Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

AYCOFSM??

great band

in all seriousness though, no I am not, and I should have realized this the first time I told someone on USEnet I wished he was dead when I was 15

I'm a no too. ilx is as close as it gets for me

What’s our working definition of ‘social media’?

I know I have laid myself open to nothing but acronyms and emoticons and links to Chris Cillizza think-pieces.

lol

For me it would be Facebook and ILX, but that would extend to the other popular platforms people use--Twitter, Instagram, etc.

😎

j. is going to single-handedly kill this thread I worked very hard to conceptualize.

Voting something in-between.

was amateurist really popular? i think not

i mean that was his charm

such as it was

I tried to cozy up to him a few times early on but he was having none of it.

Maybe popular is the wrong word. I always felt like he was taken to be very thoughtful, but I couldn't get past the tone. Anyway, I don't want this to be about him--my point was that I sometimes share the thing that drove me up the wall.

I already know I will not join commercialized social media unless under compulsion of force majeure. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Tumblr, no TikTok, no Next Big Thing Everyone Uses, even if it turns my snoot into unicorns. It's bad enough being shadowed by Amazon & other retailers, and having an Android phone.

Thank you for existing, ILX and ilxors. This is a scene I can happily join without selling myself bit by bit. (see what I did there?)

I dont count ILX as "social media", nor most other forums, even Reddit. SM is more things like FB/Insta/Snapchat/Twitter.

So insofar as Ive always loved fora and blogging (Usenet, mailing lists, blogs/livejournal/ILX), I have always sat somewhere between bored despair and outright revulsion for the rest. I'm too old (SC/Insta), or I just Dont get it (Twitter).

I log on to twitter the most because I can refrain from posting and can be anonymous and it really feels like something I can make my own very easily, also it feels like a social leveler

then instagram where I can look at my friends' posts.

I can't bear to go into my facebook account these days, I’ve been thinking about why that happened, there was nothing particularly egregious about it in my experience, I guess I’m just embarrassed to share my experiences with people I barely know

it’s much better on ilx with people I don’t at all know tbh

I love some of tiktok

I can’t sh0t any of them successfully but I try now and then. I’ve been on a discord kick for a few weeks now, it’s ok I guess.

(xposts) Age is definitely part of it (I'm 58). I think back to arguments in fanzines...You had a month to temper your response. I remember one in particular, having to do, of all things, with Celine Dion (between two other people), and I thought, wow, that's a pretty nasty exchange. It would be a shadow of an echo of a blip today.

i'm basically just wishing happy birthdays on facebook. If I posted a photo more often I'd be more in line with the majority of major social media platform users. OP describing power users/vocal minority i think

i was pretty sure this thread was going to be about the 1975

OK, I guess I'll be the pro-social media guy.

I'm reasonably active on Twitter; I use it to post links to shit I've written, or when I have a new episode of my podcast going up, and then I engage with the people I follow. (I have many more followers than people I follow - basically, I'm on there to have conversations with people I think are interesting, and anyone who follows me is the audience for those conversations, is how I think about it.) I post a lot of jokes, making fun of bands and politicians and stupid news stories and whatnot.

On Instagram, I mostly post pictures of whatever I'm reading or listening to.

On Facebook, I post some of the same shit I post on Twitter, and I comment on a few friends' posts, but that's about it. I'm also part of a FB group which has occasionally yielded professional opportunities.

For about the last decade, I have also been the social media person for my employer or for clients. I actually find "speaking" in a professional (or academic) "voice" on Twitter, FB, Instagram and even LinkedIn to be interesting, and it can be a creative challenge at times.

social media was more or less fine before it was public facing. the combination of 1. real name/identity linked to account and 2. assumption that random people you've never met will (and should be) exposed to your content turned me away from it probably forever

twitter becoming a personal brand machine for people who don't need personal brands + a supposed networking tool for many has ruined a lot of the social world for me. i can't force my brain to adjust to it and if i had it my way i would live on an island where it doesn't exist. jobs requiring people to have a professional twitter presence is obviously very bad. i don't hesitate to say it's a general evil and i don't trust people who claim it's a social good.

facebook is sort of the same. i loved it when it felt like the posts i made were for my friends. then it blew up, suddenly you're adding everyone in your family and people you barely know and even though you aren't expected to open it up to complete strangers, it still becomes a performance where you must create a version of yourself for everyone you know. i stopped posting on it when that shift happened, it lost its intimacy.

uperson you have a much more neutral approach to this than I've been able to manage

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts. it's ridiculous i know but I didn't want to be in the spotlight like that

I think that encapsulates my aversion to facebook

i listed where I actually worked for a year and posted once innocently about a raise I got. somehow, it got back to my boss as someone squealed on me for posting that.

I then changed my profile to say my job was selling drugs

haven't had it happen since

I miss the days (2008) when Twitter was an amazing thing that beamed the thoughts of kristin hersh and kay hanley to my phone

98% of my Facebook "friends" are actually professional connections - other writers, music industry people, musicians, etc. The other 2% are a couple of my relatives, with whom I never engage, and one or two people I went to high school with. Every once in a great while, my brother will comment on something I post. But otherwise, it might as well be a LinkedIn page, with dumb jokes.

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts.

Did the same three or four years ago--uncomfortable, and also, the worst, cognizant of who posted and who didn't. (Probably got that from died-just-as-Facebook-was-invented grandmother; she used to always keep an exact count of how many Christmas cards she got each year.) I continue to post birthday wishes myself with most people I've actually met, with a secret system that indicates how I actually feel about you.

"from my"

the creepy thing about birthdate on FB is I've had friends die and their family members didn't know how to convert their profile into a Tribute page, so casual acquaintances who didn't know they died would write "happy birthday" posts on their wall. I don't mean the "remembering you today, my angel" type posts, but like they actually thought they were saying it to a living person.

it's also creepy to see FB accounts up 10+ years after the person died, and yet...someone my age that I didn't even know died of a heart attack in 2010 (she was a friend of a friend), profile is still there, still not a tribute page, page preserved in amber from 10 years ago.

Twitter is basically my newspaper, I'm on it a lot to know what's going on and be entertained, but I have no drive to cultivate my own online personality or brand.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past.
And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

I think it already has. See also "i have an account but i don't even use it"

kristin hersh still beams thoughts at me!

i still have a facebook profile because i need it for work, but have stripped it of everything but my name. (xp lol) should probably change my photo now that neil peart has died

started using twitter because of work and have become pretty attached, but if i missed something, it's gone; i'm not a completist. the politics/trump stuff can become draining, but that's my fault for not better pruning my follows/filters

i'm on no others, which, i'm told, is where the real shit happens now. it's fine; i'm pretty old

85% of my relationships started one way or another on FB, usually because I'd start a convo online and then wouldn't feel so awkward talking to the person in public.

xp -- true! if only it was just that (these were the days when tweets were sent as SMS messages to your phone)

(at least in my circles, a lot of people have migrated to Discord, which feels kind of like a happy public vs. private medium)

jill hennessy liked one of my tweets so can't nobody tell me nothin about social media, forever

Yah the kids in my house are all on discord. It seems to be akin to a cross between a forum and a sort of IRC?

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

the highlight of my Twitter career was zinging Prodigy of Mobb Deep and having him laugh at it

RIP

we've probably all been retweeted by Lil B at some point?

he linked back to the ILX thread ten years ago!

also Ripper Owens was upset that I dismissively mentioned his blip of a career in Judas Priest in less than illustrious terms

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

keep thinking it's a typo for dischord

It took me a couple of tries to come around on the film, but I think one of the best representations of how bewildering social media can be is the "Orinoco Flow" sequence in Eighth Grade--even if, in the context of the film, it simultaneously shows how adept this 14-year-old girl has become at navigating that world.

I dip back in now and again for like half a day and then I remember that social media only makes me depressed and anxious and then I extract myself and towel off and hope I've finally learned my gahdamn lesson already.

xp -- yeah, that is a major issue the platform has (partly because it was originally geared toward gamers), but it's like slack in that it is primarily based around servers/channels, so it is siloed in that regard, obviously I stay far away from anything like that

Last time I tweeted I said Twitter made me feel so left out, I felt like Flagstaff Station on a Sunday.

A friend replied "Actually Flagstaff's been open on Sundays for years how behind are you?"

*kills self*

wow, wait till granny danger hears about this

(speaking of slack, some of my friends have also migrated there, basically group chats except it's slack; an under-remarked-upon trend of the past few years, I think, is the exodus to semi-private spaces)

FB is my lifeline to older, straight friends; Twitter is essential to posting opinions on the arts. I've adapted to them w/out a hitch. Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I admired amateurist's film posts.

The use of a medium depends on who uses it, obv. I don't get worked up enough about events to constantly post on FB or Twitter; that's what ILE is for, and even then I wait for other posters to clear the way.

the answer to the question is ultimately no unless it's a very small and contained space

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

I used to think Instagram was rubbish until I started following better people. Colleagues from ten years ago with babies is nice, but now my timeline is full of musicians and DJs I'm actively interested in.

Facebook is only as good as you curate it. I'm quite generous with the Mute For A Month button. A lot of people I know are articulate and insightful with posts in a way you can't really manage on Twitter (at least in my experience). I like a lot of publications' pages, I try to stay off their comments, and I join groups that match my interests so it feels more like using early forums.

I don't use Snapchat or TikTok because I am 32.

I really don't enjoy the unfollowing/unfriending element. I'll be the first to admit I have a thin skin for perceived rejection, even though it is always people I've met a few times at parties who I have legitimately nothing in common with etc. A lot of the dynamic is binary and much as we all laughed I think Google+ was on to something with the idea of circles of closeness.

Yes. But then again I only use twitter and it's just like ilx, really.

When blogs began (mid 90s?) I came at them as a reader with the same mindset I'd had as a consumer of print journalism and posted a few snarky comments. One particular music blogger responded saying essentially, Hey I'm not charging for this, these are only my thoughts, if you don't like it don't read it, or start your own. Whether or not he was right I took it as an IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON for the new millennium and I've kept a distance in my online interraction ever since.

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

no that's more like a description of some of your terrible threads tbf!

That's total bullshit. Most accounts are just quietly posting, they find other people and form micro-groups that exchange info on things that interest them.

Yes there is plenty of noise and grifting but with carefully curated following that's what you can get.

xp

calzino, what did i do to you? i am confused.

just carry on in peace, no beef to maintain here, nothing to see!

I answered yes but really I am just talking about fb. I like hearing from old friends. I've moved around a lot and otherwise I'd lose track of them, and I don't want that. I don't have a big extended family so I don't have nutters posting alt.right minion memes or live laugh love or whatever.

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

This is true for me also. I keep up with a few people about my neighborhood, but I don't understand how it functions as a place to discuss. If I blurt something out, it's not "to" anyone in particular, so why would someone else engage with it? I don't engage with others' blurts. If they asked me directly then maybe I would. I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community. And that's what I like about social media: a way to continue discussions of irl things from people I know irl about irl things (including art, maths etc)

Book Twitter is very complimentary to ILB, actually. Although some of the people that come in from blogging annoy me a bit.

the worst thing about ig is friends liking other friends' posts but not yours. don't get me started on commenting without liking. know these issues are mine, not the platform's, so this is why I patched it

Haha it’s a good thing I’m not on ig then cause I have very poor liking etiquette - fb sometimes gives me these stupid videos that say “you liked 4 posts this month!”

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past. And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I agree with both of these statements. (Assuming salubrious is a good thing.) I dwell on what bothers me in my original post, and I voted no, but--in keeping with my gray-area mindset--of course the only honest answer is somewhere in between. Obviously I wouldn't still be here or on Facebook after 10-15 years if I weren't getting positive things in return.

I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community

it's the same way as everything else, you keep showing each other attention and eventually you change the status of that person from a loser nobody to someone you track through changes and become interested and concerned about to some non-negligible degree, PHILOSOPHER WHOM I HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATING WITH WITH NO SUPPORTING IRL COMMUNITY FOR YEARS NOW

see, like that. eventually you buy them beers and they donate to your gofundme when your kid gets face cancer

but how do you get to the point when you're showing attention to people on twitter that you don't know, and they're reciprocating? it just seems scattered to me. on fb I have been friended by people relevant to my work life that I've never met irl, and we can talk there; but there's an act of friending that makes "official" that we now attend to each other's blurts.

you'd be right to again point to ILX and say: look, you just started blurting on here, a long time ago as it were, and then you build, from nothing, communality with people here.

I suppose it's that I've looked at twitter enough to not be able to understand what counts as *discussion* on there, something transcending mere mutual blurting, but rather response, development, rethinking.

I mean, I've never really gotten SMS either as opposed to email, of course I send lots of SMS to say "yeah I'll pick up some bread" or "here's this story I was telling you about" but the compression doesn't lead to dialogue.

Disagree with this last.

1/ mutual follows

2/ replies lead to replies

3/ repeat interactions intensify over time (just like facebork can predict when two people are about to commence an 'official' romantic relationship)

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

I wish there were an option of "yes but I'm embarrassed that the answer is yes"

twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

An analysis as perceptive and fact-based as "Twitter? Who needs that? Nobody wants to read what you're having for lunch!"

Anyway, the answer is 'no'. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account fwiw.

