite frankly, we need to replace the chainsaw with a table knife sooner or later. Someone’s going to get hurt.
To keep the parallel, it’s important to see that the mob becomes the authority figure.
"There was a recent case of a Karen receiving mob justice to the point people began harassing the law firm her husband runs (granted she also works there), affecting their livelihood. We don’t want to get to a point in society where your character flaws destroy your life."
To be clear, this was after it was filmed that the couple was pointing guns at peaceful protestors who were protesting on the street. The woman in particular had her finger on the trigger and was pointing it at black people walking by. (EDIT: I don't know if you're familiar with gun handling, but this is considered extremely poor "trigger discipline", which is a term describing how to handle and hold a gun safely. This is comparable to driving drunk in its reckless endangerment. One should never point their gun at a person unless they intend to shoot that person. One should never put their finger on the trigger of their gun unless they intend to fire that gun. This woman, in violating both, is expressing her intent to shoot people.)
"#MeToo had several examples of people’s career being thrown out for offenses that were basically round objects being pushed into a square hole (Aziz Ansari, Al Franken, there were a few more)."
Aziz Ansari totally, 100% owned up to not recognizing how his fame affected the social dynamics in which he now functioned and how that in turn affects consent. He apologized and his career is ongoing.
Al Fraken took photos of himself groping a female soldier while she slept in her uniform, so there's definitive proof he was doing these things. He was in a position of power where he could access women and he chose to have photos taken of him groping people who are serving their country.
I see no round objects being pushed into square holes, here? What should be done with Al Franken, who groped soldiers in their sleep?
(EDIT: I should also note that character flaws ruin lives all the time. Someone who is more prone to recklessness or thrill seeking can get themselves or others killed. Someone who is more prone to addiction becomes addicted to a life-ruining dependency. Someone who is too arrogant can ruin their professional network. Someone who is too complacent in a setting where stuff can be made out of date quickly can swiftly find themselves out of work. I don't take it to be a large leap that someone with the character flaws of "threatens to kill innocent bystanders" and "gropes women in their sleep" might not also be negative in their lives.)
What she did was indefensible, but her husband and his business is also having to reconcile this.
I believe Al Franken took a juvenile photo of a reporter friend. I don’t think he was a senator at the time, I could be wrong.
I think we will enter ‘full blinders on’ mode if we accept that the axe being wielded is not a catch all. We have to accept that the axe came out of desperation, but we need to find the solution where the axe is no longer necessary.
If there’s anything to debate, it’s only how long the guillotine should be necessary. Certainly we can’t have the guillotine forever. The guillotine was used to make it pretty freaking clear things have changed, and don’t even try to think things will go backward. I understand and accept it as a necessary strategy.
You still have to create the post-guillotine society.
In poetic terms, Robespierre was given the guillotine he created. Things go too far, often.
There's no guillotine. Aziz Ansari's career is totally fine. The statute of limitations on rape and other sexual assault ranges from 3 to 30 years. It seems completely reasonable to me that Al Franken should continue to have consequences on whose lives he harmed via sexual assault years after doing it. The effects of trauma last a lifetime. I don't understand why we should be sympathetic to one man having his life ruined for credibly also ruining the lives of multiple others.
Regarding the Tamara Harrians situation I don't know anything about it, could you link to another media besides NYPost?
30 seconds of googling can get you the Tamara Harrrians link.
Look, patterns are important. The same way we failed in jailing people for modest drug possession, is the same way we are going to fail in measuring reciprocity, or more clearly, exact legal justice on sexual harassment, racial discrimination.
I’m interested in fixing patterns.
I’m not going to die on the Al Franken hill. Frat boy behavior in professional context is unacceptable, it will get you over time. In his particular case, I didn’t see any escalation into rape or abuse of power (fuck me or you won’t get this job or promotion - Harvey Weinstein).
We will be accurate in our words, accusation, and judgement, henceforth. We will cut cleanly and carefully, no more chainsaws, we will visit all crime sites, and assess. No more games.
