Comment by tonfreed
4 years ago
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
Not more of this anti-toaster-fucking bigotry! It is _completely_ normal for a grown man to seek a consensual, carnal relationship with any electrical appliance of his choosing. Just because you can't understand the deep, intimate bond that comes from inserting your genitals into a toaster, it doesn't give you the right to shame others.
I've shared your post with my good friends at the Toaster Fucker Support Group. Expect to get doxxed within the next 48 hours, bigot.
> I blame the internet.
The irony of this ahistorical claim is that it comes very close to "Make America great again".
Think about the Vietnam War. The civil rights era. The McCarthy era. The list is almost endless. The Civil War, of course. The US has almost always had major polarization. If anything, the internet reveals what had been hidden by the whitewashed corporate Big Three TV network monopoly, which was itself an historical anomaly.
You know the Pulitzer Prize for journalism? Well, Joseph Pulitzer himself was unapologetically partisan. As was William Randolph Hearst, et al. The whole idea of "objective journalism" is not much more than a naive blip.
I agree, the difference now is that we have direct access to the information, it doesn't have to filter through a journalist now. All these twitter/facebook/youtube bans are trying to put a genie back in a bottle, Parler is gaining steam and Bitchute recently hit its funding goals.
Also, yeah, the term yellow journalism refers to Pulitzer's rags. Completely on board with that as well.
Of course it's not that one-sided. Let's not forget that the same technology that provides a safe haven for toaster fuckers also enables people with more sane, progressive yet equally niche ideas to find like-minded peers and escape the problematic offline environments and tribalism they may have been brought up in.
Sure, it's a double-edged sword, but that doesn't mean the comment you're replying to is wrong.
Continuing the analogy, it comes down to the impossibility that such tools only be used for good. We can't approach 100% without draconian censorship, but we can probably get to 90% with better education. Apparently we're currently around 50%.
Of course not. I just wanted to provide a glimpse on the other side of that coin.
I would add that the pandemic make us skip the part of telling friends.
And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
sensual -> sensical
I like the idea of common sensual, but I think we all might have slightly different tastes :D
You just need to find the right toaster :)
True, common is a loaded word nowadays...
The errors of modern leadership:
Celebrity: To be unknown or unreachable is to be invincible.
Pettiness: Completing the journey needs to provide the answer. Knowledge and discovery need to provide more than cynicism and irrelevance.
Cruelty: Empathy first made us human, practical telepaths. Criticism provokes people, poking mental burn victims. Fights devastates. Fighters eventually miss the people they just wholesale killed.
Ignorance: Force people to fix telephone poles. Spend decades ignoring their requests for mobile. Overnight fire them for not having mobile skills, a practical death sentence. Universal healthcare has wait times and job guarantees have relocation requirements.
What's the minimum you need to call yourself a government? People telling other people what to do all the time from far away? No matter what you stand for, your subject to your own laws, or else there is no law, just bullying and everyone should ignore you as best as they can. Laws themselves have their own rules. You can't tell someone what to do when you can't even do it yourself, like speak perfectly for one.
You do it. If it works, I'll look at it and start doing it myself too. If you mess up, best just to walk away. Leadership belongs to others, not just just you.
You certainly did not have to live with those around you before the internet, and were sometimes very much encouraged not to.
It isn't like the LGBTQ+ community was treated well. It was perfectly acceptable to not hire a queer school teacher, nor was it such a bad thing for students to shun a queer classmate. Or you could look at marriage between "races" and the slurs you got from them. A core teaching of a number of churches is to surround yourself with other believers instead of the non-believer next door. And certainly make sure you fit into your gender roles.
Best not to have communist or socialist leanings in the 50's, nor be asian in the US in the 40's. In so many places, it was outright dangerous to have dark skin.
Sometimes you would just accept those around you because that was all you had access to, which is true... so long as they weren't in the wrong group lest you be treated like the minority.
Social media amplifies some bubbles, but it also breaks a few and some things are more difficult to ignore.
Found the toaster fucker.
other countries also have internet access. the impact on them doesn't appear to be the same. why is that?
I dunno. The UK got whipped into an online frenzy prior to the Brexit vote. Notably, there was possible Russian interference during that campaign on Twitter, similar to the US [1]. And Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil, largely due to manipulation on WhatsApp. Roughly 47% of the country uses WhatsApp, and of the top fifty images circulating at the time of the election, only four were real [2].