I mean, I've never really gotten SMS either as opposed to email, of course I send lots of SMS to say "yeah I'll pick up some bread" or "here's this story I was telling you about" but the compression doesn't lead to dialogue.

i miss having substantive discussions via email so much, which for me completely atrophied with the rise of smartphones & social. there are so many people that I used to have interesting & fulfilling email correspondence with that i'm still in touch with, but our interactions gradually changed to 100% texting, which is almost entirely vapid variations of "[meme/article/YT link]"->"haha". (Its a two-way street obviously but after a certain number of years I started to give up on expecting people to respond to emails.) For a while ILX filled that void for me but less & less so as posting styles (incl my own) gradually changed in the smartphone/twitter era. I really miss getting an email from a good friend and reading about whatever's going on in their life in complete sentences written in their own voice. Nothing has really replaced it for me, I really feel the absence of it in my life and it still bums me out.

i just don't like when in a non-related topic people on one platform complain about people/discussion on another platform. don't cross the streams.

xp I feel you

though on the other hand as a semi-pro email reader/writer, well...

I have come to the (too late) realisation that not only is creating original / valuable work irrelevant to virality on social media, it is actually a handicap.

1/ mutual follows

2/ replies lead to replies

3/ repeat interactions intensify over time (just like facebork can predict when two people are about to commence an 'official' romantic relationship)

― j., Tuesday, 19 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Also plenty of those micro- communitues go on to form outside of twitter via WhatsApp groups to actual meet ups.

Plenty of people have made friendships or got married out of it too.

Besides all that I see ilx style discussions to events of the day all the time. With people who seem not to have met and just share an interest.

no way. dumb as a rock, poor emotional regulation

Instagram - pretty pictures, bands, architecture, friends’ kids. I find it quite nice.

Twitter - occasionally funny, I never tweet and only follow a half dozen people I actually know. It’s a cesspool overall but limited exposure is fine.

The key is to lightly consume and not be an active part of the ecosystem.

Facebook is also bearable if you eliminate everyone you don’t have a strong personal connection to and just make dick jokes with each other.

xp -- the problem with substantive discussions via email is writing the email, it's all the procrastination of writing for work plus an added vector of guilt because now it's personal

Something gained, something lost: in the early days of e-mail, it was a smooth transition from letter-writing for me, so I wrote long, thoughtful e-mails to whichever American friends I'd been writing letters to and who now had e-mail. Now I mostly FB message, and whatever e-mails I send are very short. 1000 times easier, 1000 times more superficial.

ikr

ok Twitter is good now! j, I followed your suggestions and followed a Fields medalist who is active on there, and today he made an announcement relevant to my interests & I tweeted back an invitation to further dialogue (in irl), and then they tweeted back with interest!

La Lechera posted something last year that nicely captures some key differences between ILX and social media.

I'd like to say something nice that is more generally about ILX:
When I get the urge to engage in conversation (specifically online in lieu of an IRL option), I strongly prefer to have a conversational group of people who might care about what I have to say. The way ILX is structured, I can choose to share my thoughts/questions (at any time of day or night!) about a specific topic with other people interested in that topic who ostensibly read/ post on the thread because they also have an interest in the topic. Then I potentially (ideally) avoid 1) annoying/inciting the "rage" of other people by yammering to people who don't care and 2) can learn from others interested in the topic 3) post in several different threads without feeling like I am yammering in a manner coherent to myself alone, as I would if I were to share my thoughts on twitter, for example.

There's no Me Feed here unless someone specifically searches for posts by a specific user (right?). I realize that hashtags function in this way for some people, but I like the general environment of ILX because I am free from my own image, free from my public-facing identity, and yet also hopefully at least somewhat known to people on account of having been here for a while (since 2005?!) and having met/enjoyed quality hangs with a number of you irl (and online!)

So thanks ILX, you have weathered the social media storm and come out ahead in a number of ways. You are not perfect and you have had many bouts of being unwell as a space for my preferred variety of nonconfrontational conversation, you are still here and have the above-mentioned attributes to your favor. This post is not about me; it is about appreciating the longevity and specificity of our old pal. ILX. *toast*

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, August 1, 2019 4:03 PM (nine months ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I feel that post a lot. early in my professional life a senior member of my field told me that I was quiet in an irl setting where it would have been better to be vocal, and he was right, because I get shy when there are a medium number of people watching (I'm comfortable talking to small and large groups, by contrast). I had to "get over it" because professional advancement made it necessary and I'm now ok at it. I still wonder if it's just some natural shyness, or something about my ethnic upbringing, as a Latino; and whether my profession reinforces the...forthrightness of other ethnic groups without recognizing other ethnic dispositions. Maybe this is also true of social media.

not "forthrightness", more, "forwardness", I think.

i think there's a lot of space made in philosophy for people who want to hold the floor for various reasons (many notably not good). even the ones who don't want that as speakers are disposed to encourage it by the ways they are receptive to it as listeners and respondents.

yeah it can be rotten. I think I like settings where everyone is encouraged to have their turn, rather than letting the big mouths hog things. I just wonder about the gender & ethnic dimensions of being a big mouth or of being someone who wants to give space to others (I am of the latter kind). Though sometimes I feel like I have something actually worth saying, and I guess the big mouths must feel like that all the time? I just make sure not to sit next to them at dinners.

La lechera otm, hate social media. I used to post on ilx way too much and now it seems comparatively incredibly benign. Also can be sure nothing is going to 'go viral' and so the show off element and careering that exists on Twitter say is not a thing here. There's also the archival element, you can return to theads or use them as resources (I recently read all the threads about the red Crayola while really stuck on 'introduction'

Feeling these posts from jaymc’s on down

I'll be honest: I've had more scraps on ILX than on Facebook, in about the same time-frame. Nothing too major, else I'd be long gone, but there have been more than a few exchanges over the years that upset me, something that hardly ever happens with me on Facebook. I imagine that has to do with the combination of the way I approach the two and the fact your Facebook world is much easier to control.

la lechera post is SO otm

I think I've had two scraps on Facebook in 10 years. One with a former friend I blocked, one with my sister-in-law who blocked me, but has unblocked me since. I haven't got into that many scraps on ILX in the same time period, but it's certainly been more than two!

You can look at the amount of control you have two different ways. As LL says, you can pick which threads you read or post on with ILX. But that only goes so far. Whatever scraps I've gotten into have been, presumably, "with other people interested in that topic who ostensibly read/post on the thread because they also have an interest in the topic." But that doesn't really spare you from confrontation--it facilitates it, if--the part of ILX I've never understood--someone's lying in wait to make a big deal out of the fact you don't see this common interest (a film, a baseball player, whatever) the same way. The control on Facebook is in who's on your friends list and what feeds you let onto your wall. Which, to me, feels like much more control.

This thread making me thinking about a lot of things, not sure how much I can post now, probably not too much, but for the most part, with some expected exceptions of course, FB posting seems to me so generic, so disposable, so preaching-to-the-converted, so me me me me me, etc.. Here we have a ghost of chance that we are having some kind of interesting conversation. Also you post something interesting on FB, maybe at best you will get a few likes (I have kept my number of friends amazingly low over the past decade) Post something interesting here and there is a much better chance someone will respond in kind. Even if no one responds you may find it again yourself years later and get something out of it, it doesn't have that same sense of sitting there Unliked or Uncared for.

I mean, the problem -- which is also a problem with twitter, but maybe not a social media-specific problem -- is that there are designated Bad People, which are sometimes designated due to good reasons, or reasons that are knowable and avoidable, but not always. and once someone is a designated Bad Person then anything else they post is deemed bad; and furthermore, once someone is designated as a Bad Person, everybody else is compelled to share that opinion, or else they too will become a designated Bad Person

see: the dozen or so people here who supposedly are trolls but whom, at least from their posts, have given zero indications that they are not operating in good faith, and yet every time they post in a thread, even if that string of words would be acceptable with another name attached, they receive so much vitriol

I'll probably regret saying this, but I never--never--understood the vitriol heaped on Fred B. I know he had lots of opinions on American politics from a thousand miles away--if I were American, I'm sure that would sometimes get under my skin. (I went through a much more benign version of that when I first joined ILX, a Canadian who had an interest in American politics--especially, horror of horrors, the "race-horse" aspect of it.) But, as you say, "that string of words would be acceptable with another name attached."

I've never really understood either and have wondered whether there were some posts or threads that I missed.

That's what I always think.

I've never really understood either and have wondered whether there were some posts or threads that I missed.

Yes, there were. Obviously. It wasn't just US politics threads he annoyed people on btw, he did the same every single time he appeared in a UK politics threads too. I don't want to list Fred's faults, because that's a thankless task if ever there was one, but I tried with the guy occasionally but all he did was throw stuff back in your face. I will mention one fault though: one minute (haughtily) "I don't resort to insults and personal attacks", the next minute, "You're an idiot".

No big deal though, every person who's ever been banned on here (or banned more than once in Fred's case) has had someone say, "I never saw what the problem with them".

"... with them was"

Rule #1 of ILX: every thread eventually becomes a Fred B thread, especially when he's not there to partake in it.

He's just the latest one.

Come to think of it, he supplied ILX's current board description, no?

What is it?

'not I day goes by where I don't feel like I'm smarter than everyone else on here'

It is very easy to engage with social media in moderation and maintain mental health. No one knows discipline anymore. I love Twitter but I don't spend all day on it. I know lots of people who read *their entire timeline*, like every tweet. Insane. Social media is to be checked in on, watched when you have a moment's rest, like a river or a stream. I like skipping pebbles on ponds. The key is remaining the person and not becoming the pebble. The overextended metaphor ends here, with the post

yet the thread does not

For me it does. I must leave now

but

I've always liked Fred B's contributions to the film threads. I would follow him on twitter but all of his posts are in Danish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM86DdwT71Y

It is very easy to engage with social media in moderation and maintain mental health. No one knows discipline anymore. I love Twitter but I don't spend all day on it. I know lots of people who read *their entire timeline*, like every tweet. Insane. Social media is to be checked in on, watched when you have a moment's rest, like a river or a stream. I like skipping pebbles on ponds. The key is remaining the person and not becoming the pebble. The overextended metaphor ends here, with the post

― flappy bird, Thursday, May 21, 2020 3:33 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

no it's not, actually. it's no secret that these platforms / interfaces are designed to be addictive. people don't check their phones all the time because they lack self-control. they're hooked like junkies or alcoholics.

we have an entire society that's wrapped up in this shit, that's toxically dependent on total trash, scrolling, filling the void, unable to step away.

just do some basic research on the deleterious cognitive effects of social media. we're going to look back at children with smartphones and IG accounts like how we see smoking culture now.

Post something interesting here and there is a much better chance someone will respond in kind. Even if no one responds you may find it again yourself years later and get something out of it, it doesn't have that same sense of sitting there Unliked or Uncared for.

i like this about ILX. sometimes you're posting just to share. other times it's for the conversation / perspectives / tips. but occasionally you look in on threads and it's clearly just one person's little project, and that's okay, too.

It is very easy to engage with social media in moderation and maintain mental health. No one knows discipline anymore.

― flappy bird

a boy used to kick a ball in the yard

I did have to put in place a rule, i.e. I'll read x amounts of pages/chapters before picking up my phone again.

And then I'm reading a lot more links I get from twitter and here too, so if anything I'm just reading a lot more.

I like both of bodu jeru's posts, they explain why ilx is the best social media to me

*medium

The addiction thing is real.

more and more I am starting to think the issue is more my not being cut out for human contact, of which social media is just a subset

LOL I've just remembered Joe Biden was responsible for Fred's demise too. That guy's a menace.

like, for instance, right now I do not know the proper stance to have toward the shallot pasta. I did not know it was wrong to make it until like an hour ago. how many of my other recipes are attached to the designated wrong people? how would I know? (it's all a moot point anyway because I hate shallots and would never make it anyway; but that in itself also is a wrong stance, because according to the discourse it makes me a bad person because my food thus has no flavor -- something I don't understand because there are plenty of things without shallots or onions that nevertheless have plenty of flavor (like puttanesca, which the shallot pasta basically is), but the discourse is firm with no wiggle room

No one knows discipline anymore

flappy i'm not making fun of you here but you are a person who had to *quit* listening to the smashing pumpkins

xp don't like shallots much tbh, they seem incidental to any recipe, just use onions and garlic

(to clarify this is not me defending her, but rather this is saying that I so rarely know what the rules are until it's announced that people retroactively are horrible people for having broken them. like everything one can do in life that isn't obviously morally charged, like making a recipe for pasta, can be milkshake ducked at any time)

Perhaps not every moral outrage is worth engaging with

I mean once it is put out into the world that there are moral stakes, then "not engaging" is itself a position

It's ok to sometimes say you just don't care about the controversy du jour. None of us has the mental or emotional bandwidth to take a principled stand on every last topic.

Definitely not cut out for social media but I can find a comfortable/bearable place in most uncomfortable rooms. Also trying to retrain my brain to believe it’s alright to promote myself.

I mean that's the thing though, it is always "this is wrong," not "this is wrong unless you don't have the mental or emotional bandwidth"

What the shit are y’all talking about re: shallots and pasta??

https://twitter.com/search?q=shallot%20pasta&src=typed_query

Shallot pasta only has to bother you if you willingly engage in the posting wars. Whatever the controversy is there just treat it like the tabloid headlines in the supermarket checkout line. You never had to argue with anyone about Bat Boy’s predictions.

Ok a cursory look at that lets me know this controversy is 100% not something I care about at all.

