3 thoughts on “Shame Storm”

  1. from a thankful victim

    Yea right.

    Of all history’s martyrs to shame, the one whose example consoled me most was Oscar Wilde. He is remembered today as a gay rights pioneer, but, in the letters he wrote after his release from prison, he never rails against the injustice of the law that put him away. He did not think it was a good law, he simply believed that the justice or injustice of the charge against him was irrelevant. What mattered was that he had been rescued from his own pride and selfishness by his experience, when he could not have been saved by any gentler medicine. This lesson, which produced “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (“I know not whether Laws be right, / Or whether Laws be wrong”), he put into plain prose in a letter written during his exile in July 1897.

    Sorry, I wouldn’t be comforted. Wilde died a bit more than three years later in great poverty. And the litany of suicides from people who were severely humiliated publicly indicates great harm was done to them.

    Sounds more like that Stockholm syndrome.

  2. Rittelmeyer/Andrews is basically saying “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”, but she’s being too optimistic, deep psychological wounds that leave PTSD do not leave people stronger.

    I had a look at the C-SPAN video in which Rittelmeyer/Andrews starred. If anything it was Seavey that came across as the ass (links I’ve found think so), so though she might feel she’s been through mobbing, I don’t think she was really that burned, more him that was burned by his own words.

    Rand will probably disagree with me but I think the spread of the legal practice of putting the onus on the publicly accused to prove their innocence of the public accusations against them in libel/slander cases, rather than sticking with the old British practice of requiring the accuser to prove their accusations sound, is a step in the wrong direction, especially given the development of social media mobbing.

    1. putting the onus on the publicly accused to prove their innocence of the public accusations against them in libel/slander cases

      In some cases, the publicly accused need do nothing more than ignore what was said rather than engage the legal system in a frivolous and malicious manner, which is not to be confused with proving their innocence.

      Free speech is a great thing. We need more of it and should not submit to the totalitarian impulse to restrict and punish those whose speech we don’t like. You might think that NAZI or other Marxists shouldn’t have the right to free speech but tomorrow you could be labeled the NAZI. Your speech could easily run afoul of the ever shifting notions of what is acceptable especially since ambiguity in what is considered acceptable is intentionally built into the system to allow for unequal application of the rules to target people and not speech.

      The great secret behind Politically Correct speech isn’t that speech is offensive but that certain people are offensive. Thus whatever they say is offensive no matter what they say or how they say it. You might think this makes you safe but it doesn’t. You can always become the offensive one, especially if you do not constantly change to leap the enthusiasm hurdle and display servility to the collective and even then, you just might not be important to the collective any more.

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