Or is it just me?
Maybe it’s always been this way and the viral nature of social media simply brings about more chatter and news coverage of these things in this day and age. Or maybe it truly is a culture thing.
WATCH: Anthony Weiner admits to 'Danger-ous' past http://t.co/tBX9oIBuGU #CarlosDanger
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Married Eliot Spitzer won't confirm having a girlfriend http://t.co/egwTBSkEec
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
RT @nypost Ariel Castro blames sex addiction for hideous crimes, gets life in prison without parole http://t.co/0ive9JnDC3
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Man pleads to molestation, Facebook sextortion http://t.co/O783dVBkHN
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Woman who killed friend over Facebook feud and spilled milk gets 15 years http://t.co/bBrVCt217p
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Twitter threats highlight blight of online trolls http://t.co/fB7LGVbtAW
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Fla. man sentenced to 15 months in prison for making death threat to president (on Facebook) http://t.co/QWK2xnZRSh
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
All I can say for sure is that when you look at a newsfeed for even an hour or two, you notice something.
Man the world is really messed up.
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) August 1, 2013
Many of the stories above touch upon bad behavior through social media. I’ve written before about this.
Many are quick to blame social media and the internet itself for the negative sides of people’s behavior online (I’m guilty of it myself sometimes and have to catch myself). But the truth is, such tools are merely vehicles through which people express already existing traits online. In other words, it’s the person, not the tool they use.
But who knows, maybe there’s hope.
But there is good in the world & its worth fighting for 🙂 RT @Liberty_Chick: Man the world is really messed up.
— ⚾️ Mary #FlyTheW ? (@mchastain81) August 1, 2013
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Comments
You’re just catching on to this now ? 🙂
LC, you’re so right. The world seems beyond hope quite often these days. Sometimes I’m glad a few of my departed friends aren’t here to see what we’ve become….talking mostly about the US and our omnipresent failing government
The Liberty Chick might be familiar with the following equation:
Liberty + Original Sin – religion = chaos
We gotta flip the third addend.
You want how people have sex to be the definer of “normal?” People prefer believing in fairy tales. And, fairy tales, by the Brothers Grimm were pretty awful.
Besides, if everything were neat and monogamous, you wouldn’t have gossip.
That Weiner has a fetish? Not the only guy with a fetish. But, unfortunately, unable to keep it “under the table.”
What’s the chances that either of these two “examples” actually gets elected? Isn’t the media using them? Just as it once used Lewinsky?
As to the methodology of gossip, sure, social media now adds “speed” like nobody’s business. (While back in the 1950’s “speed” was legal to take. And, women used it as a diet method so they could stay thin. And, doctors didn’t get in trouble for addicting their patients.)
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days Journey Into Night clearly spells out that there’s nothing new about families coping. As it details the life behind the curtains. Or what I call “backstage.”
It’s an amazing thing how audiences just want to be fooled, though. And, without audiences, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare.
“Fla. man sentenced to 15 months in prison for making death threat to…
A central Florida man angry at the President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul health care has been sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for threatening to kill the president.”
Yet, the NBPP and assorted sons of Obama can threaten George Zimmerman, his family, the jurors, and anyone white, pummel them nearly to death, and the President can allude (threaten) racial violence against whites if his latest demand scheme isn’t approved (when he deigns to bother to ask for approval) all without a blush or twinge of conscience.
I disagree that the media reflects the world at large, rather the media reflects it’s own world on purpose. Just cruise through the channel lineup any night and you will see a dozen or more reality channels featuring pawn shops complete with fights, flashing of boobs, etc., porn aficianodos( chicken ranch and gigolos for example), hoarders, several gay and alternative lifestyles, amish gone wild, sister wives(polygamy) and entire genre dedicated to people suriviving some island camp out stay complete with hook ups, etc. or worse, the newest in which the contestants are naked, and the non stop Nancy Grace type lawyers promoting the viewing of every sick and demented court case available. All of this is in an effort to make the abnormal seem commonplace and normal so that we may not judge because the standards are not standards anymore, rather anything goes.
When in history would someone like Anthony Weiner still be running for office instead of being incarcerated at this point in time? And why… because it is supposed to be so normal and accepted now, and if it isn’t, the more society is exposed to this garbage, the less alternative and more normal it seems.(there actually is a website called Sugar Daddy’s in which 78% of the young women that are members still approve of Anthony Weiner..there are 18,000 members)
It’s an agenda.
WHOSE $45,000 did Weiner use to fund his fake investigation of the hacking of his texting account?
IF it was public funds, he should be prosecuted forthwith and serve time for fraud/theft/misuse of funds.
“Everything’s sex, sex, sex these days. This morning I mixed up my Rogaine and Viagra. All day long my hair stuck up like a rooster comb.”
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Our older commenters may have noticed how today’s explosion in social media reminds of the onset of cable TV in the 1970s because of the way cable TV brought multiple vectors for the news, whether directly from brand new news channels, or indirectly when so many additional shows were discussing the news, such as on talk shows, late-night, etc. Before cable, you had maybe 3-5 channels from which to choose – a very condensed selection of on-air choices at any given moment. If you wanted to know the news, you had to make an appointment to see it, usually in the 6-7 pm hour, half hour local, then half hour national, and out. You got forty minutes of local and national news in the evening, much of that sports and weather. Thin exposure for political news.
