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How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

nytimes.com

391–400 of 596 posts

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#391
Our culture, or lack thereof, is just unbelievable. If a comedian had made that joke, it likely would have been no problem for him (there would still have been some outrage no doubt), but people assume everything is so serious, even when there is no logical reason to assume so. What infuriates me is that the masses let idiots deny climate change and talk about how vaccines will give you autism without shaming them, yet they destroy people's lives for posting, let's face it, a funny joke. If you want to shame someone for being a scumbag, there are plenty of targets but no one is doing it. If you want to shame someone because you failed to understand the meaning of her statement, however, that seems to be the zeitgeist. Why go after a real target when there are innocent people out there who really cannot defend themselves and whose misery you can really revel in? The irony of the story of the woman who took the picture of the guy telling the joke and then got shamed herself is quite delicious in many ways.

Posting anything on the Internet, whether it's public or not (or rather, you think it's public or not) that you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with the whole world is just stupid. Maybe people will realize this at some point. Hell, I'm worried about my home NAS that's not connected to the outside world, is behind two firewalls, and is encrypted. Of course, if it's that sensitive, it doesn't belong in any digital form.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an "MRA loser"?

"MRA is short for Men's Rights Activist. MRAs argue that, as human beings, men should have human rights, due process in legal matters, and should not be subject to "reverse discrimination" in favor of other groups. MRAs typically point to men's lower life expectancy in almost every country, higher rates of incarceration, more severe penalties for similar offenses, lower rates of health care spending and health resear…

I am an advocate for men's rights for many of the reasons you cite, but I also acknowledge that there really are people who adopt the MRA label who are bitterly misogynist nutjobs who have no interest in a more just and equal society, but are rather the flip-side of those misandric feminists who believe--amongst other things--that "rape is nothing less than a conscious conspiracy by all men against all women" (likely not an exact quote as it's from memory, but Brownmiller says something with the same meaning.)

The problem is that misogynist MRAs disrupt the possibility of positive change the same way misandric feminists like Brownmiller and McKinnon do. Because they share a label with sane people, they allow the enemies of sanity to mount a trivially plausible ad hominem against any proposal to genuinely address the real injustices that men and women face due to the simple fact of being a man or a woman.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to live to a world where your actions outside of the workplace in a physical or online sense don't affect how you're perceived but it's just not true.

Not true because of people like you who force the link, who call,email and tweet employers about the behaviour of their off duty staff.

because of people like you

^Thats quite an assumption to make, no?

For the record, I've never done any of the above.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#394

French guy here. This article only speak about employees in american company getting fired about some data shared on the web. But I would be curious to know what happened to people who faced the same situation working in continental european companies. It would be surprising if people would lost their jobs so easily. Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures)…

Well, in Europe the tradition of mobbing is a serious problem, and its definitely something that occurs on a regular basis in the real world, and not just on the Internet. In Germany, people have been fired for instigating the mob - not necessarily for saying things that offend others, but rather for rabble-rousing and trying to get the pitchfork brigade riled up. I think Europe has a keener sense of the history of t…

> People form a kind of super-being in a mob, a near God-like entity, which can perform powerful acts - go to the moon, solve humanitarian crises, and so on.

I'd hardly call NASA or UNICEF a mob.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#395

When I was on Wikipedia as an admin, someone modified their signature to point to a user who didn't exist. I was pretty pissed off about this, and so I went to the admins noticeboard I'd setup not really that long ago to ask someone to resolve the issue. This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta…

You are not your mistakes, and there is a natural human margin of error. Mistakes make us human and it's what every single one of us has in common.

You seem to be a super bright guy who experienced a momentary lapse in judgement fuelled by emotion. We all do this, it's just not always public.

Also- I don't know how old you were at the time this story occurred but according to neuroscience, the frontal lobe doesn't develop until we are 25-27 years old (males develop later than females) and this is exactly the type of mistake the frontal lobe prevents us from making.

I hope you've recovered from this incident and have learned to not take these mistakes too personally...

Even calculators make mistakes.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#396
post #304
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provided without comment, here's Cantrill on Twitter relatively recently criticizing Linus Torvalds' "idiocy" in a usenet post from 2000: https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/456540342649487361

He acknowledges that in the replies, but this particular "idiocy" is not one of tone, behavior, or offense. It is about bad technical policy in the pursuit of ego, which is something that Linus has done several times since. (And he's a brilliant enough kernel hacker that he can work around his own bad policy and still come up with a system that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not bad technical policy. I feel b…

I see what you're saying and agree that's a rational reason for bringing up past events. But hear me out. My issue was that based on these three events it seems like he continues to like to raise his relative position by slamming other people. The means have changed, where before it was social status ("have you ever even kissed a girl?") to social justice "I would have fired BEN NOORDHUIS if he worked for me and did these despicable things").

I have noticed that a number of the most vocal social justice advocates have similar sort of behavior in their past. There is nothing wrong with advocating for social justice, but to me it's clear that as it has become a socially acceptable way to punish, it has attracted people in whom the desire to socially punish others is strong. Callout culture gives these people their "fix".

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#397
post #166

Interesting article, though I wonder why the title here on Hacker News is "How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco's Life" whereas the title on the actual article is "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life."

NYT likes to tinker with titles. They don't change the urls as often, so if you look at the url you'll sometimes see the original title.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#399
post #98

Regardless of your political orientation, you should think twice before cheerleading mob justice. If you think mob justice is good and if you think "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" then you're just saying unpopular speech is always bad and wrong. Once the mob turns against your political beliefs then one day you might be the one getting attacked and fired.

Pretty sure there's a pg essay on this. "Unpopular speech is not necessarily bad and wrong" is pretty much, like, the Official Opinion of Hacker News.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Internet, someone is already calling you a loser, possibly without your knowledge. It's best to worry more about the folks who have greater power to destroy your social standing than just simple name-calling. And to provide a sentinel value for the previous search space, I'll just say it. You, and everyone else who may be wondering if someone on the network is calling them a loser, are all losers. Now that's t…

The reason you'll get banned for such behavior, and the whole reason why such behavior is against the rules, is because personal attacks are counterproductive to logical discussions. When HN degenerates into a group of people who go around calling other groups of people losers, that does not bode well.

It was, I admit, somewhat of an obscure joke. I realized, after my first sentence, that I couldn't be certain that it was true. So I added a sentinel value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_Cairo

Don't despair. Being called a loser does not make you one.

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