Crybullying comes to mind. It lacks the connotations of puritanical self-righteousness underlying these sorts of protests but it is a term that has been popularized in response to this sort of behavior.

I don't think there is a right word, but I recognize this behavior from history books. During the French Revolution the participants were similarly convinced they are doing the right thing, and they reinforced each other's views. The crowd had a feeling of a common cause and their combined strength. They believed that by beheading Marie Antoinette they are doing everybody a favor. Similarly during the Russian Revolution, the masses believed they are fighting for a great cause, some even died for it. But the revolutions are usually eating its children, and similarly now the revolutionary feminists of yesterday are being eaten by even more progressive trans activists. As Ricky Gervais said, the same will happen to the latter one day. [0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/ric...

"A l'exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mallet_du_Pan

The mindset seems to be that the existence of ideas that disagree with my perspective is violence toward me. The most succinct term I can come up with for this is "five year old".

For an actual description, it almost has to have "narcissism" in it, doesn't it? "X narcissism"? Can anyone come up with the right value for "X"?

Is there something particularly insidious about this protest? It stands to reason that any protest would find conflict with the person whose actions are being protested. In the political sphere, there's enough police protection that the people involved can still get to work, and this wasn't provided by the campus police. It strikes me that these protesters aren't that different than any others, but the security on campus is lacking so that they've had access to, for instance, deface the professor's office door.

There's nothing insidious about the protest itself. There is something wrong with the mindset of the protesters. "I'm not being violent for having a protest; you're being violent for existing in my vicinity." That's... abnormal. Also ridiculous.

To be clear, the quote implied the protestors weren’t being violent at all, right — at least in their view. Are we on the same page about that?

Edit: I guess I’m not understanding your point. To me the protester’s narrative is “This is a nonviolent protest of a faculty’s exclusionary viewpoint,” which doesn’t seem that abnormal to me. What do you think I’m not seeing?

Well... setting off flares isn't the same as punching or shooting people. It's not directly violent. But it is kind of threatening, because they can point those flares at you, and it may hit you, and that's not going to feel very good (at best). So there's kind of a threat of violence, but not actual violence.

And, yes, I think that in their own mind the protesters were either completely innocent of violence, or else completely justified in the implicit threat of violence because the mere presence of the opponent was so threatening.

It's kind of like a guy with a gun on his hip, complaining that a gun control advocate is threatening him by wanting to take away his gun.

Yeah, the flares do add a level of spectacle. Do you see the 2nd amendment protests then as similarly abnormal?

See, to me, any protest involves a mob, and I would be concerned for safety of the target regardless of whether people had guns or flares or fists or rocks, you know?

I see a mob with fists as a level of threat, rocks as a higher level, and guns as an even higher level.

My previous post had a flaw, though. I was thinking of fireworks that shoot something that burns and explodes, which flares are not. Flares are a lot less dangerous than that, and are not much of a threat. (I guess you could throw it or shove it in someone's face.) So my analogy with 2nd-amendment-vs-gun-control kind of breaks down. I'm leaving the previous post unedited for history, but it was wrong.

So at that point... you've got a group that is protesting, and they claim they aren't marching, so they aren't really threatening anyone. But at that point, they're still present. That is, by their own logic, where someone else's presence threatens them, well, they're present, so they are a threat too, right?

So, even though my previous post was wrong, the protesters' logic still doesn't make any sense.

Right. The result of the protest is an unsafe environment for the professor. My point is just that any protest I can think of, whether it’s outside a government building, a business, or on a college campus, involves being present, so it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. That’s not to say I condone an unsafe work environment, to be clear.

"This is not activism". Here is President Obama speaking about this so called wokeness in Academia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

I don’t know the word for it, but virtually every conflict in history was predicated on the defense of something greater.

For self actualization people need something to strive for, some conflict. This is universal.

Witch-hunt.

I believe that traditionally would be called a violent mob.

