Are such Twitter personalities real people? I hate Twitter and only open it to read something cited elsewhere. I used to reply to tweets, but once got caught in a burst of hate-tweets after I rashly remarked that black people can be racist too. I wish Twitter could be wiped off the face of the earth, not by looters, but silently, stifled…
Are such Twitter personalities real people? I hate Twitter and only open it to read something cited elsewhere. I used to reply to tweets, but once got caught in a burst of hate-tweets after I rashly remarked that black people can be racist too. I wish Twitter could be wiped off the face of the earth, not by looters, but silently, stifled by a wise time traveler before the first round of funding so it suddenly no longer exists in our world -- which would immediately become a far better place.
Oh yeah. And homophobic. And Jews can be genocidal (that'll bring out hate) and on and on. And yes African nations did have active slave trades and were like mechants selling goods (people) to an overseas market. The bible is history. And again, on and on. I spent the first decades of my life absorbing all the "ideal" mainstream approved stories. I've spent the decades since (about age 32 on) going through one long series of disillusions after another. I can still remember when a good friend and next door worker, a black rodeo rider and part Chiricahua Apache revealed his homophobia in reference to gay friends I knew.
Or when I first heard about Palestinians at the Olympics and it took decades before I realized they were not merely savages without any cause. I learned about the Nakba and about the anti-Semetic reasons for Britain's Lord Balfour to set up means to send Jewish pogrom refugees to the Palestine mandate, keeping them out of the UK - and something similar after WWII - which, ironically means that Israel is in part an anti-Semetic creation - really really head-slamming irony.
Much the same for Iranians and the embassy and not realizing their rage came from somewhere. It was so long before I knew about Mossedegh (never heard Ted Koppel so much as mention the CIA coup in 1953 in all the years he anchored that program, either during the hostage crisis or after).
I remember cheering on Israel in the 1967 war with Jewish friends and only found out about the USS Liberty decades later.
Just because someone has been, or is still being victimized doesn't mean they are pure as the driven snow or innocent of victimizing someone else or even doing the same kind of thing to someone else.
And then, today we have the "rage culture." I really think the immediate feedback of Twitter and other social media, along with a mis-education and stupid "reality shows" leads people to go for the instant gratification of slamming someone. Woke was okay for the first few steps and then the very concept of "woke" was to find insults with which to be enraged. Same for just about any of the trends, including MeToo which also started okay and then went off the rails just like the rest. "Rage" is the mode of operation, seldom ever is nuance or reason or evidence allowed or wanted. That is a factor of the immediate medium.
I'd rather that Twitter just fall out of fashion as a forum for discussion of current events and politics, due to user frustration with the inherent weaknesses of the format. No longer a hip thing.
280 characters. Smug Twitter swarm lynch mobs, nut-grabbing and kneecapping with sarcastic one-line cliches. Too stupid.
I've never posted there. I grant that it can be very useful for some purposes. But hot takes and thoughtful discussion do not mix well.
I don't think any opinion site should be shut down. Let people put their foot in their mouths and live with it the rest of their lives. That's the REAL cost of freedom, your own misuse of it.
I understand. My objection is not to any particular opinion -- the more of those, the better, probably -- but to the 280-character message type and instantaneous delivery to an audience which is always available. I think that mode encourages mob thinking, because the thoughts are incomplete and the "bad news" travels so fast.
I think a worse problem than the requirement to be succinct (one against which I rage in vain!) is the dopamine "reward" people become used to from getting "likes". This incentivizes comments of which a known faction will approve, not any real thought.
Yes, I call that the Mob Effect because it leads everyone to be part of some unspoken acceptable opinion group. Not to be in an opinion group suddenly feels scary and vulnerable.
FB is bad in a different way. Once it became a vehicle for selling things to its users, it became a service which was always selling the user and his/her data to advertisers. The whole phenomenon of advertising has been a big factor in poisoning the soul of the United States.
