Part 1 of 2. I don’t even know. I started out talking about tacos, and ended up really angry at the whole country. It got kind of heated near the end. I’ve honestly lost track. But it went off the rails a bit, and we have no questions. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
None.
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If you want to see a good, but really disturbing, version of Toxic Masculinity as zombie there is a Masters of Horror episode called The Screwfly Solution.
Thanks! I’ll be sure to avoid the heck out of that one!
I’m not sure if I understood this correctly or not, but I thought Will was mentioning the female comic being accused of supporting the Alt-Right or being a white supremacist as an example of endangering free speech? If that’s the claim, I would disagree. People labeling her in some way, or criticizing what she says as being discriminatory, is an exercise of free speech, just as whatever she’s saying is an exercise of free speech. If you want to argue that the labels themselves might lead to a curtailment of free speech, then one could say the same thing about someone who us being discriminatory in their speech.
I’m sympathetic to Tony’s reactions to events of this week. If it’s any help, I remind myself that this is not the majority view in the U.S. Trump got less of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did. And from what I’ve heard, this week is costing him votes among the small percentage of POC of who voted for him in the last election. (Though it has increased his support among Republicans generally.)
I didn’t think, and don’t think, that the mislabeling of the comedian, or any other critique of her, is a challenge to free speech.
Sorry I misunderstood.
No worries! The fault is probably mine. I’m usually about as clear as a bell with a cotton clapper.
I never really thought of the President as a troll, but that’s actually a great analogy (hard to tell if actually true, it’s not clear *what* is deliberate these days). But the end result is the same, as William noted about smaller, old school forum where bit player trolls turned up.
I suppose one of the major differences these days is the reach of the internet versus its almost hobbyist scope, back in the early 2000s. Social media pretty much brought everyone on board, and smartphones finished off the job. But of course, everyone’s business model has changed, in that a) the sheer scope of infrastructure needed to support (e.g., Facebook’s 2 billion users), coupled with everyone moving away from paying for content, means the entire thing is setup to encourage you to monetize what you’re saying. As an aside, that means almost anyone (with sufficient following, itself needing to be curated) can be an “influencer”.
And now, a president can casually tweet the implication that specific people he doesn’t like ought not to be let into another country and that can be given complete credence, while at the same time having plausible deniability that he didn’t TELL them to prevent their entry (technically true). Class A super trolling.
Of course, the latter should frighten anyone. To *utterly* oversimplify it, Team D because it’s Team R at the helm and a tendency to be more progressive, and Team R because you literally purport the 2nd amendment to be needed to prevent this sort of government overreach.
I’m back to deleting Twitter off my phone (despite mostly using it for following IT and space flight/climate change folks) because invariably people you follow will not only reply to trolls (loosely influencers, actual trolls, etc.) but also quote tweet them, ironically causing additional engagement for their trolling. Even with a voluminous mute word and block list, you just can’t avoid it. Of course, I won’t participate in primaries, because I absolutely don’t agree with a party system, nor needing to be a member, so back to the only avenue of dealing with the stress of the world being voting every other year in November. Sigh.
Re: censorship
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png