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Are We Too Quick To Act On Social Media Outrage?
RedK writes: Connie St-Louis, on June 8th, reported on apparently sexist remarks made by Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize winning scientist, during an event organised for women in sciences. This led to the man's dismissal from his stations, all in such urgency that he did not even have time to present his side, nor was his side ever offered any weight. A leaked report a few days later suggests that the remarks were taken out of context. Further digging shows that the accuser has distorted the truth in many cases it seems. This is not the first time that people may have jumped the gun too soon on petty issues and ruined great events or careers.
I don't use either Twitter or Facebook so would not be worried if eithere or both of them went down
When a charge is this serious, the facts don't matter. /sarc
This is the same thing that happened to a Texas Firefighter who supposedly had praised that sadistic little shit Dylan Roof, on Facebook. However, the post was a response in a thread, and the Firefighter claims it was in response to another poster, who had donated to a fund for the victims of the shooting. The words were "He needs to be praised for the good deed he has done." He was immediately suspended and is now a social Pariah, a walking target. The disturbing trend in these kinds of situations is the accuser doesn't even have a chance to defend themselves before they find their lives ruined.
I love the idea that in an article about media outrage the author uses a Daily Mail article as evidence for why someone else's media outrage was wrong.
Yes.
90% of "outrage" is virtue signalling and peer pressure.
We see this kind of outcome all over the place nowadays. It's mostly because those in positions of power are far too worried about public perception. (Of course, their almost complete lack of any firmly held moral principles leaves them adrift, and very much at the mercy of popular sentiment). Obviously Sir Tim Hunt is of infinitely more value to society than Connie St Louis - a glance at the Daily Mail story referred to in the summary makes that clear. So why was he forced to resign as a kneejerk reaction to a wave of ephemeral indignation, which will be forgotten by next week (and it's Saturday as I write)?
Recently I have been glued to a box set of the complete "Hill Street Blues" - yes, I know that telegraphs my age and unadventurous taste in TV. It was only the other night that I got quite angry at the spectacle of the police chief twisting Captain Furillo's arm to get him to abandon his defence of an apparently "bad cop". This guy, a narcotics agent, had shot and killed a young black man while interrupting some suspicious activity in the small hours. The cop claimed that he had given due warning, and fired only after being fired on - all of which was true. Also, the group he tried to apprehend were in fact committing crimes. Nevertheless, the police chief tells Furillo that it's vital for the department to be seen to throw this "bad cop" to the wolves. It's all about perception, he explains. The facts don't matter at all; all that counts is that this is a good time to throw someone to the wolves.
University College London (UCL) has indeed stained its reputation. Its refusal even to consider reinstating Professor Hunt makes matters worse. And Britain, which seems to prefer Ms St Louis to Professor Hunt, will get what it has chosen. Not to its advantage.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with "social media".
It is the Progressive thought that prevails the Western Culture.
Political Correctness places style over substance. Or, speech over actions.
Pulling words out of context and the twisting of meaning to suit one's purpose is a long and effective tactic.
People are "convicted" for "crimes" they did not commit while people who have actually committed the same "crimes" are never bothered because they are Progressives and Politically Correct actors.
Whether the reaction is "too quick" or not is the wrong question to ask. It is wrong to prosecute thoughtcrimes at all. Whether or not he is "sexist", he is still a brilliant scientist and a credit to whatever stations he was fired from.
Such prosecutions are not only unfair — and offensive to everyone, who values the First Amendment — they are also ineffective and counter-productive: people will not change their minds this way, they'll just learn to keep their mouths shut.
And, of course, it also exposes the preachers of tolerance and crusaders against bigotry as intolerant bigots. Some silver lining, I suppose...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Internet veterans know to laugh at most of the outrage. You can't take it seriously. I think a lot of the problems come from old media trying to be hip and cool so they get on social media but they don't know how crazy people can be on the internet so they take people too seriously. And then crazy people get treated as anything but crazy people.
All this hyperventilating about various moron outrages. Just do what the internet does with these people. Give them a an "oh really nick cage"... or a "sarcastic wonka"... and move on.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Tim Hunt was attacked and dismissed from UCL, the Royal Society and other bodies, based on nothing more than lies. Anybody can, with enough manipulation, be ostracized for comments taken out of context. Anybody.
If Tim Hunt is not reinstated, and the liar(s) that caused his reputation to be tarnished, will not bear the consequences of their dishonest behavior, our society is going towards a very scary future. We have not learned anything from the lessons of the past, and any Goebbels wannabe is going to fuck us up.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
So entitled to being an insufferable twat twice for the price of one?
So please listen, lady. You're not entitled to anything. And neither is anyone else due to the color of their face, their sexual orientation, their gender, their upbringing, their place of birth or ANYTHING else. The only thing you are entitled to is the SAME treatment that anyone else gets who isn't part of $minority_group (albeit I fail to see how "female" is a minority in any kind of context except maybe when it comes to who pisses standing up).
You can complain if you suffer from having other/fewer/inferior rights and treatment due to your $minority_group. You will see me in the first row center in a march for equality, be it equal pay for women and men or equal marriage rights for gays and heterosexuals. But THAT IS IT!
You are NOT entitled to be except from being made fun of because of your $minority_group. You are NOT entitled to not being the butt of jokes because you are $minority_group. You are NOT entitled of better or preferred treatment because of belonging to your fucking minority group!
Equality, yes. And I will gladly fight for it, even if I don't belong to your minority group because I do think people have the right, the absolute and unalienable right, to be treated the SAME way as everyone else independent of anything you could think of.
Entitlement, no. Not now, not ever.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Asking "should they be acting slower?" is missing the point.
