Isn’t it all just a wind up?

Jazz Jennings is utterly heartbreaking. The latest clip from the show seems to suggest a very unhappy and troubled person. I do wish Jazz would have a break from the family, get a bit of distance and fresh perspective.

The audience capture is real, too.

This thread keeps making me think about poor Jazz Jennings.

Its a grotesque Truman Show.

I wish it were just a pisstake.

Check out the Cooked and Bombd forum.

I had a quick look and it’s seemed pretty low-energy, the stuff about GL. It gives a feeling that most people are saying “yeah, and that”, “yeah, that too” they don’t seem particularly fired up about their hatred of him. It doesn’t feel like enthusiastic agreement with the OP, more like people conforming to save their own skins.

The audience capture is real, too.

I recently joined Twitter on this topic and I can already see the algorithm trying to lock me into a 'cyber-prison' with all the people who might already think exactly like I do!

I get suggestions of whom to follow and those never include people I'd like to argue with or any new topics. All this, too, is to maximise involvement for the way advertisers try to measure it. (And so is trying to elicit anger which keeps people typing away).

The idea is to offer people 'more of what they like' online which is a consumerist approach, but dangerous in politics and similar topics.

It leads into a situation where someone believes that their views are very common, will win in an election etc., just because they live in that cyber-prison or bubble with many others sharing their views, without understanding that perhaps most people don't agree at all. I'm now not even certain if the 'trending' things I see on Twitter actually do trend in some meaningful way, or if they are only trending in my bubble.

Check out the Cooked and Bombd forum.

Set up by Chris Morris obsessives to talk about alternative comedy but now bizarrely hosts a world class TRA mob who rinse Graham Linehan to the point of defending the likes of rapists in women's jails, and furries because and I quote 'only a few do beastiality'.

All with zero irony... because what the fuck do they think Chris Morris would make of it?

D'oh - my remarks were addressed to the OP and not the PP who I quoted!

Yes, it's real. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which satire and genuine idiocy are difficult to tell apart.

You're right about the genderist movement exploiting the chance to cause trouble and shout women down, but it seems to attract narcissistic, entitled misogynists and I don't think they're faking it.

However, unscrupulous people will jump on any suitable bandwagon/gravy train and it is likely that some of those parroting gender identity ideology nonsense are doing just that.

Regardless of the sincerity of the "influencers", there seem to be many people out there who have been genuinely mesmerised by this idiocy. (Fun fact: "mesmerised" is named after Franz Mesmer, who died on this day in 1815. But given your username, perhaps you knew that?)

Pretty much this. It’s remarkable.

I’ve seen that ‘audience capture’ happen on mumsnet before, where a poster ended up taking a course of action she didn’t feel very comfortable with because everyone was hungry for the next instalment of the story. She did say so and stopped talking on the thread, but that was easy for her to do, she was anonymous and wasn’t taking any money.
It’s so worrying that people like Oli London and Dylan Malvany are getting invasive FF surgery. They are so young and they’ve messed up heir faces for life. Where are they getting the money from to do it? It has the feeling of a Stephen King novel or Black Mirror.

There's also the 'audience capture' Where 'influencers' and bloggers end up living to serve the desires of their audience.

gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture

Social media pushes people into more extreme and inflammatory positions/behaviour, to get more clicks.

And the fact that structures have been created that positively enable and support anti-social behaviour and make safeguarding very hard, offering protections to people with paraphilias that they didn't have before.

When personality disordered people with paraphilias have the limits and boundaries on their behaviour removed, they will escalate as they've been given the opportunity, but also because on some level they are desperate for someone to stop them. So more extreme behaviour is likely to continue. Even if i'ts self destructive, risky, and sometimes because it's self destructive and risky.

Removing certain conditions from the DSM has attempted to normalise what are definitely not normal behaviours, and it's also meant that people who really need help, support and therapy are no longer able to access it.

Yes I can imagine, pre-social media, JM would be putting on eyeshadow and talking to (pecking at) the mirror in the privacy of his own home and occasionally being arrested and/or sectioned from losing his shit in a supermarket. No one would have any idea what he thinks.

I think the answer is probably people reaching a saturation point where they just can’t tolerate something any more. It’s ‘peaking’ isn’t it? One day you have just had enough and unsubscribe from all of your mailing lists and you are not alone, loads of people reached the same place at the same time. Suddenly something popular falls out of favour. People are just sick of it. I think the individual has less control though.

