You missed the bigger point, then: Mob justice is a barbaric and ugly thing; stop patting yourself on the back and thinking you're a good person for being a part of it.
> This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved.
... I'm sorry, I thought we were using the English language here and that we had a seven-letter Latin-derived word that we generally used to describe the situation of "[person] getting what [he/she] deserved". Perhaps I erred. Entschuldigung; tut mir leid.
But regardless, even accepting the (modestly tendentious) assertion that this is about a Bad Human Being, angry mobs following the Outrage Of The Moment and out for blood are hideous and disgusting phenomena themselves at the best of times. The modern justice system was largely invented to counter these barbarous shortcomings, which is why we have nice things like presumption of innocence, rights of the accused, impartial trials, the notion of the finitude of one's debt to society, et cetera.
I don't think someone is a "bad human being" even if he or she thoughtlessly makes a bad joke.
Moreover, lynch mob can hit someone wasn't bad at all. Someone just mishears or misunderstands, is mightily offended and the twitter storm starts. Like that guy who joked about dongles. It is not inconceivable that someone might make a half-tone joke that is completely harmless, and someone mishears and thinks it was racist or sexist.
There is no way to defend against that. "I didn't say that (in that context)" is not going to work.
I'm not sure you know what that word means. Telling an off-color joke that simply referenced race is not necessarily being racist, any more than telling "your mom" or "that's what she said" jokes makes someone sexist.
Racist:
NOUN
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
It's about the scale of the response. If someone rolls their eyes at you, you don't throw them down and stomp on their head. Yes, they were rude, you perhaps would be OK to flip them the bird, but a curb stomp? Really?
And please don't say this is totally different because racism. It was an isolated twitter joke to 140 followers. Tweets don't move the world - but floods of them can certainly ruin individual lives.
Firstly, she's not a racist, she made one joke with racial tones.
Secondly, do you not see how your position is a rather extreme one, that other, more moderate people might not endorse? Racism is bad, but saying racists aren't people and deserve any kind of mob justice against them is also bad.
I'm worried about people who water down the term "racist" to mean someone who posts mean things on Twitter.
I'm sure the systemic issue with blacks in America is largely caused by immature comments on Twitter. I'm so glad the lynch mob was able to right this wrong, its almost like I'm living in a post-racial America!
I missed no such point. If you want to be a racist, sexist, or anything else potentially covered by *-ist, do so locally and quietly. If you don't, the mob of internet injustices will hit and will kill your livelihood.
You are assuming that the "mob of internet injustices" make good choices. It's pretty clear that they don't in all cases. As someone else said, that's why we have due process, we're supposed be thoughtful before we get out the torches.
