Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

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

― plax (ico), Friday, May 22, 2020 11:23 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

some buddhists don't eat alliums because they inflame the passions, get the blood flowing type thing. antithetical to divesting yourself of desire. there is also the fact that they have to be uprooted, destroying the plant, to be consumed (I might be wrong here, probably), rather than picked from a plant which keeps on living like a tomato or what have you.

Jains do not eat onions or any other root vegetable bc you have to uproot and kill the plant to get them

xp
yes, I've been wondering if I should point out that among some religious South Asians, onions and garlic are forbidden

afaik, it's for the reason that jim mentioned

crut is also right about Jains specifically. geez these are incompetent posts, sorry

(quoting the Onion)

well played

Didn’t the queen prohibit onions and garlic on the QE2 for years because plebe food?

no she just had mad farts

And yet she allowed leeks, although it is an oceangoing ship and leeks pose a danger of sinking. curious.

Are You a Cut Up on Social Media?

Voting something between no and very no

anyway sorry if I upset anyone

I'm upset that you're apologizing ;)

Exactly, no-one is upset.

Well somebody might be but they shouldn't be.

Rather than an apology, it would be better to hear that you have reevaluated your approach to dealing with online strife.

Yeah, ^this. No pressure, though :)

I would like to tell you my own story of improving my ability to deal with such strife, but I am afraid that if I did so my contrary nature would immediately cause me to get into a few intranetz beefs pronto.

I think most of us are just confused by why you place so much value on what these people on Twitter (or Facebook or wherever) think about minor issues.

apparently I made this at some point pic.twitter.com/xrrWeZRUQ7

— Jerry Choke (@jerrychoke) May 22, 2020

well to be fair the assault on the dignity of the person is constant and fought on all fronts simultaneously

Small pantry humiliation porn

:) sesame oil in cooking is great though, sorry to add to the off-topic discussion of food items here but I recommend buying it in small quantities and keeping it in the refrigerator, because it goes off pretty quickly otherwise

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

*bump*

I ended up voting 'no' after discounting ilxor.com.

Did I miss anything?

(Kidding--I never have a problem with threads taking unexpected turns. I've sent them off in that direction many times myself.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soBNbkGl4Z0

You're psychic--one of only two Cure songs I unequivocally love (+ "Boys Don't Cry").

Thanks, I try. Or ITRY as we say on This is the crossword puzzle thread

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Hmmm...

Great revive

ffs

i don't even own a social

What’s your social? *snaps chewing gum*

So...I read the Jia Tolentino blog post about her parents' legal troubles the other day, thought "Man, that sounds rough," and liked her tweet that linked to it. Today I searched her name to see what other people were saying about it, and found a LOT of tweets from people accusing her parents of being human traffickers and posting screenshots of court documents and clucking at the "blue-checkmark elites" who were sympathizing with her.

And so I suddenly found myself feeling the way Katherine did about the shallot pasta. I really like Jia Tolentino's writing, and so my initial reaction was to feel empathetic toward her and to take her side, so to speak. But when I saw all of these people voicing outrage -- it wasn't just one or two -- it made me think, "Is there something more to this that I should be mindful of? Is it OK to still like Jia?" Someone tweeted "Keep in mind that Tolentino has a vested interest in minimizing what happened," and that seemed kind of persuasive. Then I found someone else's thread about how the charges against her parents were a total joke and ultimately dismissed in court because they were so weak. So then that seemed persuasive. Mostly, though, I found it all kind of dizzying.

The thing that I'm still struggling to understand is why these people are so motivated to tear her down. I don't want to accuse anyone of "virtue signaling," but I genuinely don't get why random people on Twitter would become so invested in this case. And it makes me question whether my opposite impulse to believe her and take her side is justified, given that it's based on little more than liking her writing. Does she deserve the benefit of the doubt? I hope so, but I genuinely don't know. The whole thing makes me uneasy.

Online: it's bad!

Liberals love cops and the George W Bush administration I guess is the motivation

Except that I get the impression that most of the people outraged about this are leftists who are resentful of "media elites."

well, there are seemingly a very small number of slots for well-compensated high-profile media (read: writing) jobs, so aside from the other reasons for finding gratification in tearing down strangers online, or affiliating yourself with others by triangulation against those strangers' (images in the relevant circles), maybe a lot of people just feel resentment at these authors taking up the lion's share of their own attention. kind of the personal correlate of the much-noted now-we-only-look-at-five-websites phenomenon. as if there is some quiet bargaining going on—if we're going to have to pay so much attention to a limited range of thoughts and words and personae, they had damn well better be sturdy as vehicles for our ideals—and then angry retaliation as soon as those bargains are inevitably felt to be broken.

