Your use of “mob vengeance” as a term is obfuscatory. Is this deliberate?
Because we’re talking about several different, often simultaneous, phenomena here. I won’t list them again, since I already listed them. Not all of them are socially acceptable; not all of them are legal. Very few people think death threats or other threats of violence are socially acceptable, and they are of course not legal. So I don’t know what you’re talking about there. Which responses to the videos are both socially acceptable and illegal, such that the statement I underlined makes any sense?
Yes, there is. The public shaming creates consequences for their actions. By making a big deal about these people calling the police on black people, we are not only providing negative consequences for their actions, but also letting those who might do this in the future that they will face negative consequences.
This is so fundamental that, outside of laws, it is the only thing that keeps people acting civilly. Sure, some portion of society just doesn’t want to hurt people. But a good portion of society lack morals and are only held in place because of they know bad things will happen to them if they do bad things.
It’s why we have to have laws, and it’s why we have social approbation. It is literally the thing that stops racism, homophobia, etc. Yes, it was used in the past to stop other things, like openly being gay and shit, but the way to deal with that is to make those things acceptable, not refuse to stand up against actual bad things.
I mean, think about it. By your logic, if you ever experience blatant homophobia, you can never do anything about it. There’s no law against it. And you are saying social approbation is wrong–than no one should try and shame them for it. And, as you say, there’s little chance you’ll convince them to not be homophobic. So homophobia is unstoppable.
That’s ridiculous. We can and should socially shame people who do bad things. Yes, we need to be careful. We need to be sure of the facts. And we cannot perform illegal actions. But we should try and stop them.
Sure, such has been used to bad ends. But the mere fact that a tool has been used to hurt someone unfairly doesn’t mean it should never be used.
Again, the consequences may be undeserved, because you, a member of the online mob, probably don’t know the whole story. But it makes you feel good, so why not?
Apparently you are in the camp that says it’s not better to let 100 murderers live than to execute one innocent person.
Extend this view to politics and you’ll see how crazy it is.
“Trump does something and you gripe about it online along with a few million others. This griping causes consequences that may be undeserved (like him losing the next election), because you, a member of the online mob, dont know the whole story. But it makes you feel good, so why not?”
So the inescapable conclusion here is that unless we are blessed with perfect knowledge about any and everything, we should not express an opinion about it online because undeserved consequences could result. Because mob vengeance.
Absolutely yes. Neither of these things should happen.
Precisely, that’s the problem. There’s no way to get out of any past mistake. The whole world knows, and will know until the end of your life. In one of the link provided, the guy mentions being fired and/or rejected from several jobs and ending on food stamps. Ruining someone’s life to this extend is a big deal, and it shouldn’t happen because someone was a jerk once.
How do you even know that these people behaviour was actually as presented? That the “victim” depicted wasn’t an absolute jerk himself and the “culprit” just ran out of patience? How much due process and rights of the defense are involved in public shaming via viral videos?
And even if the facts presented are correct, how bad the person depicted really was? How do you know? For instance, wrt to the little girl selling water, I see most people assuming that the culprit was racist, seemingly simply because the girl was black. Why would they assume so by default? How do we know that the little girl wasn’t a massive pain all day, noisy and obnoxious, and backed by parents who were equally bad neighbours and had been a massive pain during the ten previous years? Was the woman who called the police suffering from migraine? Did she receive very bad news during the morning? Was she depressed and unable to cope anymore with annoyances? Has she been a very good person for all her life, only to stumble on this day? How do you know she didn’t have tons of very good excuses or even good reasons for what she did? How do you know that she deserves all this scorn for a single incident? And even if she was this archetypal jerkish neighbor that will find fault with everything that a lot of us have met at least once, how could that justify humiliation and scorn on such a massive scale?
And finally, since you think that it’s so simple to avoid this, are you really sure that never even once in your life, you behaved publicly in a jerkish way that could have made a nice viral video showing you forever and for the whole world as a truly horrible person who won’t ever deserve a peaceful life, any kind of respect or even a job, regardless how many amends you’re willing to make? Seriously, I’m pretty sure you can remember this once incident, when you were 22 or so, and when you made this really unwarranted and jerkish statement that you would hate to be seen by everybody and to be considered by all as the proper summary of the person you are.
