Re:McClatchy Follows BuzzFeed, Vice, and Others in Cutting S...
by monksy on Friday February 01, 2019 @09:05PM
(#19060540)
Should we consider the time that you said the N word as an edgy teen in middle school? It's apart of your history.
Different unrelated events aren't context.
Re:McClatchy Follows BuzzFeed, Vice, and Others in Cutting S...
by eropple on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:12PM
(#19060990)
We certainly should take into context something like that, yes. For me, that particular thing didn't happen--I was never quite so far to the right wing as to think racial slurs were anything but unacceptable--but I was a shitty libertarian know-it-all. I've never been shitty enough to out and deadname trans people like Milo fucking Yiannopoulos, and I've never been shitty enough to cape up for bad-science racists like Charles Murray, but I've been shitty. I said things that made people mad (because they made me feel superior) and hurt people (because they intellectually made sense, because I was so rational and also had never had a hard day in my life).
Then I grew up, then I realized I was being shitty, and I stopped. And since I have made a point of standing up for the right things, instead, while not ducking that I too have been shitty.
That's more context, and that context, eventually and with hard work, does balance the scales.
It just isn't that complicated.
No, it's context. You cannot reduce political action--and "political action" should be understood as any action between people or groups, there is no light switch to turn it off or on--to a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. The game is infinite. Your history matters. The context of your actions in the body politic matters.
News organizations have a duty to place events into context, and...this is that context.