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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

14 Jan

1/ Working on a thing about this but consider two numbers:

-# of people who post/consume public radical content online

-# of people genuinely interested in harming strangers b/c of radical ideology

People believe these are directly correlated but I'm not sure that they are.

2/ Let me use an example that's (((close to home))): online anti-Semitism. If I were crowned Emperor of the Internet (any day now) I would view the goal of reducing the amount of public online anti-Semitism as *separate* from the goal of reducing internet-inspired anti-Semitic

3/ real-world attacks. That's because there might actually be an argument that if you aggressively deplatform everyone who posts anti-Semitic garbage, sure, you get rid of the 90% of them who are just in it for the shitposting and who harass journalists etc., but the 10% who hold

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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

8 Jan

I am cleaning in preparation for a move and it is BRUTAL. One side of my family has some uhhhh issues throwing stuff out and whenever I have to move or try to do a deep clean I am confronted with some ugly stuff.

This is from a cheap plastic set of drawers. The date tells me I obtained this laundry ticket in Brooklyn in 2015, took it with me to Boston when I moved there briefly post-book-deal, then took it BACK with me to Brooklyn, to my current place. Not healthy!

I also found, near that laundry ticket a nice, classy congrats-on-your-wedding card, blank, with envelope. Whose wedding was it for? Did I just not write a card I was supposed to write? No way to know.

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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

7 Jan

MY's Twitter presence has gotten so much better and trollier since he has been able to stop worrying about his colleagues reporting him to his bosses for harmful speech

Also "Red the room bro" is subtly telling because while the person who tweeted that is not a journalist that is very much what journalists on Twitter do before deciding what their opinion is

*READ

everyone shut up. I'm tired and bought S-hooks when I needed elongated S-hooks. really traumatic day

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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

5 Jan

Book publishers, like media outlets, are going to have to decide how much money they are willing to sacrifice to satisfy the preferences of their most educated, activist employees, readers, and critics, because there's a massive divide between this group and the average reader.

2/ What is worth keeping in mind with the American Dirt controversy is that we have literally zero evidence that the average Mexican, or the average Mexican-American, finds the book offensive. Which is crazy to think about! There is a great deal of values-ventriloquism afoot.

3/ I would submit that given the available evidence, which suggests that Mexicans like a lot of the same stuff we like in the States -- including Narcos -- it would be an uphill battle to argue that they are likely to find American Dirt offensive. But there's a tendency to allow

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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

29 Dec 20

https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343951801175961603

Understand that it's a right-wing talking point and we're therefore not supposed to utter it aloud, but the fact is if you're a low-income American, you are orders of magnitude less likely to be killed by cops than to be killed by a fellow civilian or myriad public-health threats

https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343951801175961603

2/ 15 years ago, when overblown fears over Muslim terrorism were all the rage, it was seen as vitally important for responsible journalists to put numbers and threats in context -- 9/11 was an outlier and few died from such attacks. We have half-abandoned that. If the subject

3/ is crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (relatively rare), we will jump into stats-land and point that out. If it's a subject that's of greater concern to 'our' political side, we jump back into anecdote-land. It's so bad and corrosive and trust-destroying.

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Jesse Singal

@jessesingal

27 Dec 20

Are people pretending not to understand that "I can drive, [that slur]" is different from hurling it at a black person, or is the point to try to collapse the distinction? Not comfortable w/a 15-year-old's life getting torpedoed over this.

nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/…

2/ If you're white, just don't ever say the word -- that's easy! She fucked up. But she was 15 and was imitating a style in which it means roughly 'dude' or 'motherfucker,' as is evident from the context. I don't understand why the story completely ignores that.

3/ This also ignores the fact that this is, unfortunately, how a subset of teenagers talk online, regularly. It's nonblack people trying to use the word the way black people do. Which is bad! But it's clearly a different and less derogatory usage, which matters in this case.

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