Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

No Justins, No Peace

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

In after Baud. Damn.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Friday Night Open Thread

Friday Night Open Thread

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… And will it matter? The Grey Lady says it’s all about “Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism“:

On a recent day, the feed of a Tumblr blog called Black Culture featured a drawing of Lupita Nyong’o, a video of a protest at William Paterson University and a text that read, “black lives > white feelings.” The blog FreeQuency Frequently Writes posted a Tweet from Solange Knowles decrying depictions of outspoken women, while another called Soul Revision turned up a post with the hashtags #SeasonOfInconvenience and #BlackLivesMatter.

As protests sparked by a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson began spreading nationwide, furor was also growing in cyberspace, in the social-justice halls of Tumblr, a social-blogging platform dominated by users in their teens, 20s and early 30s. Their feeds were vivid mash-ups of articles, GIFs, cleverly labeled images, court documents, smartphone videos, stickers and cartoons, and their posts contained news about Ferguson, along with tidbits about identity, inequality, police abuse, racism, body shaming and more.

“A lot of millennials have been discouraged for a long time,” said Zellie Thomas, 30, creator of Black Culture. “Now, with social media, they feel empowered, like people are hearing their voice. And Tumblr is a great platform for all types of media.”.

There are more than 215 million blogs on Tumblr and, according to comScore, an analytics company, 50 percent of Tumblr users are from 15 to 34 years old. The company’s internal surveys show that 64 percent of users say that they care about social causes and look into them on Tumblr. These numbers suggest that millennials, who have long been pigeonholed as an apathetic bunch, have a strong interest in social issues — it’s just hidden from the eyes of their elders…

Reader Interactions

85Comments

  2. 2.

    ruemara

    Nobody is hearing them except each other. The mutual admiration society and echo tunnel of the intertubes. I work in this field, I can be critical.

    Edited to add, these potachos are amazing.

  4. 4.

    ThresherK

    One down: Typing this from our new wifi in-home. Discovering all sorts of in-the-wall cabling issues that have existed in this domicile since cable TV was controlled with a wired box containing physical buttons, and you had to get up to change the volume. I think the last device hooked up to it was a DuMont.

    I have my work cut out for me, but it feels like quite the accomplishment so far, having chosen the “self install” shipped box o’ goodies, instead of the “you can’t do it without our guy there” appontment.

  5. 5.

    BBA

    There’s some meaningful content on Tumblr, but for the most part it’s incoherent pseudo-liberal rambling where the need to be outraged drowns out whatever it is they’re outraged about. It’s The Website You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With.

  6. 6.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @BBA:

    It’s The Website You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With.

    I thought that was Balloon Juice.

  12. 12.

    srv

    Get your socialectrons off my lawn space.

    This is just the first generation that will live mostly in a virtual world without the aid of drugs.

    35 degrees out and we’re having a thunderstorm.

  14. 14.

    Major Major Major Major

    Don’t see why we’re assuming the millennials on tumblr (the ones not using it for pr0n, at least) don’t overlap with the ones doing the voting. I’d assume it’s the ones who aren’t tweeting and tumblring and whatnot about social Justice cause du jour, but rather I don’t know pizza or whatever, that we should be pigeon holing into the “don’t vote” demographic.

  24. 24.

    mclaren

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Real Americans don’t tell kids to get off their lawn, they just shoot them.

    With a fully-auto belt-fed tripod-mounted weapon that uses tracer rounds.

  29. 29.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: My dear boy, if you want to use the rhetoric you use, you should have the fucking balls to do something. From what you have been posting, you seem to have certain beliefs. Those beliefs really require action, don’t they? Put up or shut up, shithead.

  30. 30.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @BBA: Oddly, my follow up was that I made an effort to learn shit about modern pop in order to engage my niece and nephew about music. My nephew analyzes music – lyrics, melody, and rhythm. He will eventually come to like odd and interesting music. I look forward to encouraging it. My niece is likely to be a pop music fan like her parents.

  34. 34.

    Little Boots

    actually, that was a little low, sorry, buddy,

    just post what you want.

    seventies would be nice, though.

  41. 41.

    Mike in NC

    America’s Hipsters — ironically not bothering to vote — need to take it hard up the ass from the Neo-Jim Crow/Tea Party crowd as they work to bring back the 1950s.

  52. 52.

    Keith G

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Don’t see why we’re assuming…

    Regarding the linked article, for me it’s not about doubting the sincerity of the kiddoes described therein as much as it is being cautious about another “Here’s the next big thing” story.

    A good thing about hash-tag activism (and the like) is its low barrier to entry, and that is also an important weakness. With so little skin in a game, it is easy for “activists” to toss in their hand and move on to another game leaving an important cause to be drained of energy like a forgotten echo. Witness #BringBackOurGirls or #BeenRapedNeverReported.

  59. 59.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Little Boots: I’m well, playing with my new touchscreen monitor. I don’t use YouTube often, in fact mainly to find vids to post here. Hope the New Year is treating you well.

