Good people keep society running well enough to keep bad people from completely ruining everything, but can’t or won’t run society well enough to neutralize bad people.
I don’t agree with this. Good people will absolutely run society well enough to neutralize bad people. Some people you are calling “good” are IMHO, not good. Sure enough, they are not actively committing evil acts, but they are indifferent to them. They are apathetic and indifferent defenders of the status quo. The “good” people fight for actual justice.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.
I mostly just reject the concept that people can be grouped into good/evil/neutral or whatever.
Reality is simply not that simple.
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Yeah good/evil/whatever isn’t a framework i apply to the real world. Fun in fiction I guess but human bio-computers in truth are both too simple and too complex for such mapping, IMO.
When talking about someone making a racist tweet in her latest video
perhaps she felt worldy enough, and enough in the club, and enough of an ally that she could comfortably make such a joke, and that it would be understood. White people do this a lot, and I cannot say I’m not guilty of this too.
This is what she says in a video that prominently displays a prayer candle depicting Girl With a Pearl Earing…photoshopped to be Snoop Dogg.
For Fuck’s Sake Lindsay. For Fuck’s Sake
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Lindsay was making the point that she’s not going to threat model what she says and does.
Since the she’s experience multiple harassment campaigns she can never know what she will say or do that will be taken as a joke/ out of context and used against her.
Because even if she made a legitimate mistake, there is no space for her to receive and respond to legitimate criticism, because the whole dogpiling campaigns move so fast.
I’m just reiterating what she has said in the video.
So in regards to the candle, I’m pretty confident it was a deliberate choice.
Her whole video essay format expects that you can get the memes that she uses to fit into her critiques.
The whole point of this video was describing how the dogpiling and harassment campaigns remove context and nuance from any problematic thing that she has done far beyond any healthy response the she could possibly give.
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What joke is the candle supposed to be making?
I’ve since finished her video. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts. Because nothing Lindsay said is untrue. But also the attitude she is taking is bizarre. If you come out with the conclusion “fuck the haters, you can’t bully me anymore” in the format of an almost two hour long video breaking down every Twitter cancellation you’ve had, airing some very serious past issues of abuse, putting everything in comic sans and acting like it’s all a goof, I don’t know what the takeaway is intended to be.
But that’s really besides the point that, in the exact moment when you’re talking about how white people use racist jokes because they feel like they’ve earned it and that’s not ok, you make a racist/religiously bigoted “joke”. I don’t see what’s funny about that. And if that was the intent, it’s reinforcing this pattern of Lindsay being a bit edgy and making things much worse with her response to people not liking when she crosses the line.
There was certainly a few hours there where she was doubling down and trying to tweet through it, before the dogpile started, that seemed like a pretty good opportunity.
There is one thing I can point to specifically - a number of the people she calls out as a “Crazy white person” aren’t white, or even white-passing, and many of them make that quite clear in bios and avis. I’m not going to blow up their whole deal, since the ones that I’m aware of are very much in “just quietly say it, head down, avoid too much traction, avoid notice as much as possible” mode because they don’t want to get pulled into stupid youtuber drama, though a few have already been found by Lindsay stans(And in some cases, had said stans try to have a go at them.)
It’s not a very good look, considering what started the whole mess.
I don’t know. I wasn’t defending it.
The point I was making was that it was a deliberate choice. She obviously knows given everything, anything good or bad she does from this point will be taken in ways that she cannot reasonably prepare for.
Given how many people actively respond to anything she says or does.
I have no opinion on this exact case, because I have zero interest in this YouTuber.
The question I do find interesting though, is how much someone is “cancelled” (read: how much outrage they generate) based on their initial blunder/offensive remark/etc, and how much is it based on how they respond to social media mobs all piling on at the same time?
In my mind the two questions should be separate, but of course in reality that isn’t the case. It feels arbitrary that the two are conflated, because not being woke enough for a subset of Twitter is a minor thing, and how you deal with hundreds of thousands of people spamming every channel of communication broadcasting that you’re evil is completely separate and more major thing.
It’s hard because at the start, you’re happy with attention and think that telling people to not worry, or even to fuck off, can seem like a winning strategy. But you don’t know you’re up against a mob of hundreds of thousands of people, you’re just up against a few dozen or hundred. There’s a line that’s crossed… somewhere?
This is similar to the “the coverup is worse than the crime” phenomenon. When people call you on things, do you own it and admit a mistake? Or do you double down on protecting your own ego?
The core lesson is to get your ego out of your own way and just learn to say “thank you for that, I fucked up,” and then do better in the future.
No, I think this is a very different situation. When people call you on something, and you don’t think it’s a big deal, that is perfectly fine if it isn’t a big deal.
But how do you know if it’s a big enough deal? When one person says it? When ten people say it? Obviously when a hundred thousand people say it?
When does it cross the line?
And do you know if it will ever cross the line?
And should you never respond, either positively or negatively, until you know the will or won’t be crossed?
An internet mob is qualitatively different to an otherwise minor difference in opinion.
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This is the crux of my issue here. When someone else tells you that something you did is a big deal, you don’t get to decide that it isn’t. You can disagree about the degree of bigness of the deal, but your opinion of the bigness is literally irrelevant because someone else treating it as big makes it big, by definition.
That doesn’t mean you necessarily need a two hour long overly-dramatic response. When someone calls your attention to a thing, and you think it’s not a big deal but they do, you have an opportunity to keep it small by owning up to it. If one person calls you out, you can very often get ahead of the coming landslide by listening to and respecting that one person in that one moment.
Invariably I see Internet mobs snowball precisely because a person, when called on a thing, decides that the thing is not a big deal. They dismiss the concern, so other people who share that concern step up, and the call gets louder. The more you dismiss, the louder the response - but in most cases you had the power to stop that feedback loop from even starting. It takes two to tango, after all.
