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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

> llegal to fire someone over a twitter mob [...] Anti-lynching laws

Are you really comparing getting fired from your job to a lynching? Because one of them seems a whole lot less serious than the other...

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>Are you really comparing getting fired from your job to a lynching?

Blacks used to get fired (or not hired) from jobs, or thrown out of towns and establishments for being black on the demand of racist white mobs.

Is that serious enough for someone to make a comparison with a historical issue like lynching, or it should involve a hanging too?

Lynchings didn't always involve death, sometimes it was "just" beatings, not to mention the term has had a metaphorical issue for collective violence/threats, even merely verbal, for a century now.

And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.

Lynching was part of a framework of racial terror that kept (and by its legacies, continues to keep) black people from attaining social and economic equality. I'd say that very few things meet a sufficient standard for comparison with lynching, least of which is the occasional (and generally management-class or higher) white person losing their job.

> And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.

"Right to work," at least in the US, is a series of laws designed to curtail labor rights by weakening unions (i.e., the institutions that usually keep people in their jobs, particularly in at-will countries like the US). Are you sure that's what you meant?

Before lynching were stonings. Bob Dylan said that he wouldn’t feel so all alone, if everybody got stoned. He was on too something.

Yes, they are very comparable. One tries to kill you outright, one tries to kill you by starvation or drive you to suicide.

Who told you that you can only compare things of equal severity? That would maje comparisons largely useless.

Nobody was lynched here so anti-lynching law would not apply. Given we're discussing mobs getting riled up over the wrongs of the "other", it also seems appropriate to place the actual outcome in a less exaggerated way.

Kind of ironic that people are getting offended over my choice of words here, but we could call these anti-mob or anti-bullying laws instead. The point remains, it might make sense to make it illegal for institutions to fire people over the call of a mob.

They surely are not equal, but I find them very comparable. When twitter mobs try to get people fired they're trying to prevent them from making a living, what are they after? Do they want the target to kill tthemselves?

Also "comparing" by definition can be done between any 2 things, even if they don't have the same "value". I can compare oranges and dogs if I want to.

I think there some subliminal need for people to mention lynching when it's innapropriate. Happens far too much to be coincidence.

Guy gets protested because he says 'providing support for historically discriminated-against groups in America is just like the Nazi regime' and you can almost guarantee someone is going to call it a lynching. I initially thought people were doing it to be intentionally provocative, but it appears to be some unintended impulse, probably the same 'imp of the perverse' thing that drove the initial guy to bring the Nazis into a discussion about affirmative-action as if that was going to add some clarity to his approach to the topic.

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