Who has the energy to argue about shallots or even recipes rn??

apologies for not wanting to do something I've been told is wrong, I guess

I don't understand where you're coming from, I think? Why do any of those people mad on Twitter - in either direction, people who think it's an issue of racism or people who think it's an issue of performative identity politics - have moral authority to tell you anything is wrong? The people on both sides of that war should spend 48 hours in a padded cell IMO.

the counterpoint to that, though, is why do you -- or me, or anyone else -- have the moral authority to say that they're wrong and not worth paying attention to?

well, judgment

Because what you pay attention to is a personal decision. You're exerting moral authority over yourself, which I think is a pretty fair application of it.

off topic, incidentally I cooked alison roman's chickpea stew with coconut milk recipe today, it turned out good after I added a bunch of madras curry and some more red pepper flakes, but it has 33 gm of saturated fat per serving! I liked it but I'm not going to make that again often in the future

xp -- I doubt if you told someone staking a moral stance on something that "I'm making a personal decision" would be given literally any credence at all. nor is it a principle that holds up with anything else that's a more clear-cut moral issue ("sorry I murdered your buddy, but I just don't have the mental and emotional bandwidth to pay attention to people saying murder is wrong, you know?")

are we still talking about whether or not it's okay to like the pasta made from the recipe by the newspaper lady who made a boo-boo with the celebrity??

yes, but it is just the latest example of something where it feels like dozens more rules materialize by the week in ways that are not predictable in advance

just as you can use your own judgment about whether to pay attention to those, you can also use it to determine whether to pay attention to people who think you should or shouldn't pay attention to them in specific ways? you can also use it not to voice any opinions that would elicit adverse attention from them?? idgi

the most evergreen headline in the world is "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people"

I doubt if you told someone staking a moral stance on something that "I'm making a personal decision" would be given literally any credence at all.

That's what I mean, though, what gives this person taking their moral stance any authority over you? Just because they care doesn't mean you have to. The people fighting on Twitter are mad about something with zero stakes - no one involved has any influence on Roman's job or Marie Kondo's wealth.

For it to weigh on someone's mind, they have to let it in. At that point it's hard to feel bad for someone if the Twitter controversy upsets them - they made the choice to play the game.

it feels like dozens more rules materialize by the week in ways that are not predictable in advance

if this troubles you, perhaps it is an indication that social media and you may be somewhat incompatible. one good strategy might be to confine your first 'dates' with social media to group dates which include some trusted friends, or maybe a low-key, low risk meeting with social media at a coffee shop for a skinny latte and splitting a muffin. it may be too early to exchange phone numbers or addresses until you feel more sure you get along.

it is a psychologically hazardous inference to think that if you don't care about some thing (e.g. a hot topic of the day that 'everyone' urges you to 'care' about) then you 'don't care about other people'.

also to think that there are rules, that can be predicted in advance, about how one is to care if one cares. what people can and should care about isn't given by rules, that's the whole point of caring. you have to let your concerns guide you and stay open to having them changed.

taking one's lead from the conformist drives of the daily internet mob is not a way to be guided by one's concerns, and it's not something one should be open to.

I think maybe the problem is the second level nature of Twitter controversies that makes them ignorable IMO.

If a momentarily famous TikTok person misgendered someone - snipe at TikTok person on Twitter, okay, comfort the person misgendered if you know them and it upset them, absolutely. But then when it devolves into two teams and the argument is about social positioning as being on the right or wrong team, ruuuuuuuuuun.

"yes, but it is just the latest example of something where it feels like dozens more rules materialize by the week in ways that are not predictable in advance"

Who gives a fuuuuuuck

people who care about not doing something that people have said causes harm?

that's not what you're doing is it?

people have said that it would be! (it just happens in this case that the "wrong" thing intersects with a food dislike I have. but as above, having that dislike is also wrong)

how?!?!?!?!?!? i think there is a calibration issue here, the harms you should be concerned about first are the ones that you cause by your actions or by what it is up to you to choose. harms 'people' say are being caused (to whom? by whose actions, when?) are not something that it is fruitful to prioritize on the level of day-to-day attention to the internet

and DISLIKING A FOOD IS WRONG? katherine, this is a difficult conversation to take seriously

I do think people who dislike empanadas are cum tbf

*scum

xp -- whenever it is uncovered on twitter that a person doesn't like ingredients like, in this case, shallots, they are relentlessly mocked with the implication that they are a bad person

so ignore it. i mean I'm someone who lets things get to him way way way too much but you can control who you do and don't engage with. if you try to take a side in every internet, twitter, Facebook ,Instagram, Glooper (it's not invented yet, but that's the next social media site), and feel as if you have less value if someone on any of those platforms has cast judgment about you....you're going to be miserable fast.

I have to force myself off of all of these platforms for hours a day to avoid constantly driving myself insane. and I have to accept that somewhere, a greasy dude with hair like the guy from Eraserhead thinks I'm a piece of shit. and that's ok.

Cum empanadas

That’s a mental image that’s never leaving

representative is the replies to this tweet -- a little inaccurate since I do like garlic a lot (and probably use more of it to compensate) but not once is there a "it's okay not to like a certain food, it's just a food."

Garlic and onions are staples for many home cooks. But do these plants actually add any health benefits to your dishes? Or are they purely for flavor? https://t.co/3a5m2klpkv pic.twitter.com/aGzIMkjgZK

— TIME (@TIME) February 24, 2020

"Fucking learn to cook god damn"

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6O_6tDOcUNQ/T2BNB7cPZWI/AAAAAAAACrc/gSkeJ-K3sYw/s1600/Penguin+no.+1670.jpg

All of the replies I see are basically “who gives a fuck, they taste good”?

with a lot of "you must hate food that tastes good," "I don't trust you or your cooking," "learn to cook," "you're a child," etc.

Shallot pasta only has to bother you if you willingly engage in the posting wars. Whatever the controversy is there just treat it like the tabloid headlines in the supermarket checkout line. You never had to argue with anyone about Bat Boy’s predictions.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z)

the last time i accidentally clicked on a guardian link - i think i wanted to read some old story about classical music or something - the top trending story was what lilly wachowski said to elon musk on twitter. now, i have a tremendous amount of personal respect for lilly. i am glad she has a voice. for a long time people like us didn't have a voice, and that fucking sucked. i do not, however, particularly enjoy, fuck it, i'll just say it, LIVING IN A SOCIETY where how we talk to each other is all filtered through the spectrum of twitter trash talk. it's not a healthy medium, most places on the internet aren't, and while usenet was no great shakes it's social media that, more than anything else, makes me believe that this world is hell.

xp

Well, why would there be “it’s ok not to like x” replies? The tweet is goofy bc it implies that people would only use ingredients for their health benefits, and approaches cooking from a viewpoint that seems bizarre to most people who cook regularly. I’m sure if the tweet was “onions are bad imo” there would be assholish replies (though likely the majority would be outrage in animated gif form with no real malice) but also people agreeing or saying “seems weird but whatever, like what you like”

I’m sure if the tweet was “onions are bad imo” there would be assholish replies (though likely the majority would be outrage in animated gif form with no real malice) but also people agreeing or saying “seems weird but whatever, like what you like”

― JoeStork, Thursday, May 21, 2020 10:34 PM (nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

you would be incorrect, I just haven't dug up any of the tweets proving this wrong (but they all do)

with a lot of "you must hate food that tastes good," "I don't trust you or your cooking," "learn to cook," "you're a child," etc.

I see much less of that but still, I don’t know how this relates to the rules and morals you were referring to? I don’t even see two sides developing there for a good war, just randos drive-by shit talking.

I'm very confused, are we saying that the Allison Roman controversy has devolved into an argument about whether it's ok to eat shallot pasta, and the morality of liking shallots and onions in general, or conversely, whether it is morally acceptable to dislike onions? That seems to be what we are talking about, but I really can't quite parse it.

(the depressing thing is I don't like recipes that are bland, either; there's a whole planet full of ingredients, many quite strong/spicy/fermented/bitter/sour/earthy/etc., that don't make me have to wash my mouth out for several minutes to get rid of the taste. and yet according to the discourse that isn't true)

Random people on Twitter are not "the discourse"

xp -- the commonality is that they are both points in the ever-expanding constellation of things that don't fit into any predictable moral framework, and yet are deemed to be morally wrong with no wiggle room, and to always have been morally wrong, and morally wrong enough that anyone who likes/dislikes/does/doesn't do the proper thing is fair game to mock en masse

Deemed by whom?

Phil Collins

Like, you can literally find any shitty point of view you want on Twitter

hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, all of whom generally have correct moral stances on other things (aka why "sure, some random MAGA says it's wrong to vote Trump, but their entire moral framework is essentially concentrated evil" isn't a counterargument

sorry -- why "some random MAGA says it's wrong not to vote Trump!" isn't a counterargument

seems like it's the anchovies and tomato paste that make that pasta what it is, not as much the shallots. I think I would like it but then get sick of it after a couple of servings (there are always multiple leftover servings to be consumed as a single person)

the lady of shallot

the other counterargument is "they don't actually mean that!" but if they don't mean something, then why say it? if they meant something else, they would have said something else.

Dan S lol

is everybody high in here?

no but my mask briefly cut off oxygen briefly

-briefly

no, this is the kind of thing I think about virtually every hour of every day

Whether it's ok to dislike onions?

again, this is just one example of something that there are thousands of accumulated examples of, this is just one that happened to materialize today

substitute "being a fan of lana del rey" if you want

I think the confusion is that no one seems to know why you're giving hundreds of strangers with an opinion (out of like 7.5 billion) any weight at all?

There are tens or hundreds of thousands of Flat Earthers and 40% of the US thinks abortion is a mortal sin but lol fuck both those groups IMO.

I just don’t know why replies on twitter should gain any moral weight, especially regarding something that just seems on its face to not have much substance. There are millions of people whose politics align with mine on issues of substance - civil rights, war, economic and social justice, etc. Some small minority of those people adapt those views to make moral judgments based on celebrity Twitter drama, but plenty of others ignore it completely, and I don’t think they’re turning their backs on a moral obligation by doing so. Occasionally I’ll dig into some twitter controversy out of curiosity but I rarely feel like I’ve improved myself in any way, I usually just feel gross and vaguely depressed.

because, if you were to ask any one of those strangers, they would surely say that others should give that opinion moral weight, and I do not believe in writing people off like that because "strangers"

No, they wouldn't! Have you never talked shit about... pineapple pizza? Or rolled your eyes at Twilight fans?

Should you go through life with a deep worry about the lizard people who control the one world government because David Icke and Alex Jones have large followings?

xp you should write them off because it doesn't matter what they think about whether you like shallots, that's totally your own personal private affair

a) no, why would I do that, it's just food and it's just a book

b) no, because that would also require becoming -- or at least endorsing, which pretty much is becoming -- a raging anti-semite, crypto-fascist, etc.

But twitter by its nature elevates the angriest and loudest voices, right?

angry and loud does not necessarily equal wrong, oftentimes people are angry and loud because they have something worth being angry or loud about

Shallots?

Yes, and it's worth paying attention to those voices when they're discussing internment camps and police brutality and various underreported evils in the world. But when the subject is shallots or celebrity chefs I think it's fair to assume that they might just like yelling on the internet and getting attention.

is there like a moral dimension to this? are shallots a food of the oppressor????

Just a food and just a book is why people are trash talking on Twitter. No one actually thinks you're a baby for not eating onions or sardines or whatever, there is no Shallot Army building to defend anyone's honor.
The only people drawing actual honest to God moral lines in the sand based on fandoms and tastebuds are insane.

And yeah - you use your judgement to decide that just because a mass of people believes something, that doesn't mean you need to give it any moral weight or let it intrude on your thoughts at all.

Shallots are bougie onions.

No one actually thinks you're a baby for not eating onions or sardines or whatever

but then why are they saying this

Like, sure, there is too much awfulness in the world for anyone to be completely fair-minded about what they devote their energy to. But if someone is lecturing people for days about Alison Roman in May 2020 I don't think you have any reason to view them as a voice of moral authority.

xp because they're idiots! or assholes! who cares why they are saying something that you don't have to listen to

"someone dissed me yesterday, what I'posed to do? Go cry?"

-Gucci Mane

Because they’re talking shit (or they’re assholes/idiots). That’s not even a Twitter thing, trash talking seems to be universally human.

"yet are deemed to be morally wrong with no wiggle room, and to always have been morally wrong, and morally wrong enough that anyone who likes/dislikes/does/doesn't do the proper thing is fair game to mock en masses".

Who fucking cares! Girl, you've got to stop giving so much of a fuck. You seem to think that there's no happy medium between perpetually being hyper sensitive about what every single person on the planet thinks of oneself and being a sociopath.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Geneshalit.JPG/220px-Geneshalit.JPG

Mean-spirited statements tend to attract attention and some people like to bask in it at any cost (see: the internet). It's safe to say they don't deserve our time.

No child who I sniped in Call of Duty ever fucked my mom but many claimed to.

one kid told me to leave his team cos I sucked, and I told him I was gonna fuck his mom

I might have, i don't remember

but then why are they saying this

I wish I understood your vulnerability to each and every thing that is said within range of your notice, and your apparent lack of filters that might allow you to ignore any part of it, but I do not. However, in light of that apparent vulnerability, I can say that the crashing hubbub of social media is definitely a place that will bruise your sensibilities constantly and relentlessly, and given how little sense you seem to make out of that input, I would expect you will never find any peace in your engagement with social media.

You alone can decide if this observation has any validity. All I can do is read what you write, compare that to whatever I think I know about people and the internet, and draw my imperfect and tentative conclusions to share with you. Good luck.

