Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

I can't imagine a subject I couldn't care less about other people's opinions on than what I enjoy stuffing into my gaping maw

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

I really hope that it doesn't sound smug when I assert that it's possible to be a productive and well-integrated member of society, while not being a consumer of social media. I've never had a an account on Facebook or Twitter and I'm not even 100% sure what Instagram is.
The reason why, I guess, is that I don't care in the slightest what any of those fuckers think about anything. Try it!

Wow, this thread turned into a dramatic reading of David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person" really unexpectedly.

Each and every thing is bound up with countless contexts, whose existence we scarcely even suspect most of the time. As a general rule, however, we ascribe a limited set of contexts to a given thing, and an even tinier subset – one, at times two – of these contexts tends to trump all others in day to day life. In Western cultures, for instance, viewing the swastika as a mere religious symbol is a glaring dogwhistle more often than not. But what of the shallot? As with all ingredients, it possesses its own cultural connotations, which make it an object of inquiry for sociologists of food, but none of these connotations are prominent enough to thoroughly saturate its meaning, i.e. to tie it, more or less irreversibly, to a specific context ('swastika = Nazism').

When someone makes a blanket statement about shallots ('they're bad and you're a racist for liking them' or whatever), you are instinctively prompted to evaluate their claim. The argument may well be intriguing, but in this particular case it only seems to make 'sense' against the backdrop of a hyper-specific Twitter beef that 99.9% of humanity has never heard of (tbh I've already forgotten who its dramatis personae are and what the exact issue was in the first place). Is an obscure scandal enough to exhaust the meaning of 'shallot', let alone its taste? Why would you universalize this esoteric frame of reference in particular? Why value it over and above all other contexts? You may feel like the 'shallots are bad' crew deserves a fair hearing, but once that's done, why would you grant their opinion (which may not even be one per se, since much of it looks like trolling to me) more weight than all other possible opinions about shallots, which suddenly appear to be reduced to naught?

that shallot to take in

Draw near, and fear not.

Unperson otm :(

Hard to read tbh

it's not about shallots in general, it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to. again, all of this would be apparent if people would just read what people are saying

and again, this is just one example, I don't know why everyone is so fixated on this as if there aren't thousands more examples. maybe I should have chosen the lana del rey blog post instead

it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to

To reiterate: why give so much weight to this specific subcontext?

because I don't want to support racists?

someone you shouldn't be showing support to

Your example is crystal clear. The question everyone but you has is why you care so much what this specific group of anonymous Twitter randos thinks that you are willing to agonize over your personal food choices as though they can a) see you b) judge you and find you wanting and c) punish you in some way for your "wrong"ness.

To put it another way, why are you accepting others' framing of the situation? I am aware of the contretemps surrounding Alison Roman and Chrissy Teigen. I am unclear on how that contretemps makes Alison Roman "a racist" and therefore, transitively, those who cook her recipes "supporting racism."

a) they're not anonymous; in many cases, they have their real names and faces by their accounts. if anything, most of you are more "anonymous" than they are.
b) why the fuck does it matter whether they're anonymous or not? most likely, they're still people. as people, they deserve not to be dismissed.
c) generally if someone points out racism, a person's job is to shut the fuck up and take that to heart, not to go "no! I am the only arbiter of racism! you don't even have a blue check!"

katherine, i say this out of compassion, i think you need to watch this about 100 times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7z_ztMxBgk

Whatever. By your standards I am clearly a Bad Person as well (after all, I have the Wrong Opinion in the case of Roman v Teigen), so you probably should not listen to what I say, or engage with my questions.

One final question, though: do you apply this philosophy - "why the fuck does it matter whether they're anonymous or not? most likely, they're still people. as people, they deserve not to be dismissed." - across the board, or only to people who make you feel bad about yourself?

Cooking a recipe is not rascist

b) is false, you have not given any good grounds for relying on it

my new thesis is that the central problem of the internet is that it turns things that are Absolutely None of Your Fucking Business into things you think are your business

— Girl Fieri, Dirtbag Gourmand (@Schwindter) May 22, 2020

crut extremely otm, would increase to a 100x daily ritual until it sinks in

xps you are taking a general principle of charity toward the opinions of others, and overextending it into a principle of severe self-abnegation that puts your mental health at the mercy of every random occurrence of negligible relevance to the actual situation in which you act and in which your moral worth is assessible

yes, across the board, which results in the thing I had originally mentioned, that so frequently every choices becomes wrong and there is no space for a choice that is both morally correct (does not cause or increase harm or suffering) and safe (does not you get torn apart relentlessly, with no statute of limitations)

girl i am sorry but you need to stop worrying about this!! i say this with care!