Except that I get the impression that most of the people outraged about this are leftists who are resentful of "media elites."

xpost Perhaps. One of the people offering sympathy to Tolentino was the academic/activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who replied "Solidarity, Jia." Some people clearly felt betrayed and disappointed by that response. Someone said "come on, keeanga. the rest of these media goofs don't have any credibility to lose, you're not playing for the same stakes they are. we actually need you..." To which someone else replied, "She's playing for the exact same stakes they are. She's a careerist and this is how this ilk maintains power."

By contrast, maybe I am too enamored of some of these "media goofs," idk.

Not sure what power Jia Tolentino has beyond a good job

Anyway, this is a lousy way to spend my holiday, so I am going to go back to reading The Great Believers. If Rebecca Makkai has been canceled, don't tell me.

Thank you jaymc for linking to that Jia Tolentino blog post. I hadn't read it, but had read some people tearing her down in my brief looks at Twitter recently, and was wondering what the story was.

What is interesting to me about Tolentino being a target of this sort of behaviour is my memory of her month-after-he-died post about Bowie on Jezebel, regarding an anecdote where Lori Maddix claimed to have lost her virginity to him at age 15. https://jezebel.com/what-should-we-say-about-david-bowie-and-lori-maddox-1754533894 The debate following this article was interesting, you've got Bowie super-scholars pointing out all the inaccuracies in Maddix's story-- that she claimed to have lost her virginity to Bowie after she was already in a relationship with Jimmy Page, that details about her story regarding Bowie's clothing, the hotel they were at, and so on were either mis-recalled or entirely inaccurate-- even that the notion that they would've said "hi" to Lennon and Ono was also posited as being an impossibility, given that it's recorded that Bowie only met Lennon a year after Maddix alleges these events took place (and it is also recorded that Ono and Lennon were not in L.A. when Maddix says these events took place.) On the other side of the debate, you've got Tolentino concluding, in the first three paragraphs, that Maddix's allegation (and an 80s rape allegation that was settled, with somebody else) are enough evidence for Tolentino to state that Bowie was "likely" fucking child after child, night after night.

I myself don't deny the right for Tolentino to write what she wrote for Jezebel-- it is a valid perspective, was informative, and one that has coloured my own Bowie fandom. What I am more interested in is the motivation behind Tolentino's desire to posit instead of properly investigate-- just as she, in her blog posts, bemoans the inaccuracies between What Her Harassers Are Saying and the facts of her parents' legal struggles, a serious investigation into the credibility of Maddix's claims was not offered by Tolentino. I don't think she was wrong to write what she did. I just see a corollary between Tolentino's own behaviour and that of her own aggressors-- and I have empathy for her.

In my own interactions with people and their online content-- people who I've met online and then met in person, or people I've met in person and then become acquainted with online-- I have observed a consistent thread of projection in people's online posting. An individual who regularly cooked the books at his record label is online accusing others of cooking the books. A woman who was extremely abusive to several individuals in my social circle posts constantly about the behaviours of "abusive men", unwittingly exactly describing her own abusive behaviour. A publicly posted dick pic exudes confidence but is the product of deep insecurity. An individual who regularly posts problematic opinions is bemoaning the fact that other people post problematic opinions. Every Tweet is a metonym!! Even this post, as I type it! I feel as if it is less of a post about Tolentino, online behaviour, and more of a side effect of my own experiences, fears and insecurities.

And this was the main reason why I stopped posting on Twitter, in particular-- outside of my regular nerd humour and professional promotion, all I saw in myself and my own posts was projection. In my posts that engaged "critically" with topics, I only saw what shitheads would call "virtue signalling". In a weird moment of rage in early 2017 about a friend getting fired for requesting that Slaves's shows be cancelled, I myself engaged in online harassment of the band and the individuals promoting their shows-- I was angry about the stupidity of this band and their bullheaded excuses for why the were keeping the name, but I was LIVID about my friend getting fired for expressing their opinion about it. My acts of harassment were more a product of anger about the latter than they were about the former. (For months afterward, fans of the band, and random Quebecois racists, were calling me a "fasciste" for trying to "censor" Slaves.)

