Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Emma Hart,
that was incredibly distressing for people who knew him as a human being and not a data point.
I AM NOT A DATA POINT - my next t-shirt. Sorted.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Emma Hart,
This. Which brings me back to something someone (possibly Lilith, I can’t remember) said on Twitter: don’t use someone else’s death to make your point.
There was also a rather great Tweet following the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman:
When tragedy occurs, it's best not to look at the life of the victim like a Choose Your Own Adventure book you could have navigated better.
Bloody oath. It was creepy seeing people on line who just could have lived Hoffman's life so much better than him, who knew what was in his heart and mind that day, who called him a "loser" and "a selfish asshole" for being an addict at all. Which I'm sure was such a great comfort to his actual friends and family trying to work through their own emotional shitstorm of grief.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
And even if he did, in the midst of a kind of vile, disturbing invasion of privacy none of us will ever have to deal with, does it make sense to keep on convicting him over and and over, ignoring anything else he does or says in his actual life?
It's funny how a lot of people who've had their privacy violated even more egregiously than Alec Baldwin -- i.e. every 'celebrity' who gave testimony to the Leveson Inquiry -- managed to do so without expecting a lifetime pass for their bad behaviour. There is a serious conversation to be had about privacy and perv media culture, but that wasn't much of a contribution to it. I'd rather hear from Ellen Page, myself, whose coming out to a room full of GLBTI youth workers was pointed, thoughtful and delightfully grown-up
And I'm sure Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and Andrew Sullivan will be delighted to know they're part of a 'Gay Department of Justice' who can get a low-rating, critically derided talk show cancelled with a flick of their poison pens. If that's the Gay Media Mafia in action, they're pretty feeble.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
The big problem for me about even trying to think about online bullying is who gets to defines what is bullying.
You know what, if you’re demeaning Gerry Brownlee or Meteria Turei because of their weight or where they buy their clothes instead of their policies?
You’re bullying.
If your response to getting called out on your homophobic slurs is to throw yourself a five-and-a-half thousand word pity party rather than accept any ownership for your own actions and their consequences? {ETA: Serious trigger warning - link contains a lot of homophobic/transphobic slurs I hope anyone with a shred of decency would find offensive.}
You’re a bully, and a remarkably obtuse one at that.
If you’re telling a woman whose social media has been spammed with rape threats and hardcore pornography to “harden up” because that’s what she should expect for daring to express an unpopular opinion?
You’re a bully, and I don’t even want to get started on whatever other issues you have.
Here’s the question I have: Is on-line bullying really that hard to see? Or do the people who want to make it so have their own agenda, and bully privilege to protect, in muddying the waters?
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Notes & Queries: Little CD in a Prospect…, in reply to Lilith __,
Is it bullying to criticise what someone writes?
No - but how you do it most certainly can be. Do I think a certain Tweet Charlotte directed at Lorde was ill-judged and somewhat impertinent? Yes -- but far too much of the reaction (both on-line and in the media) was surreal in it's disproportionate venom and downright nastiness. (And to mansplain the bleeding obvious, so much of it was gendered in a way no man would ever have to put up with.)
And no -- in the context of this post and out of respect for PAS as a woman-friendly safe space, I'm not going to link to any of it. Nor do I need to, which is a big part of the problem right there.
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Notes & Queries: Little CD in a Prospect…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be bullying, but projecting her experience onto someone else like that was foolish and inappropriate.
Yeah, and to be honest DHC was very far from the worse offender when it came to well-intentioned but tone-deaf and seriously distasteful projection. I cannot speak with any authority to Dawson's state of mind, and nobody knows shit about her last day.
I'm going to speak entirely for myself here, as a person who is living with manic-depression and a history of self-harm. Being audited and judged and used as a blank screen for other people to project their own agendas on (however well-intentioned) is neither helpful nor welcome. I'm a human being, not a DIY project you - or anyone else - can fix. Just don't do it. People with mental health issues need everyone's care, consideration and sensitivity. That's all.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just to be clear, the original, now removed, story was by Lincoln Tan. But the decision on the correction was made at a senior editorial level.
And as a more general principle, I’d like to see a New Rule: If you get it wrong on the front page (or in the lead of a bulletin), your correction runs in the same place. Burying the backtrack unless you're being forced to by legal is NOT genuinely owning your fail.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
And then buried on page five.
Standard operational bullshit isn’t it – get it wrong above the fold on the front page, correct at the bottom of page five in the finest of fine print unless you’ve got a lawyer (or order from a court or regulator) twisting your arm to breaking point.
Also very convenient, of course, that the Japanese Government was exceedingly unlikely to take The Herald to the Press Council to secure a proper – and prominent – retraction and apology.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to martinb,
Now the Japanese consulate is dragged in to the row, on the basis of some incorrect reporting which the Herald doesn’t seem to have corrected yet. (right?)
As far as I can tell, the correction was so half-arsed and passive-aggressive voiced it was almost meaningless. I don’t think this is a major diplomatic incident in the making, but it’s not particularly helpful to anyone. What's it achieved? The Herald, Penny Bright and Co. aren't going to drive Brown out of office; and when it comes to grown-ups making substantive criticism of Brown in particular, or the Council in general, it's just going to be that much harder to be heard and taken seriously. As I've said many times before 'The Tale of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf' should be required reading for all politicians and activists.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
More to the point, that’s a story about absolutely nothing. It’s just embarrassing.
Bloody oath – “man not only fails to bite dog, said dog happily pees on a bush and takes a nap."