It’s not reasonable to me for someone to suffer outsized social justice beyond the price paid at the moment of sentencing. You take someone like Louis CK, he paid the public shame, and career loss (financial loss). If the transgressions were beyond, such as underage sex (for example), I expect the law to quantify the retribution. Beyond that, I expect him to pay nothing more on a social level.
Name your price, I guess, and nothing more. Let it be paid, and move on. We are not gods that dole out eternal shame.
I don't think there's eternal shame to dole out. I think it's perfectly equivalent to say if you give someone lifelong trauma that the result should be lifelong consequences, including that people don't want to affiliate with you.
Restoration is a consequence. But additionally, I don't think anyone should be morally obliged to befriend someone who did something against their moral code. For example, if I had a friend who I understood to have committed CSA there is no timeline of which I would be okay with continuing to be their friend.
Again, if the regular legal system would get in gear and e.g. prosecute the police who killed Breonna Taylor, or routinely take sexual assault allegations seriously, we wouldn't be needing any of this.
The dysfunctionality of regular politics creates its own escalation. People are used to being given a sticky door, or a button that doesn't work. They're used to shoulder-charging the door of power being completely ineffective. So when it actually gives way it's a surprise to everyone.
I should remind you that a lot of revolutions had a noble goal. Russian Revolution was made by people with an enormous noble goal of freeing the whole world from oppression (and Soviet state has never disavowed World Revolution, future Communism, people's dictatorship, etc.). How it was twisted from the very beginning — even long before revolution itself, see Dostoevsky's “Demons” — is a different story. I think that “we had a noble goal, and accidentally ended up with a dead body” is an explanation only suitable for children. It is better to pay attention to the process, not its stated goals (even more so for broad and lofty causes), and judge whether it is fishy.
In fact, nothing that happens in America today comes as a surprise to people familiar with Soviet society:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so...
It's a recent article, but I remember people commonly expressing similar sorrows years and even decades ago.
If you want to look deeper into the possible future of US, see “The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices” (University of California Press, 1999).
Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. The rest were "the enemy is among us" fear based.
I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
It wasn't the Opium war (England wanting to keep cheap Opium supply from China), and it wasn't Nixon. Criminalization of drugs and declaring war on the cartels, whilst secretly supporting the cartels for their help in their fascist putsches. Civilized countries can fight the drug problem fine without declaring war, even if state actors are involved. (Eg Kosovo, ...)
Eliminating the scourge of drugs in America was Nancy Reagan's brainchild, and it was a very laudable goal. The fact that it was so ham-fistedly and wrongly implemented, and co-opted for repressive purposes doesn't diminish the nobility of the original goal that gave birth to such a monster.
Back in the 1970's it was plain to see that a Nixon initiative such as a drug war was not congruous with a free country in the same way that an absolute prohibition on alcohol was not.
The first Nixon election was actually the birth of the monster which enabled such a multi-generation debacle.
Regardless of how toxic and harmful alcohol and drugs have been for millennia.
Turns out Nixon was not only misinformed, he also had a crooked streak.
History shows that the Reagan mishandling of a free country occurred afterward.
I not only witnessed all of this first hand, it has been a painful experience.
You should have seen what a free country was like beforehand.
The war on drugs certainly did not have noble goals. It’s a matter of public record that the government used the drug war to target “free love” political radicals, and far worse happened than that.
"At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - Dan Baum, talking about John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon
Yes, this is exactly that hearsay. Not public record, but unauthorized quote published years after Ehrlichman's death. The authenticity of the quote is often disputed.
>Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals.
That distinction is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Some say McCarthy was vindicated with the release of the Venona papers and the declassification of documents from the Soviet Archives. Many of the accused were in fact spies for the Soviet. Also the stolen secrets for making the Atomic bomb almost brought the world to an end.
>I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
It's sad to see how you have to walk on egg-shells to placate the BLM zealots and still get downvoted and somebody is probably already combing through your post-history.
You don't have to placate the BLM zealots. You can say whatever you want. If people disagree, your comment gets a gray tinge. I don't understand the downvote animosity here.
It’s a powerful weapon, and can be dangerous if not used carefully.