2,478
edits
39: Admission To Sugar Baby U.: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 50: | Line 50: | ||
Thus, the most important aspect of a story may well not be its underlying substance or truth, but it's optics instead. That is, our intuitive sense of an update may well be expected to be the extent of our engagement with that story. Specific five word specializations of this as-yet unnamed law might be: "The headline is the article" or "The publisher is the politics". Knowing that an unedited video was leaked to appear on James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is presumably sufficient to make sure that it is not taken seriously by any center-left institution. The optics of the United States' cleverly named Black Lives Matter movement are stated clearly in the title. To oppose this organization for its platforms, the self declared Marxist agenda pushed by its founders, or its bizarre foray into the politics of the Middle East, where there are very few black American lives, is not possible under this law of social media without becoming a racist in the eyes of the internet. Why? Because the optics are in the title, and thus, the implied substance of the organization is designed to make it impossible to oppose without catastrophic costs to those reacting to the nuanced found in the details. | Thus, the most important aspect of a story may well not be its underlying substance or truth, but it's optics instead. That is, our intuitive sense of an update may well be expected to be the extent of our engagement with that story. Specific five word specializations of this as-yet unnamed law might be: "The headline is the article" or "The publisher is the politics". Knowing that an unedited video was leaked to appear on James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is presumably sufficient to make sure that it is not taken seriously by any center-left institution. The optics of the United States' cleverly named Black Lives Matter movement are stated clearly in the title. To oppose this organization for its platforms, the self declared Marxist agenda pushed by its founders, or its bizarre foray into the politics of the Middle East, where there are very few black American lives, is not possible under this law of social media without becoming a racist in the eyes of the internet. Why? Because the optics are in the title, and thus, the implied substance of the organization is designed to make it impossible to oppose without catastrophic costs to those reacting to the nuanced found in the details. | ||
But what, then, is the new role of what we would have previously considered the substance, before the advent of the smartphone and the social internet? Well, this remains a curious question. Let us, for the remainder of this episode, take a radical stance and call this "legacy reality". You see, in legacy reality, all sorts of things are happening that contradict our new five word law. For example, in legacy reality, a white man named Tony Timpa was killed in Dallas under almost identical circumstances to those in which George Floyd in Minneapolis later lost his life. Timpa was held down on camera for a comparable amount of time: 11+ minutes for Timpa to the 8+ minutes in which Floyd suffered, but he was white, while Floyd was black. Yet there's bizarrely no concept of Timpa's death being significant, except in one regard: it shows that we have, as yet, no ability to say which of these deaths is provably racially motivated in the absence of further evidence, and thus, to raise the issue is to question the optics of | But what, then, is the new role of what we would have previously considered the substance, before the advent of the smartphone and the social internet? Well, this remains a curious question. Let us, for the remainder of this episode, take a radical stance and call this "legacy reality". You see, in legacy reality, all sorts of things are happening that contradict our new five word law. For example, in legacy reality, a white man named Tony Timpa was killed in Dallas under almost identical circumstances to those in which George Floyd in Minneapolis later lost his life. Timpa was held down on camera for a comparable amount of time: 11+ minutes for Timpa to the 8+ minutes in which Floyd suffered, but he was white, while Floyd was black. Yet there's bizarrely no concept of Timpa's death being significant, except in one regard: it shows that we have, as yet, no ability to say which of these deaths is provably racially motivated in the absence of further evidence, and thus, to raise the issue is to question the optics of Floyd's death. | ||
In short, Floyd's death was, optically, a lynching. Therefore, in the era of social media, it was, in substance, a lynching as well by our new law, and the introduction of Timpa's death is to use legacy reality to question modern substance. Now, the reason I say "modern substance" here is that the implied racism of Floyd's death as an example of a clear optical lynching was sufficient to propel millions into the streets. And, truth be told, the issue of structural racism and the differential application of policing, trial, sentencing, and incarceration along racial lines has a long and nauseating history from the era of slavery into the present. Thus, the nonsense that powerful Americans have traditionally used to avoid looking directly at the shame of differential treatment within our criminal justice system, particularly for nonviolent drug-related crimes, was matched by the new substance of an optical lynching. Organizers were effectively saying to us, "So what if we don't know for a certainty that it is a lynching in legacy reality? It was at a minimum a much needed optical lynching to galvanize the real change we need, and for which we have waited far too long." | In short, Floyd's death was, optically, a lynching. Therefore, in the era of social media, it was, in substance, a lynching as well by our new law, and the introduction of Timpa's death is to use legacy reality to question modern substance. Now, the reason I say "modern substance" here is that the implied racism of Floyd's death as an example of a clear optical lynching was sufficient to propel millions into the streets. And, truth be told, the issue of structural racism and the differential application of policing, trial, sentencing, and incarceration along racial lines has a long and nauseating history from the era of slavery into the present. Thus, the nonsense that powerful Americans have traditionally used to avoid looking directly at the shame of differential treatment within our criminal justice system, particularly for nonviolent drug-related crimes, was matched by the new substance of an optical lynching. Organizers were effectively saying to us, "So what if we don't know for a certainty that it is a lynching in legacy reality? It was at a minimum a much needed optical lynching to galvanize the real change we need, and for which we have waited far too long." | ||