This did not start with social media. The entire internet is allows some astonishingly malevolent and cruel people to get their jollies. A few cases I've read about:
* trolls getting on suicide support groups and posting cruelly discouraging arguments for readers to go ahead and take their own lives
* trolls posting strobing GIFs on epi…
This did not start with social media. The entire internet is allows some astonishingly malevolent and cruel people to get their jollies. A few cases I've read about:
* trolls getting on suicide support groups and posting cruelly discouraging arguments for readers to go ahead and take their own lives
* trolls posting strobing GIFs on epilepsy support groups, triggering seizures in people who see them
Needless to say there are no consequences for people like this.
I could make some noise about the role of anonymity in enabling this but what would be the point? We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it.
As with television, social networks had great potential but the good possibilities have been completely swamped by bad actors.
And I would not protest the presumption of tribal syndromes, it far more true than false, especially on the MAGA side. Our side is more open to a la carte collections of viewpoints, e.g. my own strident liberalism coupled with disdain for wokeness. That someone who professes to believe the Big Lie will also be an AGW denier and a bigot may not be true for absolutely everyone but it's a statistically defensible presumption.
I have no solutions to offer but I appreciate your attempts, futile though I believe them to be.
When I was active in gay politics I wrote all the time against the confrontational belligerence that was mainstream there and only succeeded in arousing hatred ("internalized homophobia") and misery.
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.
I can handle the thumb up/down emoji, but I can't handle the faces. I think they have done a lot of damage. I know some people use them here because I occasionally use another browser but I have all emoji blocked in Chrome. I am in much better temper if I don't see them.
An unambiguous comment is better and even thumb up/down is better than the little faces. I notice that YouTube now hides the thumb down. The thing about thumb down on YouTube is that before they hid them I often wondered what kind of asshole thumbs down good music.
Ummm, one person's good music is another persons turd coil. Nearly all female vocalists give me splitting headaches, and the grating harmonic simplicity of most pop is just intolerable. But that's what most people like. Four chords, not tempo or key changes, peculiar whiney singing.
YT probably hid the thumb down because it isn't Happy.
I'm considering Fred Sokolow's zoom, "Learn a Million Songs in 90 Minutes" chord progressions class tomorrow just because they are so useful for jam sessions.
At my level, jam sessions are a social event, rather than fine music, but social events can be a good thing, especially as we age.
Sure, we all have our musical tastes. If I like it, I give it an encouraging thumb up. If not, I scroll on kind of like at a live event I walk on rather than shout, "you suck!"
I've listened to your music, and I like it. As a child I listened to classical music and as a young man listened to quite a bit of jazz. My hearing no longer supports it and I now listen to "Americana" and some world music. Vocals are another musical instrument since I often can't understand the words. You might not like some of the musicians that I like but I don't know that you'd give them a thumbs down.
I can tell the difference between "it sucks" and "it's not my cup of tea." Jazz was a rough one for me, I heard so much lousy jazz before I found some performers I liked ... later I figured out that jazz never "takes out the trash," you don't see mediocrities fade out as they do in classical. You've probably never heard of Meyerbeer but he was more played that most late Romantics you have heard of. Light opera, forgotten.
Musical tastes are odd. I'm not much into blues but there are some like Johnny Winter (RIP) I am crazy about.
Electronic pitch correction that gave us pretty faces lip synching to their studio pitch corrected vocals in live performance was a curse.
I'm not sure where you draw the line for modern singing styles. I am certainly more inclined to listen to Doc Watson than FM dial pop music. In my truck I've got SiriusXM which of late I've been listening to the Outlaw Country channel which is actually far more diverse than the name implies. On Spotify I listen to people you may have never heard of, but I don't think that they are what you are thinking of for modern singing styles.
This did not start with social media. The entire internet is allows some astonishingly malevolent and cruel people to get their jollies. A few cases I've read about:
* trolls getting on suicide support groups and posting cruelly discouraging arguments for readers to go ahead and take their own lives
* trolls posting strobing GIFs on epilepsy support groups, triggering seizures in people who see them
Needless to say there are no consequences for people like this.
I could make some noise about the role of anonymity in enabling this but what would be the point? We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it.
As with television, social networks had great potential but the good possibilities have been completely swamped by bad actors.
And I would not protest the presumption of tribal syndromes, it far more true than false, especially on the MAGA side. Our side is more open to a la carte collections of viewpoints, e.g. my own strident liberalism coupled with disdain for wokeness. That someone who professes to believe the Big Lie will also be an AGW denier and a bigot may not be true for absolutely everyone but it's a statistically defensible presumption.
I have no solutions to offer but I appreciate your attempts, futile though I believe them to be.
When I was active in gay politics I wrote all the time against the confrontational belligerence that was mainstream there and only succeeded in arousing hatred ("internalized homophobia") and misery.
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
"'Oh, drop dead' is a death threat?"
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.
I wish substack had a sad face in addition to the heart.
I can handle the thumb up/down emoji, but I can't handle the faces. I think they have done a lot of damage. I know some people use them here because I occasionally use another browser but I have all emoji blocked in Chrome. I am in much better temper if I don't see them.
An unambiguous comment is better and even thumb up/down is better than the little faces. I notice that YouTube now hides the thumb down. The thing about thumb down on YouTube is that before they hid them I often wondered what kind of asshole thumbs down good music.
Ummm, one person's good music is another persons turd coil. Nearly all female vocalists give me splitting headaches, and the grating harmonic simplicity of most pop is just intolerable. But that's what most people like. Four chords, not tempo or key changes, peculiar whiney singing.
YT probably hid the thumb down because it isn't Happy.
Speaking of the same four chords. https://youtu.be/zIXlz5Pt1Dc
I'm considering Fred Sokolow's zoom, "Learn a Million Songs in 90 Minutes" chord progressions class tomorrow just because they are so useful for jam sessions.
At my level, jam sessions are a social event, rather than fine music, but social events can be a good thing, especially as we age.
Sure, we all have our musical tastes. If I like it, I give it an encouraging thumb up. If not, I scroll on kind of like at a live event I walk on rather than shout, "you suck!"
I've listened to your music, and I like it. As a child I listened to classical music and as a young man listened to quite a bit of jazz. My hearing no longer supports it and I now listen to "Americana" and some world music. Vocals are another musical instrument since I often can't understand the words. You might not like some of the musicians that I like but I don't know that you'd give them a thumbs down.
I can tell the difference between "it sucks" and "it's not my cup of tea." Jazz was a rough one for me, I heard so much lousy jazz before I found some performers I liked ... later I figured out that jazz never "takes out the trash," you don't see mediocrities fade out as they do in classical. You've probably never heard of Meyerbeer but he was more played that most late Romantics you have heard of. Light opera, forgotten.
Musical tastes are odd. I'm not much into blues but there are some like Johnny Winter (RIP) I am crazy about.
But modern singing styles make no sense to me.
Electronic pitch correction that gave us pretty faces lip synching to their studio pitch corrected vocals in live performance was a curse.
I'm not sure where you draw the line for modern singing styles. I am certainly more inclined to listen to Doc Watson than FM dial pop music. In my truck I've got SiriusXM which of late I've been listening to the Outlaw Country channel which is actually far more diverse than the name implies. On Spotify I listen to people you may have never heard of, but I don't think that they are what you are thinking of for modern singing styles.