xp --

b) is false, you have not given any good grounds for relying on it

― j., Friday, May 22, 2020 10:38 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

by this logic I should not be listening to you because you are just known as "j" and thus aren't a person and don't count. presumably you would disagree with that

you're not reading this right

it's not that the result is choices that can't be right

it's that the result is you feeling like no choice can be right

but you're wrong about the relevance of these imagined situations (you, positioning yourself as a reader of this stream of media) to you and your actual choices and their rightness

you honestly sound like you are turning a seminar-room bout of radical skepticism into an operating principle and then challenging other people to talk you out of your impossible belief

but other people are not trying to prove you wrong to prove you wrong, they're trying to dissuade you from your attachment to a mis-estimation of the importance of some of these things that is clearly causing you distress. you cannot debate your way out of this!

what other people are asking me to do is to disregard people who are pointing out instances of harm because "lol fuck the haters, they don't even count as human"

that is not true
katherine i wish you didn't care so much about what other people think but i am def not going to argue.w you about it.
it's just hard to watch someone struggling like this.

xp no they are not, you are adding in the implication that any disregard for any reason (including irrelevance, or your own personal well being) is therefore dehumanization.

and by doing so you are simultaneously doing two things

1) parodying the positions of the people you're in conversation with, to make them seem callously insensitive to your real concerns and the concerns of the people you are worried about potentially being harmed

2) giving yourself an ilicit reason to double down on your concern for those harms because 'other people' don't even take them as seriously as you, the truly concerned person who is willing to subject yourself to this perfectly moral self-scrutiny

what other people are asking me to do is to disregard people who are pointing out instances of harm because "lol fuck the haters, they don't even count as human"

a) what j. said about disregard not equaling dehumanization
b) again, you are automatically accepting that if someone is "pointing out instances of harm" they are automatically right and you are automatically wrong, which is exactly not the way to go through life as an adult

hey katherine i'm not trying to be dismissive of your very real feelings — I myself am a person who craves affirmation and wants to "follow the rules" and not make anybody mad at me (which is hard because I am a very flawed person and sometimes very annoying and not everybody likes me!). But some people just can't be pleased. I'd say people the people who are stirring up this shallot pasta controversy are being way way OTT and it's not worth it to try to adhere to the toxic boundaries they're setting.

it does sound like you have a frustrated ability to think for yourself

This insistent use of "should" and "wrong" suggests that you believe there is some kind of objective truth managed by "other people"

I suspect these people would have more than a few thoughts if you told them they were setting "toxic boundaries"

who gives a shit

Sounds like they always have more than a few thoughts

toxic people always have a lot of thoughts they think you have to hear

katherine you're constantly arguing against yourself (in the sense of what would be in your best interests, your welfare) on behalf of the people who have no concern at all for you ('these people' you're trying to satisfy or live righteously before)

I suspect these people would have more than a few thoughts if you told them they were setting "toxic boundaries"

And the circle spins round once again. The "other people" are always right; their concerns are always to be considered before your own; and on and on and on.

You seem to be hankering after absolutes where there are but hues. You are bound to hurt yourself in the process.

it's not that, it's that in almost every case, these are expressed as absolutes; rarely do you hear "this article is awful and the writer is the worst, but it's OK if you don't think so"

you're a skilled critic and writer, you can see right now the difference between how things are expressed, and how they're meant or how they're taken; so why assume that everything that looks like an absolute must be regarded as such?

because they are clearly intended to be regarded as such? when 1000 people all reply saying, to choose another day's new rule, "you're disgusting if you don't wash your chicken and I hope I never have to be around you," it seems like an enormous stretch to interpret that as "it's OK not to wash your chicken"

K do you think everyone here is a jerk for not responding to other people's opinions like you do? Do you think every "morally upright" person agonizes over this stuff like you do? Or is it possible that there's another way to be a caring, loving, respectful, considerate, "good" human being?

(example chosen because there is an equally adamant counter-rule of "why would you wash your chicken, you're unsanitarily spreading it all over the sink, a bad cook, and disgusting if you do")

yeah people do speak in absolutes (incl. here on ILX obviously) because they think strong-arming people into agreeing with them is the most effective method

xp -- I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would

because they are clearly intended to be regarded as such?

Except this isn't always true, is it?

xp that would put us back in the territory of people's intentions not being prima facie sufficient to back the moral force of what they say. you might be right about how to interpret words like that, but you should also consider the seriousness with which the words are being published to the world. people in public fora adopt personae and stances that are determined by the ambient conditions, or by the fact that they are precisely NOT the usual contexts for some communication (like concerned moral speech between people who can be accountable to one another), so not everything with the appearance of serious, well-intentioned speech ought to be received as such by all who encounter it.

Well, ILX does need some new blood

xp -- I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would

well those people are jerks!!! (sometimes)