True, median doesn’t necessarily equal mean but I agree with the other response puzzled as to how the intelligence distribution would be very highly skewed. In household income, median and mean are significantly different because a substantial amount of the income goes to people who make 10 or 100 times the 50k (call it, approximately) median. I guess we could go down a rabbit hole of trying to find a ay to 'really' quantify how much smarter Steve Jobs was than average considering what his intelligence created, back to 's. But according to the way we conventionally measure IQ he probably wasn’t even twice the average level, nor even other public figures more famous for pure intelligence.
I didn’t generally like George Carlin, but think he was right on that one. Democracy is the worst method of govt, except all the others, because of how rulers or ruling elites tend to stray into corruption and self dealing if they aren’t accountable to voters, and the similar problem of trying to eliminate the least intelligent and knowledgeable from the voting rolls without that also turning into self-dealing. But the average person despite their better education than long ago isn’t as capable of knowing and doesn’t know as much about a vastly more complicated world with much more to know. To me that’s a strong argument in favor of limited govt, though I know it isn’t to everyone.
The problem with nearly anonymous internet settings like article comments is that potentially a lot of the people are deliberately pulling your leg, and a lot of others are acting out a particular side of their persona, not the whole ‘them’. It’s somewhat different in forum type places (like here) where it’s harder for people to maintain a trollish persona, and there’s naturally less tolerance for people venting by saying stupid and destructive stuff. As someone mentioned, it can become ‘yours’ in a sense that you feel guilty for not combating poisonous statements. As to what ‘racism’ actually is, v where the accusation is just used as a debating tactic to gain the moral high ground, that’s a whole other ball of wax. We all ‘know it when we see it’, but don’t come out agreeing in every case.
I keep trying to think of what to write but I keep deleting it.
Sadly, there is indeed a lot of “silent” racism and the north is still super racist and the Internet is giving a voice to all of these racist cowards who are finally able to reach out to other racist cowards and say racist things without consequence.
It sucks.
There are a lot of good people and a lot of people who aren’t racist but a lot of the time we are just as afraid to say anything as someone who is a target of racism might be. And I’m sorry about that.
I was hoping that racism would die out over generations but I am not seeing that happen. I hope that it doesn’t get much worse before it gets better.
Words can have enormous impact on people. The Lincoln quote “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is one of the most inaccurate things ever said.
Too many people will post the most hurtful thing they can think of because it’s impossible to get punched in the nose through your computer. Once we perfect that technology people will get much more polite.
Way too large a percentage of people find trolls amusing. Zingers are more important than content. And yes it’s wearing.
I browse Reddit quite a bit, and I’ve always found that these racist comments are banished into the down-voted section – what racist comment prompted you to make this post? Just curious.
Unless one limits their online experience to work related items, shopping and perhaps lifestyle pages, I don’t think it’s possible to spend time on the internet and come away in a happy frame of mind. I realized some time back that virtually everything that pisses me off or makes me unhappy as I go through life comes at me via electrons (TV could be included here also, when it comes to news programs and political stuff). Almost nobody I encounter in real life pisses me off in any sort of significant way (i.e., idiots on the road or people in the express lane with more than the allowed number of items and people like that are excluded, as their annoyance is fleeting and doesn’t weigh on the soul). The reason for this is that people generally encounter a better class of people while out in public, and also because those who aren’t a better class of people keep their true selves under wraps until they can get home and get on their computers where they can behave any way they want and suffer no ill consequence for it.
So hard as it may be, if you really want to be happy and go through life with any sort of sense of peace or contentment, you’re just going to have to give up most of the internet and most news and political programming on television. Do that and your stress and anger levels will go way down and your sense of peace and contentment with the world will go up. Most people aren’t willing to make that trade though, and if you’re one of them you may as well just resign yourself to going through life feeling frustrated, beaten down and/or agitated all the time.
