I've noticed a growth of righteous indignation from people, particularly over the past 10 years. It's not enough that one person disagrees with another, now this disagreement is manifesting itself in proactive rage. This rage gets directed in a vengeful, sinister effort to gravely harm someone, by getting them fired from their job etc. It seems like it's increasing, and no one is being held accountable. I've not seen this level of vitriol and other cultures, it seems uniquely American.
There is nothing uniquely American about extreme aggression towards people holding differing views. Although the current state of American society isn't great it can get so so much worse. A couple of examples.
Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.
>Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death
After Martin Luther printed his Ninty-Five Theses, Europe promptly lost its collective shit across the board. My European History is a bit rusty but a cursory glance at the Wikipedia topic should give a good idea of how much chaos the ability to spread ideas quickly and widely created.
We're talking years and years of civil war and strife. All because people who were once separated and thought they were alone found out they were not. If we use this as a barometer, we're in for some stormy seas.
Do some searches on Korea about the escalating fight between Feminist and Anti-Feminist groups. Megalia is probably the most well known and infamous organization. It's difficult to comment on due to the sheer . . . well. I'll give some links as an example:
I've given more than several different links for a reason. The difference in perspectives is really jarring and it's difficult to reconcile the two perspectives. Depending on who you talk to, Megalia is anything from a beleaguered feminist organization under attack from a misogynistic society, to a radical feminist group that is deeply hateful towards men of all kinds (straight/gay). If you dig deep enough, you'll see that a lot of important details in accounts on both sides get shaved away to create a compelling narrative. The end result is a real online bloodbath that has touched a lot of different aspects of Korean society.
I've only heard of these kinds of vitriol in S.K --but I'm still surprised by the amount of all out hate outlined in your links --in an otherwise, at least on the surface, cohesive society.
I'm just grateful that so far, Korea seems an outlier of this, at the present moment --not that it doesn't happen elsewhere or that it could not happen in places where it's rather tame. I hope as a species we find ways out of this kind of unfettered rancor.
To be fair, not unlike a few other countries out there, S.K historically has been pretty patriarchal, so given this new outlet, this vehemence is not all that surprising as they learn to navigate these waters (who other might have to learn as well).
The pent up rage of Megalia is not hard to understand if you've read up on Korean society. I'm not sure if it's still in practice, but I've heard from multiple sources that Korean companies will require women to have face shots with their resumes along with details like height and weight. It gets worse (doesn't it always), so this sort of clash is definitely wont to happen as society fights to figure out what the new "normal" is.
That being said, Korea might be at the forefront, but other countries have it simmering underneath as well. Take this article on China for example:
One of the reasons I've heard that the Communist Party heavily censors their web is to keep the nationalist elements of their populace under control. The article makes it sound fairly tame, but I've read around and seen some pretty ugly stuff. Obviously harder to find sources due to the nature of the Chinese web. You can see it in their media as well with how deeply patriotic many of their productions are.
It's because women in S. Korea (and several other Asian countries) have been treated almost like animals, and it was a cultural thing. It's a backlash for something that's been happening for a very long time, and in a way arguably more violent than in the West.
How disagreements used to happen: I think [idea]. Here's my evidence.
How they happen now: Speaking as a [member in X class], I believe [idea].
We've started to tie up our identities into our arguments, and when you do that you can't get around attacking who someone is as a person when they link their membership in a group to the epistemology of why they think something. This is my working theory for why people have started to equate speech with "literally violence". Disagreeing has become an attack on their identity, so it's only natural to interpret that in an extreme form.
So, where is your evidence that people used to have more evidence based discussions? How does it reconcile the historic role of religion in guiding the average person's beliefs and politics? Hell, how does it reconcile the historic prevalence of religion?
You have a very, very misguided view of the past, we have always tied up our identities into our arguments. In fact, I would say less so now than in the past not moreso.
The first example that comes to my mind of this manifesting over the internet would be the Korean woman harassed relentlessly over failing to pick up her dog's poop on a subway train in 2005. It was one of the major incidents that drove the country to implement a Real Name policy for Korean website operators.
by getting them fired from their job etc. It seems like it's increasing, and no one is being held accountable
It's because there's an asymmetry - students neither have jobs to be fired from nor the life experience to understand why it's such a serious matter to do it to someone. The accountability will come when the record of having been arrested for rioting/vandalism shows up in background checks when they do eventually enter the workforce. That's not much comfort I know to their victims. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do grind exceedingly fine.
Sorry to interrupt your revenge phantasy, but where do you get the idea that people opposing neo-nazis are exclusively college students, or that they commit crimes in any number that would be significant?
Looking at photos of the recent rallies in Boston as well as Charlottesville, I think any reasonable observer would conclude that those opposing the nazis tend to have better jobs than those they are opposing. I'm drawing this conclusion for the distinct difference in the amount of face tattoos between these two groups.
I think you are projecting your own fantasies onto what I wrote, such as everyone you disagree with is "a nazi". I am talking about indiscretions of youth coming back to bite people, and online spats that we used to call flamewars spilling over into the real world.
For me, the line is crossed when an act of physical violence is performed, and we already have laws to deal with it. We don't need online mob justice too.
From the description, this might encompass phenomena that we would call both coordinated harassment and public shaming, and maybe the original article by Megan McArdle also means to encompass both, though it seems to have more focus on public shaming.
Lynching, soccer mobs, religious wars, boycott campaigns, advertising pushback...
I think the biggest change is that it's pretty low effort to send harassing tweets, relative to (say) figuring out someone's address and sending them threats via snail mail or phone call.
