A bit more directly related, from a group I’m not usually a fan of, but in this instance a powerful track:
I’ve seen a couple of reports on the kind of people who become trolls, but I think it would be interesting to look at it from the other side. How long does it take before a particular Youtube comment thread becomes derailed? Often you see the initial comment which sounds reasonable enough, then the latest response, which is just ridiculous vitriol. What is the average number of comments before a thread on any topic descends into mindless hatred?
Y’know, that guy Hitler was heavily into that kind of research.
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Damnit Larry! How many times do I have to tell you? Not in front of the cameras.
When you say “thread,” you hit on one of the structural problems with Youtube comments. The entire thing is, essentially, one thread. Comments that provoke a visceral emotional response float to the top because they require minimal thought to process and react to. Combine this with the near-impossibility of reading the comment stream in anything but reverse chronological order, and you get people reacting emotionally to someone else reacting emotionally – and that’s all you will ever see. Even if there might have been a deep philosophical discussion of Proust buried in there somewhere, you’ll never find it.
I put the blame squarely on UX design in this case, but I also believe this is intentional. This is definitely a case where discussion is secondary to view counts. You want to have an actual discussion of the content of the video? Post a video response – and try not to think about the ad revenue you’re producing for Google.
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“To an extent”? Pray tell, which facts in my statement do you disagree with? Do you believe that cops can openly shoot wealthy, powerful African Americans without repercussions? Or do you believe it’s impossible for a white man to be arrested? Or do you believe cops aren’t victimizing all the poor, of many different ethnicities and skin colors? I think I’m just plain correct without qualification.
[quote="Ygret, post:34, topic:39460] but to pretend that blacks don’t face much harsher policing in most cases, and that even wealthier blacks experience “driving while black” and other dangers to their health from the police is just willful blindness.
[/quote]
Then don’t pretend that. I certainly won’t. My kids have already had “the talk”.
People need to stop trying to fight injustice with racism. Kindness is a better answer than doubling up on hatred. Solidarity is a better tactic than splitting along categories pre-defined by the oppressor. When a person limits his or her sympathies to poor people of color, while a larger group is actually suffering, that’s 100% color-line racism. And if a person actually does something meaningful to help (rather than just talking about it) but insists on limiting the reach of their action along color lines, they’ll be destroying solidarity among the poor, and the end result may well be increased racism and oppression.
Making everything into a race war is self-defeating. Fight fire with water… or you’re likely to get burnt.
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Thread is a bit charitable since they integrated it with G+. It’s more like a Burroughs-esque cut-up experiment made of racism and terrible grammar.
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Someone hasn’t done compulsory fire extinguisher training 
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Independent citizen review can and should be established, but will have little power until police are contractually obligated to carry out the recommendations of the citizen panel. Altering the way policing is conducted in the US has to be baked into their CBAs or nothing will change. In the mean time, state legislatures need to review their current statutes and amend any that carve out exemptions for police.
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Keep in mind that it used to be completely flat. You used to not even get a link back to the comment someone was replying to.
I tried to get this point out a few days ago. You have done a better job than I.
I think that many people to this point in time have so much invested in the notion that the Ferguson PD is a seething hotbed of racism that they are incapable of processing the news that Mike Brown and the officer were in a violent physical confrontation that lead to Mr. Brown being shot.
Official oppression of minorities is a narrative that we see time and time and time again in television and movies. I think that a result of all those artificial life experiences is that it has conditioned people to readily accept interpretations of real life events in terms of these fictional narratives.
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