I thought Alison Roman was a dick to Chrissy Teigen, but I also just put some Great Northern beans in an online shopping cart so I could make a soup recipe of hers that a friend recommended. Possibly the Roman-Teigen dust-up would make me reluctant to tweet favorably about the recipe (if I were the kind of person who tweeted about cooking), because I wouldn't want to invite any negative reactions while tempers are still flared. But I don't have any compunction about making it, because the controversy doesn't really seem important enough to dictate how I go about my life at home, much less how I feel about myself.

no, this is the kind of thing I think about virtually every hour of every day

I say this out of love and concern: this isn't healthy. You should seek counseling on this.

so if someone says you're being racist, you find it an acceptable answer to say "lol you don't matter"?

well not when i'm being racist, but i thought we were talking about the shallot people

that is the connotation of it, yes

If someone says I'm racist because I cooked a dish with shallots in it written by a woman who (dumbly) criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I am going to ignore that person forever.

which side is the racist side again? the ones who like the shallots or the ones who don't?

If I cooked that dish with shallots in it as a show of solidarity with a suspended writer who dumbly criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I'm also a dumbo.

I hadn’t been reading this thread but now I see that something has happened to it

so it's not about the shallots at all? the shallots are just a prop in a drama?

But I think a lot of the confusion is whether we're talking about shallots or Alison Roman - the tweet you linked earlier was about the ingredients themselves and didn't appear to have any moral component, the Alison Roman thing is about two teams of people arguing about whether one team is woke enough.

oh i get it we're talking about the olympics

the logical thread is:

- I only learned as of earlier this evening the act of making a certain shallot pasta recipe makes you a bad person because it means supporting someone bad, but also it is wrong to say that it is wrong to make the pasta recipe. both sides are adamant in this, with no wiggle room. the reason this is because I find a lot of my recipes by googling ingredients and thus literally have no idea who they are associated with, so I don't know what other recipes are and aren't acceptable. (one data point :an article around this implied that everything bon appetit puts out is suspect, which I feel shitty about, since I made something they published tonight.)

- in this particular case I dodged a bullet because I dislike shallots, and thus there was no risk of my making the pasta even if I was team hell yeah do all the racism

- however, it is hard to call that "dodging a bullet" when disliking shallots, itself, is another act that has been previously construed -- many times, usually via mocking someone who doesn't like them -- as something that makes you a bad person. in other words, I only passed the test by failing another.

- these are just examples, everyone is fixating on these examples but on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand; and then on another day entirely I could give you the discourse agreeing that doing the opposite makes you a bad person. (baking bread in a pandemic is a good example -- first it was wrong to do it because it wastes yeast others need, and then someone on medium published an article saying essentially that, and she was mocked relentlessly for suggesting it was wrong to waste yeast others need)

sorry, editing mistake, the first point should be "the reason I feel stuck is because I find..."

it's not logical at all!

there is no reason to listen to these voices!

I don't see how shallots can be shamed into voting for Biden, surely there has to be a better approach

some kind of tax credit maybe

yes, that (who to vote for, should you vote, etc.) is another excellent example of a case where there is no acceptable option presented, and the stakes should be much easier to grasp in that example

easy, just vote for the democrat, next

In no way does making these recipes or having an opinion pro or con about a mundane ingredient make you a bad person or a racist. You seem to have somehow waded into the middle of a debate that has nothing to do with just picking out recipes and cooking them.

If someone wants to make the point that famous white cooks or influencers who cook food from other cultures should do more to acknowledge those cultures, that's fine, they probably should! But it's completely stupid to yell at anyone just because they are trying to cook themselves some food they like regardless of what ingredients they do or not use. Don't take it to heart, people get angry about a lot of tangential stuff that really has nothing to do with the actual issues they are grappling with.

xp -- by no means is "just vote for the democrat" an uncontroversial stance

I only learned as of earlier this evening the act of making a certain shallot pasta recipe makes you a bad person because it means supporting someone bad,

I think this dilemma solves itself right here - you didn't know about it until you ran across a cesspool on Twitter accidentally, ergo had you made the dish at any point you would not have acted with ill intent and all those people accusing each other (and by extension, you) of terrible things can go fly a kite.

If you have a Paula Deen cookbook that doesn't make you a racist, it makes you someone at higher risk of getting diabetes. If you bought all of Paula Deen's cookbooks because she's a racist, then you're a racist - but short of that, you're in the clear.

that shallot pasta recipe is tasty

the shallot sauce is really versatile too. I make a full jar and keep some aside to add into scrambled eggs

- these are just examples, everyone is fixating on these examples but on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand; and then on another day entirely I could give you the discourse agreeing that doing the opposite makes you a bad person.

delete twitter imo

yes, that is a frequent thing told to people who have been identified as bad people/"the main character of the day"/etc

But - who to vote for is theoretically important! Like, it's easier for some people than others, but it is making a decision to endorse a person who will almost certainly be responsible for some terrible actions, and who might also prevent suffering for many others. That is a genuine moral dilemma that's worth thinking about. The pasta recipe is not important at all! Whether or not someone makes a recipe impacts no one but themselves and whoever eats the pasta, unless the cooking is accompanied by some rabid anti-SJW ranting, which is not anything you're going to do. Random Twitter flare-ups do not necessitate a new set of rules to follow, and they do not deserve to compete for space in your brain with genuine questions of morality and ethics. No one will remember this shallot shit by July.

I meant the whole thing, but sure people should delete their individual accounts also as a first step. spent far too much time on it during 2015-2019 following the_discourse and learned that all of the main characters and feted voices in blighty's Benighted National Conversation are mostly talking pish and awful basturts to boot. you won't find your moral center on twitter - far too much noise, not enough (any?) signal

no one will remember this shallot shit by friday next week

zero signal

I dunno about that, moral center of Twitter is easy to find - https://twitter.com/BassetMortimer

"so if someone says you're being racist, you find it an acceptable answer to say "lol you don't matter"?"

Depending on the person and the context, absofuckinglutely

this thread reminds me that for some reason i can never remember what a "shallot" is

Real life example: I run an open gym,for basketball. 2 native Americans came one night, male and female. The guy was being a jerk to me, for no reason (well actually turns out he was intimidated by my skills and was trying to "get in my head". We're friends now). The woman saw me and the guy squabbling and so she started playing dirty: shoved me, elbowed me, etc. I told her if she didn't stop, she had to leave. She got in my face, yelling. I said stop being stupid, your guy being a jerk to me is no reason for you to physically assault me. "Oh you're calling us both stupid?? You fucking racist!!" To which I replied yep you got me, I'm racist.
She was being ridiculous and acting out of emotions (the guy was her husband). I knew I wasn't being racist and so dismissed her accusation.

You go away for a while and you come back and everything is 0_o

it's good pasta tom

sorry

No need to apologize.

facebook: good for private groups (i am sorting out a lot of personal shit atm), i don’t use it for anything else or even have friends on there

instagram: so many ads that i don’t even open the thing any more

twitter: i have not felt more alone or ignored since high school (even before it went to shit)

reddit: just where i get my breaking news (ever since twitter went to shit)

discord: i’m pretty low key on the whole, mainly because most servers are full of adolescents and i don’t want to be that guy, but it can be pretty good when you find your people

language exchange apps: depends on where my head is on any given day; usually comprises overwhelming amounts of unrewarding small talk with strangers

ilx: the longest i’ve ever been active on one platform

linkedin: actually worse than eating my own balls

twitter trolls don’t faze me bc i was once brutally dragged in a houseplant forum for overwatering my fiddle leaf fig tree and i haven’t felt anything since

— alexa (@mariokartdwi) October 10, 2018

I like shallots

What the shit are y’all talking about re: shallots and pasta??

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, 22 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

https://twitter.com/search?q=shallot%20pasta&src=typed_query

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Friday, 22 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

There have been numerous threads on ilx over the years where people act all outraged around people's tastes, no? What's the difference?

By the time I got on twitter and saw people talking about what an abomination Dolmio was, or pineapple on pizza...I had just seen it all (or something like it, with similar levels of logic applied) before.

Pineapple and prosciutto is a solid pizza combo, may god let into the light those who do not see its wonder.

Pineapple Canadian bacon ricotta is heavenly

I can't imagine a subject I couldn't care less about other people's opinions on than what I enjoy stuffing into my gaping maw

on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand

I really hope that it doesn't sound smug when I assert that it's possible to be a productive and well-integrated member of society, while not being a consumer of social media. I've never had a an account on Facebook or Twitter and I'm not even 100% sure what Instagram is.
The reason why, I guess, is that I don't care in the slightest what any of those fuckers think about anything. Try it!

Wow, this thread turned into a dramatic reading of David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person" really unexpectedly.

Each and every thing is bound up with countless contexts, whose existence we scarcely even suspect most of the time. As a general rule, however, we ascribe a limited set of contexts to a given thing, and an even tinier subset – one, at times two – of these contexts tends to trump all others in day to day life. In Western cultures, for instance, viewing the swastika as a mere religious symbol is a glaring dogwhistle more often than not. But what of the shallot? As with all ingredients, it possesses its own cultural connotations, which make it an object of inquiry for sociologists of food, but none of these connotations are prominent enough to thoroughly saturate its meaning, i.e. to tie it, more or less irreversibly, to a specific context ('swastika = Nazism').

When someone makes a blanket statement about shallots ('they're bad and you're a racist for liking them' or whatever), you are instinctively prompted to evaluate their claim. The argument may well be intriguing, but in this particular case it only seems to make 'sense' against the backdrop of a hyper-specific Twitter beef that 99.9% of humanity has never heard of (tbh I've already forgotten who its dramatis personae are and what the exact issue was in the first place). Is an obscure scandal enough to exhaust the meaning of 'shallot', let alone its taste? Why would you universalize this esoteric frame of reference in particular? Why value it over and above all other contexts? You may feel like the 'shallots are bad' crew deserves a fair hearing, but once that's done, why would you grant their opinion (which may not even be one per se, since much of it looks like trolling to me) more weight than all other possible opinions about shallots, which suddenly appear to be reduced to naught?

that shallot to take in

Draw near, and fear not.

Unperson otm :(

Hard to read tbh

it's not about shallots in general, it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to. again, all of this would be apparent if people would just read what people are saying

and again, this is just one example, I don't know why everyone is so fixated on this as if there aren't thousands more examples. maybe I should have chosen the lana del rey blog post instead

it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to

To reiterate: why give so much weight to this specific subcontext?

because I don't want to support racists?

someone you shouldn't be showing support to

Your example is crystal clear. The question everyone but you has is why you care so much what this specific group of anonymous Twitter randos thinks that you are willing to agonize over your personal food choices as though they can a) see you b) judge you and find you wanting and c) punish you in some way for your "wrong"ness.

To put it another way, why are you accepting others' framing of the situation? I am aware of the contretemps surrounding Alison Roman and Chrissy Teigen. I am unclear on how that contretemps makes Alison Roman "a racist" and therefore, transitively, those who cook her recipes "supporting racism."

a) they're not anonymous; in many cases, they have their real names and faces by their accounts. if anything, most of you are more "anonymous" than they are.
b) why the fuck does it matter whether they're anonymous or not? most likely, they're still people. as people, they deserve not to be dismissed.
c) generally if someone points out racism, a person's job is to shut the fuck up and take that to heart, not to go "no! I am the only arbiter of racism! you don't even have a blue check!"

katherine, i say this out of compassion, i think you need to watch this about 100 times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7z_ztMxBgk

Whatever. By your standards I am clearly a Bad Person as well (after all, I have the Wrong Opinion in the case of Roman v Teigen), so you probably should not listen to what I say, or engage with my questions.

One final question, though: do you apply this philosophy - "why the fuck does it matter whether they're anonymous or not? most likely, they're still people. as people, they deserve not to be dismissed." - across the board, or only to people who make you feel bad about yourself?

