Some Buzzfeed editor posts that this is the worst tweet of 2013, and then its around the world in a heartbeat as international news, and she’s condemned, and hated, and death threats are made, her personal details are published, etc…etc… because she tweeted something. Not publicly. To her followers.
But hey… doesn’t matter right? Uninteresting details of an otherwise juicy narrative… racist privileged white girl makes aids joke. Gets fired and publicly humiliated in the international press. Thats infotainment.
I won’t ruin your sanctimonious human sacrifice. Carry right the fuck on. Be a sheep. Forget this sword cuts both ways, and go on missing the point.
I’m not condoning death threats and the like, but nobody here is - that’s never to be condoned in my opinion, for any reason.
This is about her getting fired and that there are consequences when posting something publically when you work in public relations.
Just because we enjoy the schadenfreude doesn’t mean that any action against her is automatically appropriate.
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Period. If it’s on line, don’t count on it staying private. If redistribution could have unpleasant effects for your reputation or career or friendships, think before putting it on line in the first place. If you aren’t in condition to think twice – tired, drunk, ill, whatever – think twice before posting at all. [Minor wording change to make the point clearer.]
I’m sorry for her that she didn’t guard herself better.
But when you load a gun, point it at your foot, and pull the trigger… well, some folks are going to laugh at you, and some are going to cite “evolution takes no prisoners”, and a few are going to ask “what the blippity did you THINK you were doing”… and unless you have an exceptionally good explanation, you’re unlikely to get much sympathy.
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hah, yeah, that’s cute. pointing out that homo sapiens originated in africa in response to the weird wording of your “derivation” question makes me a racist.
[Edit by moderator to remove Godwin]
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When I heard about this, I SWEAR that I heard/read that someone said this before a few years ago. Anyone remember something similar, or is it just weird deja vu glitch in the Matrix?
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Have you been drinking too much coffee? wtf?
The casual racism of the tweet this article focuses on. Get a grip!
My tangential point, which was amusingly evaded and dissolved into facetious mist, was querying the demographic of readers of the page - I was interested to know if any readers were of African ethnicity. Apparently none.
sorry, the way you phrased the comment seemed like you were accusing me of casual racism that, were you african, you would be pissed at. yeah, i was a little surprised, but re-read your comment. “pretty tight demographic” (snark re: my “everyone” comment), “tangential to the topic at hand” (pointing out my comment was off-topic, which of course it was)
and with no breaks, the final sentence. hopefully you can see why i was confused, it came off as 3 comments about my response.
and no, not too much coffee, just too used to conversations where people jump to godwin whenever they disagree with someone. (that was snark, too, btw…)
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Well, she is a “pretty white girl”, so clearly, she should get off scott-free here. I mean, how can she have possibly known what she said was “a dumb comment”… /snark
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I got the godwin snark! My mistake for being unclear. Fingers faster than brain.
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Unless your Twitter account is appropriately locked down, everything you tweet is public. To the best of my knowledge, she tweeted this publicly - based on the reports of everybody being freely able to see it in her account until she deleted the tweet (and then, the account). We should be very clear about that - it’s not like she made a private joke, and then somebody forwarded that on and it leaked out to the internet.
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I thought this topic died, but no. This is oddly reminiscent of Patton Oswald’s incredibly sarcastic tweets he put out a couple months ago, without the intentional joke. Or perhaps it’s more indicative of our strange social network habits. When a school shooting happens, I avoid absolutely all news besides traffic and weather. No one will be talking about anything else- everyone is glued to their television/computers/phones for the latest gory detail. But that seems to happen with anything bad now, even if it’s several hundred orders of magnitude less serious, like an offensive tweet by an idiot. It’s interesting to watch as people demolish her for her words and scrutinize every action while enjoying the self-satisfaction from not putting their foot in their mouth in such a way. In a time where your prospective employers look your name up, there is no way she’ll ever erase this, so who would hire her now? Someone said her family has money, and for her sake that better be true.
Frankly, politicians say far more outrageous and stupid things, and they all still have jobs. And they’re their own PR. Where’s the outrage there? Actually, I remember what it reminded me most of. Kony. A guy who was purported to have recruited ten times less child soldiers than his main opposition and hadn’t actually been seen in over ten years. A guy that already had actions taken against him by US forces in one of those little excursions we love to do. Everyone was finally interested in global turmoil and countries other than their own, and then like a match in a tornado, it was gone.
I have always contended we all originated from Australia/Indo plains, NOT AFRICA.
If you’ve got any serious credible evidence for that contention, there are lots of paleontologists who’d like to see it.
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that’s entirely possible. i’m certainly not an expert. i’ve read that a great deal of genetics can be traced to eastern africa, and i’ve read that a great deal of genetics can be traced farther east. chances are good we’ll never know for sure, because of the propensity for modern humans to get around… in both senses of the word.
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Purely subjective reasoning. I guess geologically, Australia has more eroded mountains then pinnical as Africa. If I can all that a clue.
you might be conflating geological time with the human record, which is a bit of a stretch. we haven’t been around that long… monkeys haven’t been around that long…
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I try to be a reasonable monkey. Although, Yes, I do conflagulate the eon’s of what is/might be human intervention.
Wow, this topic is way off topic.
Cue Altered States.
Of course, there is the “poly-genesis” theories, too - that modern human beings evolved in multiple places.
Also, you seem adamant about not being derived from Africa as a species… is there a problem with that somehow? I do think that is the generally most accepted theory at this point, no?
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Exactly what I was thinking. This person, while she said something awful (I’m assuming she meant it to be funny/ironic/whatever) she’s now been stalked by a lot of people and lost her job after the flight. All over an insensitive comment on Twitter on her personal account.
I hope that everyone who helped stalk this woman is also watched with the same level of scrutiny. Because unlike Justine Sacco, we’re all perfect, right?
“This is my father’s country, and I was born here. I cherish my ties to South Africa and my frequent visits, but I am in anguish knowing that my remarks have caused pain to so many people here; my family, friends and fellow South Africans. I am very sorry for the pain I caused.”
To play devil’s advocate, I’m guessing that the tweet was meant for her acquaintances, a play on rampant racism. Or maybe she’s racist. I don’t know, and neither do any of the other people who participated in the witch hunt. I’m so fucking sick of these Internet witch hunts. Anyone remember the poor sap a while back whose company was attacked on the Internet because some Random Internet Person claimed the HR person was a white supremacist? And it ended up not being true in the least? Gotta love the mob mentality.
I also “love” the doublespeak from her former employer:
“There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally. We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core.”
Well, except that she’s been fired by the people who made that comment, and that she’ll likely have to change careers after this.
TL;DR Stop and think, assholes…
I get it, and I get that it’s a horrible thing to say…on the other hand, it’s a personal Twitter account. It’s public, yeah, but I cannot stand this notion that certain jobs just mean that you have no life outside of work and no expectation of a life outside of that.
I mean…bloody hell, I worked at a small-town newspaper with a circulation of less than 2000 people and had to sit through meetings where we discussed what we could and could not say on social media, on our personal accounts. It wasn’t constrained to what we said about the company, either.
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