Otherwise we might hurt their feelings, and that would be bad.
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Well, we all know that being called a racist is the worst thing that can happen… like it’s worse than being the target of 500 years of systemic racism, don’cha know! /s
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Fuckin’ A.
I really have to wonder about people who don’t get that; it’s not a very hard concept.
Even Thumper’s mama was savvy enough to grok it:
It wasn’t so much that she wanted Thumper to ‘always be nice,’ it was that she didn’t want him to catch an ‘L’ for talkin’ shit.
That seems to be the idea being promoted here, and it’s a pretty shitty one, IMO.
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I am not sure what to do. If public shaming works, use it, but:
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I worry we are “winning” the personal shaming battles but losing the overall war (the presidential election, the senate, the house), so this is ultimately a distraction.
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Does it really scale? Are we gonna Internet digital shame 24/7 for every incident through some global outrage clearinghouse like Gawker? At some point isn’t this all we do – it takes up all our time to jump from one shaming incident to the next? And don’t we eventually get outrage fatigue?
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Does it truly change hearts and minds locally in that county? I am unconvinced, as it is wildly disproportionate and outsider driven.
I feel like a lot of this “solution” is what got us Trump in the first place. Look at all this awful and unfair political correctness!
Is it ok to say what she said? Hell no. Will anything that happened here change the attitudes of old white people that voted in that West Virginia county? Hell no. if anything it further calcifies and polarizes them.
It is a very difficult problem. But delivering individual beatdowns does not feel like the solution to me.
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Damn, it’s like you didn’t read even one word of what @Donald_Petersen wrote.
SMH
Newsflash:
#You CAN’T change anyone else’s mind.
Only that individual person can, and he or she has to want to.
And let’s face it; most people don’t want to change anything about themselves, because it’s hard.
I don’t see this as “shaming” these women; I see it a rightful disciplinary action for publicly acting in a manner that was unbecoming to the positions of authority they held.
I agree with Mindysan;
Elected officials and people whose duty it is to serve the public should still be held to higher standards of conduct, regardless to any recent failings to uphold decorum.
I also don’t believe ‘PC gone mad’ is what caused this clusterfuck we now find ourselves in.
I believe it was a combination of several detrimental factors, all resulting from decades upon decades of widespread corruption, greed, and neglect; and now, as Malcolm once famously said, ‘the chickens have come back home to roost.’
Ignoring problems won’t make them go away; neither will just letting people ‘slide’ when they fuck up.
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Until Congress or state legislatures start passing compulsory voting laws, POTUS will almost always be elected by a minority of eligible voters.
So a rightful disciplinary action involves putting the disciplinee in a stadium in front of hundreds of thousands of people? And having their name be permanently associated with this event for the rest of recorded history on the Internet?
For a mayor in some tiny dipstick WV town, that sure seems disproportionate to me. Maybe you’re right. Perhaps she deserved that and even more.
Maybe we all do.
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You know, your excessive use of hyperbole is starting to seem like hang wringing/white knighting. Real talk.
I don’t know how to make this any clearer:
SHE PUT HERSELF ON FRONT STREET FIRST.
Had she said that to her friend in person, rather than “sky-writing” it across the god damn “stadium airspace,” for all the world to see, perhaps she wouldn’t have gotten fired at all, let alone so publicly. No one would even know who she is, had she not set the entire thing in motion.
Don’t defend others’ willful stupidity; learn from it.
She has no one but herself to blame.
Forgiven is a great movie, and that’s my second favorite quote after William Munny’s monologue to Little Bill before killing him.
But I think this is a more apt one for me to leave you with:
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English Bob: [discussing the assassination of President Garfield] Well there’s a dignity royalty. A majesty that precludes the likelihood of assassination. If you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen your hands would shakes as though palsied.
Barber: Oh I wouldn’t point no pistol at nobody sir.
English Bob: Well that’s a wise policy, as wise policy. But if you did. I can assure you, if you did, that the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and you would stand… how shall I put it? In awe. Now, a president… well I mean…
[chuckles]
English Bob: why not shoot a president?
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That snarky little commentary ended up getting ol’ Bob’s ass kicked, if I recall correctly.
Not that Little Bill needed a reason, of course; dude was a straight psychopath.
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That isn’t what I said. I really wish you’d actually pay attention to that, instead of presuming my meaning.
