The thing that I find particularly obscene about these cyber lynchings is that the leaders are almost always the most privileged people in the entire world: youngish white college graduates who live in urban California and work for evil surveillance advertising companies or banks - in the 80's, they called them "yuppies."
I think it must be a way to deal with the guilt of getting paid gobs of cash while walking past dozens of homeless people every day - feel better (and more importantly, look better) by saving the hypothetically oppressed from the opinions of potential tyrants. I'm also assuming once Trump is out of office it'll all be back to business as usual.
Lynching is a pretty bad analogy. He did not die. He was not physically harmed. A guy around retirement age decided to resign from a couple of jobs.
Stallman got away with a lot for decades because he had much more privilege than the people he harmed. He might still be getting away with it had MIT not gotten caught making themselves absolutely eager to run with a serial predator. But just because somebody gets away with a lot doesn't mean he's entitled to do that forever. Nothing happened here but the consequences of his own actions finally catching up with him.
That's fair, I don't know of a less extreme word. I don't mean it in the way that it means in the southern US, but in the more broad sense of "trial-less mob justice action".
That didn't happen either. He made public comments and received public criticism. If MIT and the FSF board thought there wasn't a problem, they could have kept him on. He chose to resign.
If there's any lack of due process, it's at those institutions. But given how both organizations protected him for decades, it seems to me that the real lack of due process was in failing for many years to handle complaints about his behavior.
This type of Justice is always highly emotional, with little or zero due process, often as wrong as it gets it right, and doles out punishments well out of scope of the alleged crime.
Invoking "Trump" needlessly cheapened your comment, which was otherwise relevant (although I'd include "journalists" as the leaders). It's always "business as usual" - regardless of which skinjob has won the job of absorbing outrage.
I thought calling it an "obscene cyber lynching" committed by "young white college graduates who live in urban California and work for evil companies" cheapened it quite severely before even getting to the latter half of the comment.
That's really the main point, though. People complain about "punching down" in comedy, but that's all this ever looks like to me. It's always somebody who works at Google, or Facebook, or Salesforce, or blah blah blah, which is something that I consider to be far, far more egregious than telling off color jokes or defending the reputation of your deceased friend. If you spy on people or send spam to make money, you're a bad person and you've got no grounds at all to tell other people how to think. It smacks of the bourgeoisie telling the peasants to get in line. That's my opinion.
It's certainly not an endorsement, just an observation. I think a lot of people, myself included, feel like the world just kind of went _crazy_ in 2016, and it hasn't been the same since. Of course, it didn't really change all that much - there aren't secret nazis everywhere, antifa isn't an international communist conspiracy - it's just kooks - all your neighbors are the same people. Still, our social immune system is flaring up at record highs and the symptoms are showing. Things certainly can't continue as they are.
I think that Trump be ousted via impeachment or in the next election, and then there will be an international sigh of relief, and a lot of these outraged mobs will stop gnashing their teeth so much. Everybody will go back to enjoying the amenities provided by the decline of human civilization.
I can see specific outrage mobs slowing the gnashing of their teeth, but I don't see the trend stopping. The outrage feels like it's coming from the same place of powerlessness as during the Bush II years.
And sympathizing with the other tribe, the Obama years were only a reprieve due to perspective. And though we may judge their outrage as ridiculous ("Barry Soetoro"), that doesn't make it any less real. To me, Trump seems like a product of this craziness rather than a cause.
I think it must be a way to deal with the guilt of getting paid gobs of cash while walking past dozens of homeless people every day - feel better (and more importantly, look better) by saving the hypothetically oppressed from the opinions of potential tyrants. I'm also assuming once Trump is out of office it'll all be back to business as usual.