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Comment by wdwecewc | Hacker News Reader

As someone who claims to be educated on history, it is important then to remind yourself of why this actually occurs. You can't make essays dismissing some angry mob as if they are a homogenous hivemind. They won't listen to you because they literally can't listen to you, they act independently and uncoordinated. You have to tackle issues which cause them to be aggressive towards racists to begin with. Police brutality, for example, is still a threat not yet addressed. yet in all of Paul's preaching about the mob I don't see him making an iota of effort to do something that would actually stop the mob: fixing their issues. Instead, the current plan seems to be to dismiss their outcries and trod steadily along down the path of least resistance in a world that was already collapsing with or without the anger.

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You probably don't know this word, but you're literally advocating for ochlocracy, which is the very thing I was talking about in the upstream comments.

The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied. That's exactly how it transitions into totalitarianism. Pandering to the mob just adds more fuel to the fire.

Police brutality etc. are issues that should certainly be addressed, and there's countless other societal issues that need to be looked at. But dealing with those and pandering to the mob are orthogonal issues. We have a democracy, the rule of law, and a government structure specifically to define a process for addressing such issues. These are the mechanisms that differentiate the western world from the soviet nightmare my parents escaped. It's so bizarre and terrifying to watch people openly advocating for discarding them and embracing mob rule. Americans have fought and died to uphold these values, and now a pocket of their own citizenry wants to demolish them.

> You have to tackle issues which cause them to be aggressive towards racists to begin with

Pretty heavily loaded language there. Anyone mob targets = racist? There's far too much evidence of the mob targeting non-racists to even pretend that this is what motivates them at this stage. 'Racist', or rather the newspeak co-opted 'Bigot', is now just the current incarnation of 'Communist', 'Kulak', 'Witch' and whatever other generic labels for the enemy of the mob. The mob never runs out of enemies, the mob never runs out of issues to get angry about. It's Lord of the Flies at a national scale.

I would argue a mob is just a sort of tumor clinging onto the back of a very legitimate protest movement. My point, which I maintain, is that people like Paul are using this as an excuse to dismiss the movement in its entirety by selecting the (real) problems created by the mob. You would not be allowing the mob to rule by satisfying the entire group's demands. This is a function of very ordinary protests that have gone on over the last forever.

And I don't think it's fair to compare racists, which are real, to witches, which are not.

"racist" and "witch" are just labels given to those that don't agree with you or are somehow disapproved of by the mob. Not surprisingly, their definitions just change as needed by the mob. The term racist is just as ephemeral as witch in the cancel-culture world.

Racist used to mean something around "believing one race was inherently better than another," but now it means anyone who doesn't agree with the BLM organization or who supports the Constitution, rule-of-law, Trump, etc..

In fact, if you've taken a look at modern critical race theory writings, you might be a racist if you:

- emphasize objective thought, cause and effect thinking - support nuclear families as a good structure - prefer individualism - "work before play" or believe that hard work is key to success

You are not addressing the point that the society at large has to continue to trust institutions to alleviate concerns of corruption by the institution. The mob is not formed in a vacuum. Democracy, rule of law, and government only have value when trust in those pillars of our society have not been eroded to the point where large swaths of people form a mob to carry out their own justice. It’s been made abundantly clear in the West that our systems are very vulnerable to bad faith actors from inside the system.

> Americans have fought and died to uphold these values, and now a pocket of their own citizenry wants to demolish them.

This is true for both ends of this spectrum and also never ending. The mob doesn’t see themselves as eroding those institutions just as our current government doesn’t see itself as obstructionists. What makes this difficult is two competing extremes. I don’t focus on cancel culture because I’m concerned more with the erosion of our voting rights and the dismantling of our institutions by our own citizens. It doesn’t invalidate your points what so ever but it makes them a blind spot for individuals with competing priorities.

"I don’t focus on cancel culture because I’m concerned more with the erosion of our voting rights and the dismantling of our institutions by our own citizens."

Maybe we need to focus on both as manifestations of the same disease, even though one is much worse than the other?

Of course, but I don’t have the personal bandwidth to mentally deal with every issue we need to resolve as a society. I get around this by not out of hand dismissing concerns by others but I also can’t take an active stance in their solutions. This is likely a more common story than we want to admit and the numerous issues across our political spectrum fragment our chances at a unified response to the problem.

I think you need to spend some more time familiarizing yourself with American history. This is not the first time U.S. citizens have decided to protest for change.

You're acting like this is the first time people have ever complained about things or marched in the streets, and therefore we're on the precipice of communism. We're not.

> The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied.