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a photo of Elon Musk and Grimes (circulating on the occasion of their baby's birth) greatly resembled characters from "The Secret Of NIMH", and I searched for adequate images to make light of this fact for about ten minutes before I recognized that what I was doing was precluding an act of abusive harassment-- labelling something as "punching up" is an excuse for a lot of bullshit. And I tracked in myself a thread of narcissistic abuse-- I envy Musk's wealth, I envy Grimes's artistic achievements and visibility, and I was seeking to put them down to make myself look big, and make this rich man and this successful artist look, for a moment, small. The fact that I have the most passing acquaintances with the latter (and several mutual friends) gave me pause enough to recognize that what I was about to do-- although hilarious-- and probably justifiable-- was at the expense of a human being who is already so often a target. More to the point, I recognized that what I was about to do would only provide me with a passing dopamine rush-- it would not contribute in any way to my own desires to accumulate wealth and achieve artistic dignity.

And I start to realize that a lot of the justifications that people use when engaging in online harassment are verbatim the justifications used, historically, by violent men when they abuse their partners. "Don't worry, she'll be fine," they say after piling on a micro-celebrity chef who dared to afford to pay off her mortgage while still in her 30s. "You don't have to look at Twitter; if you're feeling harassed, just close your laptop"-- which in itself is shifting the blame for harassment on to the target. "She deserves it," over and over and over again, harassment is justified.

With every passing year, as I see the celebrities being "called out" on Twitter become more and more micro-, and their transgressions becoming more and more benign, I'm wondering how long it will take until something switches and people realize that What Is Happening Here Is Not Actually What People Think Is Happening Here. Two theories about "what is actually happening" are:

1. Social media puts people of disparate levels of visibility and means on an equal discursive playing field, which causes for friction and harassment; harassment that is oftentimes explained-away (quite well!) with discourse about intersectionality-- although it might be noted that the originator of the concept of "intersectionality", Kimberlé Crenshaw, recently had a moment in Time magazine where she spoke critically about how "intersectionality" as a concept is misused for the purpose of harassment: https://time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/

2. We are societally in need of a massive cultural revolution, and the online harassment we are seeing is a symptom of class upheaval. This is effectively "tankie-ism", I guess-- just as the "Right" has gone full nihilist with their acceptance of Trump, the "Left" is adopting a similarly nihilistic counterpunch. (I will not express here whether or not I personally support this idea.)

I have other theories as well that are mainly rooted in the psychological, but I don't possess enough education or knowledge in that field to express these instinctive thoughts with any usefulness.

One last thought-- to anybody who feels endangered in the online environment, to an irrational degree, which has led (in katherine's case) to theorizing about incompatibility with "human interaction as a whole", I'm reminded of my own tendencies toward irrational anxieties and feelings of endangerment. My irrational anxieties are the result of scars from past experiences. My therapist has told me, "if you were once beat up in an alleyway, you would have a subsequent irrational fear of alleyways". One's amygdala is rooted in irrationality, in instinct, and is trying to protect the self from harm. Once scarred, it leads to ongoing states of distress, even in situations where there is no threat. I think about this a lot when I read something online and feel distressed-- I try and remember that I'm sitting at my computer, and I CAN and WILL just close the laptop and actually get back to work.

Oh and by the way shallot pasta is delicious I encourage everyone to try it-- Alison Roman has softened people to a lot of ingredients that they otherwise might not have a taste for. She substitutes sautéed fennel as a base for certain dishes where normally there would be a mirepoix, and it's wonderful

I envy Grimes's artistic achievements and visibility

i make it 1-0 fgti tbh ;)

great post though and it cuts through to the single major issue with online spectatorism: it is so hard to not just bend any given issue to fit your own perspective. but then again, if everybody refrained from having their say, dissent would be close to impossible. in summary, maybe all online discourse is cursed

I saw shallots during one of my infrequent visits to the supermarket yesterday and thinking about the discussion here I decided to buy some! they seemed big enough that they wouldn't be too fiddly. I guess I will try that pasta.

was also thinking of a shallot vinaigrette for salads

why would shallots in pasta be bad, they're just dainty onions

it entirely depends on what else you put in there. tonight for instance we had roast peppers, roast tomatoes and roast carrots in our pasta (with a base of fried onions and garlic of course) and it was amazing. alternatively you may put raisins and blancmange in your pasta and it will be bad. shallots are surely neutral! or am i projecting my infamous tolerance of unlikely ingredients

dainty onions is the description I was trying to think of