All I’ve ever needed in this presidential election to help my understanding is this William Gibson quote:
“[Slitscan’s audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
Everyone’s read this 2012 Yiannopoulos article, which he reaffirmed his support for on Wednesday, in which he calls for people like himself to be banned from social media in a “smattering of unpopular show trials,” right?
What’s disturbing about this new trend, in which commenters are posting what would previously have been left anonymously, is that these trollies seem not to mind that their real names, and sometimes even their occupations, appear clamped to their vile words. It’s as if a psychological norm is being established whereby comments left online are part of a video game and not real life. It’s as if we’ve all forgotten that there’s a real person on the other end, reading and being hurt by our vitriol. That’s as close to the definition of sociopath as one needs to get for an armchair diagnosis, though of course many other typical sociopathic traits are also being encouraged by social media.
It’s remarkable how accurately and savagely he targeted his 2016 self.
The viciously offensive “uncle Tom” gas chamber tweet and those like it were not hers. (You can tell because the spoons that faked it forgot her blue “verified” checkmark, or the site they used can’t add one.) She has made some run-of-the-mill “pff, white people” jokes, which some people are happy to call racist.
I made this with Preview (a crippled image viewer on a Mac) in less than a minute. Unless there’s a reference to an actual tweet you can see, it’s dubious, esp. since the Gamergate/Right-wing troll brigade have made fake tweets to attack people before. It’s especially dubious to imagine that an actress in a major film wouldn’t have people vetting the crap out of her account to avoid bad publicity.
More wonderful recent Laurie Penny, about the scourge of apolitical wellness trends. Can’t remember if it was featured on BB or not.
The wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”
The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.
As with the Log Cabiners, I have no clue why people think that because a person is gay they can’t be (often self)hateful, racist, misogynistic, and myopic.
Of course these people aren’t going to vote “in self interest”, they’re going to vote in their self interest. Do they hate ALL Muslims? Do they give a fuck about women? Do they hate “the gubbmint”? Yes!
Milo is like someone who gets dragged from McDonalds PlayLand for shitting on slide, but requests a job application
He’s worse than that. He’s the guy that does that and then writes an article about how they wouldn’t hire him and although he doesn’t explicitly say to contact McDonalds he gives the address of the McDonalds and the name of the manager.
Then when people do start to harass them and McDonalds issues a statement that people should stop contacting them he writes another article about how McDonalds is anti-free speech and he is going to start a nationwide speaking tour to promote free speech…
Perhaps there are more of them on the right, but if so that is simply because that’s where they can get more attention right now.
google Donald Trump site:boingboing.net
About 4,260 results (0.31 seconds)
google Bernie Sanders site:boingboing.net
About 1,240 results (0.30 seconds)
google Jill Stein site:boingboing.net
About 98 results (0.55 seconds)
I doubt the log Cabiners are anti-drug, I also doubt that it’d lead to any discoveries of self.
All the LSD in the world didn’t stop plenty of shitty hippies from becoming reaganites, same thing with the aging ravers that enjoy MDMA and burning man going full Republican.
So you’re saying, to quote you, that Sanders and Stein have “sacrificed their morals and ethics on the altar of their unmet emotional needs”?
Or are you saying that if somehow Sanders and/or Stein got as much attention as Trump does now (and he as little as they do), then they too would have wacked-out, money-lusting, soul-less pilot fish like Yiannopoulos following them around?
I do not agree with your characterization of Stein and Sanders.
It seems to me that they already do have wacked-out soul-less pilot fish following them around. But you can’t get the true top-class eyeball sucking monsters in your train if you don’t have the most eyeballs.
Spot on. It’s amazing to monitor various blog outlets, social networks, etc. as his minions change the narrative to make him look like the victim and Leslie the racist. It is subtle and seamless. They start by posting innocent questions then others respond with the “truth” of the matter. Repeated over and over. It’s disturbing.
Not speaking for @Medievalist here, but I interpreted them as meaning that even a relatively progressive site such as bOINGbOING gives a lot more attention to people who cause the worst social problems than to those who can fix them. How many people don’t know what Trump claims to stand for? Versus how many who may not even know who Jill Stein is? As decentralized as media have become, many still seem to let the same shitty groups control the narrative. That it’s difficult to cover what is happening without indulging such narcissists in the process.
