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Thread: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

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    United States Avalon Member Mike's Avatar
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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Gracy May (here)
    Quote Posted by Mike (here)
    (as I've said many times before, what we're seeing now isn't a race war - it's a woke war masquerading as a race war, filled with all sorts of useful idiots perpetuating the ruse)
    I'm still optimistic that the movement will weaken, and begin rapidly losing credibility, as it tries to worm it's way into general society.

    Same with the movement that longs to see certain people who are predetermined guilty rounded up off the sheets, or even suffer the ultimate cancellation as in being executed.

    Neither are very healthy ways of looking at and interacting with our world, both are highly divisive new sprouts out of an ongoing culture war in general that's been slowly brought towards a boil for decades now, and the stakes only keep getting higher as each is thoroughly convinced of it's virtue.

    I wish I was still as hopeful as you Gracy.

    It (wokeness) has wormed it's way into every facet of society actually, from pre-K right thru university, and now into tech and industry at large. And media and sport. And the knitting community even! https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/...s-turned-nasty

    And veganism! Here's a nice little argument for "decolonizing" veganism. https://theveganreview.com/

    Unfortunately these insane examples are no longer outliers - they're the norm.

    The only way out of all this mess is a strict, non-negotiable adherence to Truth. Not what we want to be true, not what seems to be emotionally or symbolically true, not what we "identify" as true, not our "lived experience", but what's objectively and unequivocally true. Emotions have largely been weaponized and used against us, and must be set aside temporarily in place of sober analysis. And then maybe, in 10-15 years or so, if we're still alive, we can return to some semblance of sanity again.

    The problem is, we now have several generations of kids who have been indoctrinated into this lunacy. It might take several more to undo the damage. And I know I've been pretty hard on these kids and young adults, so it must be said that had I been born in the 90's, let's say, I likely would have been just as susceptible to it all. It must be terribly confusing being a person under 30 these days, having been mind-f#cked by all this divisive ideology right from jump street

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

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    Last edited by Constance; 14th November 2021 at 03:34.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    @Mike. Kind of playing off what Constance presented, I'll try and narrow my focus a bit. Up until October 2017, the main thing I saw the term "awakened" associated with, was spiritual. We were talking about spiritual awakenings.

    Now this "woke" crowd, I don't know where the Genesis of that term of theirs lays, but they sure as hell haven't ever even caught a whiff of a spiritual awakening. What they have caught on to, is that there are any number of unaddressed social injustices.

    I note the same from the Q Patriot Movement. Not all by any means, but many of them have had a political awakening, their eyes have been opened to some all new and horrifying possibilities for how things may really work, but it's not a spiritual awakening.

    I remember David Icke years ago describing how one can be clever, as in being clever enough to build a nuclear bomb, but do you have the wisdom, to understand the most responsible way of now being in possession of this knowledge and technology?

    What's absent from this entire picture, is any aspect of spiritual maturity from either of these movements...

    We have "woke", vs. "politically awakened". Both share roots in certain objective truths, but are also like a couple of children running around with a loaded gun seeing "reds under the bed".

    It's like the old "fire at will!" Except it's really a firing squad, and a circular one at that.

    I say we reintroduce the peace pipe.
    Last edited by Gracy; 7th March 2021 at 03:13.

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    United States Avalon Member Mike's Avatar
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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Gracy May (here)
    @Mike. Kind of playing off what Constance presented, I'll try and narrow my focus a bit. Up until October 2017, the main thing I saw the term "awakened" associated with, was spiritual. We were talking about spiritual awakenings.

    Now this "woke" crowd, I don't know where the Genesis of that term of theirs lays, but they sure as hell haven't ever even caught a whiff of a spiritual awakening. What they have caught on to, is that there are any number of unaddressed social injustices.

    I note the same from the Q Patriot Movement. Not all by any means, but many of them have had a political awakening, their eyes have been opened to some all new and horrifying possibilities for how things may really work, but it's not a spiritual awakening.

    I remember David Icke years ago describing how one can be clever, as in being clever enough to build a nuclear bomb, but do you have the wisdom, to understand the most responsible way of now being in possession of this knowledge and technology?

