The internet has some sort of magical power to make people stop acting like people. Hell even in my idiot years on the internet, I never even thought of the things some people spout off on the most inane shit.
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Itâs not that it takes all kinds, itâs just that we have all kinds.
Natural Selection Is Too Slow
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Generally speaking the Conservative mind dislikes complexity and novelty, often expressing a yearning for the âgood old daysâ when âthings were simplerâ (for them).
Hence the old saw that ânot all Conservatives are stupid, but a majority of stupid people lean conservative.â
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So that bigots would need to insert multiple lines of word salad in order to get their hate through?
âConservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.â --Madan
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Can anyone hit me up with a link to one of these âthreatsâ? I have loaded all the responses to that tweet (took a lot of scrolling) and CRTL+Fâd words like ârapeâ âclosetâ and âbrush,â but I canât find a single remark from any user promising to do anything horrible to the person who made the joke.
Were they deleted or something?
ha! clever! your example of a negative comment that isnât directly disparaging is definitely the sort that would still pass through.
that said, i could imagine the group, bots, plugin, whatever could share information, leading to a sort of notoriety/helpfulness score for particular posters.
all in all, the spam filters for my email does pretty well. even if i have to do quick scan throughs now and then for false positives.
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It might be fun to create a swarm of twitter bots that relentlessly posts progressive concepts and ideas, and engages with the crazies post for post. Let them drown in their own frothy rage while the rest of us carry on with our lives.
That said, I stopped reading Twitter years ago because itâs just too damn much anyway.
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Wow. Way to prove her point, guys.
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They probably were deleted - just extending the metaphor to creepy and threatening levels (you have to lock guns in closets when youâre done with them, for example). Of course some commenters wanted to point out that she just hadnât gotten the joke.
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An eye-opening explanation I read here on this forum a few months ago: the reason things were âsimplerâ then is because they were experiencing the world as a child.
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Oh hell anyone who has read any real history would be saying the same thing I say. Fuck âthe good old daysâ they can die in fire because they fucking sucked majorly and doubly so if you were not a white male.
It may suck now but it doesnât suck anywhere as much as it used to and we are fighting and stumbling along to the way to better in the future.
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Also, in the âgood old daysâ, many problems could simply be swept under the rug. Womenâs issues, racial issues, industrial pollution, poverty, your name it, society could pretend it didnât exist.
One popular complaint from conservatives is about how many more unwed mothers there are now:
As a programmer and IT guy I take an interest in unintended consequences. Give someone a tool, device or new law, and they use it for something other than what it was intended. For example the Duplessis Orphans in Quebec in the 1950s.
Quebec at the time was absolutely dominated by the Catholic Church. Maurice Duplessis, the premier of Quebec, was a strict Catholic. The church ran orphanages, and Duplessis signed an order changing orphanages into hospitals in order to provide them with federal subsidies. The point being that there were subsidies from the federal government for building hospitals, but not orphanages. The government paid $1.25 a day for orphans, but $2.75 a day for psychiatric patients.
And so seven religious orders declared 22,000 orphaned children to be mentally ill. Schooling stopped. Orphans became inmates in a mental institution where they were sexually, physically, and mentally abused by lay monitors and nuns.
Even setting aside the Church being more vile than their usual pedophile exchange program: Where did they get 22,000 orphans, in just Quebec?
Morality at the time meant that when a woman or teenage girl got pregnant, all anyone knew was that she âwent to stay with relatives in the countryâ and returned a few months later. And another baby was abandoned on the church doorstep. This happened A LOT.
Now much of the stigma is gone. Quebecâs Quiet Revolution happened, where health and education in Quebec was taken away from the Church. It became acceptable for single mothers to keep their babies.
And so you get conservatives deploring all the single mothers, a problem you didnât see a few decades ago. Because taking responsibility for their children is somehow immoral compared to sweeping them under the rug.
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I was looking at yelp reviews one time - I donât anymore - for a Sushi place. One of them started off âI donât like fish, butâŚâ Then they bitched about whatever and gave the place 2 stars. Idiot.
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Queue the denialists saying that women just canât take a harmless insult at face value.
OMG. This is how I personally feel about the world 100% of the time. Eerily, I remember raising this issue with @Mindysan33 and IIRC we reached the conclusion that the world isnât necessarily different from when we were younger, but that weâre old enough to see how complicated it all is.
The difference of course being that we donât lash out at others in shock and anger.
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Inanimate objects donât have rights, though sometimes legal fictions exercise rights on behalf of the people they represent. For example, a newspaper owned by a corporation is protected by the first amendment, not because we want to âgive rights to corporationsâ but to protect the rights of those who use the legal fiction of a corporation to facilitate communication. In any event objects do not have rights. If you want to hear a comic who is confused about rights, listen to the late George Carlin. He was a funny guy who was utterly confused about rights. Hopefully noone will rape or kill any mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, sisters, or brothers or threaten to do so. Everybody is somebodyâs family.
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It also has to do with we now see all the bad behavior.
When I was called a fag in the hall, I heard it, the person who said heard it. That was maybe it, maybe a few people standing around. That was it. We moved on. It MAY have been gossiped a bit. There was no hard evidence though. If the bully was with others, those people right around him might dogpile and call me names too. But the next day, some other person not involved wouldnât just randomly come up and start back in on me.
Now if someone says something like that, it sticks around awhile. It encourages others who see it to dogpile onto them. If it sticks around a few days, you get a large audience. Eventually it might get deleted, but even then someone could save the screen cap, repost it somewhere, what ever.
I donât think people are any different. If anything I think we as a whole are better. But there have always been assholes, bullies, bitches, and people who will say shit just to piss people off. Instead of a small audience in an immediate circle, they have the whole internet as a potential audience.
ETA - this also can be seen with how SCARED we are to let kid out of our sight. Right now it is the safest time to be a kid in the US than any time in the entire history of man. And yet we canât let kids ride their bikes to school or roam freely until supper time. The freedom I enjoyed one generation ago is now a legend. The shit MY dad did (take a small boat 15 miles out into the open ocean at ~13) is unheard of. Because before a kid dying made a local, maybe state paper. Now its on 6 different news channels, a meme, 100342 click bait sights, a youtube video, liveleak video, and later a First 48 Hours Documentary.
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They should start with themselves then IMHO
Well they are losing power in the real world, so they need to do their knuckle dragging mouth breathing someplace!
donât use your facts to counter my views!
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âŚsome people who disagreed with her thought the appropriate response was threatening to rape her.
At gunpoint, no doubt.
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There are many places on the Internet - Reddit for example - where nobody is surprised by this kind of behavior. âSomebody on Reddit said the most disgusting thing.â âOh, well, thatâs Reddit for you.â And we all move on. What I canât figure out is why people constantly think Twitter is not one of these places. For some reason there persists this expectation that Twitter is the kind of civil place where people never say things that are racist, violent, rapey, etc. Wake up, Twitter is awful.
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