I am STILL enjoying that thread, because the comments are a stitch.
At least a couple of people have said “what a hill to die on”, and then came Simon Hutchinson:
A weird mons to die on
Dude, I will invent a time machine, go back a few decades, and have your babies!
What kills me is that, IIRC, he says he’s approaching his rightness from a language perspective.
You’d think hundreds of people asserting their usage would at least constitute a variant. He could have said “maybe it’s a regional thing, or am age thing, or a medical vs layman’s terms thing” and worked through it.
But no. Everyone else is incorrect but him.
And there have been a few linguists pointing out that even his ‘technical’ explanation (using genus and species) is totally wrong too.
So, someone said the magic word – Chicago – and I decided to look him up. I know exactly where he lives and where he works, and it’s embarrassing to think this is what he’s done with a stellar education from some of the top universities in the country. Like, ewww, he’s one of ours, you know?
One more in that thread:
At some point, he tells someone to “release to hatred”… is this the heir apparent to Jordan Peterson?
Sounds more like Emperor Palpatine to me.
6 of one, half dozen of the other… tomato, tomatoe, etc…
Now I am their biggest fans.
Putting this here, because names are not named, but this sort of thing has implications beyond the obvious, including the fact that the more women get pushed out of medicine, the harder it is to overcome the inherent male bias in treatment.
https://www.instyle.com/times-up-surgeon-harassment-experience
At the risk of being performative, if I had been there, I’d have grabbed Costco Guy’s cart and pushed it out into the street.
As a man, you are privileged to do so with little consequence beyond a few miffed words. Women are at risk of facing immediate violence in the same situation.
The title of this article is so misleading. Actually Rotten Tomatoes is not shutting down trolls. It’s just pandering to the film industry and slightly modifying how it handles opening up comments.
This I think points to a large issue on web conversations, the belief that being fair to everyone means applying rules equally but not observing how those rules can be manipulated to intimidate others online. What if instead of rules the point was kindness and civility and anyone violating that through repeated interactions was banned. Parsing each individual post does not show a person’s true intention behind their communication. You need to look at their whole effect as a contributor and act quickly to protect the tone of your space. IMHO.
I think the difference is the former kind of rules can be coded into the site, whereas the latter require some sort of moderation by humans. Sites in general prefer code to people since code is cheaper.
It circles back to an ugly aspect of culture, which is “it’s okay to be an asshole to someone if they’re a stranger”. Like a lot of Internet things, it exists in real life too but is far worse online.
In both real life and online, it seems to be about dominance. I remember reading an article in the early days of the net which claimed it would never be important, and the proof of that was it was dominated by people at the less prestigious universities. The author failed to see how the net was subverting geography and making it less relevant.
The net continues to make traditional sources of dominance less relevant, and that is freaking certain people out – so they try to dominate and intimidate. The lesson that needs to be learned is being an asshole doesn’t get you what you want in the long term.