We don't have a mob in the U.S., we have sovereign citizens. The right to march and complain about each other is firmly protected by the U.S. Constitution. The goal of improving the nation is shared by all of us, and we take it seriously, even if some feelings get hurt along the way.

Are you suggesting that just because there's a protest or mob, that they must be right, or that the expression of the mob's force is actually aligned with contending the overarching issue justifying the existence of that mob?

Everyone agrees police brutality is a problem. Not all of us think attacking speech, undermining important institutions, and destroying people over opinions is the way forward.

No one here is against protest in general, the right to march, or the right to complain. A lot of us are against this particular protest which is ostensibly combating police brutality and racism, but manifests in undermining universities, attacking, controlling, and suppressing speech, and establishing doctrine based on anecdote and emotional reflex.

You may be correct that it is not possible to satisfy the "mob". However, I don't think the mob exists in a vacuum. It seems to me that, at least to a degree, the mob and social unrest are a symptom of a society and democracy that as broken down and that is not working for people. In order to stop it, I think you need to restore people's confidence that the system is working for them.

Removing the immunity of police officers and killing only Canadian levels of civilians would literally take all the wind out of the protests. Pretending that the populace is an insatiable mob rather than people with legitimate grievances that could be addressed is just wrongheaded.

Is this how this is supposed to work, then? A lot of people get angry about something and demonstrate/riot, and in response the laws get changed to pacify them.

There's a term for that: "mob rule". It's not a good thing.

I'm not for one second saying that Police brutality isn't a problem. I don't live in the USA so I don't know. I am saying that if your system doesn't provide a method for fixing this problem without rioting, then your system is probably broken, and it might be better to fix the system and then use the fixed system to fix the problem.

That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes.

And while people like to dismiss any group whose concerns they disagree with as being merely an "angry mob," more often than not that "mob's" concerns are legitimate, and their anger is justifiable. Laws don't get passed to "pacify" them, they get passed because public pressure and awareness turns public opinion in their favor, making it politically infeasible for those in power to continue the status quo.

That's not the way it's supposed to work, but that's the inevitable result of a democratic process and society not working as it ought to begin with.

>> That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes.

And the endpoint of that process is revolution. Again, not a good thing. Revolutions are bloody.

How can you fix the democratic process so that works as it ought and prevent the disaster you're heading for?

I don't know. I never thought I'd see the day when Americans seem more concerned about "SJWs" exercising their free speech rights than actual secret police tossing political dissidents into black vans but I guess here we are.

I look on in desperate horror at the blatant, authoritarian corruption happening every single day at the White House, and yet the only righteous anger I see on the “intellectual watering hole” of HN is towards cancel culture. I don’t get it. Don’t people read the news? How do you not have an ulcer from watching this shit every day for four years?

This is a non-sequitur.

Getting low level employees fired for some kind of political faux pas does absolutely nothing to combat Trump's gross abuses of power.

Many people oppose "cancel culture" and "SJWs" because they see them as part of a vast leftist conspiracy imposing a political agenda across media, arts and academia and oppressing free (read: right-wing) speech at every turn. Many of the same people support Trump's abuses of power being wielded against those they consider "leftist agitators" like BLM and Antifa.

Both cases linked by fear of and opposition to the existential threat of "the left" as an insidious enemy within and a willingness to accept any means necessary to stop it.

I see both cancel culture and Trump's strange presidency as part of the same problem - the one that PG is talking about.

The rise of dogmatic orthodoxy and the inability to have a civilised dicussion where the participants disagree yet respect each other.

The legitimate concerns and justified anger tend to be characterized by long-term (multiple years), consistent pressure. People exerting it can listen to opposing views (without angry screams) and justify their own.

What we see today are angry flashes that can change direction on a whim. Flash mobs of statue tear-downs, coronavirus mask/no-mask outrages, etc. are in my view more of a symptom of pent-up aggression fanned by pre-election opportunism, not of legitimate concerns. My 2c.

With the exception of the coronavirus protests, everything else has had years of consistent pressure behind it.

There have been riots and protests over police brutality and systemic racism for years. People have been protesting America's whitewashing of its history and romanticizing of the Confederacy for years. None of these issues are new. The CHAZ wasn't the result of "pre-election opportunism," read their list of demands. It's fueled by anger, yes, but also seeks redress for grievances the black community has been complaining about for years. "Biden 2020" isn't in there anywhere.

> That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes.

And it almost never ends well.

In some ways yes. It seems to me that democracy requires those in power to have a healthy fear that if the government doesn't work for their constituents then they might overthrow it.

Jefferson said:

"what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants"

Granted I'm not trying to make some extreme, tough guy statement that the current situation is equivalent to a revolutionary war. I just mean that to some degree that is how a democracy works.

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