The entertainment-misogyny complex
November 30, 2022 10:05 AM Subscribe
(Definitely still a good article worth reading, mind - thanks for the post!)
posted by Dysk at 10:41 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 10:41 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Haven't rtfa yet, but I am sad to say I saw a Guardian article recently with Helena Bonham Carter defending both Depp and Rowling. : /
posted by Glinn at 10:44 AM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
posted by Glinn at 10:44 AM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
That trial was painful as hell to watch before even getting to the vile hatred toward Amber in comments everywhere I turned. It truly feels like empathy is dying, and women and LGBTQ folks are being made examples of the intentionality of just pure ruthlessness. What the hell humanity?!
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:47 AM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:47 AM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
I kinda figured Depp or his lawyer team had some kind of tech connections that were pushing his side of the story. I refused to watch a single clip of this trial and actively tried to avoid this story but it seemed to be pushed at me from the pro-Depp side on every single social media platform. YouTube especially could not stop suggesting clips of Heard being “DESTROYED” in court. At the time of the trial I also noticed a few of Depp’s movies at the top of the suggestions on Netflix.
posted by vanitas at 11:20 AM on November 30, 2022 [26 favorites]
posted by vanitas at 11:20 AM on November 30, 2022 [26 favorites]
It wasn't even real tech connections. They were using standard SEO and marketing tactics to just drown out any other point of view. Totally helped there were a lot of angry, young men to take up his cause for free and amplify what they were putting out.
posted by jmauro at 11:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [26 favorites]
posted by jmauro at 11:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [26 favorites]
I have to admit, I tried to block the whole thing out. It's too depressing that -- after Johnny Depp made himself toxic to Hollywood by not being disciplined enough to do a few favorable interviews, turn in some good artistic work, and let everyone move on (see Brad Pitt) -- he still emerges in such a favorable position. Still doing endorsements, even!
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Yeah, when I first heard the news I just assumed that Amber Heard's allegations were true and figured I'd be ignoring Depp's films going forward. I didn't seek out any additional information about the whole thing but news about the case kept on being pushed to my news feed to the extent I had to select the option saying I'm not interested in it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Humans aren't wise enough or good enough to be allowed to mess around with the internet. It is amazing, in retrospect, how oblivious the old techno-optimists of the 80s were, to the risks of bullying when 10 million people can shitpile on one person. Enough of those old optimists were themselves bullied nerds that the potential threat should have been obvious.
I mean, speaking as a mid-80s techno-optimist who longed for the day when everyone would have a computer in their pocket (connected with all the computers in other peoples' pockets, using protocols that were not subject to censorship by The Man), which we thought would enable frictionless disintermediated many-to-many communication. Which we thought would be good. Nobody guessed that abusive shits would be able to summon hordes of flying monkeys to surrogate-abuse their targets based on misreported or decontextualized or just plain made-up statements about the latter.
I suppose we figured that the brave new world would just not have those people in it somehow. But "computer in every pocket" does imply "computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [57 favorites]
I mean, speaking as a mid-80s techno-optimist who longed for the day when everyone would have a computer in their pocket (connected with all the computers in other peoples' pockets, using protocols that were not subject to censorship by The Man), which we thought would enable frictionless disintermediated many-to-many communication. Which we thought would be good. Nobody guessed that abusive shits would be able to summon hordes of flying monkeys to surrogate-abuse their targets based on misreported or decontextualized or just plain made-up statements about the latter.
