When it’s specific, you get more of the real community aspect. You’re there with just people who are into the same little niche you are. You have more in common with everyone there. If it’s catering to a broader range of interests, you miss out on that some.
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I really don’t get that part. Is everybody connected with this story unfamiliar with the idea of “reading a contract?” It’s not as easy as, say, Tumblr… but it’s not that hard.
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Teens deserve ridicule because they are naive, arrogant, and bitchy. Yes, they also deserve sympathy and support. These are not mutually exclusive. Ridicule can be a form of support. I’m personally glad that people ridiculed my stupidity because it made me a better person.
And it doesn’t “often” lead to suicide. Teens mocking other teens rarely leads to suicide. This is part of why I believe in ridicule; it crushes entitlement and ill-founded feelings of superiority. Maybe if there were more ridicule toward the victimizers, there would be less mockery, and therefore less suicide.
The incompetence of the convention is not a separate issue here. It’s the topic of the article. I didn’t know that tumblr was a teen girl forum until you brought it up for some reason. I wasn’t shitting on teen girls; it’s just funny that this conference was so awful.
Anyway, hasn’t it occurred to you that these teenagers (did teenagers really organize this conference, anyway? if not, why are you bringing it up?) might just be having lulz and ripping everyone off and pocketing the cash? It seems like something my friends and I might have done when we were young, insecure psychopaths.
Imagine an infinite loop of privilege being checked. Also kitties and titties.
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I wouldn’t put it past a sleezy hotel operator to try to shakedown an obviously poorly run convention just because they can.
or maybe the contract was contingent on delivering at least X attendees, and they didn’t do that, so the hotel raised the marginal rate while the idiot organizers naively assumed that it would be prorated by proportion. or maybe it was just a straight-up shakedown by the dis-organizers. who knows?
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Exactly right. That’s what happened in the situations I saw. The existence of a contract is meaningless (to certain types, at least) if the other party doesn’t have the will or wherewithall to enforce it.
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It’s possible they didn’t fill all of the rooms in the block I guess. While the hotel doesn’t know exactly how many attendees there are going to be on Saturday and Sunday, they do have a pretty good estimate on the rooms. That said, blindsiding them at 10PM on Friday makes it sound more like a shakedown.
Or maybe they had been sending emails warning the convention organizers about this possibility for months but they don’t read their emails or couldn’t be arsed to do anything about it.
Oh, and that not reading email thing is not as crazy as it sounds. I was tangentially involved with a different convention, one that had a very long (30+ year run), but the guy in charge was a broke bum and let his email account expire, for the whole 6 months leading up to the convention. He also didn’t read regular mail, have a phone, or organize any kind of meetings. The only reason the convention went off at all is because everybody had been doing it for so long that they just did the same thing year after year. The convention died after the hotel that had hosted it for all of those years finally closed.
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Sadly, these are not the teens who are often the subject of ridicule. It’s the ones who aren’t those things who are often the focus of bullying and mockery.
Maybe you and I have differing interpretations of ridicule? What is yours, if I may ask? I always thought it was making fun of someone in order to tear them down. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how ridiculing people is the answer here. It seems to me some compassion would go a hell of a lot further than making people feel worse. Why in the hell should we live in a world where this is the norm? it shouldn’t be.
It’s entirely possible. Of course, there are plenty of adults who are con artists, too. But once again, my comments were on the comments about article, not necessarily on the article itself. Clearly, the con was a clusterfuck from the start, but that might not have anything to do with having teenagers involved - it seems to have everything to do with inexperienced people running this con and biting off more than they can chew. Of course, the majority of attendees, who got screwed over were probably teens, too.
Regarding suicide rates, young teen males have a higher rate of success, but teen girls have far more attempts:
According to the CDC it is the 3rd highest cause of death among people ages 10 to 24:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pub/youth_suicide.html
I see that as a problem, even if you don’t. The reasons for suicide is many and varied, but bullying is part of it, especially among LBGT youths.
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Based on stereotyping its users, it would consist of a bunch of people on trampolines screaming “Look at me! Look at me!” and “Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being repressed!”
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I can’t speak for others, but I have a lot of hostility for tumblr due to the fact like it’s a horribly designed website. I’ve got some fandom friends who migrated there, and some new fandoms seem to be mostly there, but gah, every time I try to maneuver through tumblr I wind up wanting to poke my brain out with the nearest sharp object.
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The thing that always gets me about Tumblr is when you see someone post an interesting picture or something and you want to learn more about it, so you scroll to the comments. But the comments consist only of “So and So reblogged this!” about a thousand times. Does anyone care? All I want is the artists name or where the picture was taken or whatever and information like that is never provided.
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Sadly, these are not the teens who are often the subject of ridicule. It’s the ones who aren’t those things who are often the focus of bullying and mockery.
Maybe. It’s not so clear. Under color of authority, one of the only two students at my high school nerdier than I was tried to bully me with false accusations of ‘hacking’. (shrug) The point is, everyone can be a jackass, I don’t think you can make blanket statements like this, especially not useful ones.