That would fit in describing the action, but I'm trying to get at the mindset of these people. The kind of self-righteous, belligerent, insolent, and 'we are completely innocent and have no culpability whatsoever because you made us do this' attitude I'm seeing. I can jot down synonyms for hours but I still don't feel like this truly captures and categorizes what we are seeing here. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I feel like this can be described with a single word instead of merely trying to describe it at length.

What you are describing is zealotry, and these activists are zealots.

Probably a German word for this. I agree, it's weird and new. It seems a combination of:

1) projection (I am actually doing the thing I am accusing you of)

2) Kafka Trapping (your denial of this accusation is evidence in and of itself that you are guilty of this accusation)

3) ritualistic enjoyment (just plain old schadenfreude?)

Witch-hunt.

Religion.

Religious authoritarians. Puritans.

Theological adherence is a spiral. They have an absolute doctrine. This is what happens when you shift your moral philosophy to doctrinal adherence. Introspection is not needed when you are a perfect adherent to the one true faith.

It should also be noted that religion is older than language and has a basis in biology. Just because they do not fit the modern legal categorization of religion does not mean that culturally it is not the same.

I don't really follow the academic freedom debate that closely, but I did notice that in the video that was circulating yesterday regarding a protest at Netflix over this class of issue, one of the protesters was saying "Repent, motherf*ker! Repent!" The "repent" language does seem to have a strong religious authoritarian quality.

My pet theory is that puritanism is an inherited trait (not sure if genetic or cultural). america has a lot of it due to its history. The descendants of the puritans have given up all sense of religion, which actually, for them, was a net benefit, since having an external, well-organized religion actually would pull them back from their religious zealotry (by discouraging pride for example).

Now, completely unmoored from their actually somewhat stabilizing traditions, these children -- already predisposed to puritanism, zealotry, etc -- have taken up new belief structures, except now there's nothing to bring them back to reality.

It seems to be a combination of authoritarian personality and a disconnection from physical reality. This is a mob that was formed online and mostly consists of privileged, coddled minds. That's why they are so fragile and equate mere disagreement with violence.

While no doubt there is a genetic component it would be less precise and more likely just account for a general authoritarian personality. I think this shift is too sudden to be attributable to genetics. The work of Robert Putnam on the decline of social trust in the west is more likely to be the cause.

> attributable to genetics.

I didn't claim it was genetic (I did at first, but then edited my post). It could be cultural too.

I'm not convinced it's cultural by way of inheritance. If anything it's the decline of traditional culture. A power vacuum that consumerism does not fill.

Maybe behavioral is the right term. It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

I agree... the decline of traditional culture means that there's nothing to ground these people.

>It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

Absolutely.

Check out: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....

That paper is fascinating. Have you read any of Putnam's books? Are there any you'd recommend?

In the context of civic engagement the only work by Putnam I could suggest is Bowling Alone. I also recommend Pew Research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

> religion is older than language and has a basis in biology

This is the giant gaping hole in the ideas of enlightenment atheists like Sam Harris that think that we can just dispense with religion already. Religion will have us, via that label or otherwise; if you think we can elucidate our way out of the need to communicate and share our most base values you are simply mistaken. Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values, rejecting it wholesale because "religion" is a bad word to you after you've seen the sins of our ancestors is shortsighted and opens you up to attacks from a religious perspective.

It's true that religion has stagnated, but that means we need to evolve religion into its next phase, pretending that what we're reinventing is not religion does nobody any favors.

> Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values

Is it? Doesn't religion imply belief in some kind of deity? Whereas you can have values without such a belief.

It is. If you examine the proto indo european pantheon you will find that the many gods are merely archetypes from early societies everyday life. Religion exists as stories to guide the human experience and is the cultural tradition of tens of millennia. The difference between god and man was intentionally blurred.

I wouldn't say religion has stagnated, it's more of an invisible force. For example in the quote "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" it refers to the Roman God Saturn, a God of a religion that had been dead a thousand years and was never followed in France. Of course much like Indo European language descends from a common source so do the Gods, so the Celts would have an equivalent. This shows that Religion never disappears and only morphs with time. Atheism as practiced by the Sam Harris types is an appeal to rationalism divorced from any semblance of community and thus doomed.