I suppose we figured that the brave new world would just not have those people in it somehow. But "computer in every pocket" does imply "computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [57 favorites]
Don’t feel too bad, back in the ‘90s I was telling people the internet would be the best thing that ever happened to journalism.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
From Donald Fagan's 1980's song IGY, a vision of the future from the standpoint of the early '60s... dripping with wistful cynicism and irony, long before there was a computer in every pocket.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
From Donald Fagan's 1980's song IGY, a vision of the future from the standpoint of the early '60s... dripping with wistful cynicism and irony, long before there was a computer in every pocket.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
"computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that
Perhaps - because, during the 80's - computers were harder to use (yeah, so this is 'gatekeeping') - so there was some barrier-to-entry - possibly tied to overall intelligence - and at that time, intelligent people were not typically rewarded for being complete toxic assholes. There were definitely assholes on the internet in the 80's - but it wasn't monetized and incentivized like it is now.
posted by rozcakj at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Perhaps - because, during the 80's - computers were harder to use (yeah, so this is 'gatekeeping') - so there was some barrier-to-entry - possibly tied to overall intelligence - and at that time, intelligent people were not typically rewarded for being complete toxic assholes. There were definitely assholes on the internet in the 80's - but it wasn't monetized and incentivized like it is now.
posted by rozcakj at 12:26 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
At the beginning of the pandemic, a journalist on Twitter took it upon himself to transcribe the daily events of the court case in England that was being held to determine whether Depp could credibly be called a domestic abuser (he was suing a media outlet that done so for libel). I had -- as many of us had -- an abundance of free time, and I am ashamed to admit I quickly became hooked on this reporting. It was extremely obvious to me that Depp -- while possibly himself the victim of abuse -- was definitely an abuser, and it became obvious to the court, which found against him. Imagine my surprise when a similar case took place here in America with such a radically different result, but -- as far as I can tell -- all the same evidence. It is very curious.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:37 PM on November 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:37 PM on November 30, 2022 [17 favorites]
some barrier-to-entry - possibly tied to overall intelligence
*Perceived intelligence* as recorded by biased tests designed to select the test makers and people like them as the most “intelligent”
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:38 PM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
*Perceived intelligence* as recorded by biased tests designed to select the test makers and people like them as the most “intelligent”
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:38 PM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
Was this writer born yesterday? Women have been attacking and destroying women before the internet. How is it a “shocking new development (that) Women themselves are now often at the forefront of the latest mode of misogynist harassment” ???? Did this person never go to high school? Women uphold the patriarchy, that is how it freaking stays in place.
“When did this become a world where women gleefully attack and destroy other women?"
Has this person never watched Fox news? It is all about gleefully attacking women, often done by chuckling females. And there are plenty of liberals who think it is funny to mock and attack their female foes.
Yes, the internet is based on “the vicious and demeaning attention economy”, thanks for stating the obvious.
posted by rhonzo at 12:43 PM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
“When did this become a world where women gleefully attack and destroy other women?"
Has this person never watched Fox news? It is all about gleefully attacking women, often done by chuckling females. And there are plenty of liberals who think it is funny to mock and attack their female foes.
Yes, the internet is based on “the vicious and demeaning attention economy”, thanks for stating the obvious.
posted by rhonzo at 12:43 PM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
*Perceived intelligence* as recorded by biased tests designed to select the test makers and people like them as the most “intelligent”
I don't know, we can debate 'intelligence' but the point seems pretty valid in context
There is no comparison between the early adopter and today's ubiquity. If intelligence is a measure of an individual's creative/time investment in something, it's fair to make a judgement like that. A lot of people with material means simply did not get into computing till it became.. much more accessible.
posted by elkevelvet at 1:05 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
I don't know, we can debate 'intelligence' but the point seems pretty valid in context
There is no comparison between the early adopter and today's ubiquity. If intelligence is a measure of an individual's creative/time investment in something, it's fair to make a judgement like that. A lot of people with material means simply did not get into computing till it became.. much more accessible.
posted by elkevelvet at 1:05 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
I suppose we figured that the brave new world would just not have those people in it somehow. But "computer in every pocket" does imply "computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that.
Ever since 2017, I've been thinking of when Neil Gaiman said this:
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:09 PM on November 30, 2022 [70 favorites]
Ever since 2017, I've been thinking of when Neil Gaiman said this:
One of the things that was great about the internet and social media, when it started, was that it allowed the dispossessed to find each other. I was a little geek kid who liked science fiction and there was no one in my school who liked science fiction, and I went to another school and found maybe one person or two people who liked science fiction and comics like I did. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I found my people.Though it's not just Nazis. Media illiteracy is a very real phenomenon. The Depp/Heard trial helped me cull a lot of friends whose strong opinions, it became clear, were rooted in virtually no actual information.