The problem isn't how quickly they acted, it's how stupidly they acted.
Last week in my country, a new political party overrun the previous party in charge of the municipality for about 30 years (yes, those thing happen in Europe sometimes).
The day the new government took charge, the displaced party dug out some four-year-old tweets containing a silly joke about nazis (the kind that would gather a +5 funny and some grammar nazi "corrected for you" replies around here) when the man had not even a politician. The same day, all the traditional media were reporting on their front pages as if it was the man's true opinion instead of a joke, reaching international press and forcing the councillor to resign (you may have heard about it as the "communist politician supporting the holocaust").
As long as the public falls for such obvious tactics, and until politicians learn to trim their twitter and facebook timelines when they run for office, this is bound to happen again and again.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Yes.
Take that, Betteridge!
Nothing posted to
People didn't make fun of him, they got him fired. I am in favor of shaming people for incorrect behavior that is still legal behavior. But I don't think we should limit ourselves to socially unacceptable views on women and ethical or sexual minorities. We need to shame politicians and business people that give the appearance of impropriety in their dealings too. And we should be proportional in our response. If someone makes a bad joke, and then softens it when they realize it was a bad joke, we shouldn't get them fired, we should humiliate them for "acting like an ass in public" and watch them more closely to see if they are acting like an ass consistently towards people they work with. The latter is grounds for firing someone, but not a different sense of humor. Even if he was a misogynist, racist, homophobe, it wouldn't really matter as long as he treated all his coworkers with respect and based all decisions on merit. People are allowed to be stupid, and we are allowed (and encouraged) to laugh at them, but not fire them.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Oooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllllllllllllll Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssss!!!
People need to grow the fuck up and grow some slightly thicker skin.
People still have a lot of rights. Thankfully.
But the "right to never be offended" has NEVER been among them.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Outrage is almost always a sign that someone is trying to manipulate you (either for page views, or something else).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In this time and age, with terrorism and an economy in the dump...
I really don't think that, in the US at least, there's a terrorism problem. We've had 2 problems in ~14 years, even less if you go farther back in history. I think to be a relevant charge terrorism would have to be more frequent. Car accidents kill around 32k people a year, so . For the couple trillion piddled away in Iraq / Afghanistan you could have given away self driving cars and saved ~450k people in addition to not having lots of vets with PTSD. So with the facts in mind, please don't list terrorism as a top 5 concern. On the economy you are correct. A real recovery, one for more than just the 1%, would be greatly appreciated.
I think what he did was endearing. The talk about women in the lab was a reference to his wife whom he met while she worked in a lab.
Jo Brand and Roseanne Barr got applause when they "joked" about wanting to stab men through the heart. Isn't that far worse than calling someone thin-skinned?
More here.
Rarely do people do fact checking. Propaganda is really easy to push on social media if you know how to do it right, causing people to stand up for causes, buy products or to make someone public enemy #1. This is the downside of popular opinion social media sites, if its wrong, yet a popular opinion, everyone gets a wrong popular opinion. Fortunately not all astroturfers understand how to pull on heart strings yet.
God spoke to me
Thought experiment for you. It's really important to enable women to participate in traditionally male-dominated areas involving leadership in society, right? I'm going to hazard a guess that you agree with that. So a question: is that just so the ladies aren't left out, or can an argument also be made the actual quality of these areas of society will be improved in the big picture by the participation of women? It's not unreasonable to argue the latter, and many reasonable people make such arguments.
So just take the above and apply it to child rearing, and I've successfully made my case that it's at least an issue worth considering/discussing. Diversity minus women equals "???". I suggest that the trolls in this conversation are those who say there's nothing to talk about, and everybody who disagrees with them is an idiot. I believe that would be you?
Outrage is almost always a sign that someone is trying to manipulate you (either for page views, or something else).
An angry outburst is temporary insanity. You are not rational while you are angry, and anything you are thinking of saying or doing is going to be irrational and stands a high degree of making your problem worse. If you will train yourself to relax as your default habit whenever something frustrates you, and adopt the rule that you won't say or do anything until you have calmed down, you will actually train the neurons in your brain to focus on rational problem solving instead of producing an angry outburst, and you will be able to come up with much better solutions to your problems.
A debt collector knows that if you are thinking rationally when they call, you will not pay them, so they seek to get you upset so you will do something irrational. Politicians exploit the exact same thing.
As a parent I know the most important thing I need to do in raising my children is to keep my head and stay calm and relaxed so that the solutions I come up with to parenting difficulties will be rational solutions, the best solutions possible so I can do a good job of raising my kids.
This works for nearly any problem in life.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
And calling for segregation in the labs based on gender is also sexist.
This story is not people fighting sexism. It's people reaching for the low-hanging fruit of using twitter and facebook to swarm a semi-famous person for a mildly insensitive joke he made.
Where are you, twitter vigilantes, when women are sold as sex slaves in the ISIS kingdom? When Latino girls are shipped by containers to a life of abuse in the Middle East? When Indian women are raped because they are walking on the street without a husband after sundown? When a large number of native prostitutes in America disappear?
You know where you are. You are in line at Starbucks, giving 20 seconds of attention to the latest scandal on your twitter feed while someone is preparing the skinny vanilla latte. So of course you can't find a solution to real problems, but you find it rewarding to join your "voice" to a crow of other misinformed idiots attacking someone who can possibly be shamed.
Why don't you all install a Sudoku or latest Angry bird game instead and give the world a break with your twitter garbage. Keep your shallow opinions to your close circle of friends instead of broadcasting your ignorance and everyone will win.
lucm, indeed.