>if you think I'm exaggerating about how groups of angry citizens almost always lead to senseless violence
If you're saying that groups of angry people always lead to senseless violence, you're wrong, and there's no history book that will back you up. Yours is the typical argument against the concept of anger in defense of of a person who has inspired anger. Completely empty.
To say that a particular reaction isn't justified in a particular case is one thing. To say that to react to anything in anger makes one dangerous and therefore bad is silly and an argument that can be directed at everyone on every side of the argument with equal vacuity.
Was the lynch mob the one that decided not to use or support the use of a particular product, or was the lynch mob the group of people all over the country who combined forces to help defeat an element of gay rights in a single state? Answer: neither. No one was lynched, people weren't prevented from expressing themselves, and people weren't prevented from expressing objections to those expressions through their own personal choices: Eich got to donate money to help keep gays from getting married, and people stopped using Firefox because they didn't want the company that makes their browser to be run by a homophobe.
If you wanted to use Firefox twice as much to show your support for people being able to express any view (or even just the views you like) without personal consequences, you were always free to - Chick-Fil-A, Duck Dynasty, Cracker Barrel, Hobby Lobby, and Paula Deen still do good business.
You have set up a straw man by omitting the "almost". You're right, though; if I had said they always led to violence, everything you said would be true, but I didn't. So it isn't.
You seem to have set up a straw man for each paragraph. And they're all unique.
If you're saying that groups of angry people always lead to senseless violence, you're wrong, and there's no history book that will back you up. Yours is the typical argument against the concept of anger in defense of of a person who has inspired anger. Completely empty.
To say that a particular reaction isn't justified in a particular case is one thing. To say that to react to anything in anger makes one dangerous and therefore bad is silly and an argument that can be directed at everyone on every side of the argument with equal vacuity.
Was the lynch mob the one that decided not to use or support the use of a particular product, or was the lynch mob the group of people all over the country who combined forces to help defeat an element of gay rights in a single state? Answer: neither. No one was lynched, people weren't prevented from expressing themselves, and people weren't prevented from expressing objections to those expressions through their own personal choices: Eich got to donate money to help keep gays from getting married, and people stopped using Firefox because they didn't want the company that makes their browser to be run by a homophobe.
If you wanted to use Firefox twice as much to show your support for people being able to express any view (or even just the views you like) without personal consequences, you were always free to - Chick-Fil-A, Duck Dynasty, Cracker Barrel, Hobby Lobby, and Paula Deen still do good business.