  61. 61.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Little Boots: Really nice part of the touchscreen is that it works with my directv app. I’m trying to get it to work with my Linux VM’s.

  65. 65.

    Darkrose

    @Ilya: I wouldn’t use Reddit as a credible source on what Tumblr is like. Labeling Tumblr as all “radical SJW’s” makes about as much sense as labeling Reddit the home of #Gamergaters and MRA’s.

  68. 68.

    Darkrose

    It’s easy to dismiss Tumblr because the majority of users are young. And there are a lot of people who are just there for the pretty pictures and to hang out–which is okay. But you know what? They’re talking about stuff that in many cases, my generation couldn’t talk about because we didn’t have the vocabulary at the time. There was no space in the mid-80’s where a high school student could go to talk about being trans, or bisexual, or kinky. There was no space where you could go to say, “Someone in my class is telling rape jokes, and I don’t know how to articulate why that’s not cool.” There was no support outside of a few “problem” kids for pointing out that dress codes based on “girls can’t wear yoga pants because they’re distracting to boys” are putting the burden on managing male behavior on the girls instead of where it belongs.

    And I have yet to see anyone explain why fighting for social justice should be something to be ashamed of or to be mocked–especially on a liberal blog. The scorn for “SJW’s” is exactly like the whining about “political correctness” from people who believe that their right to be assholes trumps everything.

  71. 71.

    Marc

    @Darkrose:

    And I have yet to see anyone explain why fighting for social justice should be something to be ashamed of or to be mocked–especially on a liberal blog.

    Fighting for social justice shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of or mocked.

    But reducing social justice to a hashtag – or worse yet, a set of passwords and shibboleths used to enforce another kind of social hierarchy – does nothing to fight for social justice.

    The critical element in “SJW” shouldn’t be on the “social justice” part, it should be on the “warrior” – as mockingly applied to people whose fight rarely seems to move beyond policing their peers on social media.

    But at this point the MRA types have dug into the label so thoroughly, and tried to make it about the social justice part, that it’s best to avoid it entirely. Quarantine the label and nuke it from orbit.

  72. 72.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @BBA:

    Balloon Juice is the Drunk Uncle of websites. Or maybe Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest as the “don’tcha hate it when…” guys.

    A few years ago I called our generous host Mr. Cole ‘The Foster Brooks of the Internet’. Only old people like me got the reference. One of the things I’m happiest about for 2014 is that the comparison fails now.

  75. 75.

    CarolDuhart2

    @Marc: Not everybody can march or be that active-but I think even the hashtags raise awareness and uncensored information. I was a teenager in the 1970’s. We had less than nothing-no newsletters, nothing, not even cassette tapes until late in the decade. What we would have given for hashtag activism so people who thought differently could actually communicate with each other.

    And something else I’ve noticed about hastag activism- during the whole Ferguson thing (it’s still ongoing), it did a lot to defuse bullshit quicker than anything I’ve seen before. When the bigots took out their COINTELPRO, Nixonland memes to discredit the protestors, twitter had firsthand video and pictures to disprove those memes. That “Cop Killer” video lasted a handful of days. There were hundreds if not thousands of pictures of completely peaceful actions taken in real time that both inspired onlookers and informed many.

    Twitter also defused agent provocateurs, helped raise funds and in short gave activists a direct way to communicate uncensored. Martin Luther King would have killed to have a Twitter account or a blog where he could speak freely to millions.

  77. 77.

    Kay

    I think there’s a bit of an assumption here that “everyone knows everything” so we have to go right to action or there’s no value and I would just not agree with that. Everyone doesn’t know.

    My 12 year old son and his friends read this stuff and a lot of it is new to them. They aren’t born understanding the evolution of feminism or why Ferguson is (or isn’t!) like the civil rights movement or why there’s a big discussion about young women and gaming or any of the other things we all “know”. This is brand new to them. It’s compelling and interesting to them because it’s presented by people who aren’t much older than they are and it’s from each individual’s perspective. Living where they live and doing what they do they would NOT hear from so many different people on these topics. Now they do.

    It sounds corny but it really does make their world much bigger to watch and read so many different “ordinary” (not famous) young people passing this back and forth. Is some of it maybe wrong or inaccurate or overheated ? Yeah, but that’s also true of a large group of people talking about anything,

    Just for myself, I understand my grown daughter’s version of feminism much better after reading women her age while lurking on Twitter. It’s different then women my age and I didn’t know what they said or thought because I don’t hear hundreds of them in my daily life. I could read 25 carefully curated published essays by women that age but that’s a much narrower chosen slice.

  78. 78.

    Kay

    @CarolDuhart2:

    but I think even the hashtags raise awareness and uncensored information.

    Agreed. I think you can call an awareness campaign a success if 12 year old boys in rural Ohio are asking about “hands up don’t shoot”. That’s a pretty effective awareness campaign :)

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @Marc:

    The main reason I was willing to be open to Occupy Wall Street was when I look at this country and the direction it’s gone over the last 30 years I have to admit whatever method or approach “we” were using to promote economic issues was not working.

