deusvulture replied to your photo: why would you hurt me like this, Amazon
they know you
in my worst nightmares, I wake up and I am Milo
I had no idea anti-Italian racism was so prevalent in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s
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I keep hearing people use this as an analogy to anti-muslim/arab sentiment, and I don’t think they realize that they’re needlessly shooting themselves in the foot. The most law enforcement officers to die in a single attack before 9/11, by *far*, was when Italian anarchists blew a police station to hell (unlucky accident - they were aiming for a less-crowded *church*!).
The fact that kids in school have to learn ad nauseam about Sacco and Vanzetti, and yet no one ever mentions (say) the Wall Street bombing of the same year, is simply nuts.
I’m not saying that prejudice against Italians was “justified” in some metaphysical sense; they’re a plenty successful immigrant group these days. I’m just saying that you wouldn’t have to be a crazy racist to want to stay out of Little Italy at night, or tell a policeman if you saw a Sicilian-looking guy leave his bag on a train seat.
This is all a little tangential to your point, maybe. I guess I’m just sick of seeing references to anti-Italian prejudice in United States history tossed around as if it was a persuasive historical analogy to present situations. There are better ones!
Allow me to disagree. While there are many other immigrant groups that have achieved success afterwards, many of them fall under the “model minority” umbrella. Italians are a useful example because of this objectively existing violent sub-culture. The sentiment was that, remember, while this country is one of opportunity, these guys are the exception, they are uniquely bad, they are inherently criminals incompatible with our polite society, and if we keep allowing them then our civilzation will just drown in crime over time.
The most law enforcement officers to die
I don’t agree with this criterion due to the fact that most terrorists simply didn’t target police stations with intent to kill a lot of police, which includes this one.
Keep in mind, though, that “Italian” is not an ideology with a well-defined(ish) book detailing exactly what one must do to be Italian - and what one must do to those who fail to uphold the True Principles of Italy.
If it’s something that was done and there was no mainstream blowback then it wasn’t an unambiguous norm violation. Also, norms aren’t content-neutral.
For anyone who’s nervously wondering how to avoid being aggressively sanctioned in public for their views/writings: Don’t…. be confrontationally nonconformist…. unless you have a sufficiently powerful outside institution backing you up. This is sheerest common sense, and the whole reason that dramatic public censure is public and dramatic is that it’s for things that are virtually impossible to do on accident.
Ah, yes, things that are virtually impossible to do by accident, such as the dongle thing and the shirt thing.
And it is worth remembering that “confrontationally nonconformist” includes things like “you donate money to a campaign for a state ballot proposition that wins the popular vote” and “someone finds out that you do BDSM”.
Tumblr kinda relies on being esoteric and cumbersome enough a platform (e.g. indexing, basic usability, permalinking, etc. are all complete garbage here) to keep the normies away. A large amount of seminal discourse is happening here (ironically, @argumate will probably unironically deny this (or make a joke about the word “seminal” as a dodge)) and subsequently failing to remain easily traceable as the source by the time it becomes a wikipedia citation or a news article (e.g. donglegate-type discourse and the Scott A.s, and @kontextmaschine posting Pepe in 2014, before Pepe was supposed to be a right wing thing).
Classic blogs were kinda like that in the ‘00s, and the same is perhaps true of USENET in the ‘90s.
I think it’s important for obnoxious thinkerpeople to stick their necks out a bit, and that includes reputational risk. If you don’t harvest risky future potential while people are still being civil, things will eventually turn uncivil (e.g. Rotherham and the rest of the UK and the rest of Europe). The actual measurable risks to the openly opinionated contrarian in a genuinely violent society are a lot greater that the ones in a less violent society (duh). It’s not a paradox but a pigeonhole to say that people who would care to avoid a particularly violent future have to take risks now, while things are still generally nonviolent.
Hmn… fair enough.
Though I benefit a lot from the Tumblr format in terms of average length, time-to-feedback, etc. Most blog entries out there have no comments, and nothing like “likes” to indicate perceived value and uptake, nor reblogs to spread them.
So what just happened with Trump?
I seem to have missed the good bits.
The news of the night is Jeff Sessions lied about the nature of his conversations with Sergei Kislyak, but this post is about the whole elephant.
As I said to @deusvulture, I think most people don’t know why they should care about the issue and why they should care if the facts are sufficient to support the pleaded claims.
Everyone on Tumblr, from reactionaries to conservatives to libertarians to liberals to the left seems to have the same indifference to the issue, and it mystifies me. I don’t know enough to write an airtight account of the controversy, but no one else seems to know the stakes at play.
I know that the stakes are pretty high, but everyone else seems to think that there are no stakes at all.
Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.
Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
Watching these videos of people keeping exotic animals on the Internet.
Then you look it up, and it’s like…
The less smug you are, (and the less unethical you are), the less it stings when your most unethical behavior comes to light.
It’s good standard practice to avoid using “wit” (and snark) on people because they are low-status (”gross,” “smelly,” “ugly,” “fat harpy” and so on). First of all, it’s just not a good mental hygiene habit. Second of all, it cannot then come back to haunt you.
