Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

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.

I wholly disagree with Lana del Ray singing "my pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola" but I will die defending her right to sing it.

I might be missing something here but what exactly is the hideous moral outrage of running recipes and childcare articles instead of sports

I swear to god every fucking thing is wrong anymore

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Monday, May 11, 2020 8:32 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is from the quid-ag NYT thread last week, when we were making fun of their new "At Home" section, and I wondered at the time...1) did anyone in here call this a hideous nmoral outrage? and also 2) what does Katherine mean by "wrong"?

It's okay to disagree with things or really not just get them w/o defaulting to a moral binary

the whole thing out there of “you’ve been preparing this food wrong”... some people like that stuff I react poorly to the framing

If you are passionate enough about any topic online and post a lot, you'll be called a monster by somebody daily

anyway, I am cut out neither for social media or real life

Same tbh.

anyway, katherine - I'm sorry if it feels like everyone is piling on here, and if it makes you feel like you are the Bad Person on ILX - you aren't. I think pretty much everyone in this thread is posting out of genuine concern that you are letting the most ephemeral controversies cause you anguish. And if there's a sense of frustration, it's because you seem to give far more weight to these unnamed people on Twitter who are able to get outraged over pasta recipes than you do to the people itt writing paragraphs telling you that these controversies don't have any bearing on your moral standing and you're allowed to ignore them. It seems as though you're operating under the assumption of "whatever feels bad is true," which I think a fair amount of people here are familiar with in their own lives. I don't think I've dealt with the level of depression or anxiety that a lot of people here have, but I understand the impulse to think the worst about yourself, or that you're never living up to the standard that you need to. But that is a symptom of depression much more than it is a reflection of reality, and I think it would be helpful to talk to your therapist about coping strategies when you start feeling overwhelmed by what you're reading on social media. I think you've said before that it's not realistic for you to abandon social media altogether, but the way you engage with it now seems to make you feel awful about yourself, and while we're all trying to be helpful here I don't think any of us are going to talk you out of those feelings right now.

where's Aimless when you need him

I said as much as I knew how to say yesterday evening in the post that started "I wish I understood...". I have nothing to add to that.

xp I don’t think anyone on earth has ever talked anyone out of the feeling they’re having, that’s god’s business

xp -- yes, that's another example, maybe people might understand it better being on one side of it. I still don't understand what's wrong about running articles about recipes or looking at the stars or whatever. but it was treated as some kind of self-evident moral outrage deserving of criticism. so, as a result, I don't know what to think, and generally speaking, in situations that are framed as (quoting the Onion) "this decision will harm people and cause damage to others"/"no it won't, it just won't," the first position is both more likely to be correct and less harmful if you choose wrong. kinda like pascal's wager, except the reason why pascal's wager doesn't work -- most religions it's applied to think "believing in God" is insufficient -- is not present here

milo - how do you know it doesn't?

Maybe she has diabetes, true

Pascal's wager was based on the assumption that the stakes included an infinite good (viz. an eternity in Heaven) on one side of the wager.

xp on the other hand, I think of Rev. Lovejoy’s line from the Simpsons - “Marge, just about everything is a sin. You ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not supposed to go to the bathroom.”

re people thinking hating onions makes you a terrible person I think there's a little spoken of 'if I had that person over for dinner effect' whereby when people express food preferences at odds with how one eats and prepares food it is very easy to imagine how annoying it might be to have that person over for dinner and not know what to cook. this is despite the fact that nobody ever has anyone over for dinner and when they do they never know what to cook anyway.

if they ask for the racist pasta they're not getting it, I'm sorry

for a lot of reasons (the cultural imperialism of middle class white people, snobbery, the fetishization of "national cuisines") food writing often can't help but expressing simple likes and dislikes about particular foodstuffs in ways that suggest the writer's racism. there's a bit in 'simple French cooking' where Richard olney dismisses coriander, which he dislikes the taste of while noting that in any case it's only used in *Arabic* cooking. I always think of the olney example but possibly I'm at least partly projecting as he reminds me so much of (more than one) gay Islamophobic American's I know who live in the South of France.

from what I understand of the shallot thing I realise this is only tangentially relevant

i just made a dip from olive oil, balsamic, salt and in a final flourish of improvisatory inspiration coriander, and now i feel like the wokest poster on ilx

'just' = an hour ago, before that was posted. i ate it with rice cakes. saint imago

holy holy

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

you can hear them jingling their little vials of coriander

catholic cuisine tastes

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

re people thinking hating onions makes you a terrible person I think there's a little spoken of 'if I had that person over for dinner effect' whereby when people express food preferences at odds with how one eats and prepares food it is very easy to imagine how annoying it might be to have that person over for dinner and not know what to cook. this is despite the fact that nobody ever has anyone over for dinner and when they do they never know what to cook anyway.

― plax (ico), Friday, May 22, 2020 1:39 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, I do worry about this very often -- in practice it's been less of an issue than you'd think (one time it was carbonara, another stir-fry just with different veg, etc.)

that’s a good point. as a vegan I am very familiar with that kind of anxiety!

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

Whoa there, pardner

I'm not at all surprised this isn't that much of an issue. I can imagine it's harder when eating out but I don't know how deep your dislike goes, like I hate hate hate eggs but for some reason egg fried rice is fine (my mother who also has eggs is repulsed by egg fried rice)

xp to Katherine

I also hate mushrooms

and freedom

it is much, much harder when eating out, and all I can do is just not think about it unless it's impossible (a few years ago I'd ordered fried mushrooms that were very obviously coated in a huge amount of onion powder, and it took me like 10 minutes in the bathroom washing my mouth out and eating a couple tangerines I was lucky enough to have taken home from work to stop being nauseated

do you hate other aliums like garlic or spring onions or is it only onions

also I would have thought Japanese food is your friend here

I could literally eat sushi for every meal if I was allowed

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again

cool those Cypriot fires a moment, imago. the word catholic has broader meanings than just the faith defined by the papal succession.

" I don't know what to think, and generally speaking, in situations that are framed as (quoting the Onion) "this decision will harm people"

One needn't take on the burden themself of ensuring that no one anywhere is ever harmed. Again, there's a happy medium between an inconsiderate jerk and perpetually fretting over whether your every single thought and action is harming people in any way.

also isn't there like a while Ayurvedic thing about onions, I feel like hare Krishna food has no onions for this reason, not that I really know what Ayurvedic actually means

garlic is fine, spring onions/scallions/leeks/chives are not

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

― imago, Friday, May 22, 2020 11:01 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

splitters!