SocraticGadfly: Before using social media to fan controversy flames ...

November 07, 2014

Before using social media to fan controversy flames ...

Read Ken White's "Ten Short Rants about Gamergate." They apply to far more than that.

Moving somewhat beyond his immediate circle of targets, Ken's observations, his 10 points, apply to a lot of situations, especially ones where social justice warriors, or SJW folks are involved, and especially ones where doctrinaire anti-SJW folks are also involved, not just Gamergate.

As for that next circle of hell?

Without being offensive just for the sake of giving offense, other people shouldn't be passive, either.

Spades can and should be called spades, or, per Ken:
I'm going to call out idiots and assholes and thugs.
And, per Ken, and the particular issue at hand or related ones, both social justice warriors, or SJWs, and men’s rights advocates, or MRAs, have a fair amount of people fitting at least one, if not all three, descriptors. I’ve “met” online people in both groups who do that. And, to the degree either SJWs or MRAs are organized, they do a shitty job of self-policing. Both of them.

And, I myself have experienced being called an MRA just because I won't cosign every line of SJW bullshit. And still am, right now, by an SJW on Hardball Talk, NBC's sports blog.

That person claimed that SJW:MRA was like ACLU:KKK.

That's laughable on two counts, as I said.

First, neither the ACLU nor the KKK was created in the Internet era, per Ken's link and my header.

Second, the SJW movement is in no way equivalent to the ACLU. (And, welcome here, anybody clicking on my name at Hardball Talk. I deliberately redated this post to pin it at the top of my blog.)

And, having run into said person before, I know that they know that I'm not alone in these observations. But, it's part of the martyrology to act like anyone who doesn't 100 percent agree with you is your enemy.

Beyond that, as a Facebook friend of mine said, they really should be a kind of "user's manual" for anyone posting anything online, especially in social media.

That's because, as this screen capture about third-party trolls in Gamergate shows, there's trollery everywhere. Let's all get better at not abetting it, at cutting it off at the pass, and at reporting it. And, let's patronize websites, etc., that do that themselves.

The Internet wasn't originally "built" to be a libertarian cesspool of foul-mouthed, foul-minded, "gotcha" thinking and writing any more than it was meant to be a hypercapitalist cesspool of ads bombardment, putting a dollars cost on everything, virus-bombing URLs and other things. Unfortunately, it's become both.

Like the worldwide eradication of smallpox, getting rid of, or even just adequately containing, both problems won't be easy and it won't be quick. But that's no excuse not to do what we can.

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