You can apply the same cynicism to any political or protest movement. Not sure that it tells us very much.

I agree with your first sentence, only I would replace the word "cynicism" with "skepticism".

And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power.

I am not saying that those barriers should be infinitely high, but fairly high.

For us humans, it is easy to succumb to "righteousness in numbers".

If innocent people being murdered or the threat of an imminent environmental catastrophe don't meet your 'high barriers', then nothing will. So though you claim in principle to approve of some protests, what you're saying in practice is that no-one should protest against anything because they'll probably just make things worse – because people in general are fairly awful and people who take charge of things are even worse. It's impossible to argue against this kind of cynicism as it's self-reinforcing, but it doesn't strike me as an interesting or insightful position to take. Especially when painting in broad brushstrokes rather than addressing issues with particular political or protest movements (which no doubt are not beyond criticism).

It's also important to weigh the harmful effects of apathy in the balance. These are easily forgotten but almost inestimably enormous. Just think of all the damage done in the decades (centuries) where hardly anyone could be bothered to protest against slavery, women's oppression, racial segregation, pollution, etc. etc.

War is often more complicated than "innocent people being murdered" and we both know it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't morally black and white, and the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is something else entirely.

I think you may be proving my point. Taking one side of a complicated situation because of a black-and-white moralistic thinking is potentially destructive, and organizations like Hamas benefit from that.

As for your slavery example, did slavery disappear because humanity awakened morally and started demonstrating in the streets, or because we gained a new non-human resource of raw power? Previous civilizations didn't engage in slavery because they were profoundly immoral, but because human and animal muscle was the only practical source of power. The specifics varied across the globe, but unfree labor was ubiquitous in pre-modern societies.

For a contemporary situation, imagine a 22nd century activist judging people of 2024 for eating meat from dead animals, when he can get a good steak by pressing a button on a steak-making machine. It wouldn't be demonstrations which made the difference between 2024 and 2124.

Protestors are protesting against things that they think are seriously wrong. What you think about the Israel-Palestine conflict or the history of the abolition of slavery is completely irrelevant to their decision whether or not to protest about something. (But err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery. The Haitian revolution didn't happen because we 'gained a new non-human resource of raw power'.)

"Protestors are protesting against things that they think are seriously wrong."

OK, but that was sort-of my point. The more outrage, the less you need to really think about things.

"err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery"

That is a chicken-and-egg question. Why did those mass movements only emerge at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and why did they emerge first in places that were influenced by the Industrial Revolution the earliest, while other places (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire) only followed suit after their own industrialization began?

I don't think the arrow of causality is so simple here. A hypothetical society that abolished slavery, serfdom etc. in the 15th century could easily prove non-viable against its slavery-powered foes, which had more brute force at their disposal. By 1820, the situation was very much turning around and it was the modern, personally freer societies that were more effective in commerce and at war.

Notably, even though Victorian Britain was very anti-slavery, starting with the monarch herself, it had no moral qualms against subjugating a quarter of humanity in another form of submission. Which tells me that it was less about morality (equality) and more about practicality of the situation.

Everyone agrees that innocent people are being killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that this is an outrage. The disagreement is over exactly which people fall into this category and who is to blame. Acknowledging the horror and being outraged by it does not preclude thought, and it is ungenerous and inaccurate (and, indeed, cynical!) to characterize all protests about the conflict as thoughtless.

Your take on slavery is pretty wild. The Industrial Revolution did not replace Haitian slaves with machines for harvesting sugar cane. Nor did Spartacus invent the steam engine.

Wars are brutal. No doubt about that. Nevertheless the disagreement that you mention ("which people fall into this category and who is to blame") seems to run so deep even here in the West, that I wonder if some of those protests wouldn't end up in an old-fashioned pogrom, if they weren't thoroughly policed from the outside.

Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution. I don't think my take is pretty wild. The historic correlation between industrialization and abolition of slavery is rather strong, and while we can argue about whether it was causative, the hypothesis is at least plausible.

"Wild" would be if I attributed abolition of slavery to something that is clearly uncorrelated with it, so, say, the Milankovic cycle.

>Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution

That's the point. The Haitian revolution didn't have anything much to do with the economic viability of slavery, but it still happened, and was a major and very definitely causative event in the broader history of the abolition of slavery.

If you think that slavery ended for purely economic reasons, then perhaps you can point to a mainstream historian who advocates this theory. I don't think you are doing your overall argument any favors by tying it to wild revisionist lost causes.

So free association is less than ideal is what you're getting at?

If you abstract away enough, you will always get to "X is less than ideal".

Food is less than ideal, war is less than ideal, death is less than ideal, HN is less than ideal.

Are you satisfied with this sort of Twitter-like posting and thinking? I am not.

Pixels are basically free and we should strive to post more than one-sentence snarks. For one-sentence snarks and drive-by dismissals, Reddit is the ideal territory.