Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

I have a question: Are people on Twitter expressing these opinions to you directly and saying that YOU specifically are a bad person? Or are you seeing a bunch of Twitter replies and interpreting them as a party line that you now must adhere to, lest someone possibly think of you as a bad person?

If it's the former, then I get feeling defensive and confused when things like that happen (even if I rationally know that I shouldn't take it so personally, and that I shouldn't care so much about what others think). If it's the latter, then it feels like you're going out of your way to feel guilty and bad about yourself.

If some people say washing chicken is bad and some say it's good, how do you determine who is correct? Just add up the numbers on each side, majority wins? And more importantly, how does your own, uninfluenced view on the subject factor in?

there's this enlightenment idea of judgement

it's hard

and necessarily compromised

that's why kant's motto is in latin

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

I think I'll live.

am i right in understanding katherine's argument that you should take any anonymous person on the internet seriously no matter what opinion they express if they express it with a tone of moral absolutism? what about all the obvious counterarguments like people who make obviously immoral arguments with a tone of moral absolutism? you wouldn't treat a neo-nazi seriously just because they seem to truly believe their holocaust denialism, or feel bad about believing the holocaust was a real event just because they told you you're a naive idiot asshole jewdiazed collaborator for doing so. ok obviously that's an easy case but once the principle is set that just bc someone says something sincerely online doesn't mean you need to accept it (or even treat it seriously) you can move onto edge cases like should you feel bad for liking shallots when some idiot online said liking shallots is racist?

I addressed this upthread but they generally are not neo-nazis and are on the right side of history

I have a question: Are people on Twitter expressing these opinions to you directly and saying that YOU specifically are a bad person? Or are you seeing a bunch of Twitter replies and interpreting them as a party line that you now must adhere to, lest someone possibly think of you as a bad person?

the former has happened to me, not to as great a degree as some people I can think of, and not always on twitter. but mostly it's the latter. which makes sense, it has even been stated as such: "every day on twitter there is a main character and your job is to never be that person"

We are all the main characters in our own personal dramas

"I addressed this upthread but they generally are not neo-nazis and are on the right side of history"

Yeah so you've found moral guides (in the form of a nebulous grp of ppl who have "enlightened" humanistic views) and once you had that you completely offshored/contracted out your own ability to engage in moral judgments to them.

for the last fucking time they aren't "nebulous," they have names and faces, which makes them less anonymous than a person who goes by "Granny Dainger"

i just want to echo what ll is saying, it's really hard to see you struggling like this. i get where you're coming from on this. i have my own beliefs but i don't know that expressing my beliefs would help here. i hope things get better for you soon. :(

It's not unreasonable to assume the people posting here are more familiar with each other than with the people on your Twitter feed that we know next to nothing about.

K it's nebulous because it's not an actual organized grp, not because they're not anonymous. The members come and go, have differences of opinion among one another, etc

Not because they're anonymous

But my point still stands of you remove the word nebulous there

rarely do you hear "this article is awful and the writer is the worst, but it's OK if you don't think so"

Because the “but it’s OK if you don’t think so” is implied in nearly all situations by virtue of being an adult who can think for themselves

It would be like requiring “imo” appended to everything before having your own opinion

have you ever noticed how ppl who grew up in families where ppl didn't listen to each other often talk louder

Because the “but it’s OK if you don’t think so” is implied in nearly all situations by virtue of being an adult who can think for themselves

― some vast airy pantaloon is required (PBKR), Friday, May 22, 2020 11:55 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not when saying something is right or wrong

Yes, even then.

like, for instance, very few participants in this conversation seem to be implying that. otherwise you'd imply "yes, even then (but it's OK if you don't think so)"

You and you alone get to decide, no matter how hard it is. That is life.

I hope you find a way to live more comfortably with this aspect of life.

No such thing as right and wrong fortunately

starting to get some loud & clear answers to the question posed by this thread title

Um, cautious lol at that.

And sending positive thoughts, etc.

I hope you find a way to live more comfortably with this aspect of life.

don't be such patronising wee fucks

lol

Can't help but notice the contrast of dismissing everyone's opinion on this (ppl who want you to feel better about yourself) vs accepting whole hog the opinions of ppl that has the consequence of making you feel bad about yourself

"right"

"wrong"

ne'er the twain

FTR, plenty of moral philosophers have published pseudonymously, if we're gonna grant arguments more or less weight based on whether the person making them attaches their "real name" to them...

this seems like a sort of window into the reactionary personality where i can imagine if you entrusted yr moral decision making 100% to the group then left-wing pieties in particular are extremely hard to meet in total and are extremely demanding and so there are tons of opportunities to feel bad. if you are more comfortable making yr own moral decisions (or have a moral tree outside contemporary Western social media liberalism) or good at ignoring inconsistencies btwn yr personal ideas/behaviors + the canonical social norms, then you can be a lib and still enjoy shallots. but if you can't avoid these inconsistencies and have given over moral decision making to the collective you're practically forced to either hate yourself or realign with reactionary politics just to escape the gravitational force of all the judgement