Cooking a recipe is not rascist

b) is false, you have not given any good grounds for relying on it

my new thesis is that the central problem of the internet is that it turns things that are Absolutely None of Your Fucking Business into things you think are your business

— Girl Fieri, Dirtbag Gourmand (@Schwindter) May 22, 2020

crut extremely otm, would increase to a 100x daily ritual until it sinks in

xps you are taking a general principle of charity toward the opinions of others, and overextending it into a principle of severe self-abnegation that puts your mental health at the mercy of every random occurrence of negligible relevance to the actual situation in which you act and in which your moral worth is assessible

yes, across the board, which results in the thing I had originally mentioned, that so frequently every choices becomes wrong and there is no space for a choice that is both morally correct (does not cause or increase harm or suffering) and safe (does not you get torn apart relentlessly, with no statute of limitations)

girl i am sorry but you need to stop worrying about this!! i say this with care!

xp --

b) is false, you have not given any good grounds for relying on it

― j., Friday, May 22, 2020 10:38 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

by this logic I should not be listening to you because you are just known as "j" and thus aren't a person and don't count. presumably you would disagree with that

you're not reading this right

it's not that the result is choices that can't be right

it's that the result is you feeling like no choice can be right

but you're wrong about the relevance of these imagined situations (you, positioning yourself as a reader of this stream of media) to you and your actual choices and their rightness

you honestly sound like you are turning a seminar-room bout of radical skepticism into an operating principle and then challenging other people to talk you out of your impossible belief

but other people are not trying to prove you wrong to prove you wrong, they're trying to dissuade you from your attachment to a mis-estimation of the importance of some of these things that is clearly causing you distress. you cannot debate your way out of this!

what other people are asking me to do is to disregard people who are pointing out instances of harm because "lol fuck the haters, they don't even count as human"

that is not true
katherine i wish you didn't care so much about what other people think but i am def not going to argue.w you about it.
it's just hard to watch someone struggling like this.

xp no they are not, you are adding in the implication that any disregard for any reason (including irrelevance, or your own personal well being) is therefore dehumanization.

and by doing so you are simultaneously doing two things

1) parodying the positions of the people you're in conversation with, to make them seem callously insensitive to your real concerns and the concerns of the people you are worried about potentially being harmed

2) giving yourself an ilicit reason to double down on your concern for those harms because 'other people' don't even take them as seriously as you, the truly concerned person who is willing to subject yourself to this perfectly moral self-scrutiny

what other people are asking me to do is to disregard people who are pointing out instances of harm because "lol fuck the haters, they don't even count as human"

a) what j. said about disregard not equaling dehumanization
b) again, you are automatically accepting that if someone is "pointing out instances of harm" they are automatically right and you are automatically wrong, which is exactly not the way to go through life as an adult

hey katherine i'm not trying to be dismissive of your very real feelings — I myself am a person who craves affirmation and wants to "follow the rules" and not make anybody mad at me (which is hard because I am a very flawed person and sometimes very annoying and not everybody likes me!). But some people just can't be pleased. I'd say people the people who are stirring up this shallot pasta controversy are being way way OTT and it's not worth it to try to adhere to the toxic boundaries they're setting.

it does sound like you have a frustrated ability to think for yourself

This insistent use of "should" and "wrong" suggests that you believe there is some kind of objective truth managed by "other people"

I suspect these people would have more than a few thoughts if you told them they were setting "toxic boundaries"

who gives a shit

Sounds like they always have more than a few thoughts

toxic people always have a lot of thoughts they think you have to hear

katherine you're constantly arguing against yourself (in the sense of what would be in your best interests, your welfare) on behalf of the people who have no concern at all for you ('these people' you're trying to satisfy or live righteously before)

I suspect these people would have more than a few thoughts if you told them they were setting "toxic boundaries"

And the circle spins round once again. The "other people" are always right; their concerns are always to be considered before your own; and on and on and on.

You seem to be hankering after absolutes where there are but hues. You are bound to hurt yourself in the process.

it's not that, it's that in almost every case, these are expressed as absolutes; rarely do you hear "this article is awful and the writer is the worst, but it's OK if you don't think so"

you're a skilled critic and writer, you can see right now the difference between how things are expressed, and how they're meant or how they're taken; so why assume that everything that looks like an absolute must be regarded as such?

because they are clearly intended to be regarded as such? when 1000 people all reply saying, to choose another day's new rule, "you're disgusting if you don't wash your chicken and I hope I never have to be around you," it seems like an enormous stretch to interpret that as "it's OK not to wash your chicken"

K do you think everyone here is a jerk for not responding to other people's opinions like you do? Do you think every "morally upright" person agonizes over this stuff like you do? Or is it possible that there's another way to be a caring, loving, respectful, considerate, "good" human being?

(example chosen because there is an equally adamant counter-rule of "why would you wash your chicken, you're unsanitarily spreading it all over the sink, a bad cook, and disgusting if you do")

yeah people do speak in absolutes (incl. here on ILX obviously) because they think strong-arming people into agreeing with them is the most effective method

xp -- I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would

because they are clearly intended to be regarded as such?

Except this isn't always true, is it?

xp that would put us back in the territory of people's intentions not being prima facie sufficient to back the moral force of what they say. you might be right about how to interpret words like that, but you should also consider the seriousness with which the words are being published to the world. people in public fora adopt personae and stances that are determined by the ambient conditions, or by the fact that they are precisely NOT the usual contexts for some communication (like concerned moral speech between people who can be accountable to one another), so not everything with the appearance of serious, well-intentioned speech ought to be received as such by all who encounter it.

Well, ILX does need some new blood

xp -- I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would

well those people are jerks!!! (sometimes)

"intention" doesn't totally capture it; someone tweeting the reaction gif of people pointing and laughing at someone might be "intended" to get likes or make people laugh, but it only works because there is an underlying and strong moral imperative of "this is wrong, don't do it" toward the person it's directed at.

… which can be carelessly invoked and exploited by people for any number of reasons, such as the likes or laughs you mention. which does not signal any significant attachment to the moral judgments that are involved, as it were merely for their functional role.

Literalism isn't the be-all and end-all of human communication, thank Christ. We must account for ambiguity, irony and the like, as they are always looming in the background. These also provide us with the wiggle room we need to breathe and play and think and create.

am i right in understanding katherine's argument that you should take any anonymous person on the internet seriously no matter what opinion they express if they express it with a tone of moral absolutism? what about all the obvious counterarguments like people who make obviously immoral arguments with a tone of moral absolutism? you wouldn't treat a neo-nazi seriously just because they seem to truly believe their holocaust denialism, or feel bad about believing the holocaust was a real event just because they told you you're a naive idiot asshole jewdiazed collaborator for doing so. ok obviously that's an easy case but once the principle is set that just bc someone says something sincerely online doesn't mean you need to accept it (or even treat it seriously) you can move onto edge cases like should you feel bad for liking shallots when some idiot online said liking shallots is racist?

I have a question: Are people on Twitter expressing these opinions to you directly and saying that YOU specifically are a bad person? Or are you seeing a bunch of Twitter replies and interpreting them as a party line that you now must adhere to, lest someone possibly think of you as a bad person?

If it's the former, then I get feeling defensive and confused when things like that happen (even if I rationally know that I shouldn't take it so personally, and that I shouldn't care so much about what others think). If it's the latter, then it feels like you're going out of your way to feel guilty and bad about yourself.

If some people say washing chicken is bad and some say it's good, how do you determine who is correct? Just add up the numbers on each side, majority wins? And more importantly, how does your own, uninfluenced view on the subject factor in?

there's this enlightenment idea of judgement

it's hard

and necessarily compromised

that's why kant's motto is in latin

xp -- I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would

I think I'll live.

am i right in understanding katherine's argument that you should take any anonymous person on the internet seriously no matter what opinion they express if they express it with a tone of moral absolutism? what about all the obvious counterarguments like people who make obviously immoral arguments with a tone of moral absolutism? you wouldn't treat a neo-nazi seriously just because they seem to truly believe their holocaust denialism, or feel bad about believing the holocaust was a real event just because they told you you're a naive idiot asshole jewdiazed collaborator for doing so. ok obviously that's an easy case but once the principle is set that just bc someone says something sincerely online doesn't mean you need to accept it (or even treat it seriously) you can move onto edge cases like should you feel bad for liking shallots when some idiot online said liking shallots is racist?

I addressed this upthread but they generally are not neo-nazis and are on the right side of history

I have a question: Are people on Twitter expressing these opinions to you directly and saying that YOU specifically are a bad person? Or are you seeing a bunch of Twitter replies and interpreting them as a party line that you now must adhere to, lest someone possibly think of you as a bad person?

the former has happened to me, not to as great a degree as some people I can think of, and not always on twitter. but mostly it's the latter. which makes sense, it has even been stated as such: "every day on twitter there is a main character and your job is to never be that person"

We are all the main characters in our own personal dramas

"I addressed this upthread but they generally are not neo-nazis and are on the right side of history"

Yeah so you've found moral guides (in the form of a nebulous grp of ppl who have "enlightened" humanistic views) and once you had that you completely offshored/contracted out your own ability to engage in moral judgments to them.

for the last fucking time they aren't "nebulous," they have names and faces, which makes them less anonymous than a person who goes by "Granny Dainger"

i just want to echo what ll is saying, it's really hard to see you struggling like this. i get where you're coming from on this. i have my own beliefs but i don't know that expressing my beliefs would help here. i hope things get better for you soon. :(

It's not unreasonable to assume the people posting here are more familiar with each other than with the people on your Twitter feed that we know next to nothing about.

K it's nebulous because it's not an actual organized grp, not because they're not anonymous. The members come and go, have differences of opinion among one another, etc

Not because they're anonymous

But my point still stands of you remove the word nebulous there

rarely do you hear "this article is awful and the writer is the worst, but it's OK if you don't think so"

Because the “but it’s OK if you don’t think so” is implied in nearly all situations by virtue of being an adult who can think for themselves

It would be like requiring “imo” appended to everything before having your own opinion

have you ever noticed how ppl who grew up in families where ppl didn't listen to each other often talk louder

Because the “but it’s OK if you don’t think so” is implied in nearly all situations by virtue of being an adult who can think for themselves

― some vast airy pantaloon is required (PBKR), Friday, May 22, 2020 11:55 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not when saying something is right or wrong

Yes, even then.

like, for instance, very few participants in this conversation seem to be implying that. otherwise you'd imply "yes, even then (but it's OK if you don't think so)"

You and you alone get to decide, no matter how hard it is. That is life.

I hope you find a way to live more comfortably with this aspect of life.

No such thing as right and wrong fortunately

starting to get some loud & clear answers to the question posed by this thread title

Um, cautious lol at that.

And sending positive thoughts, etc.

I hope you find a way to live more comfortably with this aspect of life.

don't be such patronising wee fucks

lol

Can't help but notice the contrast of dismissing everyone's opinion on this (ppl who want you to feel better about yourself) vs accepting whole hog the opinions of ppl that has the consequence of making you feel bad about yourself

"right"

"wrong"

ne'er the twain

FTR, plenty of moral philosophers have published pseudonymously, if we're gonna grant arguments more or less weight based on whether the person making them attaches their "real name" to them...

this seems like a sort of window into the reactionary personality where i can imagine if you entrusted yr moral decision making 100% to the group then left-wing pieties in particular are extremely hard to meet in total and are extremely demanding and so there are tons of opportunities to feel bad. if you are more comfortable making yr own moral decisions (or have a moral tree outside contemporary Western social media liberalism) or good at ignoring inconsistencies btwn yr personal ideas/behaviors + the canonical social norms, then you can be a lib and still enjoy shallots. but if you can't avoid these inconsistencies and have given over moral decision making to the collective you're practically forced to either hate yourself or realign with reactionary politics just to escape the gravitational force of all the judgement

As the great Danish philosopher Victor Eremita once put it, 'I do not create myself – I choose myself. Therefore, whereas nature is created from nothing, whereas I myself as immediate personality am created from nothing, I as free spirit am born out of the principle of contradiction and am born through choosing myself.'

it has even been stated as such: "every day on twitter there is a main character and your job is to never be that person"

Katherine the meaning behind this is that your ‘job’ is to not go out of your way to post bizarre and inflammatory shit on twitter that gets thousands of people making fun of you, e.g. that Christian magazine guy who started ranting last week about how masks are for cowards. It does not mean that your job is to scrupulously follow every twitter dust-up for hints at what the current moral calculus of social media is. You just don’t need to.

For the record my name is Oliver and I’m on social media under my own name. And looking at this thread I see a pretty wide range of political viewpoints as ILX goes, neolib shill centrists all the way to tankie purist Trump-enablers, and they’re all in agreement that these people you speak of on twitter, however righteous their politics might be, do not deserve the space in your head that you’re giving them. And you might give an equal amount of space to the people here that you choose to converse with and share your feelings with.

Katherine the meaning behind this is that your ‘job’ is to not go out of your way to post bizarre and inflammatory shit on twitter that gets thousands of people making fun of you

sure, but my entire point is that it is often opaque as to what is "bizarre and inflammatory," c.f. people having thousands of people making fun of them for not liking onions or wearing the wrong shade of lipstick or whatnot

(the latter in reference to the time that one far-right person handcuffed herself to the twitter building, but the thing that people mocked her for was wearing a shade of lipstick that I have frequently been seen in public wearing)

Do you think it's fine to mock people for wearing that shade of lipstick in public?

sometimes even people who are on the right side of history in some moral sense can also be toxic in their discourse and how they treat other people. nobody is perfect, and it's unreasonable to expect people to always say/think the "right" things, and also unreasonable to live by the belief that anyone — even people you often agree with — is the absolute arbiter of what is right and wrong. as much as people may try to convince you that not toeing the line makes you a complete and utter failure

where's Aimless when you need him

"I don't necessarily think everyone here is a jerk, but I do think that those people, if they knew what you were saying about them, probably would"

Would those ppl, if they knew the negative effect they are having on you, be happy with that? Think yes, this is the effect I desired to have on my Twitter followers? Would it cause them to self reflect and try to tone things down a lil?

he already said all this yesterday iirc :(
seriously, re the thread question -- the fear of being attacked is not limited to twitter or social media. you have to either separate yourself from the inflammatory material (the material that is making you inflamed enough, for example, to be worried about your shade of lipstick) or find a way to live with it/ignore it. it's not going to stop inflaming you though and you're not going to successfully conquer it with logic.

no reason to think there's an internally consistent and coherent moral system that isn't incredibly vague or monstrous

When I was 16, a stranger online tore me apart from the ground up. Told me I was an "amoral bottom-feeder" and laid out why I was a hateful, awful person. It was devastating.

It hurt, yes. I had never been talked to like that, online or off. The words made me miserable for years and years. But nowadays, I don't think about it anymore.

Because I finally found out where he lived two years ago and beat the shit out of him.

I hope you recited the Navy Seal copypasta to him before pwning his ass in person.

