hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

the world is full of bad people and they should feel bad about it

ppl feel so much shame it just becomes sort of a baseline, or to put it differently feeling shame is not enough to provoke more virtuous behavior

I haven't read the book, but her description of Ronson's take on the donglegate thing seems really misleading based on the extract that was published in the Guardian

and Ronson comes dangerously close to saying that she deserved what she got.

'comes dangerously close to saying' is such a weaselly construction

I wonder if any gotcha video will be coming out of the Ponderosa Stomp?

xposts
Buzzfeed blew up the Justine Sacco story, which Ronson's book covers. His publisher's also using it in the promo for the book. Of course they're pissed off with Ronson's take on it. Come on.

the real scandal here is that caity weaver hasn't had an article published since late february tbh

wtf is going on gawker caity is a treasure

i mean the process of twitter shaming may be a misnomer, a lot of the time the shamed seem to be getting exposed to points of view they were previously unfamiliar with which is good, if ppl just want to look at that and only see the shaming aspect i guess thats their prerogative but its pretty convenient for not relating to the substance of the conversations

was just thinking abt how its so lame when good writers get promoted to editor and stop writing what a horrible system, free caity and max! xp

The Buzzfeed piece is pretty weak. To take just one example, "the comparison is telling (and not only because it defines women’s social roles as primarily sexual and men’s as economic)". Yes, this perception is exactly what Ronson's female interviewee was talking about in the previous page that wasn't in the screenshot. To take another, she criticises the "virtual lynching" line from an interviewee as if Ronson endorses the choice of word and needed to butt in to prove that he doesn't, even though his style is show don't tell. And a third - she leaves out Lindsey Stone entirely because Stone's case doesn't fit her argument that the book is only about privileged people under fire from the left. A Huffington Post piece made similar points about Ronson's lack of interest in the sociopolitical dynamic without using as many sneaky distortions.

from reading a few reviews (if they are correct) and the table of contents, ronson goes to bat for jonah lehrer and mike daisey, but is skeptical of adria richards

yeah idk man

i'm interested in taking a look at the book myself, shame is def an 'interesting phenomenon'

bizarro very otm

yeah mike daisey's career has reeeeally suffered

mike daisey is truly shameless, prob some sort of sociopath

the weirdest shit was listening to him explain the concept of _artistic truth_ repeatedly instead of just saying that his monologue was not exactly what he saw

like dude you can say you're expressing artistic truth and still admit your act isn't 100% your own experiences. it's not like the vagina monologues is all first-person truth, either.

my artistic truth is that the factory guards were meancing me with guns even tho almost no one in china has guns and the guards werent menacing me why dont u see

what mike daisey did was really not okay. i mean jonah lehrer obv is a waste of ink so i'm glad he's wasting less but making up boomer-icon quotes to burnish your corporate self-help books is more inexplicable-lols than a terrible violation imo. the daisey stuff was pornography and imagining him laboring over his details while the glow of righteousness suffused his soul is nauseating. xps yeah.

remember the assembly-line laborer brushing his ruined claw-hand over the flickering surface of the ipad he'd never seen before and saying "it's a kind of magic"

lmao

he was looking for queen uploads on youtube

lol I forgot the gun part, that was amazing

he's still aggrieved about it too. seems like a narcissist. tweet from last week:

‏@mdaisey
It's too bad TAL didn't go the Rolling Stone route and have an outsider tell the story--I can tell you it would have landed differently.

Speaking of RS, he's really the version of the Rolling Stone reporter who was looking for the perfect campus rape story and then ended up screwing up all kinds of things

and again I haven't read the new one yet - but Ronson's M.O. is almost always to get close to despicable & possibly sociopathic people and tell the story through their eyes. I don't know that it necessarily constitutes a defence of their actions when he does that. I guess alarm bells don't go off when I see he spoke to Daisey and Lehrer after reading his stories on David Icke, Alex Jones, David Shayler, etc.

tbh I doubt many people cared in the North American market because those are either British or fringe figures

like no one really cares about Alex Jones other than conspiracy theorists and people who enjoy their antics, but a bunch of NPR-listening ppl and the general news-reading public know about Daisey and Lehrer

his earlier books about cranks and paranoids are called "kooks" and "them".

this book is called "you have been publicly shamed" not "you are a fucking liar"

yeah this is def a departure for him

i mean he was never in his past books all "lizard ppl ruling the world is my personal greatest fear"

lord knows it's mine

I don't think so - his last book was about psychopaths. His whole m.o. is always to humanize unlikeable people without excusing what they've done. Dedicating a book to people who have been held up to global derision seems to fit right in - and it would be a less-interesting book if he cherry-picked a bunch of comepletely sympathetic people. I'll have to read the book to see if he pulls it off. He doesn't always, but he's good at what he does.

its really not what hes doing here tho

like he is overtly personally identifying with the publicly shamed and saying public shaming is bad

"you are a kook"

How do you know - you say you've made up your mind and you don't want to read the book?

and that he should be publicly shamed for a line that was edited out of the book

already read multiple articles/excerpts/interviews/tweets hes written on the topic feel like i have a pretty good handle on it

taking the approach from his past books wld maybe be more provocative and interesting except that the publicly shamed arent outcasts everyone already has great sympathy for them

the shamers are actually the outcasts

right, and we've always been at war with eastasia

k

lol

Does shaming actually have salutary political effects? I remember reading psychology studies that separated shame from guilt, and noted that the former -- because it deals with how people feel about themselves as people rather than their actions -- almost always leads to antisocial outcomes. Guilt is more useful, and some level of it is necessary for moral growth.

Maybe we don't care about Lerher's growth as a human, but I see no reason to totally discount the kid in the video and hope that he feels "called out" before his peers. This is more likely to produce defensiveness than guilt. It would have been better if j0rdan tracked down the kid and sent him a private message about his concerns.

Shaming might affect behaviors -- make people more cautious -- but I think those benefits could come at the expense of more serious damage to the shamed and those afraid of being shamed.

Felt this way with Lena Dunham too, and almost every case like this that comes up.

funny how we're having a conversation about gawker publicly shaming people and nobody has brought up adrien chen's doxxing of violentacrez yet

Violentacrez was committing criminal breaches of privacy. It feels different.

Felt this way with Lena Dunham too, and almost every case like this that comes up.

― Treeship, Wednesday, April 15, 2015 1:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i otoh told lena nobody had ever made me feel this way before

i'm getting kinda tired of seeing the word "shame" over and over as the all-encompassing word for what happens when someone gets caught out there with a bad tweet or unflattering picture or whatever. there's probably no single word that fits better as an all-purpose shorthand for book titles and stuff, but to me it conjures this Scarlet Letter moral judgment vibe that doesn't really apply to a lot of these situations, which are often more about point-and-laugh derision or just fed-up anger at people still saying evil racist shit or whatever. SOMETIMES these kinds of internet backlashes involve fat-shaming or slut-shaming or something like that, but i dunno if you'd call it dumb-shaming or inarticulate-shaming when someone fires off a shitty offensive tweet or whatever.

Agree, suggest new word 'treesh', as in that dude was publicly treeshed

if only people doing the shaming (for all these definitions of shaming) would be more chill

brb gonna reach out privately and express serious concerns about offensive #content i see on the web

inarticulate shaming is kinda fucked up tho