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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Now ask yourself - in the modern era, will you speak up for folks who've attracted the anger of a mob?

In 1930, black people were the outgroup. Now we have a different outgroup.

In 2016 you get huge amounts of social approval points for opposing racism nowadays, so the victims of mob mentality will not be black people. Nowadays they might be drunken frat boys who raped the poor black girl, the community leader who's attracted vague allegations of some kind of misconduct, or the douchey smirking CEO who raised prices of a good consumed by sympathetic people.

Will you oppose the (now mostly internet, thankfully) mobs out for blood? Remember that get exactly zero social approval points for doing so.

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Just stop it, nobody is being beaten or lynched for not being 'PC' enough.

Having grown up in the evangelical church, what you describe applies equally to those on the right when it comes to issues like opposing taxation or abortion.

I explicitly said "now mostly internet, thankfully". Why do you argue against a straw man I explicitly disclaimed?

The entire point of my post was to explain the feeling of going against the crowd. Defending those black dudes in the past probably felt the way that defending Martin Shkreli or Jacob Applebaum does today.

Because you're making this comment in the context of a story about actual lynching and mob violence.

I think(hope) you just chose bad examples there(aside from that community leader one). I feel that the right reaction is to get as much information on what actually happened and act accordingly. If there is actual evidence that such allegations are true, and it sufficiently outweighs the evidence against, then the outrage is well deserved. However, what happens far too often is that people read an article from buzzfeed, gawker, or some shady source and feel that they have gathered all of the necessary information, when in fact the way such an article will portray a situation is not anywhere close to an accurate description of what happened.

I generally am suspicious of any article saying that someone did something super illegal/inappropriate/outrageous if it doesn't provide any real evidence for the allegations. 90% of the time the truth is far less interesting...

i agree->outrage is never well deserved when it can easily destroy lives- as evinced by the internet era. rape allegations are just as powerful as rape convictions and no one is legislating meaningfully on the issue of new media irresponsibly reporting on sensational topics just to get eyeballs.

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