The irony being that Facebook owed much of its original appeal as competitor to Myspace to the falsehood that they were the "non-commercial alternative", keeping advertising off of the site. Then they snapped the trap shut.
I agree. This was the same fateful decision that US radio and television stations had to decide. The most convenient way to pay for their expenses such as electricity to send the signals, was to charge the users nothing and get paid by advertisers. They decided to advertise, with catastrophic results for the country.
Then online Services, initially free, decided to to do the same. This surprised me, because I thought it was obvious how harmful the TV/radio solution had been.
You really need to qualify a statement like that one. Especially given the abysmal level of popular discourse in the US, where "the Left" is a term that routinely gets applied to multibillionaire capitalists, neoliberal politicians, and the set of all people opposing Donald Trump's re-election.
What if the people I mean when I say "those people" is an ill-defined smorgasboard of people who lack principles and think poorly? I will confess to calling them "lefties", Marxists, progressives (and progtards, NPCs, proglodytes, and SJWs-as-insult), and other terms that usually do not carefully identify who I mean.
It's a real problem, I admit. It's like when "those people" call their opponents "rednecks", "hillbillies", fascists, alt-right, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time THOSE identifiers are less than accurate. This is not whataboutism, just identifying the problem of labelling ill-defined groups.
I suggest using modifiers to narrow and focus observations like those.
If it were me, I'd call the group "the incoherent Left", "the extreme Left", "Left-wing nihilists"...something like that. Some nihilists were actually officially self-titled Nihilists- the members were a 19th century Russian anarchist faction.
I found this history book, The World That Never Was, to be a good readable overview of that era. Committed anarchist politicos (that oxymoron) would probably disagree, though.
I found that the ideas and philosophy of 19th century anarchist movements have a lot of resonance with present-day anarchism here in the US. It's worth pointing out that 19th century Europe experienced waves of anarchist disruption and terrorism a couple of orders of magnitude greater than anything we're seeing nowadays here in the States. Most of the terrorism of the era was assassination attempts, several of them successful.
Are such Twitter personalities real people? I hate Twitter and only open it to read something cited elsewhere. I used to reply to tweets, but once got caught in a burst of hate-tweets after I rashly remarked that black people can be racist too. I wish Twitter could be wiped off the face of the earth, not by looters, but silently, stifled by a wise time traveler before the first round of funding so it suddenly no longer exists in our world -- which would immediately become a far better place.
Oh yeah. And homophobic. And Jews can be genocidal (that'll bring out hate) and on and on. And yes African nations did have active slave trades and were like mechants selling goods (people) to an overseas market. The bible is history. And again, on and on. I spent the first decades of my life absorbing all the "ideal" mainstream approved stories. I've spent the decades since (about age 32 on) going through one long series of disillusions after another. I can still remember when a good friend and next door worker, a black rodeo rider and part Chiricahua Apache revealed his homophobia in reference to gay friends I knew.
Or when I first heard about Palestinians at the Olympics and it took decades before I realized they were not merely savages without any cause. I learned about the Nakba and about the anti-Semetic reasons for Britain's Lord Balfour to set up means to send Jewish pogrom refugees to the Palestine mandate, keeping them out of the UK - and something similar after WWII - which, ironically means that Israel is in part an anti-Semetic creation - really really head-slamming irony.
Much the same for Iranians and the embassy and not realizing their rage came from somewhere. It was so long before I knew about Mossedegh (never heard Ted Koppel so much as mention the CIA coup in 1953 in all the years he anchored that program, either during the hostage crisis or after).
I remember cheering on Israel in the 1967 war with Jewish friends and only found out about the USS Liberty decades later.
Just because someone has been, or is still being victimized doesn't mean they are pure as the driven snow or innocent of victimizing someone else or even doing the same kind of thing to someone else.