Ridicule to me is the peer version of censure. Parents say that such-and-such thing is ‘morally bad’ from a place of authority, while ‘peers’ ridicule stupid things as stupid. Either one can go horribly wrong, of course, but ridicule is not necessarily abuse, just like parental authority is not always not-abuse. Maybe there should be both more compassion and more ridicule. Otherwise people are just emotionally-suppressed grey goo, which is the most depressing outcome of all.
Regarding suicide rates…
Of course suicide is going to place high in cause of death, relatively speaking, among the young. They’re otherwise healthy! Even though it’s in third place, it’s still worth noting that the suicide rate is 0.00008, or 0.008%, or approx. 1-in-11000 per year.
And not even close to all suicides are due to bullying.
Yes, any rate above zero is a problem, especially when the impact is disproportionate to disadvantaged groups. We agree there. But what’s the solution? We can’t make everyone happy. Human nature just doesn’t work that way.
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So that makes it okay? Because everyone can do it? At what point does it become unacceptable to you?
So, it’s an acceptable form of social control to you? To make people who diverge from the mainstream move back into line? I just don’t buy your view that ridicule should be an acceptable form of social control.
I think we should definitely not have a culture that celebrates and rewards bullies, actually. It’s not about making everyone happy, it’s about not having a culture that tears people down, especially groups that are vulnerable to depression and various kinds of instability.
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But I think that’s a different thing - functionality of the platform is not really what I mean - it’s the tumblr culture that I’m talking about. It might well suck, but I don’t have a tumblr myself, so I don’t know.
I’ve found tumblrs to be half and half. A fair number of them are sort of annoying, but I’ve found some that are well done and interesting, too. But it’s far more customizable it seems than other social networking sites (facebook, instagram, twitter), which I imagine is part of it’s appeal to tween/teen girls? Or teens in general…
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So that makes it okay?
No. I never said anything like that. I just said you can’t divide people into abusers and victims. Many people are both, sometimes even at the same time.
So, it’s an acceptable form of social control to you?
Well, the great thing about ridicule is that it can be less like social control than censure is. Ideally much less. You seem to be framing things in this “mainstream abusers” vs. “oppressed rebel” sort of way and I don’t know if that’s totally true.
I think we should definitely not have a culture that celebrates and rewards bullies, actually.
Sounds great. Have a plan? I don’t think “being nice to everyone” is going to work.
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I agree. People have been abused often turn around and do the same to others, because they see it as a way to take back control and to fit in again.
I’d be lying if that isn’t part of how I view the world. You got me! 
Have you tried? Compassion doesn’t always work, but it goes a lot farther than you think. I’d just like to start with making treating others like crap because they don’t fit in more unacceptable.
No. Not really. I wish I did. All we can do is try to change our own actions to be kinder overall when we can.
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This stems from the perception that tumblr is an echo chamber populated by individuals who hijack every conversation in order to promote their particular niche interest (whether it be internet activism or magical ponies or whatever). Sheltered adolescents just kind of fall into that category.
In reality, it’s all relatively harmless (and there are actually some pretty cool tumblr sites, though Sturgeon’s Law applies), so I don’t see where the hatred would come from.
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Right, that’s what I’ve heard.
I don’t know, either and I’m wondering if the gender (real or perceived) of the users are part of the reason why? According to this, at least, it skews younger and it skews towards young women:
But I have no idea how accurate that is or how that reflects today…
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I don’t know. I subscribe to Tumblr in Action on Reddit, and while feminists get featured on there quite a bit, it tends to be the…erm…ones who have unique perspectives on feminism. Like the ones who claim that transgender women are the worst misogynists ever, or that gay men being gay are misogynist for rejecting women, or another example I’ve seen would be referring to the male gaze as “eye rape”. Or worse, young, naive people who claim that men cannot be raped. Sorry, guys who have been raped; it’s impossible. IMHO that’s all pretty cringe-worthy, and mock-worthy.
They also mock people who claim to be reincarnated dragons, people who claim to have “headmates” and that it’s a wonderful thing, or people who claim to be “triggered” by chewing, or claim that people who are transgender and want surgery are “truscum” and therefore horrible, horrible people. Or…it goes on. A bunch of Tumblrinas jumped all over Wil Wheaton’s bizznezz one day because he made a comment about his “spirit animal”, which they took as cultural appropriation because white people have never had a concept of spirit animals. And of course, Tumblr is aflame because one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity has been accused of rape and he hasn’t confessed and killed himself yet. (Note to Tumblrinas: “OMG kill yourself” is extremely rude, might trigger people with depression to do so, and might possibly be illegal.)
I’m sure there are “OMG there are girls here eww” types, though.
I’ve seen quite a bit of that kind of complaining; that somehow, a boy, or especially a man, liking MLP is “shitting” all over something intended for young girls. I think the origins of that was Princess Molestia.
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