I mostly remember people mocking the person who handcuffed herself to twitter hq for being a moron, but I’m sure people made fun of whatever they could find. But those people weren’t mocking her lipstick out of a moral distaste for her lipstick and a desire to banish it from public use, they were mocking someone who had made a decision to act incredibly foolish in public. People like to zero in on slightly unusual details in viral moments because it gives them something to add to the content mill. Without the wider context the lipstick is just lipstick. Without the celeb feud context the pasta is a decent-looking recipe. The vast majority of people will not be aware of the context, and the vast majority of the people who are aware will have forgotten about it a month later. No one is scanning pictures for Laura Loomer’s lipstick shade.

Nobody thinks about her at all

hearing about the Alison Roman controversy irl a week ago or whatever and then hearing, also irl, about dumb shit Lana del Rey said yesterday am so glad that I no longer have twitter and don't have to think about these things for a second. My only take on either situation is that Alison Roman is maybe a little bit overrated - her chickpea stew is just ok for instance, why so popular - and I don't like Lana Del Rey's music. There is no need for me to engage in these controversies whatsoever, and doing so in any form does not give value, pleasure or meaning to my life in any way

I think I'm going to deactivate my Facebook again and delete Insta from my phone. sick of getting adverts for things my phone has heard me talk about, very creepy and I don't want it.

I wholly disagree with Lana del Ray singing "my pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola" but I will die defending her right to sing it.

I might be missing something here but what exactly is the hideous moral outrage of running recipes and childcare articles instead of sports

I swear to god every fucking thing is wrong anymore

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Monday, May 11, 2020 8:32 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is from the quid-ag NYT thread last week, when we were making fun of their new "At Home" section, and I wondered at the time...1) did anyone in here call this a hideous nmoral outrage? and also 2) what does Katherine mean by "wrong"?

It's okay to disagree with things or really not just get them w/o defaulting to a moral binary

the whole thing out there of “you’ve been preparing this food wrong”... some people like that stuff I react poorly to the framing

If you are passionate enough about any topic online and post a lot, you'll be called a monster by somebody daily

anyway, I am cut out neither for social media or real life

Same tbh.

anyway, katherine - I'm sorry if it feels like everyone is piling on here, and if it makes you feel like you are the Bad Person on ILX - you aren't. I think pretty much everyone in this thread is posting out of genuine concern that you are letting the most ephemeral controversies cause you anguish. And if there's a sense of frustration, it's because you seem to give far more weight to these unnamed people on Twitter who are able to get outraged over pasta recipes than you do to the people itt writing paragraphs telling you that these controversies don't have any bearing on your moral standing and you're allowed to ignore them. It seems as though you're operating under the assumption of "whatever feels bad is true," which I think a fair amount of people here are familiar with in their own lives. I don't think I've dealt with the level of depression or anxiety that a lot of people here have, but I understand the impulse to think the worst about yourself, or that you're never living up to the standard that you need to. But that is a symptom of depression much more than it is a reflection of reality, and I think it would be helpful to talk to your therapist about coping strategies when you start feeling overwhelmed by what you're reading on social media. I think you've said before that it's not realistic for you to abandon social media altogether, but the way you engage with it now seems to make you feel awful about yourself, and while we're all trying to be helpful here I don't think any of us are going to talk you out of those feelings right now.

where's Aimless when you need him

I said as much as I knew how to say yesterday evening in the post that started "I wish I understood...". I have nothing to add to that.

xp I don’t think anyone on earth has ever talked anyone out of the feeling they’re having, that’s god’s business

xp -- yes, that's another example, maybe people might understand it better being on one side of it. I still don't understand what's wrong about running articles about recipes or looking at the stars or whatever. but it was treated as some kind of self-evident moral outrage deserving of criticism. so, as a result, I don't know what to think, and generally speaking, in situations that are framed as (quoting the Onion) "this decision will harm people and cause damage to others"/"no it won't, it just won't," the first position is both more likely to be correct and less harmful if you choose wrong. kinda like pascal's wager, except the reason why pascal's wager doesn't work -- most religions it's applied to think "believing in God" is insufficient -- is not present here

milo - how do you know it doesn't?

Maybe she has diabetes, true

Pascal's wager was based on the assumption that the stakes included an infinite good (viz. an eternity in Heaven) on one side of the wager.

xp on the other hand, I think of Rev. Lovejoy’s line from the Simpsons - “Marge, just about everything is a sin. You ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not supposed to go to the bathroom.”

re people thinking hating onions makes you a terrible person I think there's a little spoken of 'if I had that person over for dinner effect' whereby when people express food preferences at odds with how one eats and prepares food it is very easy to imagine how annoying it might be to have that person over for dinner and not know what to cook. this is despite the fact that nobody ever has anyone over for dinner and when they do they never know what to cook anyway.

if they ask for the racist pasta they're not getting it, I'm sorry

for a lot of reasons (the cultural imperialism of middle class white people, snobbery, the fetishization of "national cuisines") food writing often can't help but expressing simple likes and dislikes about particular foodstuffs in ways that suggest the writer's racism. there's a bit in 'simple French cooking' where Richard olney dismisses coriander, which he dislikes the taste of while noting that in any case it's only used in *Arabic* cooking. I always think of the olney example but possibly I'm at least partly projecting as he reminds me so much of (more than one) gay Islamophobic American's I know who live in the South of France.

from what I understand of the shallot thing I realise this is only tangentially relevant

i just made a dip from olive oil, balsamic, salt and in a final flourish of improvisatory inspiration coriander, and now i feel like the wokest poster on ilx

'just' = an hour ago, before that was posted. i ate it with rice cakes. saint imago

holy holy

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

you can hear them jingling their little vials of coriander

catholic cuisine tastes

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

re people thinking hating onions makes you a terrible person I think there's a little spoken of 'if I had that person over for dinner effect' whereby when people express food preferences at odds with how one eats and prepares food it is very easy to imagine how annoying it might be to have that person over for dinner and not know what to cook. this is despite the fact that nobody ever has anyone over for dinner and when they do they never know what to cook anyway.

― plax (ico), Friday, May 22, 2020 1:39 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, I do worry about this very often -- in practice it's been less of an issue than you'd think (one time it was carbonara, another stir-fry just with different veg, etc.)

that’s a good point. as a vegan I am very familiar with that kind of anxiety!

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

Whoa there, pardner

I'm not at all surprised this isn't that much of an issue. I can imagine it's harder when eating out but I don't know how deep your dislike goes, like I hate hate hate eggs but for some reason egg fried rice is fine (my mother who also has eggs is repulsed by egg fried rice)

xp to Katherine

I also hate mushrooms

and freedom

it is much, much harder when eating out, and all I can do is just not think about it unless it's impossible (a few years ago I'd ordered fried mushrooms that were very obviously coated in a huge amount of onion powder, and it took me like 10 minutes in the bathroom washing my mouth out and eating a couple tangerines I was lucky enough to have taken home from work to stop being nauseated

do you hate other aliums like garlic or spring onions or is it only onions

also I would have thought Japanese food is your friend here

I could literally eat sushi for every meal if I was allowed

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again

cool those Cypriot fires a moment, imago. the word catholic has broader meanings than just the faith defined by the papal succession.

" I don't know what to think, and generally speaking, in situations that are framed as (quoting the Onion) "this decision will harm people"

One needn't take on the burden themself of ensuring that no one anywhere is ever harmed. Again, there's a happy medium between an inconsiderate jerk and perpetually fretting over whether your every single thought and action is harming people in any way.

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

garlic is fine, spring onions/scallions/leeks/chives are not

srsly if u conflate those neophyte vatican scum with the old faith again i will call u an ashkenazi

― imago, Friday, May 22, 2020 11:01 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

splitters!

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

Danity Onions

xp -- yes, I was thinking about that as well, clearly the stakes are genuinely a lot higher in that case

but I guess my point was that all the stakes feel just as high, for everything

(a thing I have thought about a lot, recently, is how one of the most pronounced, but least remarked-upon, cultural shifts of my lifetime has been the shift back from moral relativism to moral absolutism. one of the rare shifts that's taken place across the board politically)

(another thing I think about a lot, constantly, is a throwaway line from some thinkpiece I don't even remember anymore besides this line, which I pasted and saved: "it seems increasingly likely that this generation will turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean")

Moral absolutism allows for a much simpler worldview with far less thinking required, which is sweet, because thinking is hard work. Moreover, the brain's ability to compartmentalize incompatible ideas allows most moral absolutists to avoid noticing how often their moral absolutism produces opposing imperatives. This is, as our president would say, "winning"!

The message of absolutism finds its perfect medium in Twitter.

the shift back from moral relativism to moral absolutism

I think it's what it's always been: moral relativism for me, moral absolutism for you. Similarly, socialism for the rich, fascism for the poor.

"but I guess my point was that all the stakes feel just as high, for everything"

Only if you give a fuck

Seriously. Go a week trying not to give even the slightest of fucks. It's great.

Every form of social media can be used well, but I ain't cut out for Twitter.

I feel like human trafficking is something where it should be fairly uncontroversial to say people should give a fuck about it, but maybe that's me

only things Twitter is useful for, for me:

*trying to chat up rappers who would never talk to me in real life (been successful a few times)
*if something local happened that news hasn't gotten wind of, searching the most recent tweets featuring keywords related to the event to get an idea of what happened from people who were there (ie, when the Coheed and Cambria drummer collapsed at the Orlando show last year)
*trolling Trapt (but they blocked me)

xpost right but I don't know that people need to commit to an opinion one way or another on *that* specific issue (the author's parents' legal issues) until they've at least had a chance to catch themselves up to speed.

The Tolentino stuff is insane and why it's not necessary to have a public opinion (or an opinion at all) about everything all the time.

The Red Scare reddit (where it supposedly originated) - obviously, patently insane.
Tolentino's blog post could certainly be self-serving.
Fuck the feds, ACAB, etc. but not every prosecution is inherently discriminatory.

Trafficking in Twitter opinions to form a viewpoint about anything seems dangerous, an even more unstructured version of gleaning values and meaning from the editorial section instead of the news section. If you really care about it, you're going to have to wait for a good reporter to tackle it (unlikely because no one cares now) or read all the court documents yourself and why on earth would you do that?

So maybe her parents are dirtbags. But she pretty obviously isn't, so maybe just don't read anything her parents publish?

She really didn't have to defend them at all

I mean another way to illustrate Twitter's terrible telephone, for something more innocuous...I once was scouring Twitter trying to see if Meek Mill was giving the time he'd go on stage for a show he opened about 7 or 8 years ago. and he tweeted about a Miami show he was doing that night (whereas the show I was going to was in Orlando). never mind that this isn't unusual for rappers (to do a short opening set in one city, helicopter to another and do a late club appearance), the internet exploded immediately, with concert attendees freaking out that "Meek was cancelling his Orlando show without notice" and people starting to tweet about "how could this happen?" and trying to get info on refunds.

I pointed out this was ridiculous and that he was probably doing both shows and I had a bunch of people clown me, only for Meek himself to basically tweet in response to the commotion "y'all trippin, i'm doing both shows".

we went from "cool, seeing Meek Mill in Orlando later" to IT'S CANCELLED in a matter of 5 minutes.

Also, don’t feel bad for wanting to clown on right-wing billionaires. Jesus.

I feel like human trafficking is something where it should be fairly uncontroversial to say people should give a fuck about it, but maybe that's me

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Monday, May 25, 2020 7:45 PM (seven minutes ago)

well "human trafficking" is also sometimes a real thing but sometimes (more often??) a phrase abused as a wedge by anti-sex-work activists

Also, don’t feel bad for wanting to clown on right-wing billionaires. Jesus.

I also remember seeing a news story once where someone had been reported as receiving death threats on twitter. story was legit, but the Tweet they used as evidence of the death threat read "you ripped my family apart and made my momma cry. So when I see you n**** it's gon be a homicide", which is a Meek Mill lyric.

(sorry don't know why all my dumb Twitter stories are about Meek Mill)

lol Meek ain't no billionaire, I knew who ya meant

well "human trafficking" is also sometimes a real thing but sometimes (more often??) a phrase abused as a wedge by anti-sex-work activists

― silby, Monday, May 25, 2020 10:55 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this doesn't involve sex work

I mean, I just read this: https://historicly.substack.com/p/trick-mirror-a-reflection-on-mass which rhetoricizes that Tolentino believes the BTK Killer is innocent, extrapolated from the logic of her blog post.

I have no opinion on Tolentino and her parents— I dated a Filipino for 13 years and became intimately aware of the processes of sponsorship of overseas workers, and it’s sketchy at the best of times. I have an opinion on articles like this one (which highlight the cost of Tolentino’s education but gloss over, let’s say, US Imperialism’s role in the upholding of the Marcos regime) and the opinion is: this is bad writing. The mere idea that a “blue check” makes a person responsible for impossibly attainable nuance when addressing as complicated an issue as “my parents’s trafficking scandal, which was expensive and intrusive and ended by default” is a transparent act of throwing stones as somebody’s Twitter Mansion

Oh just for the sake of complete transparency: my grandfather was a whip to Diefenbaker, was at first a hugely popular politician, was at one point tipped to be president of the PC party, but then played a part in shutting down the Avro plant and subsequently resigned under justifiable suspicions of cronyism in the construction of YYZ. I spit on the ground every time his name is mentioned no I don’t I miss him and wish he hadn’t died when he did— oh, full disclosure, he died while on a hunting trip on a shady resort island that has a history of mistreating their employees, can’t forget that, he died of a brain aneurysm

I don’t even think this is about moral absolutism, it’s just bullshit pretending to be moral absolutism, it’s a posture of moral absolutism to smokescreen something else. Is Jia’s writing any good? If we want to see her cancelled, cannot we cancel her on the basis of her shit writing and otherwise let her write in peace without all of this?

