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The point wasn’t that saying something racist was acceptable, it’s that a single tweet sent before taking off with racist overtones should not result in losing
by jchw 5y ago
The point wasn’t that saying something racist was acceptable, it’s that a single tweet sent before taking off with racist overtones should not result in losing your career and 50,000 people screaming at you when the plane lands. A Disney star should not openly lambast a 14 year old kid in front of their entire Twitter audience for an edgy ironic tweet. These are real things that happened.
To quote Anthony Jeselnik himself, “I get away with it because I’m just the guy who does it.” Anthony built a brand around saying horrible things. I admit he is a talented comic, but that’s not the point; even when South Park misses, people don’t suddenly turn on it and start feigning surprise about how crude it is. “Of course it’s crude; it’s South Park, you idiot.”
People say stupid stuff all the time. Read my HN comment history and tell me how long it takes you to get to something I’ve said that’s stupid. I try to self-censor rather heavily by simply trying not to engage in too many controversial topics and I’m sure there’s still some statement or other in this entire corpus of my own comments that would appear pretty ugly in a decontextualized light (and perhaps even with context, I dunno.) Well, thanks to context collapse, that happens all the time. It’s almost the default and exceedingly few people care to check.
And if the mob winds up being wrong, do 50,000 people apologize? Do you get your job prospects back? OR: does it get ignored, you get a permanent set of headlines in the search results for your name, and your mere association with unscrupulous topics limits your potential indefinitely? Yeah, I am pretty sure I already know the answer here.
And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once.
Even if you did feel it was a proportionate response, somehow, it’s hard to argue that it actually accomplishes much of value. However, it has lead to some documented suicide attempts! So that’s just peachy.
Maybe people should stop trying so hard to justify vigilante internet mobs. Even if its not exactly a lynching, it certainly is character assassination, harassment, and frankly, disgusting shitty human behavior that is hard to justify.
- nandhinianand 5y agoOkay.. this comment finally got me to login and chime-in on this topic. > And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once. Completely agree... No arguments with this .. And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative. The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones. To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/). The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-is-about-life-before-death-it-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective.. > “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).