Well, you can simply avoid being too online.

@ArabellaScott

Don't forget the medium affects the message. I would say, having seen a fair amount of oddbods on Tiktok, that that app and social media in general is a fierce conduit for narcissism. Jeffrey Marsh looks to be like that 'budgie pecking a mirror', and so many of the people posting shitty videos are entranced by their own reflections.

Indeed! I got interested in the way the social media provides ideal playgrounds for narcissists and for some other types of personality disorders when I began watching Trump. Individuals liking fights are drawn to divisive political topics, too, especially the kinds where one side is labeled angels and the other side demons.

And when the game falls apart, there's always some other group to choose for another game.

After a while I began spotting the individuals who are doing this. It's extremely difficult to apply the real world solution to them which is to avoid them.

OP to answer your question directly

no it’s not just people dicking about online

it is in our real lives. I first wrote to the local MP nearly 10 years ago. It’s a real life genuine issue.

Don't forget the medium affects the message. I would say, having seen a fair amount of oddbods on Tiktok, that that app and social media in general is a fierce conduit for narcissism. Jeffrey Marsh looks to be like that 'budgie pecking a mirror', and so many of the people posting shitty videos are entranced by their own reflections.

A little digression about paedophilia.

When lots of women patients told Dr Freud they’d been abused by their dads, he assumed they were making it up and it manifestation of an unfulfilled wish to be raped by their dads. Clueless bloke.

During the second wave of feminism, the women’s consciousness-raising sessions made them realise how many women had actually been sexually abused as kids.

In the past, people used to think kids reporting abuse were making it up, but then people started to believe them.

In the 80s research revealed that a large number of kids were abused, averaging about one or two in every classroom- and girls at 5 times the rate of boys.

Huge exposes revealed the prevalence of sexual abuse with the church, children’s homes, Boy Scouts, you bloody name it.

There was a need to wise up and protect kids.

A public will to ‘do something for fuck’s sake’ is not a moral panic.

After measures like the Children’s Act were put in place, people who wanted to interfere with kids found themselves thwarted, and on the surface, safeguarding measures can look a bit extreme. Some men would complain that they couldn’t sit and eat their packed lunch innocently watching the kids playing in the park any more, without people thinking they were a nonce, that kind of thing - it had all gone too far. I do think that is such a high price to pay for protecting kids. So, no. It was not a moral panic.

Chris Morris brought out Brasseye in around 1993-4.

Meanwhile, actual nonces started becoming sex tourists to find easier access to children in countries where there are lax child protection laws.

It's one of the bonkers things about it - the whole thing is so patently absurd, that when there's a parody account taking the piss, it's actually quite hard to tell the difference.

Slow down slow down, back up a bit. Eh?

What are you talking about? A moral panic after PIE? Please give me a rough time period you are talking about and how this manifested. What happened as a result of this panic?

It is also having a homogenising effect on culture around the world - so young people are more engaged in US politics and history than their own and there is no ‘authority’ to look towards or unifying experiences.

I am curious to see how it will all iron out and settle.

It was a moral panic though after pie. There are no more paedophiles now than before. However there are more of them than we thought and many institutions such as c of e and bbc covering them up goes to show there's always been risk and better safeguarding exists now, at least in theory.

It’s not a theory. It’s a remark. I believe Chris Morris is dodgy. That last episode of Brasseye felt off.

The trouble is that the internet has been great in many ways. I used to go to secondhand bookshops and browse. That was fun, but the chances of finding a particular long out-of-print book I hankered after were vestigial. Now all the booksellers can put their stock online and somebody thousands of miles away can find the listing and buy the book. Similarly, people with very rare medical conditions struggled to find anybody to compare notes with. Now they can have online support groups.

The flipside, of course, is that some of the people who've come together via the internet are not doing each other good, quite the reverse. Plus, the internet is addictive and people spending all their lives online are not getting out into the fresh air and exercising, meeting people face to face, developing real life social skills and judgement, and so on, so they are not leading healthy lives, physically or emotionally.

No idea how we turn this round. The genie is out of the bottle.

Wow, that's one of the more insane theories I've read for a while!

This is such an excellent post. It explains in simple terms what has been happening as a consequence of the online world replacing the real world in some crucial ways.

That 'curating' was not without obvious problems as governments in many countries have used that power to mislead, silence, and oppress their populations. But when it was combined with freedom of speech and debate in universities it worked, though imperfectly, and it also allowed the process to be improved over time.