I feel like human trafficking is something where it should be fairly uncontroversial to say people should give a fuck about it, but maybe that's me

This is a serious question, Katherine, although it is a very elaborate one.

Now you have heard some people accuse someone else of human trafficking, with most or all of whom you have only the most tenuous and incidental connection, most or all of whom you have never met and may never meet, and with whom you probably will never have any meaningful interaction, what exactly is the practical significance of your giving a fuck to the people who may have been harmed by the people who were accused (or they may not, you have no certain knowledge one way or the other), or to the accused perpetrators of that crime, or to you in any likely way in the foreseeable future?

I hope you can suss what I am getting at in all that convolution, which is that your giving a fuck leads nowhere and has no benefit to anyone, and your not giving a fuck harms no one. It is simply a state of mind that you carry with you. If that state of mind is causing you harm, then the net effect in reality is not benefit, but harm.

Compassion is excellent. Compassion for those you have not met is very fine. But compassion must extend to yourself, too, for your limits in time and space and your inability to save all sentient beings from suffering. You are human. Treating yourself within anything less than compassionate understanding is form of self abuse. Try to find a balance.

then this is just an irreconcilable argument because I believe that in virtually all cases "not giving a fuck" is a toxic viewpoint, and the majority of the problems in the world are caused by people not giving a fuck

there's a difference between caring and caring in a way that is effective.

my grandfather was a whip to Diefenbaker

You definitely have to be Canadian to be smiling ear-to-ear at this.

and there's a difference between both those things and not caring

and as far as compassion, I'm showing exactly the amount of compassion toward myself as others generally show toward other people who have done something wrong

Giving a fuck about something requires time and effort that in many cases is often better spent elsewhere – on more ethically pressing matters, for instance. It is impossible for a human being to give an equal amount of fucks about everything, unless you believe yourself to be some kind of omniscient deity.

there may be a subjective difference between not caring and caring ineffectually, but what is the value of caring ineffectually if it gives you grief and is done mainly in order to avoid the self-perception (or perception by others) of not caring at all? no one is ultimately counseling you to not care at all, just to not care where doing so can accomplish nothing. that still leaves open the wide range of possibilities involved in caring in ways that matter!

as someone who has struggled with similar issues (to a lesser degree), I offer this. Many of the types of stories that are making national news today would have been regional news only, and some regional stories wouldn't have been stories. the speed in which news travels and the state boundaries that social media removes has flooded the internet with more stories and causes than one could take in during a lifetime.

when it comes to "caring", the internal feelings you have on most issues impact nobody, unless you're in a position to take action and your internal feelings cause you to act, or not to act. For example, if I witnessed somebody striking their significant other, and I somehow was not moved by that scene and I just kept going about my business and didn't call the police...yes, that would be fucked up. But only because my lack of empathy influenced my actions, or lack thereof.

However, if I wasn't actually present at the scene, and instead I read an article indicating a man I didn't know beat his girlfriend, and for whatever reason, it didn't cause an emotional reaction in me...that person isn't going to be negatively impacted by my lack of reaction to the story. Obviously if NOBODY had an emotional reaction to the story, that would be bad, but the chances of that are low, as this person would likely have friends and family members, colleagues etc that would show up to their rescue.

Obviously, it's important to keep up with worldly events, and to care about things, including things that don't directly affect you. I read a lot about the Bolsonaro and Orban regimes because of my concerns with how the far-right is infecting Europe as well as the United States. But you're always going to have blind spots. Either because you don't have enough time in the day, you have your own life concerns to deal with, or you just don't come across something. Somebody whose father is dying in the hospital might not be as prone to keep apprised of world events, because their parent is their world at that point in time.

I think you're interpreting "not caring" as saying "this issue isn't important and nobody should care about it", when it's more like "I'm not that familiar with this thing" or "as of right now, I haven't engaged with this issue enough for it to register with me". Human trafficking IS bad, yes - and if you were aware of a human trafficking ring and did nothing to report it, yes, that would be bad. But when it's an almost 40-year old story that you weren't previously familiar with, you don't have to go from not knowing about the issue to suddenly being passionate about it and sharing your opinion internet-wide in a mere 5 minutes. In fact, nothing requires you to engage with it at all, and not engaging with it doesn't mean you don't care about the victims of human trafficking or that you're in favor of human trafficking. It just means you're a human being and you can't possibly react to every single things that happens.

Some people will argue vehemently online about the issue to where you think you're in the wrong for not having their level of passion about it. But this isn't a blind spot for them. It's a blind spot for you. And chances are, there's a cause you feel passionately about that they either don't have much of an opinion on, or know anything about.

Likewise, some Twitter folk might dial it up a notch and suggest you're a bad person if you don't share their opinion or have an opinion on the issue. Well - so what? Unless you're Catholic, nobody's going to be tallying up on a scorecard whether you're a 'good' or 'bad' person, and even 'good' people do 'bad' things now and then. and those people who are wracked with guilt over being a "bad" person generally....aren't the "bad" people, who usually don't worry about such things.

Unless you give weight to those people's judgments and believe them to have merit, they have no power over you. If you feel the need to constantly meet the approval of strangers, and argue your side with them in hopes that you win their approval, you've essentially given these people control over you. and then you can wind up gaslighting yourself (as I often do to myself), questioning your own core values. And frequently needing validation or "permission" to say and do things....from people you'll never meet.

sometimes, you'll learn things from other people and change your beliefs/behaviors, and that's great. but there's a difference between that, and wanting to feel "approved" of by your immediate environment at all times, whether we're talking the physical world or the internet. And it won't happen. Chances are, at any time, a feeling or a belief you have is going to generate negative feelings in someone you know. And many beliefs are just those, beliefs. Not universal truths.

for example, I got into a fight with a 15-year friend last week. I had gotten angry after I went to Publix and once again saw 40% of the store not wearing masks, and I went on a rant about how after more than a month, there was no excuse for it, and that it was sending a bad message to those at the store. This friend, who has often complained about my political posts (even though he could very easily just "unfollow" me which he has done many times), blew up, saying I was basically calling him out for not wearing a mask to Publix that day, and that I was acting like I was "better than everybody else".

I found myself immediately reacting to his disapproval with revulsion, like I needed to correct it, but before I could be conciliatory, I stopped myself, and said to myself that I didn't feel I was wrong. I still responded more weakly to him than I would have liked, stating that I am sorry if he felt personally attacked, but I was clearly talking about the collective inaction of non-mask wearers and not specific individuals, and that I was upset because this puts me at greater risk of transmitting it to my father after going to the grocery store. and he responded snottily saying I had anger issues (a nice bit of irony since he has gone to therapy for that himself).

my mood was temporarily ruined because someone I cared about felt disappointment/disapproval with me, and I took down the offending post, and replaced it with a new snarky one (that I hid him from seeing) stating "here is my inoffensive, content free FB post". other friends, knowing why I had done that, called me out for being too afraid to speak my mind and use my voice, simply because I was viciously challenged by a friend. and they were right. I immediately regretted taking down the post, but I thought to myself and realized I was angry at the friend for not only obtusely missing the point of what I wrote, but for his constant attempts to police what kinds of content I share (i.e. not just unfollowing me, but PMing me to condescendingly tell me things like he's "worried about me as a friend" and that I 'Need to stop posting inflammatory things like this'). So instead of responding to his shitty message, I didn't talk to him for two days. I went about my business and didn't worry myself about pleasing the fucker. it felt pretty good. I didn't feel his judgment because I took back the power from him. now, I'm still not 100% thrilled with the weak way I responded to him, and still need to address long-term some of the shit I"m not "ok" with, but it's a start.

anyway....I'm with Aimless and j on this one, as well as pomentul...and Granny.

*Many of the types of stories that are making national news today would have been regional news only, and some regional stories wouldn't have been stories decades ago

i thought that was a good post neanderthal.

this article is relevant to this discussion, but i didn't vet the author's parents who may or may not be involved in crimes so use your best judgement:

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2702/the-self-conscious-drama-of-morality-in-contemporary-fiction-24022

uuugh lauren oyler is just a bad writer

i'm a bad person, that's why i posted it

you're not! she just has bad ideas and conveys them poorly

i was joking but ty.

maybe so, i've never heard of her, but the article is mostly a series of relevant observations on contemporary lit

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-to-disguise-his-horns

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes in volume five of his series of autofictional novels My Struggle, in a representative passage. “I had to stop being a coward, stop being evasive and vague, I had to be honest, upright, clear, sincere.” In the next volume his best friend, Geir, jokingly calls him “a bad person . . . one of the few true narcissists” while discussing the uncle Karl Ove has angered by writing his books.

NOW WAIT A MOMENT

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels are an exception that proves the rule: Praised for their portrayal of “unlikable” women, a feminist and therefore moral project, they’re often narrated by a person who seems to be taunting the reader with her awareness of her own badness.

i'm not a huge moshfegh fan but surely there is more going on than this

The shift to socially conscious art and criticism Molly Fischer termed “the Great Awokening” has meant most books are judged on everything except aesthetic terms

citation needed

i could go on but i won't

I think both the Aeon article and the Oyler article are pretty weak btw

(xp: ye, the second sentence BradNelson quoted is the one that jumped out at me from the Oyler -- this is an assertion people reflexively emit again and again but it just.... doesn't seem to have any relation to the way I actually see books out in the world being judged, praised, sold)

i just think any discussion of a topic like that of our ilx's katherine will need the distinction between morality and moralizing at some point.

The distinction is real, and neither of these two articles do a good job of making it (only the second really tries)

And though she occasionally makes mistakes—cheats on her boyfriend, offends her friends after drinking too much, doesn’t call her mom very often—she admits them.

what is a good person? someone who has the correct politics on social media even if their offline actions include infidelity, indulgence to the pt of cruelty and alienation from their family.

I mean, that's what the article wants you to think some unspecified cabal of people in charge of our culture insists, yes.

But that is not a stance you will find in either of those Lerner novels, the Jenny Offill book, or How Should A Person Be?.

i don't think the author wants you to think the person in the first paragraph is a secret bad person - they probably think the composite is reasonable for the social mores of the day (at least of a certain set)

it’s hard to tell one way or the other bc it’s not well-written

Yes, looking at it again, I feel like there is just something fundamentally disorganized in Oyler's writing. It's not clear to me what she means to say about e.g. Sheila Heti. I felt the same about her review of Tolentino's book -- each paragraph read like something that was saying something but I could never actually get it to cohere into something but a sensation of complaint.

I do think that when a clear assertion emerges it is, like "The shift to socially conscious art and criticism Molly Fischer termed “the Great Awokening” has meant most books are judged on everything except aesthetic terms," incompatible with my experience.

She's probably a good person though

The fact that I'm spending my time engaging with this is presumably a sign I'm cut out for social media

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

the aeon one is almost unreadable

The fact that I'm spending my time engaging with this is presumably a sign I'm cut out for social media

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, May 27, 2020 8:33 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it weird that i think the same fact about me means i'm not cut out for social media at all

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

― silby, Wednesday, May 27, 2020 11:36 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

was waiting for this post

you're both right! that's the paradox of being cut out for social media xp

what if... social media is cut out for us

I think the Aeon one is trying to say that 'virtue signalling is bad not good' (if anyone needed a tl;dr, there it is).

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

― silby, Wednesday, May 27, 2020 11:36 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

was waiting for this post

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Wednesday, May 27, 2020 8:41 AM (five minutes ago)

:*

what i got out of the laura oyster article is here are some examples of how authors' novels were shaped in various ways by the depiction of anxiety about being a "good person" which is triangulated according to an acute self-awareness that their morality will be judged widely and visibly by their audience on social media

this is actually a perfect example but not for the reasons claimed it is; after reading the article my basic stance was "this was a decent article, I'm glad I read it, I should look up some of those other books," but now I am questioning that stance because it does not seem to be aligned with the correct one, nor do I trust that I'm right

What do you think?

I don't fucking know because what I think is apparently the wrong thing

yr ego balloon needs inflating!

I don't think "how should a person be" (apparently discussed in the article I won't read) is written in the context of social media scrutiny at all!

katherine I definitely recommend all the Ben Lerner novels and both Jenny Offill novels and How Should A Person Be? because they are all funny and good. Probably Motherhood is good too, it's on my shelf and I just haven't gotten to it yet. I think the things this article is concerned about are most present in The Topeka School, which, perhaps not by coincidence, is the least successful of Lerner's books, I would start with 10:04 (or, better, How Should A Person Be?, which is just wonderfully and radically its own thing, and when you are trapped in a social-media-mediated self-consciousness spiral the best prescription is a radically alternate perspective)

Motherhood is really good too! It's sort of secretly about the Holocaust though.

Leaving the Atocha Station is no less apposite to this discussion and very much worth everyone's time as well.

I've read most of those except the ben lerner

Oh sorry for wrongly imagining otherwise!

