Whats the most offensive thing youve ever said?
I wonder if in our surveillance society, in a few years, if I’ll be able to just google
Whats the most offensive thing L_Mariachi ever said?
And get an answer.
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As much as people ridicule the stupid, most are also humble and forgiving on the turn around.
Also, most people should just stay off of Twitter. It’s way too easy to post brain farts. And for the most part, tweeting isn’t mandatory, unless it is a requirement of your job, and in that case, it should be edited and treated as if it were being published by a major news organization.
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I’d just like to point out that I don’t see any lawmakers, celebrities, or people on my Facebook feed standing up for her right to tweet what she wants when she was clearly let go from her job for it…
Tangential comment: AIDS treatment may be the Cause you care most about, but there are a lot of other Causes. You don’t get to decide which are worthy for other peoples’ resources. You don’t get to decide whether other people contribute a little to many causes or focus on one cause. Your specific reply is not only arrogant, though. It’s also stupid. The original post (and the whole kerfuffle) calls out racism and white privilege. and those are behind a lot of the neglect of AIDS in Africa.
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This has a bit of a feel of a pile-on and strikes me as a bit ugly. Go look at, to pick a basically random example, the comments on the NY Times’ article on the racial gap in in breast cancer survival. I’d estimate that at least a quarter of the comments have a kind of cluelessness that matches the tweet when you actually think about what’s being said. Several just say in essence, “what do you expect—black women are fat.”
Further, the tweet might have a deliberate element of self-parody; it’s hard to tell.
The comments I’m looking at are clearly serious. But we don’t seem to pile on the deeply concerned commenters who just don’t see why it should all be about race*. Instead, it seems as though this sort of storm tends to focus on some woman we can put in a “dumb blond” box.
I think others have addressed it all quite well! But I was asked a question, so…
You think that a racially-insensitive PR executive’s public quip about AIDS in Africa is “fairly banal”, and you “frankly don’t care”, yet you do think that mocking the utterer is “deplorable”, a self-righteous and self-entitled witch hunt. It even makes you feel ill.
Well, here’s what I’m thinking! I think that a lot of people do care about it, and that making fun of public acts of privileged stupidity does make a difference. It helps diffusely, in how it influences the culture of discussion, and directly, in that people see it and pledge. All contrary to your cynical and revealing suggestion that “you and I do nothing to help those people.”
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?
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Honestly, I think I could understand feeling sorry for her as everyone, at some point, has suffered foot-in-the-mouth-syndrome, maybe not like this example, but in some form.
I think, though, that the commenter could have made a one stop statement like, “I feel sorry for her”, agreed that what was said was stupid and highly regretful, and then moved on.
By persisting on the thread for so long, it seemed to turn into a mission of a sorts. Maybe s/he thought s/he hadn’t explained her/him self adequately, but then it took on a life of its own. That’s the other element of the internet that we have all suffered, at one point or another, and that is not knowing when to end the argument. I’m trying to get better at this, myself.
Anyway…
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I don’t know if that’s what it is, it may just look like that. But if you have an open comment section, more than one person is going to respond. Unless you think that one commenter can represent all of the views. That can happen if one person succinctly comments and then everyone “likes” it. But you know, this woman was able to publicly state her snark or whatever it was, so then is it terrible if others are given the same opportunity or is there some invisible quota that should be adhered to, and who decides that? Or is it that people should never respond to stupid comments at all? Or is it limited to certain types of people making the comments?
There was so much of this going with the Duck Dynasty story. He said awful things and then people didn’t want anyone to respond because he had rights. I mean, is everyone now required to ignore everyone else? I realize they were different circumstances, but that seems to be a growing trend, that people responding to things are somehow shamed for responding at all.
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Well, here’s what I’m thinking! I think that a lot of people do care about it, and that making fun of public acts of privileged stupidity does make a difference.
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?
So, if I’m parsing this correctly, we should speak up when we see people doing things we consider wrong… but only with mockery and scorn and derision, not with pious expressions of disappointment.
You’re right, though, it doesn’t work on BB.
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I don’t know, I have posted some earnest comments, and haven’t been wished out into the cornfield yet.
Further, the truth is, if you are clicking and commenting multiple times on a subject, even in defense of that subject, in reality you are giving it more attention and credence than making one comment and then vamoosing.
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Dear Everybody,
My mother tongue is not English but the first time I read this tweet, it sounded like a politically incorect sarcastic stand up comedian joke. Straight to the point, reminding us of the world’s problems we know about but close our eyes on. Using humor as a pretext. Making us laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time.
Looking at all the reactions here and on Twitter, it seems that the concensus is that she wasn’t joking but was serious and is racist. I genuinely would like to understand what I’m missing here to take that tweet seriously. This tweet slapped my face with the reality of AIDS in Africa and the problem of racism, am I the only one that reads it wrong?
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I thought perhaps it was snark, but she’s not a stand-up comedian, she’s a PR person, so I think a more staid type of behavior/decorum is usually expected. I think it also depends upon who you are representing, how you comport yourself and what or how you write/say something is contingent upon what is appropriate for those people.
The easiest thing would have been for her to clarify, apologize for the glibness, perhaps, stressed that her mission was to help AIDs victims, and move on.
Edit: I just read the NYT article and apparently it’s her schtick to rag on everyone. Not a smart move at all for a PR person. She seems to be a stereotype-bot on Twitter.
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Ever since banner ads became blinky, I was praying for a solution to my problem.
Thank God I don’t see any advertisements the last few years at all
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At best a darkly ironic self-deprecation that could never fit into 140 characters
What’s that supposed to mean? It DID fit in 140 characters, it was a twit!
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I’m going to the bathroom now!
Ahhh, that was a good one!
(Harry Shearer stole this from me, though in all probability he doesn’t know he did)
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In a completely separate, but related issue… I notice that the New York Times article has been silently updated since I first looked at it. It now contains a screenshot of the twitter account, has added mention of “questions about whether Ms. Sacco’s account had been hacked by an unauthorized user”, and quite a bit of other content.
On the one hand, evidence of the facts is a good thing. It seems rather rude, however, to make such a point of what one person said before it was deleted without also noting where the reporting about it has been changed over time.
See, you’re doing it right!
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“We’re all 140 characters away from being vilified.”
Only if we all post ignorant, vile crap on Twitter. I’m immune to that, at least.
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It was probably a failed attempt to fit something into 140 characters that could never fit there. If you imagine the intent to make a hypothetically successful joke that is “2 parts irony, 1 part racial insensitivity and 7 parts carefully-chosen context”, her tweet was … “1 part racial insensitivity and a homeopathic memory of sarcasm.”
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