So it was this idea where there were people like me in every town and every school that had no voice or power and were suddenly becoming a mass power and could talk to each other and go, “Oh my gosh, we’re not alone,” and that was wonderful.
What never occurred to me is that in every town you also have a Nazi who had been sitting there going, “I can’t talk to anyone about being a Nazi. I can’t talk to anyone about my belief that people should be killed and the races should be cleansed.” They went online too, and they found each other, “Oh wow, actually, there are hundreds of thousands of us! And now we’re all together now too!”
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:09 PM on November 30, 2022 [70 favorites]
I remember I was so nervous for my first Intelligence test back in 1990. You fail that one, you don't get another chance at the intenet for 4 years!
posted by some loser at 1:27 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by some loser at 1:27 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I think back to when I clicked on a video that was of the "Johnny Depp absolutely DESTROYS in court" variety that was all over and I was like, well, there's not much of anything going on here. He... did not destroy. It was all implied in the title, but the video was just Johnny Depp giving mediocre, perhaps slightly pithy comments behind his sunglasses.
But the whole "how could we not have known about the Internet" argument has really come into clarity to me over the past few years. In the '80s or '90s, we simply could not conceive of people with lower levels of intelligence managing their own computers or the Internet and participating in these online systems. Sure, there were cranks and spammers and extreme-right jerks, but they honestly were the erudite, competent ones.
All of a sudden, in the late aughts, things changed. It was, please excuse me for making it this simple, the iPhone, and not just the iPhone, the App Store in 2008. Brogrammers suddenly flooded San Francisco hoping to get in on the riches yielded by the masses seeking this gilded device. At the same time, platforms that let you amplify opinions proliferated - Facebook and Twitter and Youtube suddenly erupted. These were not people carefully crafting opinions from the command line or a green screen, these were people firing off epithets from their pockets. It was a radical change in the late aughts that I'm not sure I've seen documented in media.
In the meantime, I stay out of celebrity matters. There's no reason that whatever the hell happened between the two of them needs to be on my radar. It has no influence on my life. It is of no benefit to me, or those I love. I hope both of them can find justice and peace.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 1:35 PM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
But the whole "how could we not have known about the Internet" argument has really come into clarity to me over the past few years. In the '80s or '90s, we simply could not conceive of people with lower levels of intelligence managing their own computers or the Internet and participating in these online systems. Sure, there were cranks and spammers and extreme-right jerks, but they honestly were the erudite, competent ones.
All of a sudden, in the late aughts, things changed. It was, please excuse me for making it this simple, the iPhone, and not just the iPhone, the App Store in 2008. Brogrammers suddenly flooded San Francisco hoping to get in on the riches yielded by the masses seeking this gilded device. At the same time, platforms that let you amplify opinions proliferated - Facebook and Twitter and Youtube suddenly erupted. These were not people carefully crafting opinions from the command line or a green screen, these were people firing off epithets from their pockets. It was a radical change in the late aughts that I'm not sure I've seen documented in media.
In the meantime, I stay out of celebrity matters. There's no reason that whatever the hell happened between the two of them needs to be on my radar. It has no influence on my life. It is of no benefit to me, or those I love. I hope both of them can find justice and peace.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 1:35 PM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
The wild thing about the trial was that I had female friends who were consistently on the side of #MeToo accusations by women, except for this one. To this day I still don't really understand why. I don't think they're all secret anti-feminists.