If you've read all those books and thought the Oyler was on point maybe it's me who's missing it!

glad some ppl think it's funny to ask if Ammonium Nitrate would be a great metal band name the day after Beirut.

was unusually dickish to this person cos it was in poor taste

I hate when you notice you have less mutual friends than before with someone because it means nearly always someone has removed you and even though you know logically that it doesn't mean anything, it still stings your ego a bit. I like to think that I'm not so unlikable that my mere online presence (which can be muted) is so unpleasant. OTOH these days I only seem to share pro-feminism and pro-trans rights articles I've enjoyed reading, so maybe it's for the best these people remove themselves from my social media circles

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-to-block-sexually-explicit-videos-starting-in-october

if i were smarter and knew how to program, launching an onlyfans knockoff that is JUST explicit video seems like a goldmine

"We have decided that our role in distributing sexually explicit videos is morally and ethically wrong and something we want no further part in. That is why we are only going to engage in this harmful and exploitative activity for another, oh, let's say 45 days, so we can all get comfortable with the idea. We don't want to be rash."

I'll admit to being out of the loop but...isn't OnlyFans basically just OnlyExplicitVideos?

yes

this isn't related to the link forksclovetofu posted, but how does everyone "keep up" with social media?

am i getting old or not using it right?

i try to read local and world news every day. it sometimes takes me up to two hours and i still feel like i only skimmed through a lot of articles. i may have too many interests, though?

i would say i'm not cut out for social media because it seems like an endless stream of information. add that you have to learn how to parse people's meaning according to whatever character they're playing or their personality, and things just become so complicated.

i only use facebook but don't have any personal details or pictures up. it's mostly to keep in touch with friends, because we don't all live in the same city anymore. i have less than 20 friends on there.

and just when Rachel Dolezal set up her account no less

damn, rachel dolezal joining onlyfans made them ban porn. i mean it scans.

tumblr banning porn and then this are honestly shocking to me. really didn't realize how institutionalized sexual repression is in the u.s. i kind of thought the internet ended all that, lol. like, my personal journey was the one that everyone else went on. nope!

the word will literally burn up before americans aren't horrified by their own sexuality

world

onlyfans shutting down the sexy vids has everything to do with them having issues getting funding and nothing to do with a moral stance.

why do you think they are having issues getting funding?

exactly

too many butts

why do you think they are having issues getting funding?

The Bloomberg and Axios articles say they are. Apparently, some investment firms are prohibited from investing in adult businesses, and others just don't want to.

Here's the thing: OnlyFans had over a billion dollars in net revenue last year. Why the fuck do they even need outside investors?

And my follow-up question: What do they think they're going to do for money after this? Nobody goes to OnlyFans for non-explicit content. Do they think celebrities are gonna flood in and make it something like Cameo? Cause that's never gonna happen. This is just a stunningly bad idea.

I missed this poll, but my answer is (increasingly) no.

I don't think it's venture capital that's the reason. I have a friend doing her phd on the online porn economy and she pointed me to:

Potential legal trouble: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4avpe3/ann-wagner-fosta-onlyfans-csam-doj-letter

MasterCard recently changed their rules for "adult businesses": https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-mastercard-rules-mean-for-adult-sites-producers

All equally speculative I suppose, but these seem more convincing to me

The Evangelical women trying to make onlyfans disappear don’t realize if I lose that income I’ll start fucking their husbands for money again

— Sydney Leathers (@sydneyelainexo) August 19, 2021

The Evangelical women trying to make onlyfans disappear don’t realize if I lose that income I’ll start fucking their husbands for money again

— Sydney Leathers (@sydneyelainexo) August 19, 2021

Don't know why that link posted twice; in a follow-up tweet, she called out Ann Wagner by name.

My theory: pivot to OnlyFeet incoming

A good Twitter thread that explains a lot:

A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong, and the reality of it is a lot more damaging and concerning to both the livelihood of sex workers and online freedom in general.

— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) August 20, 2021

Thanks for that background, it’s illuminating.

We are making a few changes at OnlyFans pic.twitter.com/MiD2tlZcK1

— Vinny Thomas (@vinn_ayy) August 19, 2021

moving in a nude erection

https://myystar.com/MYYSTAR_PRESS_RELEASE.pdf

^in which Tyga tries to piggyback onlyfans

^in which Tyaga tries to piggybareback onlyfans

ok then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-25/onlyfans-drops-plan-to-ban-sexually-explicit-content-amid-uproar

fucked around, found out, decided to continue to fuck around

What did they expect the reaction to be?!?

Nope

Not really

I'm attempting to build a modest music career, and the extent to which everything revolves around social media now is disheartening.

Yes, and I don't think that speaks well of me

I know how to do this, breaker 1-9 a copy...

Yup, sure am!

Those best cut out for social media are probably those that realize they should cut out social media. (Though not Soto.)

Yes, and I don't think that speaks well of me

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

??

Why wouldn't it?

ILX and an extremely scrubbed, adblocked, chronological FB feed are more than plenty for me, so I think the answer is probably not.

I used to be quite good at Twitter and Instagram and now can barely be arsed with even WhatsApp. So I guess 'no'.

I don't know who social media is for any more, nobody seems to enjoy it or get anything out of it, and it's completely useless for sharing anything you've made.

idk I still get quite a lot of engagement and conversation on FB, even X. I know my life would be poorer without the friends and acquaintances on them.

Quitting sm for a day led me to speak to people irl
Now I’m trying to combine sm with real life

For me, there is a category of person for whom Facebook (or whatever) is _exactly_ the right amount of contact. It's my stepsister's husband or my ninth ex-girlfriend or the person I was in a band with that one time.

I do enjoy and treasure those connections, but I want to calibrate my closeness very carefully. Do I want to lose them forever, and completely forget our shared history? No. But do I want to invite them over for Thanksgiving, and have them stay in my guest room? Fuck no.

If you are careful about curating friends and feeds and keeping appropriate boundaries, social media can be a good tool.

Tl Dr there are some people in my life where social media allows me to stay exactly the right distance from a lot of people

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person? This friend is always proposing irl meetups but I just don’t have the appetite until I get to know them better

No.

Thanks YMP

it's not "weird" but if you want to get to know them better i would meet in person. IME even if most of the interactions you'll have are going to be online, spending a small amount of time together in person will give your online interactions some important context you are missing otherwise. it's necessary to understanding who they are.

anyway i am not cut out for social media because i'm susceptible to that co-option of my thinking space and attention. i broke my scrolling addiction when i deleted my socials several years ago, but it's become a problem again since i got my first smartphone in late 2020. i could stare at the ceiling all day without getting bored, mobile internet is a danger and i need to go back to using a dumb phone.

I think my hesitation has to do more with the fact that I just don’t want to get to know this person better. Ugh

yeah, that's what i was hoping to clarify.

i think dial up aol with chatrooms and instant messenger and usenet all tethered to a desktop was the right amount of internet for me.

ty dm!

Why wouldn't it?

Fair question. I think being "good at social media" is related to but not identical with a certain kind of .. I don't know, is glibness the word? I am also good, in real life, at coming up with a succinct turn of phrase, and I think I habitually use this to sound as if I know more about something than I do, or have thought more deeply about something than I have. It's a bad habit in real life and on social media it's very explicitly rewarded. So I think of this particular skill I have as something that it would be better for me to resist deploying or further developing.

well put

I think I have the opposite problem. I can follow what is happening from loads of different sources and get a reasonable grasp on events and then sound like a clueless numpt when I post about it .. lol it can always be be worse.

Stance on this has hardened a bit since this thread was posted. Quite important to have more sources than ever as things develop in places we know little about.

Sometimes we can do something with this information at the moment -- such as marching -- sometimes there is little.

More locally I only see things getting worse and degraded. In Europe I see much of the public become more divided and more with right wing (or worse) parties elected to power in response to Western made catastrophes like climate change. This week: Dutch elections, riots in Dublin.

So I just think it could become an issue of safety as well, and/or not despairing as very good people are speaking out on issues.

In current concern-trolling news, apparently there are people worried about how social-media-driven cultural polarization means that young people won't get married.

https://wapo.st/46wP02g (non-paywall gift link)

The argument here (I guess) is that social media is helping to sort people into political camps. And they will not marry each other.

Which it does, of course, but that is not necessarily a bad thing (like, why would I want to marry someone who hates me and hates what I believe in?)

This sounds like a digital follow-on of the "big sort" where people physically moved to be near people who agree with them on stuff.

One of my controversial opinions is that polarization can be useful. There are people I do not wish to compromise with.

Quitting sm for a day led me to speak to people irl
Now I’m trying to combine sm with real life

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person? This friend is always proposing irl meetups but I just don’t have the appetite until I get to know them better

― calstars

do you know how long it took me to figure out that by "sm" you meant "social media"?

fet sucks, go to a munch

Pet peeve: I hate it when scolds say that being on your phone isn't being with people.

Songs? Made by people. Movies and TV shows? People. Games? Concieved and made by people. Books? Written by 0eople. Social media? People. Discord, Slack, Instagram? People.

ILX? People.

When you look at a screen, most of the time it is a way of experiencing... people.

People
People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world

Pet peeve: I hate it when scolds say that being on your phone isn't being with people.

Songs? Made by people. Movies and TV shows? People. Games? Concieved and made by people. Books? Written by 0eople. Social media? People. Discord, Slack, Instagram? People.

ILX? People.

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

Soylent Green? People.

ok serious post i think

i grew up on the internet. i learned how to interact with other people on the internet, how to communicate with other people on the internet. initially, i found it a relief. all of the interpersonal skills people wanted me to have in real life weren't necessary on the internet. i could talk to people on the internet about myself, about my interests, i could be _vulnerable_ on the internet in a way i couldn't be in person

i think that... i've done a lot of work over the past few years in particular on learning to express myself in a healthy way. interpersonal skills have their benefits. my dream of the internet was a place without borders, or any other kind of boundaries either. boundaries are a lot more important to me than they used to be.

i have problems setting my own boundaries sometimes. it helps me to be in an environment that has healthy boundaries. i find that my emotional boundaries are healthier in person than they were on the internet.

i get a lot out of interpersonal interaction that i don't get on from the internet. the internet is great for talking about things intellectually. it just doesn't meet my social needs, though. i found this to be... particularly challenging during covid, when my in-person ability to socialize was curtailed severely.

i have a lot of friends that aren't local, and i keep up with them through the internet. a lot of times i want to express myself in writing, and the internet is good for that. my level of engagement with the public internet is _minimal_, though. this is the only place i post to on the public internet. i like the people, of course, but also, this place has healthy boundaries and isn't overwhelming in scale.

maybe i could get a gram and make it friends-only. maybe i'll do that at some point. that seems to be the way everybody i know does it. honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person?

I have at least two friendships that are pretty solid where I met the person on social media, live within ten miles of them, and still have yet to meet them in real life. one of them that's lasted about 10 years.

as far as why we haven't met up, just hasn't happened.

ever since I was 11 and started emailing some random dude from a newsgroup about model rockets (who I assumed was also 11 like me) I wondered about this very thing. like how cool would it be to make an actual friend from the internet. I did randomly meet a person from ILX once and it was pretty weird. not because of the person in question (he was very chill and easy to talk to) but because they potentially could know you better than your IRL friends in a lot of ways. I reveal a lot of stuff on here that I just never talk about IRL. not because it's private or embarrassing but because I don't think anyone else really gives a fuck. in fact it's not until recently that I realized I had never said the word "Autechre" out loud before.

long story, but pretty much my whole life is the way it is because of a good friendship with a guy I met from IRC in the 90s.

honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

tale as old as time

honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

tale as old as time

― bae (sic)

one of the best things about social media is people being able to pick up on my puns :)

I realized I had never said the word "Autechre" out loud before.

how did you say it? this happened with a friend the other day. he said "...uh...autech-ruh" and then soon afterward, when i was speaking, i said "autekker"

then we had that magical eye contact moment which says "we have chosen different paths of pronunciation here"

I said it the way you did. but then quickly realized "hmmm that's probably not right". and then had a little anxious moment where I realized I had no idea how to actually like, talk about their music

I used to write for an online zine called Satan Stole My Teddybear (it's long gone now) and posted on their message boards beginning at age 18, moving over to a new, independent message board when SSMT closed theirs, and now the remnants of us are on a third independent message board.

I met one of the members of the board in 2015 at a Rush concert, and then one in Las Vegas in 2019. it was kind of incredible each time, we'd both been part of an online community for half of our lives from a distance...boom, they're here, in the flesh!

a third I met last year. he was the infamous L0rd V1c of alt.rock-n-roll.metal.metallica who in the 90s would troll people and create Metallica quizzes full of obscure trivia and insulting people when they failed. he and I were adversaries then, out of the blue in 2022, he messages me under his gov name on FB to say he's reformed himself and rid himself of all of the bad people he used to hang with in the scene, and said if I still bore any resentment, he'd understand. but I didn't and we chatted and he's actually a good dude now and I met him in Atlanta seeing Mercyful Fate.

perhaps the most bizarre one....there was this complete dude in the 90s who used to post on USEnet as M1k3 M0sh in the metal forums, he was kind of a weirdo, overenthusiastic, occasionally posted questionable shit. him and I posted in the same threads on alt.music.slayer but didn't really have many convos, but he said he lived in FL - a bit I remember because when another poster found out he was going to the same show I was, he asked M1k3 to kick my ass for him.

like many, I left USENET like...in 2002? and 2015 rolls around, and I'm at a Deicide show talking to this dude for a bit (drunk af) and we get around to introducing ourselves and he says his name is "M1k3 M0sh". man, the look I must have had on my face. like not only are you this weirdo from USEnet, but you actually call yourself by your handle in person. I still don't know his real name. I don't even think his first name's M1k3.