Whether it's good or bad for society is a complex topic, but spending your time riling up a digital mob every time someone says something controversial can't be a personally healthy way to live.
It’s an old saying that a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Now it’s more like, 10 times around the world, and nobody even gives a damn what the truth ever was.
Or to put it another way, wrong-think statements can be weaponized against the speaker more effectively than ever.
There are a lot of incendiary political topics de jour where it's obvious that important voices are being silenced. See, for example, the pseudoaddiction post from SSC yesterday. Popular uprisings are often based on kernels of truth, but the conversation becomes distorted when experts or just laypeople with diverse viewpoints decide, fuck it, it's just not worth the liability of weighing in.
A couple weeks ago there was a story about a minor girl in high school charged by a prosecutor and found guilty by a judge of distributing child pornography--upheld on appeal--for texting her friends a video of herself. [1] But if it's political suicide to even try to have a conversation about how the laws on child pornography could be harming children, then it will never be fixed.
So at some point it should be acceptable for someone to stick their head out and say, "This term 'sexual assault' it doesn't really mean what most people think it means a lot of the times. It would make for much healthier discussion if we could be more specific!" Or, "These arbitrary age barriers (which change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can catch innocent people engaging in consensual intimate acts." And it's also OK for someone else to say, "That's just not what happened in this case, because <reasons>... and you're blinded in this case by your relationship with the accused." But at the end of it, for everyone to agree that there was a conversation in good faith and everyone can decide for themselves who's right, wrong, or an imbecile trying to cover for a friend, without demanding a head on a platter.
You can take a look at what Lessig wrote about Ito [2] and likewise come away from it entirely incensed and calling for Lessig to resign, or pondering whether the story is more complex than the headline. Where in that case, the NYT took a complex issue that Lessig tangled with, and turned it into;
“It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.”
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/mds-top-co...
[2] - https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
Stallman had said more than enough to merit his termination IMO, but he still deserved due process before such judgment was passed.
That said, I have a nagging worry from watching some videos of his behavior that he is mentally ill and there might be a backlash from that.
But why we can't allow a process like that to transpire before passing judgment is beyond me. Why wishing such an impartial judgment upon him is downvote worthy is really worrisome to me. That's not what western democracies are about as I understood them up to now.
I Just do not believe we should make career-ending decisions like this based on the rage of a mob on social media, that's literally a Black Mirror episode (and a really bad episode of The Orville as well). I believe their role is to raise awareness of situations like to the point where the above should transpire. Does holding that viewpoint now make me subject to "cancellation" as well?
Do you really find murder to be equivalent to this?
