SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.
[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.
Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:44PM
It's best to shoot for examples, and hopefully there will be plenty. I'd like to supply two of those example things.
First up, we have a small-ish return of racial segregation. There's the Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community [nbclosangeles.com] as requested by the CSULA Black Student Union at Cal State LA [abc7.com]. Particularly amusing was this quote referenced in both links:
Jonathan Thomas, a freshman living in the dorm, said it wasn't about segregation. Thomas, who is studying communications, said the dorm was a place for him to feel safe. He said anyone was welcomed in the dorm.
"I think that's like a really loaded word, and even I'm using it, but it's not segregated, not at all in my opinion," Thomas said. "I don't know where that assumption even came from."
See also University of Connecticut's [fox61.com] ScHOLA²RS House [uconn.edu] (need a \newcommand here if I have to type that again).
ScHOLA²RS House is a Learning Community designed to support the scholastic efforts of male students who identify as African American/Black through academic and social/emotional support, access to research opportunities, and professional development.
(Be careful with identifying there! Being trans-black or whatever gets you chewed out and humiliated by Jessica Williams on national TV! No, no, no, don't read too much into that. I just think it's amusing. But hey, if somebody can provide the preliminary MRI imaging study to show me I shouldn't laugh, I keep an open mind!)
Second, I must keep revisiting the M&Ms. As I'm sure we're all aware, once upon a time a bunch of assholes wrote a book called Der Giftpilz [archive.org] (often translated as “toadstool,” lit. poisonous mushroom). Moral of the story was “with Jews you lose.” Many years later, we learn that men are a lot like poisoned M&Ms [slate.com]:
Third, the people saying [#notallmen] aren’t furthering the conversation, they’re sidetracking it. The discussion isn’t about the men who aren’t a problem. (Though, I’ll note, it can be. I’ll get back to that.) Instead of being defensive and distracting from the topic at hand, try staying quiet for a while and actually listening to what the thousands upon thousands of women discussing this are saying.
"UNFAIR! NOT ALL MEN!" Imagine a bowl of M&Ms. 10% of them are poisoned. Go ahead. Eat a handful. Not all M&Ms are poison. #YesAllWomen
— Martin Wagner (@wagnerfilm) May 26, 2014
For irony top score, one will note that the article and the tweet were both written by men. I could elaborate about how this is exemplary of “white knight” behavior where the One Good Man must protect the Hunnies, but that's a rant for another time. Anybody who believes in gender equality would be wary (and weary perhaps) of falling into the trap of protecting the Hunnies, a term I hope is utterly degrading.
However, as it turned out, who was it, one of Trump's kids? tweeted about Skittles and was promptly eviscerated by the moon matrix media who suddenly remembered Der Giftpilz and how this line of reasoning was Nazi propaganda.
If there's one sweeping generalization I can make to be absolutely fair, it appears that humans are just all racists (and sexists)! These are things we should strive to overcome, not embrace.
(Yeah, I probably have no right to write that last sentence.)