    I mean if “we” had this huge series of wins over the last 30 years on economic issues I would be a lot more comfortable telling the OWS people they were doing it wrong but we don’t.

    Maybe they feel the same way about social justice. That they aren’t making gains.

  80. 80.

    Marc

    @Kay and @CarolDuhart2: I agree with you about the value of awareness and information. I see no such value in the kind of shaming, silencing, ally-policing behavior that also characterizes a lot of online left discussion (using “discussion” very loosely here). Not every criticism of Tumblr activism is invalid–and the criticism that most of it isn’t really activism strikes me as the most valid of all.

    Kay, I actually see a lot of OWS, Ferguson, and other social justice movements replicating the failures of the left of the last forty years–namely, the focus on self-righteous theater (whether street or online) ahead of working to influence the levers of political and economic power. I think OWS went wrong when its focus shifted from changing the conversation about economic inequality to holding the territory in a couple of city centers, and stopping traffic isn’t going to convince anyone that our criminal justice system doesn’t value black lives. It just isn’t. It isn’t going to move policy either. I think these are cases where the instinct to go “right to action” actually hurt the causes, so I agree with you on that point, but it’s not like the kids aren’t just as prone to it. At some point a movement has to move beyond awareness, and it definitely has to move past theater.

    I went to a lot of marches, protests, die-ins etc. to protest the invasion of Iraq. I did more, much more to end it when I started knocking on doors for Obama. I’m not sure where the similar leverage points are on police brutality and institutionalized racism, but I suspect supporting Bill de Blasio would be a good start.

  81. 81.

    Another Holocene Human

    @BBA:

    There’s some meaningful content on Tumblr, but for the most part it’s incoherent pseudo-liberal rambling where the need to be outraged drowns out whatever it is they’re outraged about. It’s The Website You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With.

    It’s a New Left style circular firing squad without the pretensions to understand or reference philosophy, economics, or political theory.

    It’s also a good place to get up-to-date with what’s trendy in gender studies but as a born Genderfraud! it gets my blood pressure up so damn much I stay the fuck away. Fucking asshats I was passing when you were still taking dumps in your diapers and now you’re trying to tell me I’m trans the wrong way.

  82. 82.

    Another Holocene Human

    @KG:

    How is tumblr different than blogger was a decade ago? Is it other than new tech/apps?

    Because it’s all HD images being reblogged so they show up on the scroll plus the technology to autoload more images as you scroll down, ensuring that the people who really use it hardcore will be on a university-class fat pipe only with the latest computer and keeping off cheapskate fogies like you or me with monthly bills to pay.

    I’m so old and mean I remember when there were specific newsgroups for shitty binary image files and I must say I enjoyed the days of text only chatter. When php forums exploded with a million obnoxious gifs I thought it was the death of the internet.

  83. 83.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Darkrose:

    And I have yet to see anyone explain why fighting for social justice should be something to be ashamed of or to be mocked–especially on a liberal blog. The scorn for “SJW’s” is exactly like the whining about “political correctness” from people who believe that their right to be assholes trumps everything.

    It depends what you mean by SJWs, do you mean actual effective activists or do you mean little teenaged narcissists playing oppression olympics and bullying each other online with flowery language ganked from women’s studies and gender studies?

    MLK jr was a wise man. He said hate cannot defeat hate, only love can do that. There’s a lot of hate, victim complex, wounded egos, hysteria, bandwagoning, piling on, rage, and disproportionality on tumblr. Being a berserker for civility is a contradiction in terms. Witness the havoc Suey Park wreaked within the activist community she was a part of. There have been endless blog posts this last year about the addiction to anger and the harm being caused within especially feminist circles by the SJW mentality but it seems these twitter and tumblr users can’t stop themselves. It’s toxic, toxic, toxic to the core.

    Of course they attract supervillians to battle them, such as the ever evil mustache twirling TERFs or the bully-boy psychopaths of Gamergate (and Operation Lollipop, which late the groundwork for it–GG of course had dupes whereas OL was all insiders). Batman is a crazy psycho who should be in Arkham with the Joker and the other freaks. Extremist SJWs are doing just as much harm as TERFs and MRA/Racewarriors online, they just color their cyber helmet with a different tint. Who cares in the end, when you survey the human wreckage. Fuck these people.

    I have all the respect for actual activists seeking social change and I love tha the internet especially helps high school kids find support and resources. Both sexual and gender minorities and atheists and freethinkers have benefited enormously from this national support group and access to national non-profits who will actually provide them with legal help within their communities. In the past it was really hit or miss if they would even know such groups existed.

  85. 85.

    NobodySpecial

    People want to complain that millennials do so much stuff low-key and not confrontational and then get mad at OWS for ‘street theater’. Won’t even talk about the myriad of ways you can lose your job for your online content – well, no, it’s not for your online content, see? (wink wink) But the olds must have something to bitch about as their conservatism hardens in their veins.

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