My personal feeling is that race issues have become a vicious cycle in recent years. Like with politics, religion and even sports fans, the extremely loud vocal minority on either end of the spectrum (racists and those hypersensitive to racism) are making the situation intolerable for the rest of us. But they feed each off each other and just scream louder and louder and louder. I’m equally tired of the racism itself as I am of the highlighting of every racist act someone commits.
I tend to agree. There hasn’t been much mention of the hypersensitive groups, and they’re as big of a part of the problem as the overt racists. There’s a sort of shutting-down of the dialogue on one side as far as people who don’t agree with you as racist, sexist, misogynistic, whatever.
I mean, if I was to say that I don’t find some particular ethnic looks attractive, I daresay that I’d be called out as racist, and probably sexist as well. Which isn’t the case, anymore than ethnic women who don’t like clean shaven, short haired white guys attractive are sexist or racist.
There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground anymore where you can make a statement about another group that’s not wholly positive or complimentary without being lambasted as a racist, sexist, etc…
I generally deal with it by classifying things I read on the internet in the same category of potentially suspect literature and periodicals that I place things like flyers under my windshield wiper, or stuff I’d read in the opinion page of the newspaper. Interesting, but probably mostly crazy bullshit. I don’t look at it as being much more than that; at worst, it’s maybe something akin to a sort of exhibitionistic/voyeuristic mind-reading exercise, where we get to see whatever crazy things that people want us to see, and that we want to look at, because we get a rise out of it, one way or another.
I’m sure there are some people who manage just fine, but this is true to my personal experience. Social media in particular is as poisoning as junk food or other sources of physical stress and almost always makes me feel worse about myself.
I must be getting old because I agree with this more and more every day. I have a large contingent of radical left friends (I am arguably radical left myself) and they seem to be embracing an ideology I cannot get on board with. Systemic racism, the oppression of women, toxic cultural attitudes about gender, I am utterly convinced these are all things, but I am increasingly unconvinced that the current radical left social justice strategy is an effective avenue for addressing them.
And even I’m not allowed to say that. In a conversation with other women, I’m not allowed to say, ‘‘I think you are wrong about this approach to feminism’’ because then I am tone policing and being invalidating and I think it’s all a load of bullshit. A movement without internal examination and criticism will stagnate and die. A movement that creates division instead of unity will fail. I get it, people are angry, people are sick and goddamn tired of the constant bullshit, and they want to scream until they are hoarse, until they are heard. I’m sick of it too. But this approach is clearly not working. You can’t lecture and prostyletize people into social change.
I’ve seen stuff on the internet I wish I could unsee and some of it has me doubting my free speech convictions. So, I understand that reality and the portrayal of reality is in many ways overwhelmingly grotesque. I don’t think people are saying “get over it” as much as they are trying to convey that you shouldn’t let stuff outside your control overly depress you.
The internet can be a very deceptive place. If you judged the US by comments on YouTube, etc, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the majority of Americans were hard-core racists. But of course that’s not true. It’s simply that many low-lifes spend huge amounts of time writing nasty comments while most sane peope have lives to lead, thus creating a mistaken impression of just how many racists there are out there.
I’ve learned from bitter experience that it’s useless engaging with these people. They’re of such severely restricted intelligence that one may as well converse with a brick wall.
I don’t get that impression. The majority of comments I see are not “hard core” racist.
No, I get the impression that the majority of Americans are soft-core racist (“I will upvote this horrible comment about black people being monkeys because even though it is over the top, it is hilarious and FREE SPEECH BRO!”) Or they are indifferent to racism ("Likening black people to monkeys isn’t racist. They did the same thing to George Dubya and no one batted an eye. So gimme a break]!)
I have no basis for deciding that these folks are a rare, insignificant, minor fraction of the population. It may make me feel better to believe this. It may make it easier for me to live my life as a black person in a predominately white work environment. But there is no empirical evidence that this is true.
The default setting on the American psyche has always been “Whites good, non-whites bad”. Every generation seems to believe that they have overcome this tendency, but they are always proven wrong.
monstro, you didn’t comment on my last post #38. I basically said that Humans are a frail lot, and the internet is a means to share that frailty too easily and document it forever. Your comment above is an example of that in the U.S., but to me it is a universal Human condition.