    What's missing from this entire picture, is the absence of spiritual maturity from either of these movements...

    We have "woke", vs. "politically awakened". Both share roots in certain objective truths, but are also like a couple of children running around with a loaded gun seeing "reds under the bed".

    It's like the old "fire at will!" Except it's really a firing squad, and a circular one at that.

    I say we reintroduce the peace pipe.


    The term "woke" is meant to imply something called "critical consciousness" (I'll call it CC for the rest of this post). CC is a way of viewing the world and all it's interactions as a zero sum game - one group trying to get power over another group. For CC people, life is nothing but a power game between oppressors and the oppressed. For example: they don't ask the question "did racism occur in this situation?"; instead they ask the question "Where did racism occur here?" In other words, they just assume it exists everywhere and work backwards to "prove" the accusation. It's a ubiquitous mentality now, even among academics. There's a silly but disturbing game people are playing now, where a random word is typed into a google searchbox, i.e. is ( ) racist? It could be is air racist? Are apples racist? Is ice racist? And you'll almost inevitably find a serious article (sometimes scholarly!) indicating that these things are indeed racist.

    That's the foundation of Critical Race Theory. And it's being taught to kids as young as 10.

    But there are all kinds of critical theories being taught at university now (and high school and grade school). Fat studies, queer studies, gender studies, etc. And none of them are about what you'd think they are about. Fat Studies, for example, isn't about the dangers of obesity, proper diet, dangerous blood markers and so forth. No, Fat Studies is a critical theory that attempts to normalize obesity. It's all based on the belief that obesity being unhealthy is only one narrative, and that any attempt to suggest it's undesirable is "fat shaming" and an attempt of one group to dominate another - in this case skinny/fit people dominating fat people.

    What all these critical theories have in common is a complete and utter lack of science. It's all about power as it pertains to race, sex, gender, etc. I just listened to a man talk about a scholarly paper he'd read about glaciers. And the paper determined that glacial science was totally inadequate in the absence of how glaciers relate to gender. I imagine you're quite confused now. Well he was too. And so am I. But this is the type of madness we're dealing with.

    Honestly I still don't know much about Q. And while I can see why you made the comparison, I can't really place the 2 in the same ballpark ( Q and Wokeism). I assume you view Q as an undesirable manifestation of the alt right? Something like that? I dislike and am extremely wary of the extremes on the left and the right; the reason I'm always blabbing on about the dangers of the far left is because at the moment they're holding all the cards and their ideology is dominant in media, tech, universities, and so on. And their ideology and their activists are far more aggressive and power hungry. As far as I can tell, Q people aren't educating young boys and girls on genital mutilation, they're not promoting obesity, they're not teaching self hating and racist philosophies to kids, they're not anti free speech, anti free thought, and so on. Plus, atm there are no openly Q leaning educators, politicians, or religious leaders. The woke have infiltrated all those domains. And there are no Q departments in business and industry teaching employees the Q philosophy(whatever it is), unlike the woke movement which has "Diversity" camps set up in many universities and businesses.



    Critical social justice people don't want to talk, meet in the middle, exchange olive branches, or anything of that nature. They only want to do 2 things: destroy western civilization and empower critical race theorists. This isn't my interpretation of things: they say it themselves in their books and scholarly journals.

    I'm going to break all this stuff down really soon, point by point, when I find the motivation. I've actually already started. It'll take me a little while. It's all kinda confusing because words get used interchangeably, and it's hard to know what's what and who's who. But I'll explain it all. I think its super important for everyone to understand.
    Last edited by Mike; 7th March 2021 at 08:30.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    “Does Society have a Mental Disorder?” To ask the question is to answer it.

