“‘Don’t feed the trolls’ also ignores an obvious method for addressing online abuse: skilled moderation and the willingness to kick people off platforms for violating rules about abuse. At one website I used to write for, everyone constantly remarked that we had the most amazing, thoughtful commenters. How did we achieve this? Easy: a one-strike policy. Complete zero tolerance. Did people complain? Of course they did. But it stopped people with bad intentions from being a part of the community, and it kept all the well-meaning people on their best behavior. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It also a took a ton of effort on the part of the entire writing team. We had to ignore the other popular sentiment of “don’t read the comments” (which is largely about trying to maintain sanity while staring at the void) and embrace a jaw-droppingly obvious fact: what truly derails any given thread or conversation lies not in a given response to trolls, but the very troll who is trying to derail in the first place. The second you treat them as a ‘constant’ or inescapable part of your community, you have given them permission.”
It frustrates me, because back when I was on forums the reason people were told “Don’t feed the trolls” was to make it easier for the mods and admins to do their job and ban them. And we just collectively dropped the bit where you have a moderating team whose job it is to make sure that the majority of users have a good experience in exchange for some kind of free-for-all where everyone ends up bruised and bloody and the only people enjoying themselves are the trolls. It’s the antithesis of how to foster a good community.
Remember how Pratchett wrote that Reacher Gilt, the evil head of the Grand Trunk company who is responsible for deaths and the theft of the company and the exploitation of workers and however many other crimes, works out of Tump Tower
Going Postal was published in 2004
I respect Mr. Pratchett a lot, but Trump is 71 years old and he’s been publicly known to be a douchecanoe since at least the 1970s. You didn’t exactly have to be a fucking prophet to know in 2004 that he was a tremendous dickbag.
No doubt with a heavy dose of “Idgaf, so why would I evenpay attention to time zones? Listening to me jack my jaws at all hours is obviously the most important thing these fools could possibly be doing.”
This is interesting. It’s dehumanizing and sexist, of course, but there’s a kernel of an interesting idea there. If I’m honest, I don’t think that most men can possibly grow up in our misogynistic society with an excellent grasp of how to relate to women as people 100% of the time. I have met one or two who really seemed to have it down, I guess. I don’t think that if I had been a man, I’d have it down; it’s simply too difficult. At the very least it requires years of practice and consistent rejection of dehumanizing ideas.
Because of all that, there’s almost always an unspoken difficulty for women who are trying to interact with men, made all the worse because many men don’t understand the difficulty exists. The difficulty is how to navigate an interaction in which, at any moment, I might encounter the perception that I am weaker and less worthy of respect than he is. I can pretend the difficulty doesn’t exist, which sometimes means swallowing indignities. Or I can confront the difficulty head-on and be branded as angry and uppity. Or I can non-confrontationally lament the difficulty, in which case I seem sad and self-defeating, and possibly confirm the preconception that I’m weaker.
It doesn’t always bother me because I’m not always paying attention to it – no one could; we’ve got jobs and lives – but it’s there. (Perhaps it is not there for all women. Perhaps, for example, it isn’t there for powerful women who by necessity spend most of their time interacting with people who are less powerful than they, like Hillary Clinton.)
I think…hmm. I don’t think this is untrue, but I also don’t think it’s unique to men. I don’t really think anyone has a solid grasp on how to relate to others as people 100% of the time, especially not others from groups you don’t belong to or don’t know very much about. Any take on the issue that handwaves the fact that *everyone* is capable of this behavior is missing something, I think. Ironically, the post you linked spends quite a lot of words bemoaning male dehumanization while itself talking about men in a very dehumanizing way – and it’s all the more dangerous because the author seems completely blind to her own capacity for dehumanization.
It’s true that different people are likelier to dehumanize in different ways, some more harmful than others, because of the particular messages they’ve received. But I think it’s important to spend as much time interrogating that tendency in oneself as in others. Being a subjective creature means putting real, continuous effort into understanding the full breadth and depth of other people.