Maybe someone like Permit Patty deserves to be embarrassed and laughed at by the people at the picnic, but does she deserve one moment of her life thrown in her face for the rest of her life? That’s the problem I have with public shaming. One moment of bad judgment turns a person into a meme forever.
I have far less sympathy for people who premeditate bad behavior, who deliberately antagonize and troll in public like the “I’m gonna call ICE” lawyer guy. He’s been recorded more than once. He knows he’s being a dick and he dares people to confront him. Someone finally did, and now he’s paying a price for it. I think that’s probably a better example of how public shaming ought to work.
A guy in one of the links given was publically shamed and had his life destroyed because he engaged in the fight against homophobia, but did so in a jerkish way. So, don’t assume that people publically shamed are necessarily people from the “side” opposed to yours. Anybody can do or say something jerkish because, say, they were irritated this day.
You’re unlikely to be perfect, and there could be tomorrow a viral video with you starring in it, maybe not for racism or homophobia, but say because you made an unwarranted comment to a stranger, you behaved badly in a restaurant, you drove unsafely, you acted wrongly with your child, you made a joke in poor state, you lost patience with a saleperson, you said something hurtful to a friend. Maybe you didn’t think long enough about what you were going to say or do, maybe you justifiably lost patience, maybe you were drunk, maybe the other person amply deserved it, maybe what appeared in the video was really misleading, maybe you were ignorant of something and that’s why you acted this way. Or maybe you just were a jerk, of course. Anyway, now, 347 millions of people know that you are a terrible person, 17 845 sent you a hateful mail, random strangers stare at you in the street, you’ve been fired from your job and evicted from your house. And finding a new job or a new place to live will be an uphill battle. Your potential friends, love interests, coworkers, employers, neighbours will immediately see with a quick google search how bad and untrustworthy a person you are and this will define you for the foreseeable future (you know the joke : “fuck a goat once and…”). And no amount of explanations or apologies will change that. You’ve been branded. And not just in your local community that you could leave, but in the world at large.
I flew cross country last month, the number of travelers dressed like they were heading to the beach in flip flops, cut offs and muscle T’s was astounding to me, I wasn’t dressed up at all, but my feet were covered and my upper thighs were dressed and my pit hairs were covered. okay I digress, and it’s not about the animal, it’s about her damn attitude. Hunt her down!
For those of y’all that feel like pubic dissemination of misbehavior is always unacceptable, is there any behavior that you think warrants this sort of thing? Many of these cases have been really, really egregious–well outside of any behavior any decent person could show on a “bad day”. You don’t go off on a two-minute racist rant because your mom just died. That shit’s been brewing.
I am sympathetic to the idea that the response can be disproportionate to the offense: What we need is a ritualistic way for people to absolve themselves and go on with their lives: we need like a standardized formula for people to atone: you videotape an apology, donate a sum, and then you go on with you life. Most of human history, this “new norm” was just life: in a small community, everything you do stays around forever. But people could be punished and move on.
Because generally speaking, unless you think it’s unsafe, it’s better to try to resolve situations in a friendly manner than to escalate by bringing in the cops.
"Don’t publically protest anything, children! Because no one needs to know your opinion about anything. And your opinion can cause other people to feel the same way and LAWD KNOWS THAT WILL BE THE END OF CIVIL SOCIETY!!
Personally, I learn a lot by hearing other people’s opinions. Some behavior does not immediately strike me as good or bad until I hear other people react to it and share their feelings about it. Maybe this makes me “sheeple”. But I don’t think I am unusual in this regard.
He didn’t ask her rudely. He just told her, in case she didn’t see it. If someone said “Hey, your dog shit on the floor” to me, I’d have reacted with “oh my god! I’m so sorry” and I would have dealt with it. I would not have interpreted that as a confrontational thing to say.