Social media has proven itself to have massive impact on the zeitgeist, and it has been weaponized the world over to serve the interests of those willing to manipulate others in order to further their own (often misanthropic) goals.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia...
[2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/whatsapps-influence-brazilian-elect...
Most of the Russian stories were pure election stories, there is almost no merit to it at all.
This is actually one thing I don't understand about the alleged progressive side and many people share this view. You could be made to believe basically anything the same way Trump supporters believe a communist overtake of the US is imminent.
Furthermore the support these stories got from intelligence agencies point to very serious problems that do indeed influence democracy in a very bad way, far worse than Putin can imagine in his dreams. Of course it might put a smile on his face, that much is understood.
True that the zeitgeist has influence, but it is mainly driven by western companies, not by the Russian government. Aside from the language barrier you cannot name one talking point this alleged Russian propaganda contained.
You do understand the implication if you decry any opposition to EU integration as Russian interference? Because any political discourse stops right there with you.
No, there was honest dissatisfaction with the EU in Britain. That might be wrong or not, but the Russian thing just made people reinforce their views, because that actually makes sense now.
Russians, seriously...
Brazil is another story here, although I think the facts have to be checked.
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Bolsonaro was not elected because WhatsApp, this was a fake news and the journalist that spread that lie was condoned by spreading fake news.
It surely does.
Social Media did not create division. Internet did not create division. TV did not create division.
They only amplify it. US was divided long before the creation of Internet. That baseline were far higher than other countries. Compared to other countries Internet definitely has its impact, but the baseline was small it isn't as obvious.
Let's put some number into it.
Division Score of US is 100, Internet Usage as a Multiplier, US also has one of the highest Internet usage ( especially with Social Media ) around the world. if you put that as 10. You get a total of 1000.
Division in Country A is 50, Internet usage as 4 ( If you take social media ads revenue split per capita between US and other countries as an indicator ), you have 200.
That is 5x difference.
Maybe it is affected by the number of people on the internet. Back in my initial internet troll days, you could go on pretty much any forum and know you would be treated fairly even if you were a dickhead.
Now you can start whole blood feuds talking about pineapple on pizza.
My money would be on a more homogeneous culture. Look at somewhere like Australia, the Scandinavian countries or NZ where we pretty much share our attitudes with the most of the others in the country.
As opposed to the US where you're pretty much divided on whether you grew up in the city, suburbs or rural and then again on state. A Californian is wildly different from a Texan, who are again wildly different from a Wisconsonian. The UK is similar with the divide between the north and south of England, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish.
I think some of it is natural, but it's being amplified with the advent of globalism.
You had me until the Che, I didn’t get that reference. What’s that?
People on the right think very poorly of Che Guevara with not very strong evidence, so they make fun of people who wear shirts with his face on them
I mean, it's not like he killed gay people and wrote incredibly racist stuff about black people.
But my point was the people that idolise him online and think they're going to carry out a violent revolution are inevitably the same people that tweet abuse at Adele for losing weight.
So they dislike an actual Marxist for once.
So it's not the internet but social networks.
Theres not really a difference.
In 1995 it was a Usenet newsgroup, in 2005 it was a vBulletin forum, today it's a Twitter or Facebook community, tomorrow, it will be something else.
Facebook and Twitter get tons of hate because they make money hand over fist and founders/insiders become richer than god, (unlike Usenet or forum sites) but the internet has always been this way.
Don't forget about Reddit.
Reddit is designed around grouping people in echo chambers and users come to it for this reason. Facebook may still be more impactful due to the sheer volume of users, but I don't think Reddit's impact is negligeable.
There were higher barriers to entry into those groups in the 90s.
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Partly, I guess. The whole internet is a battlefield in the culture war now, though, and even completely unrelated subreddits start banning people who post in the "wrong" places even if they're otherwise following the rules. That and wikipedia is a complete mess now, instead of celebrating what we could build together academics are holding "edit-a-thons" where they tell students to put the lecturer's slant on everything. I have a feeling we might actually be in WW3 and it won't be nuclear, it'll be all about who can distribute their propaganda most effectively.
As an aside, even though HN has a distinct left bias I would say it's definitely one of the fairest forums I've posted on in the last couple of years.
The Social Dilemma movie highlights this brilliantly, as does Tristan Harris in his Joe Rohan interview https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg
Internet or population?
I completely agree with you.
Look at what the press was saying about Lincoln before the war. Nothing new these days.