Mob justice is trampling democratic discourse
The problem is that now we have all of these discussions on a stage in front of a mob.<p>Discourse is no longer a tool we use to approach a better mutual understanding, it’s a gladiator match where there has to be a loser and a winner.<p>I’ve run into this problem with people who use a lot of twitter.  They would keep asking me to “state my position”, and also demand it to be about 1 sentence long.  The problem being…I don’t usually <i>have</i> a “position”, but rather I have a set of things which haven’t yet been proven false.  So it’s really a body of existing understanding, not an individual idea, which should be examined as part of a discussion.  (I run into this problem with young people, in real life).<p>An prescient example might be my dislike of electronic voting machines.  If I say this in public, to the audience that grew up on twitter, they’ll accuse me of being a Republican, an insurrectionist, racist, ivermectin conspiracist anti vaxxer.<p>I’m none of those things (although ever day I become close to being some sort of Republican), but the more complex discussion isn’t really possible on twitter.  Because that is where so many people learn how to interact with others, snd where they learn to derive understanding, it doesn’t matter.  And even trying to explain that some of these ideas can be bad independently springs some sort of Kafka trap.<p>Here’s a fantastic article that I think lays out a version of the problem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;woke-wont-debate-you-heres...</a>