I don’t think that this is the same situation as Justine Sacco - who made a stupid joke (which everyone seemingly misunderstood) and wasn’t actually trying to be racist. I think what happened to her was pretty terrible, in that case. I also wonder about he life being ruined “forever” since Sacco is still very much alive and given her relative privilege, I’m sure she eventually landed on her feet (hell, she could go off and take a job in Ethiopia). It sucks what happened to her, especially since I think lots of people completely misunderstood what she meant. But honestly, I don’t think that this woman meant to call Mrs. Obama what she did as an ironic critique of white privilege. I have no interest in seeing her life wrecked, but I’m not sure she should represent the public when she thinks so little of POC.
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Not tolerating racists in position of power, for one. We aren’t particularly interested your opinions on “tumblrina sjws”.
“Both sides do it” does not indicate anything close to a centrist or certainly not progressive worldview, because there is no “proportional” racism coming from lefty politicians.
This seems more a gimmick account concern driving trollies than anyone sincerely “concerned” about speech online.
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Justine Sacco came from enough privilege where she could 1) make that stupid joke and others like it, 2) think her unfunny privilege flaunting is something anyone remotely cares about, and 3) expect nobody to say boo about it. So, after getting booted from her fake social media job, she got to go to Africa to do some happy clappy feel goody bullshit that privileged white people seemed to love,* and then she got another fake social media job. All the while she got to do that “boohoo my life is over” drama that people love to go through, provided they never have to experience the slightest bit of adversity before, during, or since.
*“I expected to teach the poor Guatemalans everything I know, but they were the ones who taught me.” Now where’s my admission packet to Yale?
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Isn’t “white people volunteering for a month then leaving” an actual industry?
Edit: Wow, more than I thought.
http://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/the-help-and-harm-of-the-173-billion-voluntourism-industry/
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Her family is from South African, yeah? And it’s pretty clear that she was privileged. But yeah, she had a rough time of it and I’m sure she felt horrible about how she was treated. Given that it was an actual joke about white privilege, I don’t think that justifies what happened to her. Plus, she wasn’t an elected official, either.
This WV mayor losing her job over an actual racist statement is of course a different story.[quote=“Phrenological, post:71, topic:90468”]
Isn’t “white people volunteering for a month then leaving” an actual industry?
[/quote]
Yep. You’re spot on there. Thanks for the article link!
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Yes, but they aren’t from Ethiopia where she pretended to be a good person for a month.
She didn’t have a rough time of anything, because she never had any kind of rough time in her life. She bounced from fake social media job to feely goody voluntourism thingy to fake social media job, and now the Great Internet Outrage Machine has forgotten all about her.
Speaking of social media, there has to be a reason why her tweet was so objectionable. Let’s dissect this kitten:
- Making fun of AIDS. AIDS jokes are so passé. They had been played out by the late 80s. If she was a kid in Iowa trying to be oh so shocking, we would just roll our eyes, yawn, and move on. But she was neither a kid nor from Iowa.
- Specifically making fun of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, and how it relates to race, as someone from South Africa. Like, what the actual fuck? White and black South Africa are worlds apart from each other, including the AIDS epidemic, and it’s not by random chance.10% of South Africa (the white 10%, obviously) has completely subjugated the other 90% of the population, and within her lifetime. To say it’s privilege flaunting is a gross understatement. It’s the equivalent of making the “pizzas don’t scream in the oven hurr durr” joke as a wealthy German national in the 1950s.
- Doing all this shit as a senior social media person. PR people are supposed to have some decorum and professionalism, and not totally tone deaf. This marks her as being really fucking bad at her job, and objectively she should have been fired. It doesn’t help matters that a lot of people see these jobs as sinecure positions given to privileged white people’s spoiled children, and she just totally confirmed that stereotype.
I could go on, but I won’t. It’s an old story, and is just a symptom of the greater problem of unexamined privilege, which will not go away anytime soon. Every time I cut one head off the snake, five more grow back.
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Yup. She wasn’t punching up, she took the horror of existence as a joke. Nothing good was intended, no humanity was being expressed or shared between her and the subjects of her statement.
Their lives are a literal punchline to punctuate her latte-drinking Social Media Personality lifestyle.
And in the end, she emerged unscathed and re-employed. Doesn’t that make for a poorer example of political correctness gone too far?
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Annnnnnnd, it’s happened again.
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