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    Arrow Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Star Mariner (here)

    A cognitive bias by which people will consider a statement or other information to be correct if it has personal meaning or significance to them. People whose opinion is affected by subjective validation will perceive two unrelated events (i.e., coincidence) to be related because their personal beliefs demand that they be related.
    I chose Subjective Validation, which is complex because it stems from group feelings that had the same impression. What if the goal was not just to respond to something that makes like-minded people. For the mystics this world is an illusion which one believes to be only the reality of a repetitive daily life, would not be a wave of the magic wand of the great magician or Krishna for the Hindus. Subjectivity is the extension of the truth which becomes ephemeral, all truths are like the water of the stream which does nothing but pass. Why should the truth be conditioned to serve the only logic to be followed when this same truth will suffer the wear of time? What matters is consciousness and it needs all of these available tools to find its true path, right?

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil (here)
    What matters is consciousness and it needs all of these available tools to find its true path, right?
    Yes, agreed. The obstacle however is the barricade placed before us -by those powers that be - which prevent us from reaching the truth and thus personal empowerment. This world of illusions is difficult enough without a mountain of state sponsored deception and conditioning muddying the waters too.

    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil (here)
    Why should the truth be conditioned to serve the only logic to be followed when this same truth will suffer the wear of time?
    I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
    suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.
    "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
    ~ Jimi Hendrix

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    Arrow Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Star Mariner (here)
    I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
    suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.
    Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many. We each hold our truth, following our plane of consciousness, our intellectual heritage, our understanding of the world, our understanding filters. We can say that the truth belongs to us, but that does not make a universal truth, but a truth at a time that we will have chosen to make our own, but that does not mean that this truth is immutable. Truth by itself is constantly undergoing its own evolution, with birth, climax and decline. Everything is not eternal, there is a beginning and an end ...


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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Going out on a limb here, every one of us suffer from at least a modicum of some type of mental disorder.

    It is a very unfortunate trait that lingers from our animal state. (Yes, of course we are still animals but we like to believe we are not.) I'm talking about the need for a herd mentality, it is deeply wired in our very being and I have often wondered why I seem to have scant regard for it. Every lesson I learned was done the hard way, but those others who didn't follow my path never learned a lesson through experience, they learnt it via adoption, acceptance.

    The young chimpanzee in the jungle saw the snake that bit their cousin, it saw the tribal response of screaming, agitaion and fear. It is not a lesson you forget. These days, unfortunately, people are learning from how often something is repeated but with no personal experience beyond that. They never saw it, smelt it, experienced it. Its just noise, and its a cacophony of noise that requires discernment to discover anything at all. (How does one learn discernment but through a long, and often painful, process of experiences).

    You can imagine how easy that might be to manipulate were you wishing to do so. Perhaps it needs no conspiracy behind it, it was inevitable. Currently the advent of technology and the result of various offspring - internet, social media etc. - is totally unknown, but there are enough alarm bells to think we really were nowhere near ready for this. Imagine you were born in the year 2000, you know nothing else other than a world of technology, communication, soundbytes and memes. You believe the internet is a source of knowledge, and it CAN be, but can you find it?

    Mental disorder is in everyone. I'm sure Spock would agree. (However, emotion might be our greatest gift, despite the pain it can bring and contrary to what Vulcans think of human beings).
    Last edited by Ewan; 7th March 2021 at 22:20. Reason: Clarity

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil (here)
    Quote Posted by Star Mariner (here)
    I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
    suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.
    Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many. We each hold our truth, following our plane of consciousness, our intellectual heritage, our understanding of the world, our understanding filters. We can say that the truth belongs to us, but that does not make a universal truth, but a truth at a time that we will have chosen to make our own, but that does not mean that this truth is immutable. Truth by itself is constantly undergoing its own evolution, with birth, climax and decline. Everything is not eternal, there is a beginning and an end ...


    If you stick your hand into a fire today the skin will burn off. Same thing would happen 5000 years from now

    It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.

