Political Memes

Okay, that is interesting, but some of those people really brought it upon themselves. I mean, a racialized joke about AIDS while on a layover on her way to Africa? Even if she explains later that the intent was to criticize the epistemic bubble of living in a first world country with white privilege, that satire just doesn't transfer over text very well. And she was the senior PR director of an international media company...

Still, the guy who propagated her ignorant tweet to his 15,000 followers was wrong for following up months later (after she had volunteered in Ethiopia for a month) when she got a new job. At that point it seems like harassment. Like, he claimed he didn't want to destroy her life and that she'd ultimately be fine... but he wouldn't let it die...

And he kinda deserved his own comeuppance when he got push-back for saying "Bring Back Bullying." Bullying is atrocious and should never be rationalized. And it doesn't cause people to conform to pro-social behavior, it only rewards anti-social behavior, so the whole notion is based on a fallacy anyway. Like, "Oh, if only the columbine shooters had been bullied harder then they wouldn't have gone postal." No, if they hadn't been bullied in the first place, then they wouldn't have gone postal.

Still, now that it's been over a decade since Sacco's public shaming, if she's learned her lesson, I think she should be able to return to a normal life without constant reminders of her mistakes.

The point isn't to excuse bigotry, hatred, ignorance, or intolerance. It's to understand that people make mistakes and can learn from them, and should be allowed to recover if they learn their lessons.

I think these quotes raise some good points though:

Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

The movement against public shaming had gained momentum in 1787, when Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a paper calling for its demise — the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”

The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”

But the guy at a tech conference who whispered a crass joke to his buddy about big dongles? That case was way overblown. He wasn't a public figure. He didn't make a public statement. Yet one person who overheard and didn't like it decided to take a picture of him and post it with a synopsis of the joke? That's stretching credulity, and he shouldn't have lost his job over it. It wasn't meant to be a public comment, she wasn't intended to overhear, and plus if that's fairplay then literally anybody can take a photo of anyone and claim they said something whether they did or not, while stripping it of any mitigatory context. So that one was shitty.

The person who posted it didn't deserve to be doxxed and receive death threats over it, but characterizing the rest of the backlash she received as misogyny and the big spooky "men's rights activism" kinda misses the point. Power-tripping cause you have over a thousand followers and ruining a person's career because you overheard a tasteless joke that you didn't like (which wasn't even aimed at anyone) is not really okay...

It's a complex topic, but that only means it requires nuance, and an angry mob is incapable of nuance or impartiality.