Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

This psychological point is the key issue which seems to have unfortunately been missed in a lot of the HN discussion.

not always : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHCqz-J51IU&list=RDEHCqz-J51...

From the article:

> Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed onto the bodies of porn actors. Websites were created to teach people how to make the superimposing look seamless — by matching skin-tones. On Facebook someone wrote, “I hope I can find Adria, kidnap her, put a torture bag over her head, and shoot a .22 subsonic round right into her fucking skull. Fuck that bitch, make her pay, make her obey.

See my previous post about proportionate response; this ain't it. Even if Adria is not making herself a likable person, by shaming Hank in public and failing to accept any blame for the backlash, this is not something that she deserved because of that.

Agree on Hank. Adria's case is more complicated. With regard to Hank, I know this is going to be unpopular but if the threats of physical violence (and, even, the actual fact) were directed at those who turned their backs on Hank, I'd support it, because morality demands enforcement sometimes, and abandoning someone in his time of need is unacceptable.

Adria fucked up, but she was the wrong target. She did something bad, and stupid, and wrong, in hot blood. The people who decided to abandon Hank in cold blood are the ones who deserve to be brutalized and terrorized into future decency (or oblivion).

Adria's case is more complicated because firing her was the right decision (she was in a PR role, and a fuckup that ruins another person's reputation is unacceptable when PR is your job) but I bet it was a sleazy tech-company firing where there's no severance or contractual positive reference, and where the person is often singled out and humiliated. They also picked the wrong time to do it. They should have eased her out with a 6-month "you don't work here, but we'll support you in landing on your feet" period, and unless there's something unusual that I don't know about, they didn't. So they're almost certainly dirty as hell and I almost hope she reads this, gets treatment for her issues (described below) and also sues the hell out of them, not for firing her (they had to remove her from a PR role) but for firing her, a person with disability (I'll get to that) in a damaging way at a damaging time.

Her lack of empathy is absolutely staggering. And, "if I had kids, I wouldn't tell jokes"? Seriously?

I'm going to say this non-judgmentally. I have cyclothymia (mild bipolar) and panic disorder and... I know it when I see it. She's mentally ill, and the most dangerous kind of it, because she doesn't know that she's ill. Instead, she justifies her horrible, mistaken actions by pretending she's some kind of SJW rather than someone who panicked in a crowd and fucked up.

I didn't join the Adria-hate bandwagon, originally, because I saw her as someone who fucked up rather than someone to hate. And I found the hatred rising as I read this interview. Then I got to the part about the abuse, and stopped hating her, because it made sense: she has PTSD, doesn't know that she's ill, and has a lack of empathy because severe mental illness makes you selfish, not out of a character flaw, but by necessity. So, I found myself not hating her at the end (although she should still get the courage to apologize for fucking up).

She, almost certainly, has PTSD because she was abused. That's nothing to be ashamed of. That's how normal people react to awful experiences. She had what sounds like a (mild-to-moderate, because she was still able to type) panic attack. For evidence, this quote:

“Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

(Trigger warning: this paragraph.) She was in a crowd. The people around her were annoying her. (When you have an anxiety disorder, lots of small things annoy you.) At some point, her nerves blew out. Again, nothing to be ashamed of. It happens. I've had hundreds of the fucking things. And panic can make you an asshole, like when you're in line for water (to stop the dry-throat-feels-like-it's-closing-up feeling) and you're screaming at the people in front to "stop taking so fucking long". (I screamed at someone, mid-panic, for using what I thought was a credit card for a $3 purchase and "holding up the line". EBT, or "food stamps". Huge dick move on my part; thought she was a yuppie who couldn't be bothered to carry cash, I was wrong. Had to apologize profusely after that one.) So I am generally sympathetic to people who fuck up because of mental illness, even though posting a Tweet about the guys behind me wouldn't be my strategy for dealing with a panic attack. I fail to see how it would resolve the episode.

What galls me about her is that she refuses to admit that she fucked up. I've seen enough not to demand empathy from the severely ill, but human decency is non-negotiable, and her self-righteousness is off-the-charts. Then she has to fall back on "he's a white male. I'm a black Jewish female." No, Adria, it's not about that; he was never a danger to you, and you are someone with an intensely painful, but fortunately treatable, medical condition. You freaked out and ruined someone's life in addition to your own, and that makes you hazardous. I have a lot of sympathy for people who suffer from mental illness, but not if they refuse to recognize and take responsibility for the problem.