As the great Danish philosopher Victor Eremita once put it, 'I do not create myself – I choose myself. Therefore, whereas nature is created from nothing, whereas I myself as immediate personality am created from nothing, I as free spirit am born out of the principle of contradiction and am born through choosing myself.'

it has even been stated as such: "every day on twitter there is a main character and your job is to never be that person"

Katherine the meaning behind this is that your ‘job’ is to not go out of your way to post bizarre and inflammatory shit on twitter that gets thousands of people making fun of you, e.g. that Christian magazine guy who started ranting last week about how masks are for cowards. It does not mean that your job is to scrupulously follow every twitter dust-up for hints at what the current moral calculus of social media is. You just don’t need to.

For the record my name is Oliver and I’m on social media under my own name. And looking at this thread I see a pretty wide range of political viewpoints as ILX goes, neolib shill centrists all the way to tankie purist Trump-enablers, and they’re all in agreement that these people you speak of on twitter, however righteous their politics might be, do not deserve the space in your head that you’re giving them. And you might give an equal amount of space to the people here that you choose to converse with and share your feelings with.

Katherine the meaning behind this is that your ‘job’ is to not go out of your way to post bizarre and inflammatory shit on twitter that gets thousands of people making fun of you

sure, but my entire point is that it is often opaque as to what is "bizarre and inflammatory," c.f. people having thousands of people making fun of them for not liking onions or wearing the wrong shade of lipstick or whatnot

(the latter in reference to the time that one far-right person handcuffed herself to the twitter building, but the thing that people mocked her for was wearing a shade of lipstick that I have frequently been seen in public wearing)

Do you think it's fine to mock people for wearing that shade of lipstick in public?

sometimes even people who are on the right side of history in some moral sense can also be toxic in their discourse and how they treat other people. nobody is perfect, and it's unreasonable to expect people to always say/think the "right" things, and also unreasonable to live by the belief that anyone — even people you often agree with — is the absolute arbiter of what is right and wrong. as much as people may try to convince you that not toeing the line makes you a complete and utter failure

where's Aimless when you need him

"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"

Would those ppl, if they knew the negative effect they are having on you, be happy with that? Think yes, this is the effect I desired to have on my Twitter followers? Would it cause them to self reflect and try to tone things down a lil?

he already said all this yesterday iirc :(
seriously, re the thread question -- the fear of being attacked is not limited to twitter or social media. you have to either separate yourself from the inflammatory material (the material that is making you inflamed enough, for example, to be worried about your shade of lipstick) or find a way to live with it/ignore it. it's not going to stop inflaming you though and you're not going to successfully conquer it with logic.

no reason to think there's an internally consistent and coherent moral system that isn't incredibly vague or monstrous

When I was 16, a stranger online tore me apart from the ground up. Told me I was an "amoral bottom-feeder" and laid out why I was a hateful, awful person. It was devastating.

It hurt, yes. I had never been talked to like that, online or off. The words made me miserable for years and years. But nowadays, I don't think about it anymore.

Because I finally found out where he lived two years ago and beat the shit out of him.

I hope you recited the Navy Seal copypasta to him before pwning his ass in person.

I mostly remember people mocking the person who handcuffed herself to twitter hq for being a moron, but I’m sure people made fun of whatever they could find. But those people weren’t mocking her lipstick out of a moral distaste for her lipstick and a desire to banish it from public use, they were mocking someone who had made a decision to act incredibly foolish in public. People like to zero in on slightly unusual details in viral moments because it gives them something to add to the content mill. Without the wider context the lipstick is just lipstick. Without the celeb feud context the pasta is a decent-looking recipe. The vast majority of people will not be aware of the context, and the vast majority of the people who are aware will have forgotten about it a month later. No one is scanning pictures for Laura Loomer’s lipstick shade.

Nobody thinks about her at all

hearing about the Alison Roman controversy irl a week ago or whatever and then hearing, also irl, about dumb shit Lana del Rey said yesterday am so glad that I no longer have twitter and don't have to think about these things for a second. My only take on either situation is that Alison Roman is maybe a little bit overrated - her chickpea stew is just ok for instance, why so popular - and I don't like Lana Del Rey's music. There is no need for me to engage in these controversies whatsoever, and doing so in any form does not give value, pleasure or meaning to my life in any way

I think I'm going to deactivate my Facebook again and delete Insta from my phone. sick of getting adverts for things my phone has heard me talk about, very creepy and I don't want it.