Other posters point out that venturing into online freezones/lightly moderated areas is much more likely to be a source of stress vs. an alleviator of it. I see the sense in that and guess I kind of moderate myself in terms of exposure to it.
I am left thinking of Candide the fable by Voltaire. When all is said and done, we must cultivate our own gardens.
First there was omnipresent racism, most people didn’t notice it, lacking a critical perspective with which to call it into question.
Then a few people on the social fringes criticized racism and were considered outrageous and radical, and they were considered disruptive.
Then it became a topic of public debate, with opposition to racism gradually becoming more socially acceptable than adherence to it.
Then racism became sufficiently defeated in the court of public opinion that it became socially unacceptable to express racist sentiments; many people who still held them learned to keep their opinions to themselves if they did not want to be ostracized and held in contempt.
Now it has become sufficiently marginalized that some idiots embrace it as “edgy” while people holding serious racist opinions and attitudes feel threatened by the decline of their world-view; and meanwhile many people who would have expressed horror and outrage shifted towards just ignoring racists and rolling their eyes dismissively at the quaint stupidity of leftover dinosaur racists who don’t seem to realize they’re virtually extinct.
It may not seem like progress when you experience overt racists shouting (or writing) their shit, and it’s still a long way from truly over and done with but I think they are louder now because it’s their last-shout era.
Last shout? I wouldn’t be overly optimistic. Wars still happen. People still murder and rape. I doubt uncharitable words and thoughts are soon to be eradicated.
My working assumption is that Humanity has a somewhat-fixed quota of dysfunction and strife, it is just distributed differently over the ages. As you address one issue, others will emerge in other parts of our worlds.
The internet shines a light on a dysfunction that has always been part of us. Having the light on will change how that dysfunction manifests, but not make it go away.
I don’t see Humans achieving a “higher state of consciousness” any time soon. I am a huge fan of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, but think the emergence of communicators and tricorders are the predictions that have played out, not his post-race/sex/whatever-ism Utopian society.
There’ll be other “isms” for future generations to be concerned about. Not so much because new ones will rise to replace the old ones, but because the new ones are with us right now, we just aren’t as of yet aware of them as social injustices.
This is actually a pretty good example of what I said earlier about the fringes on both sides making all the noise. Most people probably didn’t watch the CMAs and most of those who did either enjoyed or thought nothing of Beyoncé’s performance or else kept their thoughts to themselves. But some loud racists said racist things and got attention for it. And those people are assholes, no doubt about it. But the other side just as loudly decried country music fans as a bunch of white racists. This doesn’t help. And here we are with all this noise ruining the show for everyone else.
I don’t entirely agree with this. Racism is not the default setting. It is learned. I’ve seen enough pre-schoolers and kindergartners to know that they couldn’t care less what another kid’s skin looks like. But eventually they’ll be exposed all this bulllshit. They’ll hear black people are dangerous or white people are privileged, racist assholes and they won’t be able to just live and let live.
Where I was thinking about it was actually on here and other places where if you say, certain things in otherwise rational and intellectual discussions, you’ll be called racist, sexist, slut shamer, etc… when what you’re saying does have merit, but it’s just not what that other side wants to hear.
For example, if I were to get $500 in cash, and walk through South Dallas on a Friday night at 11 pm showing it off, I shouldn’t get robbed, and it sucks that I would, and probably get injured in the process, but it’s also very true that I should know better and expect to get robbed if I behave like that. Few people would dispute that. It doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t mean that I wasn’t victimized, but it’s a logical outcome.
But shift the argument, and point out that a girl wore provocative clothing and got so drunk that she couldn’t stand up, and then got sexually assaulted in some fashion, and the world will freaking blow up with “Blaming the victim” posts.
There’s a difference between justifying the assaults and pointing out that one’s actions made the assaults more likely, but one side of the debate shuts it down completely by shooting the messenger, so to speak.