But cable TV brought TBS, CNN, plus berths for the network news of ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they all had a LOT of time to fill. All of a sudden, small local stories with an interesting ‘plot’ (narrative) became national stories. Dead tree media’s nostrum ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ became the operating principle of cable news, same as today. Talk shows diversified. You no longer had to play to a daytime, kids-are-in-the-room, female audience, which brought us Mike Douglas, Phil Donahue, and the like. Talk shows got edgier, newsier, got into ‘issues’. The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, Dick Cavett, etc. Before cable, the networks could only air one show each at a time; on cable you can take as many channels as you can afford. When cable took off, the amount of news we saw and then heard churned up by the growing species of talking heads rose tenfold, perhaps more.
The sense of overwhelming news saturation – most of it bad news – was relative to how little we really received before cable TV. We adapted quickly, honed the necessary skill of discerning shit from shinola, watched the commercials, and asked for more. Cable is now 24/7 & 500 channels, essentially a full house. It was time for a breakthrough and a free market provided it – today’s social media venues.
Now we’ve (you’ve) got Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the rest, and it feels overwhelming, especially when the news is bad, but it has always been thus: “Dog Bites Man is not news, Man Bites Dog is news.” Good news doesn’t sell as well as bad news and blood always leads.
Factor in too that ours is a country of over 300 million people with social and news media inclusive of much of the western world: UK, Australia, Europe, Canada, etc., and that totals up to a LOT of people. You have to factor in this overall ‘draw’ pile from which to pull stories when you’ve heard one too many sickly violent crime stories. Statistically, we are better off now in most things, though it doesn’t feel that way sometimes (witness liberal miscalculations on actual prevalence of gun violence). News saturation can make every story feel like it’s happening in your own neighborhood sometimes. It’s a sensory overload to which social media users will soon enough adapt.
The majority of people are sheep. Follow fads. Get their ideas about what’s normal or cool from what they see around. Cliques. Groupism. Advertising, product promotion, porn, the pop music industry, Hollywood movies (amazing crap), idiotbox “news” touting the most salacious stuff no matter how unimportant, celebrity gossip rags and mags and websites, the commercialization of everything… The internet does not reflect values; media and marketing create them and then behavior is copied because it’s perceived to be normal. It doesn’t help that the uninformed and the stupid now have internet soapboxes. It is crazy, crazy-making. At least for those old enough to see it.
Regarding Weiner and Spitzer, I’d like Gary Hart to weigh in!
Cut off the TV and take a nice ride down the backroads of America. Avoid the cities like the plague and stop in the small towns. You’ll feel better when you get home.
I used to go to Vermont every year to do exactly that, travel all the nice, quiet little villages. I think it’s a good year to resume that tradition 😉
Ignoring the political leanings there, of course…
If you are not careful, you might find another home town.
One guy runs around flashing himself in his underpants, and it’s suddenly everyone else’s fault?
Anthony Weiner became a successful politician because he was willing to endure endless “meet & greets.” Rubber chicken dinners. And, really going out and working for votes. Sure, he had to swallow a lot of hot dogs. But to Anthony Weiner it beat the grind of having to go to work every day.
Now his fetish didn’t come out of the blue! It strings onto his genetics. So, his dad, or his uncle, or his grandpa, all did some form of weird thing. He could’a stood on a subway platform, wearing a raincoat. And, flashing girls he saw seated inside of trains. Because what could they do? Get up and scream?
What the media discovered is that this fool’s story brings in readers! Readers and viewers mean money! And, that’s why in the commercial world, when an Anthony Weiner shows up (not quite nude). Not quite with a “wide stance” in a public bathroom’s stall … It still becomes “titillating.”
In Barnum’s time this was just part of the side-show. And, Barnum charged you a dime just to look.
Sure, it seems odd a man on the cusp of winning a mayoral race, after already beeing a disgraced congress critter … couldn’t keep a lid on his fetish.
Maybe, ahead, Hanes will offer him work?
Mr. Weiner’s qualifications and propensities make him fit only for liberal academia…where Ayers and all the other veterans of perversion and treachery seem to land. There they can continue to be maintained by public funds, do very little work, mouth off their theories and ideology with impunity and carry on in their sexual and political exploits.
Another public official apologizes for his sexual indiscretions:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/09/05/110905sh_shouts_rudnick
News! News! News! Messiah crucified on a hill by Roman authorities after Jewish community leaders demand his torture and death.
Yeah. The world has just all of a sudden got strange, hasn’t it?
What is it with folk who think everything started happening right after they learned to read and write?
The world has always been this way. It’s just now announced on twitter, in real time.
But what’s really messed up is that the woman who killed over spilled milk will be sentenced to 15 years, while the sextortionist who committed a rape on a 16 year old woman and molested an 11 year old boy will only get 9 years, and he’s already applied for probation.
And that’s in Texas. Really, Texas?