6 ms·

> "Do you want a medal?" one woman quipped. > "Do you mean a man rather than a child Brent? It comes across as a man rather than a woman and I'm sure you don't

• gadders 8y ago
  I'm not even sure if they knew he was disabled. I think it was more a reflex to call people out for perceived wrongs.
  • weberc2 8y ago
    The article was pretty clear about the first case, but it was unclear about the second. But yes, "call out culture" is tedious and ugly and narcissistic. Some people feel the need to correct anything that can be perceived as unorthodox to their political views, especially when it clearly wasn't meant as a political comment in the first place.
    • gadders 8y ago
      Yeah, that need to correct random people on the internet happens a lot: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35581577 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35581577
    • kazagistar 8y ago
      Almost everything is a bit political. But yeah, sometimes it's just not really appropriate to comment on those politics. But with enough people, someone is inevitably going to screw up and do it anyways.
  • mikestew 8y ago
    In the first case, disabled or not, who the fuck asked you, lady? Oh, she was "mortified" when she found out the details. She ought to be mortified that she shit-posts to random people that she's obviously never met. In the second case, I'd bet real money the academic was not apologetic in the slightest. You know the type, Jesus Christ/Mohammed/Buddha himself could come and gently point out, "you're, umm, doing it wrong" and the response would be, "yeah, but..." In summary, I don't think the abilities of the target played into it. Those are just the kind of people most of us try to avoid interaction with, and they are demonstrating why.
    • isoskeles 8y ago
      > who the fuck asked you What’s with all the tough guy shit on HN now? Who asked her? No one. No one asked them to post publicly on twitter either so “who the fuck asked you” doesn’t seem to apply.
      • mikestew 8y ago
        What’s with all the tough guy shit on HN now? In light of TFA, the irony of your indignation is not lost on me.
        • isoskeles 8y ago
          That isn’t indignation, but I don’t blame you for projecting.
• LandR 8y ago
  > I feel so much more pity towards the kind of people who gets pleasure criticizing the mentally disabled on the internet. And the people who seem to try and twist everything anyone says into something they can be offended by. It must be an exhausting way to live.
  • SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    The problem isn't professional outrage trolls. All of us sometimes take a comment the wrong way, inferring an insult where none was present. The problem is that Twitter's design makes it very likely for someone who's having a bad day and doesn't have any context to see your post.
  • scarmig 8y ago
    It's performative. The intended recipient of the call-out isn't the "called" but the audience the message is broadcasted "out" to, as you get to establish yourself as superior not just to the target but also all the people not as woke who didn't call the person out. Twitter lends itself to that, as does most social media. Other forms of more direct communication have much less of a call-out culture.
  • C1sc0cat 8y ago
    Depends if it happens to you I follow a kidney charity related to my chronic kidney condition and saw a tweet saying that people like me should "be left to die".
    • LandR 8y ago
      I thought it would be pretty obvious I wasn't including comments such as these where the intent is obviously malicious.
• exergy 8y ago
  It's a shame what this world has come to. A part of me wanted to dive right into the witch hunt and hoped that the BBC would have posted the actual name of the academic, but then I realized that I was getting sucked into the exact same thing that makes Twitter a miserable place to be. The snap reactions and the quickness to anger. It's the Social Media version of ADHD. I hope there is hope once we get past this morass, but meanwhile, I can only see the winning move to be to not play at all.
• Insanity 8y ago
  That 'academic' wasn't the brightest of the bunch I am assuming. You expect a modicum of common sense. Reading that comment really annoyed me for some reason.
  • DanBC 8y ago
    The BBC hid the name, but the comment is easily available on Twitter. I too got really annoyed by the comment. But when I thought about why I was so annoyed about it I realised I'd been projecting a bunch of stuff onto it. I'd given the tweet a particular voice and style of talking and I thought I knew what that woman was like -- ridiculous things for me to do from a tweet. But I'm still annoyed by it.
  • masklinn 8y ago
    > That 'academic' wasn't the brightest of the bunch I am assuming. You expect a modicum of common sense. Common sense is a superpower, you can't expect everyone to have access to it.
  • tome 8y ago
    It turns out the 'academic' works at Oxford University!
