Is social media a fundamentally censorious culture?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments
The tweet that made Justine Sacco internet famous

The tweet that made Justine Sacco internet famous

You should follow Willy Staley on Twitter, not just because he is responsible for the best thing that happened to my career in 2014, but also because he has coined the phrase “digital Manichaeism.” He was referring, in part, to this amazing story about Justine Sacco in the New York Times. Flying to South Africa to visit family for the holidays, she tweeted the above ill-considered joke to her 170 followers before she got on the plane. By the time she landed, she had been fired from her job and was the number-one trending topic on Twitter. Sacco became the focus of social media’s robust shaming culture, and it blew up her life.

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Jonathan Chait commits internet seppuku with PC essay

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology, Ethical Dilemmas 2 Comments
New York Magazine author Jonathan Chait destroys his ally cred with a blue blazer.

New York Magazine author Jonathan Chait wrecks his ally cred via blue blazer.

One of the signal pleasures of reading Jonathan Chait’s essay on political correctness in New York Magazine is being glad you didn’t write it. Chait makes some good points, one of which is that social media will probably excoriate him. He’s right. My personal favorite is the tweet that accuses him of mansplaining the term mansplaining, which includes a shrugging emoticon but does not say how his explanation is wrong. Perhaps the implication is that anyone but a white man should explain what that term means, which seems right. It is certainly a bitter irony that a man should establish the definition of pedantic man-talk. Something about that sentiment seems illiberal, though. Must Chait be wrong in defining mainsplaining even if his definition is correct? Here we encounter the crux of his argument, and the complicating realization that he is the wrong person to make it.

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Fleet of tweet, Gingrich tastes defeat

By Dan Brooks in Go berserk? 3 Comments
Former Speaker of the House Newton Gingrich

Former Speaker of the House Newton Gingrich

Watching nine TVs at once in search of a way to either reverse his aging or end his childhood, Newt Gingrich saw President Obama praise American pilots for flying missions against ISIS “with courtesy.” It was right there in the closed captioning on C-SPAN. Quickly, Gingrich turned to Twitter to express astonishment at the president’s strange diction:

Newt Fruitin'

That’s a screenshot from my phone, so remember that those two tweets appeared in reverse order. They also arrived one minute apart, q.v. The Washington Post. Gingrich could not believe that anyone, least of all the president, would apply “courtesy” to the act of bombing military targets. Seventeen minutes later, he figured out how to rewind his DVR:

Tweet Gingrich

Poor Newt—it turned out he could believe the president said “courteous” and was in fact the only person capable of doing so. And he came pretty close to admitting he was wrong.

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Shia LaBeouf interrogates authorship, taunts Clowes with skyplane

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology 0 Comment
An image of Shia LaBeouf originally published in The Worst magazine, as if that means anything

An image of Shia LaBeouf originally published in The Worst magazine, as if that means anything

It’s all our faults collectively, but Transformers made Shia LaBeouf an aristocrat. We had to see live actors be friends with computer-rendered characters from a cartoon about a toy, so now LaBeouf gets an income forever. Like many members of the leisure class, he has turned to art, producing a short film obviously plagiarized from a Daniel Clowes comic. Like many m.’s of the l.c. who get in trouble, he subsequently turned to philosophy, arguing that authorship is censorship and intellectual property is theft in a series of weird interviews that were, themselves, kind of plagiarized. He also hired a skywriter to blanket LA with a sarcastic apology to Clowes, who lives in San Francisco.

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SpaghettiOs and Pearl Harbor: Go berserk?

By Dan Brooks in Go berserk? 0 Comment
A zero we can all remember fondly

A zero we can all remember fondly

(Ed.: An earlier draft of this post contained the phrase “pubic service.” While the error persisted for some time, Combat! blog assures you that it was an error, and we would never perform such services for free.) Now that the cat video thing has died down, the internet has one fundamental purpose: to show us things we can get offended about. Our sense of righteous indignation is like our sense of beauty, however: engage it too often and we risk dulling it. It is therefore by way of public service that Combat! blog examines the recent quote-unquote controversy over SpaghettiOs’ Pearl Harbor tweet, along with the nested controversy of Natasha Leggero’s remarks thereon. There’s a lot of information out there on the internet and precious little time to get offended by all of it. Today we ask the question: Go berserk?

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