If it’s not a big deal then just own up to it. If it’s truly inconsequential to you then it should cost you exactly zero ego to admit that you’re wrong.
So, there’s no hard number that I can find. Rather, it’s a trendline - a person who continues to ignore successive louder calls will find themselves in a landslide in short order. Don’t let it start.
It’s possible that it crosses the line anyway, but the vast majority of landslides I’ve seen have a series of early interactions with a (typically privileged white) person repeatedly ignoring or dismissing (typically marginalized) voices calling their attention to a problem.
But you are missing my point. The nature of a an internet mob means nothing isn’t a big deal. There’s no way to know when the mob will arrive.
No amount of “just own up to your mistake” is going to help if you don’t believe you made a mistake, and in the hours before a mob forms you say anything even remotely disagreeable.
There isn’t a clear line between you saying anything at all to disagree, or to defend yourself, or telling people to go to hell… and what comes after a mob coming down on you for what you think isn’t something wrong.
To be clear, EVERYONE has said something that isn’t woke enough for a Twitter mob to form, if not recently then a decade ago. Do you know that’s never going to come up again? No.
My interest is that inflection point. How many people have to tell you something is a big deal, when you think it isn’t a big deal, before even any questioning or in the moment exclamation of “that’s not a big deal” is merely fuel for a future mob you can’t know is coming.
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My observation is that it’s typically less “how many” and more like…the intensity of the disparity between audience and creator?
If I could concoct some kind of index value, I’d drum up a relationship between privilege and prominence. The bigger your platform and the greater your privilege, the less room for error. I don’t have hard numbers, but generally the bigger and whiter you are, the worse the Twitter mob gets.
The inflection point isn’t fixed, I think - or maybe it is but because of the size of your audience, one step hits 10,000 people instead of 100, so the consequences of your actions grow in magnitude as your platform grows. Maybe it takes 5000 points of Outrage to tip the scales; someone with a bigass platform can do that in a single 280 character Tweet because they have a LOT of followers.
I run into this phenomenon in micro in my reenactment group - when you’re a community leader, the onus is on you to be more careful with your words, because when people look up to you a slight misstep has a dramatic impact.
But your point still doesn’t really change my core argument:
The mistake is you not believing you made a mistake. The mistake is not believing people when they tell you that you fucked up. The mistake is believing that your own experience is more valid than the experience of the people about whom you are speaking.
The mistake is prioritizing your ego as a creative over the lived experience of your audience.
Obviously things are fuzzy because Internet mobs are unwieldy organic things, but I firmly believe the center of this particular mass is right at that point when a privileged person speaks about a marginalized group’s lived experience with unearned authority, and then dismisses the issues that are brought to their attention.
I don’t have actual data on this and there could well be a reporting bias here; I don’t pay attention to almost any Youtubers or Internet personalities because nothing on earth is more boring to me than some nerd who thinks their opinion is Very Important, so by the time any such thing reaches my attention, it’s almost always because someone has Fucked Up Real Bad.
Nonetheless, that’s where the bulk of the energy is.
EDIT:
Thinking more on the intersection of privilege and prominence - I think maybe the directionality is a function of the privilege gradient between creator and audience?
If a prominent white person says some bullshit about PoC lived experience, we see the expected outrage. Harm has flowed from the privileged person to the marginalized people.
If a prominent black person dares to express an opinion about white people, the outrage from whites is immediate and dramatic. Harm flows to the black person from the white people, following the gradient of privilege.
That might be one way to express the operating mechanic here. Still don’t know about how much exactly needs to happen.
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I have said many things long ago that were the very opposite of “woke.” I’ve learned a lot over my life, and believe I now know better, but I also know I will always have more to learn for the entire time I am alive. I hope my fuck-ups now are far less often, and even less often in the future, but I also can not expect them to ever be zero.
If someone tells me something I said was hurtful, I will admit that I was very wrong. I will not make any excuse whatsoever. I can’t undo the past, but I will do my best to learn and do better. If someone says I should be unfollowed, unsubscribed, etc. I will agree with them. If I have said or done something wrong that someone can not look past, they should take whatever action they see fit.
If the people who end up hating me are people I believe to be bad, like white supremacists, then I can tell I’m doing a good job. I’m on the right track and don’t need to consider what they are saying. I want to hurt them, so that’s just great.
If the people who are hating me are people I like, then that’s the time to listen, learn, and correct course. Not because I care what they think about me, I don’t care about that. Not because I want to minimize consequences for myself. If I deserve consequences, I should suffer them. Not because I want to fit in and let mob mentality or peer pressure shape my beliefs. I’d like to believe I’m an independent person who has their own beliefs. If something I strongly believe in creates a rift between myself and others, then so be it.
I do this simply because I care about other people. I do not want to do things that hurt other people. If someone tells me something I have said or done has hurt them, in good faith I must believe them. I then simply do my best to remedy the harm I have caused and prevent it going forward, without any regard to the cost to myself.
The people on the receiving end of these “mobs” almost universally are guilty of caring about themselves and trying to reduce the consequences they will suffer, more than they care about the harm they have done to others. Hurting someone else isn’t something you can argue away. Someone may not believe their words or actions should have caused harm to someone else. They may not have meant to cause harm to anyone else. But the unavoidable fact is they did hurt someone, so now what will they do about it?
This YouTube person, that I never heard of until yesterday, clearly said things that hurt people. Their words after the fact demonstrate that they were more concerned with themselves than they were with the people they hurt. Knowing nothing else about them, my initial impression is not good.
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I would normally bow in respect of this amazing achievement. However, this person did it to a public hospital. Not cool. If you’re going to trick someone into paying for you to not work, make it a for profit corp.
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