And then, today we have the "rage culture." I really think the immediate feedback of Twitter and other social media, along with a mis-education and stupid "reality shows" leads people to go for the instant gratification of slamming someone. Woke was okay for the first few steps and then the very concept of "woke" was to find insults with which to be enraged. Same for just about any of the trends, including MeToo which also started okay and then went off the rails just like the rest. "Rage" is the mode of operation, seldom ever is nuance or reason or evidence allowed or wanted. That is a factor of the immediate medium.
I agree and that is why I think Twitter is a net bad thing for our civilization. I would favor regulating it heavily or shutting it down.
I'd rather that Twitter just fall out of fashion as a forum for discussion of current events and politics, due to user frustration with the inherent weaknesses of the format. No longer a hip thing.
280 characters. Smug Twitter swarm lynch mobs, nut-grabbing and kneecapping with sarcastic one-line cliches. Too stupid.
I've never posted there. I grant that it can be very useful for some purposes. But hot takes and thoughtful discussion do not mix well.
I don't think any opinion site should be shut down. Let people put their foot in their mouths and live with it the rest of their lives. That's the REAL cost of freedom, your own misuse of it.
I understand. My objection is not to any particular opinion -- the more of those, the better, probably -- but to the 280-character message type and instantaneous delivery to an audience which is always available. I think that mode encourages mob thinking, because the thoughts are incomplete and the "bad news" travels so fast.
I think a worse problem than the requirement to be succinct (one against which I rage in vain!) is the dopamine "reward" people become used to from getting "likes". This incentivizes comments of which a known faction will approve, not any real thought.
Yes, I call that the Mob Effect because it leads everyone to be part of some unspoken acceptable opinion group. Not to be in an opinion group suddenly feels scary and vulnerable.
Facebook too.
FB is bad in a different way. Once it became a vehicle for selling things to its users, it became a service which was always selling the user and his/her data to advertisers. The whole phenomenon of advertising has been a big factor in poisoning the soul of the United States.
The irony being that Facebook owed much of its original appeal as competitor to Myspace to the falsehood that they were the "non-commercial alternative", keeping advertising off of the site. Then they snapped the trap shut.
I agree. This was the same fateful decision that US radio and television stations had to decide. The most convenient way to pay for their expenses such as electricity to send the signals, was to charge the users nothing and get paid by advertisers. They decided to advertise, with catastrophic results for the country.
Then online Services, initially free, decided to to do the same. This surprised me, because I thought it was obvious how harmful the TV/radio solution had been.
The Left has always been about rage. The important thing has always been to destroy what exists, seize power, and oppress the survivors.
Read the biographies of communists and revolutionaries, you usually find terrible anger from childhood on.
You really need to qualify a statement like that one. Especially given the abysmal level of popular discourse in the US, where "the Left" is a term that routinely gets applied to multibillionaire capitalists, neoliberal politicians, and the set of all people opposing Donald Trump's re-election.
What if the people I mean when I say "those people" is an ill-defined smorgasboard of people who lack principles and think poorly? I will confess to calling them "lefties", Marxists, progressives (and progtards, NPCs, proglodytes, and SJWs-as-insult), and other terms that usually do not carefully identify who I mean.
It's a real problem, I admit. It's like when "those people" call their opponents "rednecks", "hillbillies", fascists, alt-right, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time THOSE identifiers are less than accurate. This is not whataboutism, just identifying the problem of labelling ill-defined groups.
I suggest using modifiers to narrow and focus observations like those.
If it were me, I'd call the group "the incoherent Left", "the extreme Left", "Left-wing nihilists"...something like that. Some nihilists were actually officially self-titled Nihilists- the members were a 19th century Russian anarchist faction.
I found this history book, The World That Never Was, to be a good readable overview of that era. Committed anarchist politicos (that oxymoron) would probably disagree, though.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640470-the-world-that-never-was
I found that the ideas and philosophy of 19th century anarchist movements have a lot of resonance with present-day anarchism here in the US. It's worth pointing out that 19th century Europe experienced waves of anarchist disruption and terrorism a couple of orders of magnitude greater than anything we're seeing nowadays here in the States. Most of the terrorism of the era was assassination attempts, several of them successful.