    You appear to be talking about spiritual truths and philosophies, and I get that. I'm just chiming in here because the "there are many truths" brigade is now attempting to apply that concept to everything, including basic objective and unchangable truths, such as sex and gender, and it's creating a dangerously incoherent world

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    Arrow Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Mike (here)
    It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.
    There is always a way to find a way out, that's what the powerful of this world do who have the law on their side. Normal, the laws are created for their advantage and not that of the people, in this sense Yes the truth belongs to the power in place.
    The example of a fire that burns is like the water in which we drown, the earth to plant vegetables and the air that transforms the wind into a storm, these are the four elements of nature, natural laws that cannot be derogated from.
    The truth of the spirit, of the laws, of the thought, is only an invention of men.
    You wanted to trap me, smart boy.
    The truth is interchangeable and very often it is created out of nothing and often created in order to be clear and to be right.
    In my astrological practice, I do not hold any truth, because like the snake my animal totem, which shifts by changing its skin, I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years. Truth is not static, except perhaps for the rational mind, which will always find a truth that suits it.

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    United States Avalon Member Mike's Avatar
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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil (here)
    Quote Posted by Mike (here)
    It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.
    There is always a way to find a way out, that's what the powerful of this world do who have the law on their side. Normal, the laws are created for their advantage and not that of the people, in this sense Yes the truth belongs to the power in place.
    The example of a fire that burns is like the water in which we drown, the earth to plant vegetables and the air that transforms the wind into a storm, these are the four elements of nature, natural laws that cannot be derogated from.
    The truth of the spirit, of the laws, of the thought, is only an invention of men.
    You wanted to trap me, smart boy.
    The truth is interchangeable and very often it is created out of nothing and often created in order to be clear and to be right.
    In my astrological practice, I do not hold any truth, because like the snake my animal totem, which shifts by changing its skin, I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years. Truth is not static, except perhaps for the rational mind, which will always find a truth that suits it.

    Well in a liberal society, laws are made by elected representatives, based on what is desirable for all, which is based on rationally derived observations of objective reality. Yes, people in power will always be susceptible to corruption, and hierarchies of power will always exist, but they must exist in order to have a kind of coherent and ordered world. The world will never be perfect!

    The people that are rapidly gaining power now - the "woke" - are not elected officials, have decided ahead of time they know what's right for everyone (they do not believe in individualism or free thought, or objective reality for that matter) and want to destroy western civilization(liberalism) and replace it with their socialist woke utopia...despite the fact that their formula has been tried many times before and failed every time..resulting in millions and millions of deaths.

    Is it a mental illness? Or a well thought out plan?

    Well it depends on who we're talking about. Many woke actually mean well, are not part of any conspiracy whatsoever, and are doing what they feel is best for society. "Useful idiots" you might call them. They're running on a program - Jung would say they are "animus possessed" - and are mostly operating from a very low resolution understanding of the world. They are definitely corrupted mentally and emotionally, and that is very much like a mental illness.

    The people above them know exactly what they're doing and why, and are happy to manipulate the mob beneath them. But that's a whole other thread.

    One game they like to play is the "nothing is real" game. The game that states that there are countless ways to view the world and they are all valid. Well they got the first part right but the second part wrong. There are really only a few ways to interpret the world which benefit all and reduce suffering as much as possible. One of those ways has been refined and improved upon for the last 5 centuries. It's called liberalism. The woke want to toss that out in the trash, because in their wondrous wisdom they know better. So they say.
    Last edited by Mike; 7th March 2021 at 23:20.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    "When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there." ~ George Harrison

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil (here)
    Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many.
    Quote Posted by Lunesoleil
    I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years.
    If a truth is replaced by another truth, it was never the truth. What you are talking about here is perception, not truth. As Mike says exactly, objective truth is unwavering regardless of perception. Truth doesn't change, only perception changes - in either gaining more clarity (of that truth), or losing it.

    One of the traps of woke culture is its corruption of the word 'truth'. My truth, your truth, living the truth, and so on. The 'truths' of wokeness change daily, so how can it ever be the truth? This phenomenon is summarized perfectly in the definition of Truthiness outlined in the first post.

    Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.
    "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
    ~ Jimi Hendrix

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    All you have to do to answer this question is to go outside and to a couple open stores without a mask on and see how people react.

    Although I won't relay the entire conversation here, but when you have a mask guard at a store explain to you why you should wear a mask "..because the particles of diseases are everywhere."

    Yeah, it is scary out there because people have either lost their education or not had one.

