Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

the lady of shallot

the other counterargument is "they don't actually mean that!" but if they don't mean something, then why say it? if they meant something else, they would have said something else.

Dan S lol

is everybody high in here?

no but my mask briefly cut off oxygen briefly

-briefly

no, this is the kind of thing I think about virtually every hour of every day

Whether it's ok to dislike onions?

again, this is just one example of something that there are thousands of accumulated examples of, this is just one that happened to materialize today

substitute "being a fan of lana del rey" if you want

I think the confusion is that no one seems to know why you're giving hundreds of strangers with an opinion (out of like 7.5 billion) any weight at all?

There are tens or hundreds of thousands of Flat Earthers and 40% of the US thinks abortion is a mortal sin but lol fuck both those groups IMO.

I just don’t know why replies on twitter should gain any moral weight, especially regarding something that just seems on its face to not have much substance. There are millions of people whose politics align with mine on issues of substance - civil rights, war, economic and social justice, etc. Some small minority of those people adapt those views to make moral judgments based on celebrity Twitter drama, but plenty of others ignore it completely, and I don’t think they’re turning their backs on a moral obligation by doing so. Occasionally I’ll dig into some twitter controversy out of curiosity but I rarely feel like I’ve improved myself in any way, I usually just feel gross and vaguely depressed.

because, if you were to ask any one of those strangers, they would surely say that others should give that opinion moral weight, and I do not believe in writing people off like that because "strangers"

No, they wouldn't! Have you never talked shit about... pineapple pizza? Or rolled your eyes at Twilight fans?

Should you go through life with a deep worry about the lizard people who control the one world government because David Icke and Alex Jones have large followings?

xp you should write them off because it doesn't matter what they think about whether you like shallots, that's totally your own personal private affair

a) no, why would I do that, it's just food and it's just a book

b) no, because that would also require becoming -- or at least endorsing, which pretty much is becoming -- a raging anti-semite, crypto-fascist, etc.

But twitter by its nature elevates the angriest and loudest voices, right?

angry and loud does not necessarily equal wrong, oftentimes people are angry and loud because they have something worth being angry or loud about

Shallots?

Yes, and it's worth paying attention to those voices when they're discussing internment camps and police brutality and various underreported evils in the world. But when the subject is shallots or celebrity chefs I think it's fair to assume that they might just like yelling on the internet and getting attention.

is there like a moral dimension to this? are shallots a food of the oppressor????

Just a food and just a book is why people are trash talking on Twitter. No one actually thinks you're a baby for not eating onions or sardines or whatever, there is no Shallot Army building to defend anyone's honor.
The only people drawing actual honest to God moral lines in the sand based on fandoms and tastebuds are insane.

And yeah - you use your judgement to decide that just because a mass of people believes something, that doesn't mean you need to give it any moral weight or let it intrude on your thoughts at all.

Shallots are bougie onions.

No one actually thinks you're a baby for not eating onions or sardines or whatever

but then why are they saying this

Like, sure, there is too much awfulness in the world for anyone to be completely fair-minded about what they devote their energy to. But if someone is lecturing people for days about Alison Roman in May 2020 I don't think you have any reason to view them as a voice of moral authority.

xp because they're idiots! or assholes! who cares why they are saying something that you don't have to listen to

"someone dissed me yesterday, what I'posed to do? Go cry?"

-Gucci Mane

Because they’re talking shit (or they’re assholes/idiots). That’s not even a Twitter thing, trash talking seems to be universally human.

"yet are deemed to be morally wrong with no wiggle room, and to always have been morally wrong, and morally wrong enough that anyone who likes/dislikes/does/doesn't do the proper thing is fair game to mock en masses".

Who fucking cares! Girl, you've got to stop giving so much of a fuck. You seem to think that there's no happy medium between perpetually being hyper sensitive about what every single person on the planet thinks of oneself and being a sociopath.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Geneshalit.JPG/220px-Geneshalit.JPG

Mean-spirited statements tend to attract attention and some people like to bask in it at any cost (see: the internet). It's safe to say they don't deserve our time.

No child who I sniped in Call of Duty ever fucked my mom but many claimed to.

one kid told me to leave his team cos I sucked, and I told him I was gonna fuck his mom

I might have, i don't remember

but then why are they saying this

I wish I understood your vulnerability to each and every thing that is said within range of your notice, and your apparent lack of filters that might allow you to ignore any part of it, but I do not. However, in light of that apparent vulnerability, I can say that the crashing hubbub of social media is definitely a place that will bruise your sensibilities constantly and relentlessly, and given how little sense you seem to make out of that input, I would expect you will never find any peace in your engagement with social media.

You alone can decide if this observation has any validity. All I can do is read what you write, compare that to whatever I think I know about people and the internet, and draw my imperfect and tentative conclusions to share with you. Good luck.

I thought Alison Roman was a dick to Chrissy Teigen, but I also just put some Great Northern beans in an online shopping cart so I could make a soup recipe of hers that a friend recommended. Possibly the Roman-Teigen dust-up would make me reluctant to tweet favorably about the recipe (if I were the kind of person who tweeted about cooking), because I wouldn't want to invite any negative reactions while tempers are still flared. But I don't have any compunction about making it, because the controversy doesn't really seem important enough to dictate how I go about my life at home, much less how I feel about myself.

no, this is the kind of thing I think about virtually every hour of every day

I say this out of love and concern: this isn't healthy. You should seek counseling on this.

so if someone says you're being racist, you find it an acceptable answer to say "lol you don't matter"?

well not when i'm being racist, but i thought we were talking about the shallot people

that is the connotation of it, yes

If someone says I'm racist because I cooked a dish with shallots in it written by a woman who (dumbly) criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I am going to ignore that person forever.

which side is the racist side again? the ones who like the shallots or the ones who don't?

If I cooked that dish with shallots in it as a show of solidarity with a suspended writer who dumbly criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I'm also a dumbo.

I hadn’t been reading this thread but now I see that something has happened to it

so it's not about the shallots at all? the shallots are just a prop in a drama?

But I think a lot of the confusion is whether we're talking about shallots or Alison Roman - the tweet you linked earlier was about the ingredients themselves and didn't appear to have any moral component, the Alison Roman thing is about two teams of people arguing about whether one team is woke enough.

oh i get it we're talking about the olympics

the logical thread is:

- I only learned as of earlier this evening the act of making a certain shallot pasta recipe makes you a bad person because it means supporting someone bad, but also it is wrong to say that it is wrong to make the pasta recipe. both sides are adamant in this, with no wiggle room. the reason this is because I find a lot of my recipes by googling ingredients and thus literally have no idea who they are associated with, so I don't know what other recipes are and aren't acceptable. (one data point :an article around this implied that everything bon appetit puts out is suspect, which I feel shitty about, since I made something they published tonight.)

- in this particular case I dodged a bullet because I dislike shallots, and thus there was no risk of my making the pasta even if I was team hell yeah do all the racism

- however, it is hard to call that "dodging a bullet" when disliking shallots, itself, is another act that has been previously construed -- many times, usually via mocking someone who doesn't like them -- as something that makes you a bad person. in other words, I only passed the test by failing another.

- these are just examples, everyone is fixating on these examples but on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand; and then on another day entirely I could give you the discourse agreeing that doing the opposite makes you a bad person. (baking bread in a pandemic is a good example -- first it was wrong to do it because it wastes yeast others need, and then someone on medium published an article saying essentially that, and she was mocked relentlessly for suggesting it was wrong to waste yeast others need)

sorry, editing mistake, the first point should be "the reason I feel stuck is because I find..."

it's not logical at all!

there is no reason to listen to these voices!