I think the person that comes off worst in that article is (shock!) Sam Biddle.
The irony is Biddle caught some shit and calls for his job sometime later when he tweeted a ‘misunderstood joke’ of his own.
He writes about it here: http://bit.ly/1sJAdbA
He acknowledges how his situation opened his eyes to Justine S’s intent and reality but he, of course, didn’t lose his job or social standing – and he still doesn’t come off well in his own article.
My lifelong experience is that communication is fraught with mis-understanding. Isn’t one of the back bones of science the art of exacting communication? I am sure we have all had the experience of an argument that boils down to a difference in the understanding of the meaning of a single word. All of these facts should lead us to the idea that determining someone’s character based upon a single utterance is ridiculous and unfair and a failure of reason. But no.
“When China spits, we drown”.
I’ve just posted that to my 55,000 followers on weibo. Expect righteous wrath. And more.
It’s probably not the original wording, although it refers to the feeling some groups (like Tibetans) feel when faced with the influence of China’s sheer population size. A similar expression (“If all Chinese go to the coast and spit, Japan will drown”) was/is actually used by Chinese people to refer to Japan’s relatively small population. I lived in the city where Japan first invaded and which was the site of some of their human experiments, so you’d hear the second one now and then.
That’s what she said.
We? You ask as if there was an Official Boing Boing Policy.
We, meet us.
[quote=“beschizza, post:101, topic:17218, full:true”]
All that voluble disappointment, all these “you should be better than that” pieties. Has that ever once worked with us? Does it ever work with anyone?[/quote]
About as well as rhetorical questions?
My little brother has just left Heathrow for Johannesburg. Sometimes the temptation to see if he’s changed his Twitter password yet is almost overwhelming. 
Well, that’s an interesting point central to this story. Yes, she made a boneheaded tweet, but she did so while she was the Chief Communications Director at a $3.1 BILLION dollar company run by the guy who helped create Fox Broadcasting Company. She got paid, and paid handsomely, to know better.
Thus I think, at the time, most of her detractors were certainly not punching down.
In retrospect, I’ve come to have more ambivalence about the Internet Hate Machine, but not because Sacco was (or has become) a more sympathetic character.
When this happened, she had only 170 followers. More than many non-teen and/or non-celebrities, but not by much. It’s because one of those people sent it to someone else who did have a lot of followers that the tweet went viral.
If it’s true that it was meant to be an in-joke sarcastic tweet – and only if – then I agree this is just a mistake that should be learned from and moved on from. And by learned from, I mean we ALL need to remember to use the /s tag if writing anywhere a stranger might misread. But if she really is stuck back in the mid-1980’s then this was a helluva wake up call, sadly necessary.
Not a great communicator myself . . . I was referring to the crowd taking down anyone based on a single quote. Crowd-hate is ugly and tribal (seems to me) This post was as much about that as the particulars of her story. Mark said he was less willing to engage in public shaming after this. I kinda thought of witch burnings and lynchings of blacks, and wondered why he thought this was any different (beyond the issue of scale.) Let those involved sort it out. The crowd may be a source for some kinds of wisdom, but it certainly does not have a good history where justice is involved. In fact, isn’t that why we have judges educated in the finer points of errors of thinking (one would hope, anyway.) No one deserves a stoning. No matter how guilty.
I just watched Black Mirror, S2 E2 last night.
It’s rather apropos for this story.
Except that I shouldn’t have to be responsible for sanitizing everything to avoid being victimized by a group of social vigilantes. How about, unless we seek out every violation of social mores, we just ignore the ones being committed by people who are intensely vulnerable? Politicians can say shit like this and rarely have to walk anything back. Just because we can crush nameless little people, it doesn’t mean we should. 1980s attitudes or not.
I’m sorry, but if teenage Arab me, went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and pulled the same stunt with the same intent, I’d probably be dead by now. I refuse to pretend that this “process” can ever be anything remotely close to fair. It selects for the vulnerable at random. It hardly shames and hurts people who have the power to push back. In my mind, this makes it worthless.
Oh, holy crap, that episode. But it really is apropos…
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