• nailer 8y ago
  > the kind of people who gets pleasure criticizing the mentally disabled on the internet. These people weren't doing that. At least this person was very obviously virtue signalling by looking for things that would possibly be interpreted to be sexist, and missed that the person is disabled: > "Do you mean a man rather than a child Brent? It comes across as a man rather than a woman and I'm sure you don't believe that women can't choose their clothes and hair!" The other example: > "Do you want a medal?" is taking down someone for being proud, which seems to be more acceptable in they're in a left-designated target group (the victim here is a European male). Basically it's the non-liberal left doing business as usual.
  • lucozade 8y ago
    > and missed that the person is disabled Unfortunately, that's very unlikely to be true. When Brent's account first followed her she commented on it, suggesting he ask his mother what philosophy was. It's pretty clear from the conversation that followed the controversial tweet that she was deliberately talking down to him as if he were a child.
• dmix 8y ago
  But did the first one deserve to be "hounded" and harassed until she left twitter? Those people are just as bad IMO. > But some of Brent's followers hounded the woman, even after she deleted the tweet. Jacqui tried to rein it in and said she would deal with any "bother" on the account, but eventually the woman was forced off Twitter. The mother DM'd the woman and she apologized immediately. Lynch mob internet justice can be equally destructive as some thoughtless likely uninformed (that he had down syndrome) tweet.
  • vlunkr 8y ago
    Even if her Tweet was uninformed, it's still not a nice thing to say. One of the big problems with social media is that people have very different standards about what they will say on the internet vs. real life. It wouldn't have happened if she hadn't decided to be a jerk to someone she didn't know.
    • isoskeles 8y ago
      People are sarcastic in real life too. “Want a medal?” is usually harmless.
      • fnordsensei 8y ago
        To people you know and have an understanding with, it might be no problem. To people you don't know, it'll come across as pretty hostile.
        • isoskeles 8y ago
          Yeah, I'm trying to pick through all the situations where it would bother me. In my imagination, it is limited to (1) if this happened at work (to me or to someone else), I'd see it as toxic or (2) if it happened on the internet, as it did, and it was someone I knew who did it. And in the second case, it's more of a feeling of disappointment. "I know you're better than this, why are you wasting your time being mean to strangers on the internet?" But I can't quite put myself into the mood of getting angry at them and trying to bully them into deleting their account or even getting them fired from a job. I'm trying to understand that.
• acjohnson55 8y ago
  To be charitable, it seems like those commenters may also not have understood the full context of the posts they're replying to. But I also think the mob mentality to hound these people only magnifies the issue. It's a zero-sum game of public correctness, rather than all of us collaboratively trying to be better and let each other make mistakes. It reminds me of Donglegate a few years back. Everyone was wrong to an extent, but the series of overreactions by every person--and also the mob--kept multiplying the problem.
  • tome 8y ago
    > it seems like those commenters may also not have understood the full context of the posts they're replying to Then maybe they should have spent 10 seconds understanding the full context!
    • ohithereyou 8y ago
      The design of Twitter actively discourages understanding context.
      • webdood90 8y ago
        I've never really thought about it but I think this is my #1 gripe with Twitter.
    • sdenton4 8y ago
      But this is Twitter we're talking about here... Context is for those nerds at Metafilter!
    • chrisseaton 8y ago
      The context was irrelevant though - it wasn’t a nice thing to say no matter what the context.
    • acjohnson55 8y ago
      I agree. But that agreement is different from condoning a mob reaction to their faux pas.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  > "Do you want a medal?" one woman quipped. See, my first assumption is that the person probably ran across this tweet, saw a guy putting laundry away and bragging about it, completely missed that he has a disability and is taking pride in his ability to do normal things and just assumed it was some sexist pig who felt like he was being all pro women's lib because he did five fucking minutes of housework. Then, without so much as looking at the account to see that it was a disabled individual, they fired off their tweet from their high horse where they imagine that gender policing random strangers on the internet by pissing all over them without taking context into consideration somehow makes the world A Better Place. Okay, they are assholes. But they are assholes whose asshole behavior would be actively celebrated in many places on the internet. It's a kind of assholery I routinely see on HN and I hesitate to say too much about it in part because, you know, pot meet kettle. If I run around crabbing constantly at people for doing that, I'm basically guilty of the same crime as they are, no? I don't know a good solution. But my feeling was this was not about his disability. This was about "Oh, some man thinks he done good by doing five minutes of women's work. Let's let him know our ugly opinion of that!"