    I am by no means "highly educated" by phd standards or anything, but I have done my homework. That is what everyone should do - do their own work and make an effort to find out the truth.
    Last edited by Patient; 8th March 2021 at 16:46.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    I am not sure that "conformity" is a mental disorder? The following along with what others (are doing, telling us to do) despite what one thinks is true is endemic in human culture. Even when alone we may act out "conformation"? The major issue is how do we choose to be nonconformists when everything we "know" we learned? It's a conundrum.

    I hope people won't discount the info just because it is on wikipedia? Asch conformity experiments

    Quote In 1951, Solomon Asch conducted his first conformity laboratory experiments at Swarthmore College, laying the foundation for his remaining conformity studies. The experiment was published on two occasions.[1][11]

    Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining participant would react to the actors' behavior.

    The actors knew the true aim of the experiment, but were introduced to the subject as other participants. Each student viewed a card with a line on it, followed by another with three lines labeled A, B, and C (see accompanying figure). One of these lines was the same as that on the first card, and the other two lines were clearly longer or shorter (i.e., a near-100% rate of correct responding was expected). Each participant was then asked to say aloud which line matched the length of that on the first card. Before the experiment, all actors were given detailed instructions on how they should respond to each trial (card presentation). They would always unanimously nominate one comparator, but on certain trials they would give the correct response and on others, an incorrect response. The group was seated such that the real participant always responded last.

    Subjects completed 18 trials. On the first two trials, both the subject and the actors gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the actors would all give the same wrong answer. This wrong-responding recurred on 11 of the remaining 15 trials. It was subjects' behavior on these 12 "critical trials" that formed the aim of the study: to test how many subjects would change their answer to conform to those of the 7 actors, despite it being wrong. Subjects were interviewed after the study including being debriefed about the true purpose of the study. These post-test interviews shed valuable light on the study: both because they revealed subjects often were "just going along" and because they revealed considerable individual differences to Asch. Additional trials with slightly altered conditions were also run,[citation needed] including having a single actor also give the correct answer.

    Asch's experiment also had a condition in which participants were tested alone with only the experimenter in the room. In total, there were 50 subjects in the experimental condition and 37 in the control condition.

    Results
    In the control group, with no pressure to conform to actors, the error rate on the critical stimuli was less than 1%.[1]

    In the actor condition also, the majority of participants' responses remained correct (63.2%), but a sizable minority of responses conformed to the actors' (incorrect) answer (36.8 percent). The responses revealed strong individual differences: Only 5 percent of participants were always swayed by the crowd. 25 percent of the sample consistently defied majority opinion, with the rest conforming on some trials. An examination of all critical trials in the experimental group revealed that one-third of all responses were incorrect. These incorrect responses often matched the incorrect response of the majority group (i.e., actors). Overall, 75% of participants gave at least one incorrect answer out of the 12 critical trials.[1] In his opinion regarding the study results, Asch put it this way: "That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern."


    Conformity of the anonymous crowd leads to criminal behavior here. How do we hold others to account when we are part of the same crowd?

    Last edited by Delight; 8th March 2021 at 17:03.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Great article by Greenwald ripping into, (and rightly so), woke culture and its "toxic tactic" to delegitimize criticisms by screaming harrasment and abuse.

    [Go to link to activate video/twitter excerpts sprinkled throughout article.]

    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cri...fvALIG2Q-Z5ZJ0

    Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

    As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society's most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

    Glenn Greenwald, 11 March 2021

    The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

    One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

    The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

    She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

    The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

    That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

    That is deliberate
    .

    Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

    This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

    But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter.

    By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

    During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

    A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

    When Joe Biden announced his choice of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary and various news outlets reported that she had spent the last several years collecting many millions of dollars in speaking fees from the very Wall Street banks over whom she would now exercise immense power, the reporters who disclosed these facts and those expressing concern about them were accused of sexism. Somehow, a narrative was peddled under which one of the multi-millionaire titans of the global neoliberal order was reduced to a helpless victim, while the far less powerful people questioning the ethics and integrity of her conduct became her persecutors.

    One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions.

    Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms:

    In the paradigm peddled by Maddow, Elizabeth Warren was instantly transformed from an outspoken, intrepid Harvard Law Professor, consumer advocate, and influential lawmaker into a vulnerable abuse victim. Anonymous Sanders supporters were the ones wielding the real power and strength in this warped and self-serving framework. In order to shield themselves from the same scrutiny and accountability every other powerful public figure receives, they’re resuscitating the most discredited and antiquated myths about who is strong and weak, who requires protection and special considerations and who does not.

    No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about journalists like Laura Ingraham or Mollie Hemingway or Briahna Joy Gray or political figures such as Kellyanne Conway, Susan Collins or Kirstjen Nielsen. Have at it: the sky’s the limit. Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

    One also need not worry about accusations of anti-Semitism if one opposes the landmark quest of Bernie Sanders to become the first Jewish president or even expresses bitter contempt for him. No bigotry allegations will be applied to critics of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Richard Grenell, or Ben Carson.

    This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique.

    Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

    The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

    Those who invoke this shield on their own behalf do so by claiming that they receive abusive and bigoted messages and even threats online. I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. In the age of social media, anyone with a significant public platform will inevitably be subjected to ugly vitriol. Often the verbal assaults are designed for the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other aspects of their demographic identity in order to be as hurtful as possible.

    In response to Lorenz’s use of International Women’s Day to elevate her suffering to center stage, Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong described her own personal experience to argue that verbal condemnations from angry readers can cause “serious mental anguish and made me fear for my own safety and that of my family.” She acknowledged that “it’s not physical or material harm” and is “not legal persecution,” but, she said, it is nonetheless “a very real, constant, negative force in my life, something I have to think about all the time, and that sucks.”

    It is hard to dispute Wong’s claims.
    Not only do studies demonstrate that a barrage of online criticism can adversely affect one’s mental health, I can speak from personal experience — vast, sustained, and intense personal experience — about what it is like to be the target of coordinated, bigoted and threatening attacks because of one’s reporting.

    When Jair Bolsonaro was in the middle of his successful presidential candidate in 2017, he hurled an anti-gay slur at me using his Twitter account to his millions of followers. In 2019, he publicly claimed my marriage to my husband and our adoption of two Brazilian children were fraudulent, done only to prevent my deportation. Does it take any imagination to envision what my email inbox and online messages were like for months after each of those episodes?

    From the time my colleagues and I at The Intercept Brazil began our multi-part exposé about corruption on the part of high-level Bolsonaro officials in mid-2019, my name trended on Brazilian Twitter on a virtually daily basis for weeks if not longer, accompanied by demands for my deportation and arrest. Much of the vitriol was anti-gay in theme, to put that mildly. My husband, one of the only openly gay members of Congress in the history of Brazil, and I have received a non-stop deluge of very specific death threats aimed at our family and our children. As a result of that, none of us — him, me or our two children — have left our home in almost two years without armed security and an armored vehicle. And it all culminated in the attempt to criminally prosecute me last year on over 100 felony counts.

    That is most definitely not the first time I’ve encountered such criticisms and attacks, nor, I say with confidence, will it be the last. I was unable to leave Brazil for almost a year after returning from Hong Kong where I met Edward Snowden and published our first reports on the NSA due to publicly and privately expressed threats from U.S. officials of criminal prosecution.

    I’m so far from unique in any of this. These kinds of recriminations are inherent to journalism (when done well), to confronting those in power, to insinuating yourself into controversial and polarizing political debates and controversies. Journalists love to laud themselves for “speaking truth to power” but rarely think about what that actually means.

    If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

    Death threats like this one arrive in my inbox every week at least. When a news event related to our work transpires that angers large numbers of people — such as this week’s news that the criminal convictions of former President Lula da Silva have been invalidated and his political rights restored, thus rendering him eligible to run against Bolsonaro in 2022 — those threats and vituperative messages intensify greatly and we are forced to enhance our security measures.

    Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

    But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

    And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well.

