From the New York Times Magazine:
Some Online ‘Mobs’ Are Vicious. Others Are Perfectly Rational.
Let me guess …
By Amanda Hess
Aug. 7, 2018… Whether a group is labeled a “mob” often does have more to do with its aims than its tactics. The angry crowds coded as mobs are those whose actions are later condemned by history — the pogroms that murdered Jews in Russia or the lynch mobs of the Jim Crow South. Those whose ideas are eventually adopted and normalized become, in hindsight, revolutionaries. …
For example, here’s a “perfectly rational” mob:
As the revolutionary Trotsky said in demanding the socialization of agriculture, a policy the revolutionary Stalin later adopted with, shall we say, revolutionary results:
… the historical question was formulated by Lenin in two pronouns – “who whom?”
Hess goes on to explain that there are good revolutionary mobs and bad far right mobs:
The Johansson “mob,” for instance, was dedicated to challenging a fault in the status quo, punctuated by trans actors’ insights into the ways Hollywood was embracing their stories but still boxing them out of participating in telling them; it seemed less interested in punishing Johansson than in gaining opportunities for trans people.
Personally, I think Scarlett Johansson playing a role where she pretends not to be a woman defeats the entire purpose of Scarlett Johansson’s existence. Aristotle would agree with me on this one.
… The Gunn mob was led by a clutch of far-right men who only frame themselves as outsiders and use as their weapon the most thoroughly accepted norm they can find: that pedophilia is indefensible.
See, these “far-right men” “only frame themselves as outsiders.”
How can you tell? Well, they are men and they are far-right, so therefore they must run Hollywood.
Who? Whom?
