{"id":69717,"date":"2019-01-23T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69717"},"modified":"2019-01-22T06:47:14","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T12:47:14","slug":"how-to-change-the-world-when-youre-a-sniveling-coward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69717","title":{"rendered":"How To Change The World (When You’re A Sniveling Coward)"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks wrote this piece – “The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture<\/a>” – almost a solid week before the Covington kerfuffle, in which a dishonest media led a pack of bovine keyboard commandos to a high-tech lynching of a MAGA hat and the kids standing around it.\u00a0 But the episode brought it back to mind for me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brooks details a fascinating – and by “fascinating”, I mean “terrifying” – episode involving a chain of online “denunciations” that seem reminiscent of the sort of thing that got millions killed under Mao and Stalin.\u00a0 \u00a0And the chain led back to one, er, man:<\/p>\n\n\n

The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert. He told [NPR podcast] \u201cInvisibilia\u201d that calling her out gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. \u201cNo, I don\u2019t care,\u201d he replied. \u201cI don\u2019t care because it\u2019s obviously something you deserve, and it\u2019s something that\u2019s been coming. \u2026 I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don\u2019t care if she\u2019s dead, alive, whatever.\u201d
When the interviewer, Hanna Rosin, showed skepticism, he revealed that he, too, was a victim. His father beat him throughout his childhood.
In this small story, we see something of the maladies that shape our brutal cultural moment. You see how zealotry is often fueled by people working out their psychological wounds. You see that when denunciation is done through social media, you can destroy people without even knowing them. There\u2019s no personal connection that allows apology and forgiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

My theory? The Covington social lynching, like the paroxysm of gleeful hate around the Kavanaugh hearings, are the result of an awful lot of people who’ve never learned to see political differences as anything but “hate” being told to “punch a Nazi” – and they can’t find any actual Nazis, because there are bowling leagues in Cincinnati with more people and political clout than the Nazi party in the USA today – but then again, to them pretty much everyone they disagree with is a Nazi…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…and they can’t punch, anyway. So they use the only weapons they have; the social media mob. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks wrote this piece – “The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture” – almost a solid week before the Covington kerfuffle, in which a dishonest media led a pack of bovine keyboard commandos to a high-tech lynching of a MAGA hat and the kids standing around it.\u00a0 But the episode brought it back to mind for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69717"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69784,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69717\/revisions\/69784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}