    That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

    That is why I do not consider myself remotely victimized: I chose to do this work knowing what it would entail if I did it well, and I continue to do it, rather than do something else, because it is a price worth paying. It is fulfilling and gratifying work to me, and I see the recriminations as proof of its efficacy. Not everyone will have that same calculus, which is why different people make different choices for their lives based on their assessments of the costs and benefits inherent in them, but the framework is essentially the same for everyone.

    What I ultimately find most repellent and offensive about this incessant self-victimization from society’s most powerful and privileged actors is the conceit that they are somehow unique or special in the treatment they receive, as if it only happens to people like them. 

    That is the exact opposite of reality: everyone with a public platform receives abuse and ugly attacks, and there are members of every faction who launch them. If you have any doubts about that, go criticize Kamala Harris and see what kind of staggeringly bigoted and hateful abuse you get back in return.

    Whenever this tactic is hauled out in defense of neoliberal leaders — to claim that Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive, or that Corbyn supporters are, or that Trump supporters are: basically that everyone is guilty of abusive behavior except neoliberals and their loyal followers — the real purpose of it becomes clear. It is a crowd-control technique, one designed to build a gigantic moat and drawbridge to protect those inside the royal court from the angry hordes outside of it.

    Last week, I participated in a debate on Al Jazeera about online censorship with the liberal British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She was quite a reasonable and candid advocate of the need for online censorship and I found the discussion consequently illuminating, particularly because she was so blunt about what she believes is the real problem that online censorship needs to solve. Listen to what she said:

    Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed.


    That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

    Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. 

    Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

    Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    Quote Posted by Gemma13 (here)
    Great article by Greenwald ripping into, (and rightly so), woke culture and its "toxic tactic" to delegitimize criticisms by screaming harrasment and abuse.

    [Go to link to activate video/twitter excerpts sprinkled throughout article.]

    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cri...fvALIG2Q-Z5ZJ0

    Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

    As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society's most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

    Glenn Greenwald, 11 March 2021

    The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

    One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

    The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

    She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

    The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

    That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

    That is deliberate
    .

    Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

    This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

    But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter.

    By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

    During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

    A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

    When Joe Biden announced his choice of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary and various news outlets reported that she had spent the last several years collecting many millions of dollars in speaking fees from the very Wall Street banks over whom she would now exercise immense power, the reporters who disclosed these facts and those expressing concern about them were accused of sexism. Somehow, a narrative was peddled under which one of the multi-millionaire titans of the global neoliberal order was reduced to a helpless victim, while the far less powerful people questioning the ethics and integrity of her conduct became her persecutors.

    One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions.

    Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms:

    In the paradigm peddled by Maddow, Elizabeth Warren was instantly transformed from an outspoken, intrepid Harvard Law Professor, consumer advocate, and influential lawmaker into a vulnerable abuse victim. Anonymous Sanders supporters were the ones wielding the real power and strength in this warped and self-serving framework. In order to shield themselves from the same scrutiny and accountability every other powerful public figure receives, they’re resuscitating the most discredited and antiquated myths about who is strong and weak, who requires protection and special considerations and who does not.

    No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about journalists like Laura Ingraham or Mollie Hemingway or Briahna Joy Gray or political figures such as Kellyanne Conway, Susan Collins or Kirstjen Nielsen. Have at it: the sky’s the limit. Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

    One also need not worry about accusations of anti-Semitism if one opposes the landmark quest of Bernie Sanders to become the first Jewish president or even expresses bitter contempt for him. No bigotry allegations will be applied to critics of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Richard Grenell, or Ben Carson.

    This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique.

    Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

    The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

    Those who invoke this shield on their own behalf do so by claiming that they receive abusive and bigoted messages and even threats online. I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. In the age of social media, anyone with a significant public platform will inevitably be subjected to ugly vitriol. Often the verbal assaults are designed for the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other aspects of their demographic identity in order to be as hurtful as possible.

    In response to Lorenz’s use of International Women’s Day to elevate her suffering to center stage, Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong described her own personal experience to argue that verbal condemnations from angry readers can cause “serious mental anguish and made me fear for my own safety and that of my family.” She acknowledged that “it’s not physical or material harm” and is “not legal persecution,” but, she said, it is nonetheless “a very real, constant, negative force in my life, something I have to think about all the time, and that sucks.”