I honestly feel like I’m rolling the dice interacting with anyone of any gender, to be honest.
oh phew, here I was thinking I’d have to pay for the plane ticket and transportation and food and lodging and a passport and getting back home or visiting any areas of interest while traveling that require money
guess not, what luck
You say this to me without handing me a few thousand dollars and I am going to unleash the most hideous scream you have ever heard, kick you in the shins, take your wallet, piss in it, shove it in your mouth, and walk quietly away.
Stephen King, 1980: Writing 327 books a day at 1000 pages each, all of them about psychic children and people getting bludgeoned to death, while snorting mountains of cocaine
Stephen King, 2018: Still writing at a ridiculous pace but replacing the mountains of cocaine with dad jokes and puppy pictures on facebook
…Imagine my reaction when I opened up the trailer for On the Basis of Sex last week and saw Felicity Jones grace the screen. British Felicity Jones, with her fine features and her awkward American accent, beautiful, perfectly manicured, and erasing any trace of Ginsburg’s roots.
…But I think what hurts more about watching Jones portray the first female, Jewish Supreme Court Justice is how little they physically look alike. Justice Ginsburg has strong, identifiably Ashkenazi Jewish features. She looks Jewish. Missing from Felicity Jones is any trace of RBG’s large Jewish nose. In its place is a delicate, slightly upturned nose. One that conforms more closely with White Western Christian standards of beauty. Frankly, the absence of RBG’s schnoz is bumming me out.
…This issue is more than skin deep. Judaism is a huge part of Justice Ginsburg’s identity now, but it also provides another dimension to her early career. While it’s definitely true that when RBG went to law school, it was uncommon for women to attend, and when she challenged legal precedent she was a young woman disrupting what has historically been a boys’ club, it was also unusual to be a Jew in these contexts at the time.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered law school, many top universities still had “Jewish quotas.” Not many Jews were practicing law, and not many historically had done so. So it was not just that she was a woman disrupting these norms and defying conventions in the legal field, she was a Jewish woman in a professional field that did not have many Jews or women. She was a double anomaly. She is doubly impressive.
And yet, any trace of her Jewish identity — from her accent to her face — is erased in the casting of Felicity Jones in the role. This should be pissing people off. Prosthetic makeup is used all the time to transform actors into their roles in biopics. Prosthetics were used to make Nicole Kidman into Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. So why is it missing here? Why are we allowing a key component of this icon’s identity to be erased? Why do we need a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who, it should be noted, was a total babe but really that’s beside the point — to be conventionally beautiful?
The way I see it, this is really problematic for two reasons. First of all, the irony of altering the appearance of a historic figure in order to make her more conventionally attractive in a movie about her combating sexual discrimination is almost too rich to put into words.
Second of all, representation is important.
…Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up with identifiably Ashkenazi Jewish features at a time when it was not easy being Jewish in her professional field or in society in general. When RBG’s character is robbed of these features, the story loses something. We all lose something. Something important and integral to Ginsburg’s, and America’s, struggle.
And beyond the story, we lose something else. As a girl growing up with a big Jewish nose, I hated my nose because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I thought my nose was actually incompatible with delicate femininity. How wonderful it would have been to have more examples of that in popular media, to know that it could be otherwise. And how wonderful it would be now to see the story of a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg: hard-headed, trail-blazing, beautiful, and Jewish.
Read Anna Miriam’s full piece at Alma.
idk what age exactly they’re going for but i could see mayim bialik as a young ginsburg. also, the fact that bialik is a highly educated jewish-american woman too makes her seem like a good fit.
I’ve seen Jenny Slate suggested and I’m just going to let the pictures of Jenny and a young Ruth speak for themselves.
But yes, Mayim Bialik would absolutely have been a really good choice as well.
listen I have big Mayim Bialik feelings too, not least from growing up around the Blossom era. But the amount of energy she’s maybe-unintentionally given to anti-vaxx misinformation, as both a celebrity and a damn scientist, is horrifying to my autistic ass.
I know the internet likes treating ppl like Jones as some kind of clownish crank, but he’s not your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, hes the guy responsible for preying on your uncle’s anxieties and encouraging his crazy, and he did it because its lucrative as hell.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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