The point of the protest isn't to destroy a person's life, the point of the protest is to (1) make Google's employees reluctant to continue being Google's employees and as a result (2) make Google rethink their official and unofficial policies, in order to (3) make the world a better place.
AFAIK, they haven't really hurt anybody (this time). They are just pressing the points that (they think will) hurt the most.
No one deserves to feel unsafe, especially in their own home. Just because they haven't literally harmed his person doesn't mean that they're acting morally.
That's not a particularly good argument, because one of the main point of people protesting the NSA surveillance (which Google is a part of) is that it makes them feel unsafe. It's all a matter of perspective.
I'm not sure how I feel about the protest in general, but I was reacting to the idea that they "haven't hurt anyone". As far as my system of morals is concerned, making someone feel unsafe is still hurting them.
If one takes "kind of" to mean "not," then yes. Otherwise, no, the point of protest is not to threaten anything or anyone, including revolution.
Seriously, just look up protest in a dictionary. It's an expression, a communication. It's a chance for people to respond. It's a visible, recordable effort, as opposed to an anecdote.
Your argument suggests a certain naïveté, or else a desire to claim there is no subtext whatsoever in organizing a mob to serve as the medium of the "communication" to which you refer.
Whatever the overt message, and especially when the purported message is as confused and vaguely threatening as in this case, in the act of arranging that someone should awaken, to find a crowd surrounding his house and shouting imprecations, there cannot but be a subtextual implication which amounts to "And you'd better listen to us, or else!"
Of course, I'm sure that, finding yourself in the position poor Levandowski did, your first instinct would be to argue semantics with the mob! What more reasonable response, after all, could there possibly be? And what more reasonable creature, than a shouting mob, with which to carry on such a discussion?
My argument parrots the dictionary. Yours smuggles in all kinds of baggage, such using a weak definition of the word "mob" while implying the strongest and saying "surrounding" when they were likely only in front of.
Your suggestion that a subtext exists would be useful if there were a history of protestors at Google employee's houses. However, there is none beyond what you are imagining in your creative (how do you evidence your statement that they were shouting?) mind.
In fact, now that a peaceful demonstration has taken place outside a Google employee's house, a precedent has begun to form in which the subtext is that employees should NOT feel threatened by protestors. I would not have realized this myself had not you not mistakenly claimed its opposite, so thank you and have an up vote.
You talk of parroting the dictionary as though that were desirable. While a dictionary is a good and useful thing, there is much of value which is not to be found in such a book.
In particular, a dictionary concerns itself with what a given word is currently agreed upon to mean, and not with the history of the phenomenon that word might happen to denote; your apparent desire to constrain such historical consideration, to include only incidents in which a protest occurs at a Google employee's house, is quite neat, I suppose, in that it neatly sidesteps any concern over the implicit threat of violence which is part and parcel of any deployment of the tactic. But I don't find such circumscribed historiography particularly compelling.
Of course. The essence of the argument is whether or not threatening to maim and murder as necessary, to produce whatever result the protesters hold dear, is a morally sound tactic.
They haven't really hurt anybody physically this time would be a more accurate way to put it. Its hard to imagine that he and his family aren't going to be up late nights worrying about what comes next. I'm truly stunned to see folks on hn defending this behavior.
I wish I were. They agree with the protesters, don't you see? And, because they feel themselves to be on the "right side of history", whatever that means, they are utterly innocent of fear that they should ever themselves awaken to find a shouting mob on their doorstep.
Of course, they're also utterly ignorant of history, or they'd know what happens, in a revolution, to people who consider themselves on the "right side of history", but are found insufficiently so by those to whom all weapons are friends. Little Dantons, all of them! -- and I'd be perfectly sanguine about the sanguinary fate to which they'd unknowingly consign themselves, did it not take such enormities to slake the thirst of the mob; one of the Terror's distinguishing characteristics, after all, is that it is always so very hard to steer.
They agree with the protesters, don't you see? And, because they feel themselves to be on the "right side of history", whatever that means,
This sounds so familiar, where have I heard it before? Seems to have a lot in common with the anti-abortionists who bomb clinics and kill doctors . . .
I really can't believe people are trying to justify bullying like this. The points they're trying to smear him on are outlandish like saying he's personally responsible for NSA surveillance, or because he made an app for construction blueprints he's personnally kicking people out of their homes?
You'd have to be completely insane to believe #3 is in any way related to #1 and #2. I personally feel the world is a much better place (certainly Oakland is) with highly skilled employees flushing out the trash.
The people taken in by this movement are worse then insane, and they are worse than morons. They are articulate enough to be dangerous.
However, comments like the one you make here just strengthens their movement. "Trash" ? No one is trash! If you refer to criminality, know that good hearted and decent poor people are also adversely affected.
AFAIK, they haven't really hurt anybody (this time). They are just pressing the points that (they think will) hurt the most.