    It is hard to dispute Wong’s claims.
    Not only do studies demonstrate that a barrage of online criticism can adversely affect one’s mental health, I can speak from personal experience — vast, sustained, and intense personal experience — about what it is like to be the target of coordinated, bigoted and threatening attacks because of one’s reporting.

    When Jair Bolsonaro was in the middle of his successful presidential candidate in 2017, he hurled an anti-gay slur at me using his Twitter account to his millions of followers. In 2019, he publicly claimed my marriage to my husband and our adoption of two Brazilian children were fraudulent, done only to prevent my deportation. Does it take any imagination to envision what my email inbox and online messages were like for months after each of those episodes?

    From the time my colleagues and I at The Intercept Brazil began our multi-part exposé about corruption on the part of high-level Bolsonaro officials in mid-2019, my name trended on Brazilian Twitter on a virtually daily basis for weeks if not longer, accompanied by demands for my deportation and arrest. Much of the vitriol was anti-gay in theme, to put that mildly. My husband, one of the only openly gay members of Congress in the history of Brazil, and I have received a non-stop deluge of very specific death threats aimed at our family and our children. As a result of that, none of us — him, me or our two children — have left our home in almost two years without armed security and an armored vehicle. And it all culminated in the attempt to criminally prosecute me last year on over 100 felony counts.

    That is most definitely not the first time I’ve encountered such criticisms and attacks, nor, I say with confidence, will it be the last. I was unable to leave Brazil for almost a year after returning from Hong Kong where I met Edward Snowden and published our first reports on the NSA due to publicly and privately expressed threats from U.S. officials of criminal prosecution.

    I’m so far from unique in any of this. These kinds of recriminations are inherent to journalism (when done well), to confronting those in power, to insinuating yourself into controversial and polarizing political debates and controversies. Journalists love to laud themselves for “speaking truth to power” but rarely think about what that actually means.

    If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

    Death threats like this one arrive in my inbox every week at least. When a news event related to our work transpires that angers large numbers of people — such as this week’s news that the criminal convictions of former President Lula da Silva have been invalidated and his political rights restored, thus rendering him eligible to run against Bolsonaro in 2022 — those threats and vituperative messages intensify greatly and we are forced to enhance our security measures.

    Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

    But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

    And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well.

    That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

    That is why I do not consider myself remotely victimized: I chose to do this work knowing what it would entail if I did it well, and I continue to do it, rather than do something else, because it is a price worth paying. It is fulfilling and gratifying work to me, and I see the recriminations as proof of its efficacy. Not everyone will have that same calculus, which is why different people make different choices for their lives based on their assessments of the costs and benefits inherent in them, but the framework is essentially the same for everyone.

    What I ultimately find most repellent and offensive about this incessant self-victimization from society’s most powerful and privileged actors is the conceit that they are somehow unique or special in the treatment they receive, as if it only happens to people like them. 

    That is the exact opposite of reality: everyone with a public platform receives abuse and ugly attacks, and there are members of every faction who launch them. If you have any doubts about that, go criticize Kamala Harris and see what kind of staggeringly bigoted and hateful abuse you get back in return.

    Whenever this tactic is hauled out in defense of neoliberal leaders — to claim that Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive, or that Corbyn supporters are, or that Trump supporters are: basically that everyone is guilty of abusive behavior except neoliberals and their loyal followers — the real purpose of it becomes clear. It is a crowd-control technique, one designed to build a gigantic moat and drawbridge to protect those inside the royal court from the angry hordes outside of it.

    Last week, I participated in a debate on Al Jazeera about online censorship with the liberal British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She was quite a reasonable and candid advocate of the need for online censorship and I found the discussion consequently illuminating, particularly because she was so blunt about what she believes is the real problem that online censorship needs to solve. Listen to what she said:

    Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed.


    That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

    Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. 

    Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

    Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.
    Bump. This is a very important piece. Please read, and more importantly: please understand.

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    Avalon Member gord's Avatar
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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    The only place a perfect right angle ever CAN be, is the mind.

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    Default Re: Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

    This is a scathing critique.


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