I stopped visiting Facebook years ago, but from what I’ve read about it’s algorithmic moderation standards, it isn’t set up to give more people a voice, it’s set up to enable disinformation, and to excuse properly-adjectived hate speech. A hostile environment can be a silencing technique. And harassment and deliberate triggering, so common in online spaces, are silencing techniques, which tend to deny marginalized ppl a voice:
I don’t even want to think how often the word “suicide” came up in casual interactions with my friends when I was in high school. As in, “I don’t care if the teacher said you could make up your own topic for the essay. If you don’t do one of her topics, you may as well commit suicide.”
We were talking about grades suicide, or social suicide, but I wouldn’t trust some hypervigilant admin to get that.
On the one hand, violating students’ privacy to the point where they’d even hear that is reprehensible.
On the other hand, trivializing suicide like that is pretty awful in its own right.
On a third hand, teenage years are when you kind of work through your own awfulness and poor judgement.
So, yeah, I still find the idea of spying on students creepy and invasive.
Have you never heard of the phrases:
- career suicide
- commercial suicide
Neither of those have to do with actually offing oneself, and no-one is “awful” for speaking metaphorically. Context is important – context school admins are often lacking.
Heard of them. Don’t approve of them, either.
Calling behaviour “awful” is not the same as calling a person “awful.”
In general, speaking metaphorically isn’t, but there are specific metaphors (rape and suicide being the first two that come to mind), the use of which can be pretty awful.
Edit to add:
The most powerful metaphors invoke a mental image to relate the subject you’re talking about with a subject that lends itself better to visualization (the Wikipedia page on metaphor uses the phrase “the sense of a transferred image,” which I think is a good way of putting it).
If you can’t see why the image being transferred when using suicide in metaphor might be horribly traumatic (i.e. “awful”) to people with certain personal histories (especially when used trivially and/or insensitively)…
I have zero power to enforce the language other people use. So, to a certain extent, I have to deal with my reaction to such terms: to repress, or redirect, or take the time to confront, accept, and experience, the traumatic emotions that they dredge up. I have to accept that these are terms that people are going to use, because I can’t change anyone but myself.
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to back down from calling the metaphors of “academic suicide,” “social suicide,” etc., awful.
And that’s exactly the kind of pedantic literalism that put a friend of mine in therapy because her parents (and psychiatrist) didn’t grok Goth. They did far more damage making her explain again and again that she wasn’t Really Into Death than leaving her alone would have.
If you’re dismissing the description of the actual trauma that using that kind of metaphor inflicts upon me (and, presumably, other people who have experienced similar trauma) as “pedantic literalism,” then I have nothing further to say.
What makes revenge porn so insidious, however, is how difficult it is to fully quash. As the New York Times reports, many Republican critics of Hill have been posting the explicit pictures of her on Twitter. The platform has removed the posts that have been reported, but users are still rushing to upload new ones.
What will they do when a couple of kids get together with automated emails that go out to each other with random swear words in it every time the system chastises them for swearing in emails?
Fear-brag about how clever their students are, not realising that ones been around since before they started high school themselves.
BuzzFeed and CNN sued the U.S. government for the right to see the primary-source information that Mueller’s team didn’t disclose when it published its 448-page report in March. Justice Department lawyers say the material could run to 18 billion pages.
Signed by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries.
But, it’s just not conveeeeenient for me or my savings account, so too bad. /s
Fuck, man, that’s what it comes across like. If it interferes with someone’s ability to stripmine the world for profit, people react like they are being deprived of their most basic human rights. Rich fuckers’ comfort, convenience and profit VS human life just makes me wish the Day of the Guillotine gets here soon. Otherwise, we’re all more or less fucked.