We’re wrapping up our weekend at Lake Itasca, and I’m about to head south for the beginning of fall semester at UMM, so I’ll just leave you with some miscellaneous writing by other people.
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I am the woman you laughed at on the internet: it turns out that fat jokes have victims.
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GoFundMe campaign for Ferguson shooter drowns under racist commentary: almost a quarter million dollars was raised for Darren Wilson, and the comments…oy, fucking racists.
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What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings: would you believe that data on shootings by police officers is incredibly hard to come by? I wonder why.
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#FreeWarMachine: A hashtag for the worst people on planet earth: Try it yourself at #FreeWarMachine. It’s being invaded by anti-trolls now, so it’s a little better, but yesterday…all hope for humanity was lost. I found this one person who was so vile that I was instantly motivated to try and report him for abuse, the first time I’ve done that, and discovered how impossibly tedious Twitter’s abuse reporting mechanism is.
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More than 60 years later, a love note from a familiar stranger: all right, a sweet story for dessert.
Wow, that WarMachine one. Why is twitter okay with this sort of shit?
weird internet
if the memetic arm, leg and groin of the darren wilson campaign celebrates 1000000 shekels in donations, is it a sign of racism, antisemetism, desire for “lulz and kekz”
or (c) all of the above?
i have lurked the relevant forums when the campaign was in full swing, and it was horrible internet people doing horrible internet things
of course the majority of them were either blatantly racist or severely racially insensitive
but racism was not the overarching motivation
lulz were
to me the sincere core of cop-supporters
who think a man in uniform can do no wrong and on site executions (for “violent thugs”) are justified
are much more worrying than than the 5$ donation paired with a ridiculously racist comment made for the sole purpose of trolling
PZ, the story about the woman laughed at on the Internet is apparently a transcript of a performance which is available here:
Is This You? | Amy Salloway
So you never were able to report that user to Twitter? I’m all for erring on the side of free speech, but that is just reprehensible. What’s wrong with people?
Off topic: The five-day-old “Good Morning America” post is showing up at the top of Pharyngula this morning. Is that intentional, or a tech glitch.
PZ pinned it this morning.
Wow, that War Machine bit was a little too depressing. I had such a pleasant weekend; seeing that just reminds me again that the world is shit. And the worst part is these people are all around us in our everyday lives. They’re co-workers and neighbors. What a sick epidemic this mentality is.
Oh, and that old couple reconnecting story… d’awwww :)
RE: Data on Police Killings.
The author suspects that it’s intentional that these data are not collected. I think it’s one of those 50/50 things. People have a natural instinct to avoid things that make them look and feel bad. Individuals in an institution will have a tendency to avoid things that make them and their institution look bad. Sure many of them will be deliberately and consciously trying to make inconvenient reality go away by any means necessary but there is also something I like to think of as a de facto conspiracy.
In a de facto conspiracy humans will be following their instincts as a group and bad outcomes happen as a result of collective neglect and downplaying. Individuals still need to be held accountable for their actions (and lack of actions when avoiding information this obviously important), but it’s partly an insidious group behavior thing as well.
Here is another good example,
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/20/louisiana-judge-blasts-overheated-prison-for-trying-to-hide-cruel-and-unusual-conditions/
The military has historical problems analyzing it’s rape problem, the same for prisons. The urge to pretend that we are something grand and perfect is deadly.
Yes, the part where you have to sign your “signature” seems rather egregious. Surely if you’re logged into Twitter then they already know who you are and what your email address is.
Yet, it’s so simple to report accounts as being spam. What are we more concerned about the feelings of bigots than spammers? Apparently.
First, I’m not sure how you know what their motivation was. Second, the overarching effect was to support racism, so I find your sanguinity about the people who are “doing it for the lulz,” as you put it. I’ve encountered this attitude before when dealing with rape threats made on the internet against me. As the target, I can’t really tell. Without the benefit of your mindreading skills, all I can tell is that someone is threatening to rape me. Whether it’s because they find it amusing to make me upset about the prospect of being raped or because they really want to doesn’t matter from my perspective. I’m sure it’s the same for people who are targeted by racism. I am not one of them and I suspect you aren’t either.