Thirded.
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Right. It’s been privatized… The production of culture has been privatized for a long time, though. The question is whether or not the mass production of culture means it’s inherently warped.
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Most people seem to consume the culture that agrees with them, and label it righteous.
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“If you suck on a tit, the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.”
—Jack Nicholson
Bonus depression: he said this in the late 70s or early 80s.
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I know my first thought in seeing the photo (at the time) was: she’s so scared and running for her life that she doesn’t even care that she’s naked. It was only later that I learned about her napalm burns.
The nakedness is actually a crucial part of the photo. Imagine how bad things would have to be for your daughter to run naked through the streets. That’s why the photo hit home: not because she was burned, but because what was happening to her was so bad that being naked wasn’t the worst thing anymore.
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I think you’re correct there. We live in an age where we can really dig into our little cultural niches and have all our biases confirmed pretty regularly and never even come across any sort of opposition. It probably distorts one’s perception of what “society” thinks about the world. It’s become a fair amount of work to engage with opinions that dissent from our own, which is probably one of the reasons so many people have negative family interactions on places like FB.
All culture is subcultural now. Which means there probably is no effective counterculture, because what would that be exactly?
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Forgiveness isn’t about the perpetrator, it’s about the victim letting down the burden and walking free.
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True enough, but I wasn’t writing here about the victim.
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Of what service is Facebook a monopoly provider?
I have lived through Facebook’s entire existence without ever using it and for not one moment has my life been negatively impacted in the least.
Now when a real monopoly, like the power company or my cable company, starts denying service to people based on what they choose to speak about, then you’ll have a case.
If the public sets the rules, Fred Phelps and Milo Yiannopoulos get all the FB time they care to have, too. As long as you are OK with that…
That’s a finely tuned description of how forgiveness can work in some good ways, but in declaring my statement “pretty much useless,” you detached it from its context. I was talking in particular about white liberals (like so many NPR listeners) who want to feel a cozy connection to those among the brutalized who seem welcoming and forgiving, rather than those who seem angry and combative (and thus, not yet forgiving). You know, the kind of people Phil Ochs sang about so long ago; they’re basically still with us.
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Oh, I see it as a product, not an end-goal as many faux-activist charities with bloated budgets practice.
All Wars are offensive, and not good for the children caught in them.
What ever happened to the Peace movement.
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I think @William_Holz is working on it. But it’s a hard problem. Most people are more interested in calling out those they hate than they are in finding reasons to love “those people”. And some of us are tending our own gardens; we’ve (perhaps foolishly) committed everything we’ve got to the limited scope that a single person can personally influence, and haven’t got any resources left over for a group effort.
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harassment is generally treated differently under the law, and hate speech can have legal consequences.
but basically, yes. it is better to have everyone operating under rules which are democratically controlled, and based upon core concepts of individual liberty, than the arbitrary whims of corporations
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It’s just one of things we Westerners could stand to learn from the stoic, exotic cultural mores of the Orient.
Your analogy is not wrong, but it’s not completely right, either.
If your broadband ISP which held a monopoly in your area said to you that it didn’t appreciate your use of foul language and if you didn’t stop they’d cut you off, would you feel so strongly that your use of the ISP’s property to use the Internet meant had no say in what you got to say?
I mean you could always start your own ISP, right? Except government regulations not to mention the exorbitant expenses would be pretty prohibitive to allow you to speak as you’d like to.
Facebook isn’t quite a monopoly or a utility, but even the Federal government is considering making it mandatory to give border agents access to your Facebook account when you enter the country. It’s not an insignificant medium of speech at this point, and it may have certain public obligations as an American corporation, a status afforded to it by the American government.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
But there’s certainly room for discussion.
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And has employees to help now!
Very much this. Both from a ‘makes everything harder right now’ standpoint and a ‘I don’t think we could make the nonevil master plan work without openly exploiting it’ standpoint.
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These people have always been with us, and unfortunately always will be with us.
Phil Ochs called it perfectly. He was an astute observer and way ahead of his time. If only he were still alive today, God only knows what he’d have to say
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Believing that someone should allow historically/artistically significant work to remain published on a site is perfectly on keeping with deleting a few posts of people unconstructively shitposting about site moderation. It is not a common occurrence.
You see hypocrisy, but some “censorship” is qualitatively different than other.
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