This case and the social media analysis around it, for some reason, got to people. I don't know why it worked so well. For some people Depp became a singularly sympathetic figure, someone so hard-done-by that even if Heard was right and he'd hurt her, it wasn't as bad as she said and she deserved to be punished for damaging him. It's like all their inclinations toward sympathy around accusations of abuse were able to be DARVOd against Heard; it was really jarring.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:37 PM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
This case and the social media analysis around it, for some reason, got to people. I don't know why it worked so well. For some people Depp became a singularly sympathetic figure, someone so hard-done-by that even if Heard was right and he'd hurt her, it wasn't as bad as she said and she deserved to be punished for damaging him. It's like all their inclinations toward sympathy around accusations of abuse were able to be DARVOd against Heard; it was really jarring.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:37 PM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
"Intelligence" tests.... (Maybe that was the wrong term - maybe it was more socio-economic classification - but it wasn't easy for early adopters, they had to put in alot of sweat-equity and time to get onto even BBS's with crappy modems that required physical jumper tweaks)
I took an intelligence test on lark - I was a borderline student, flunked some subjects, excelled at others. I didn't even try very hard, and only spent 30m on it. The result was ... unreasonably high for the lack of effort/complete guesses I put into it - now, did I go about thinking I was a genius? No - I had enough cynicism to realize that the whole testing process was bunkum - and rigged for a certain type of thinker/brain. (Later in life, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained alot of the missed opportunities for subjects that simply did not interest me)
posted by rozcakj at 1:41 PM on November 30, 2022
I took an intelligence test on lark - I was a borderline student, flunked some subjects, excelled at others. I didn't even try very hard, and only spent 30m on it. The result was ... unreasonably high for the lack of effort/complete guesses I put into it - now, did I go about thinking I was a genius? No - I had enough cynicism to realize that the whole testing process was bunkum - and rigged for a certain type of thinker/brain. (Later in life, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained alot of the missed opportunities for subjects that simply did not interest me)
posted by rozcakj at 1:41 PM on November 30, 2022
The wild thing about the trial was that I had female friends who were consistently on the side of #MeToo accusations by women, except for this one. To this day I still don't really understand why. I don't think they're all secret anti-feminists.
The vast majority of people doing the work of [white supremacy | misogyny | queerphobia] genuinely think of themselves as Good People, firmly on the side of human rights and other nice things, but they keep being swayed with "except for this one" and "he's no angel" and "but not around kids". It's exactly how these things work, and the Depp PR machine knew it and used it right out in the open.
posted by Etrigan at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
The vast majority of people doing the work of [white supremacy | misogyny | queerphobia] genuinely think of themselves as Good People, firmly on the side of human rights and other nice things, but they keep being swayed with "except for this one" and "he's no angel" and "but not around kids". It's exactly how these things work, and the Depp PR machine knew it and used it right out in the open.
posted by Etrigan at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
It has no influence on my life. It is of no benefit to me, or those I love.
I find this to be true of lots of the news that makes it to the headlines. Like earlier this week there was something about 8 people dying in landslides in Italy. As in one of the top stories during the 5 minute hourly news report on the radio. No doubt it is terrible news for the people affected but I'm in Canada, why is this on the news here if none of them were Canadian? And even if they were Canadian, there's over 30 million of us, I expect on any given day lots of us are dying so there better be something newsworthy about it to make it to the news.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I find this to be true of lots of the news that makes it to the headlines. Like earlier this week there was something about 8 people dying in landslides in Italy. As in one of the top stories during the 5 minute hourly news report on the radio. No doubt it is terrible news for the people affected but I'm in Canada, why is this on the news here if none of them were Canadian? And even if they were Canadian, there's over 30 million of us, I expect on any given day lots of us are dying so there better be something newsworthy about it to make it to the news.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
FWIW, the VA trial should be overturned on appeal. The trial court judge fucked up really, really bad.
Some resources:
Judgement of the Queen's Bench of the High Court of Justice
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Judgment-FINAL.pdf
The "Statement of Facts" from Heard's counter-claim.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/sites/circuit/files/assets/documents/pdf/high-profile/depp%20v%20heard/cl-2019-2911-def-counterclaims-8-10-2020.pdf
Amber Heard Appeal Designation of Assignments of Error (Basis of Appeal)
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23131065/amber-heard-appeal-outline-designation-assignments-of-error.pdf
Amicus filing in appeal
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/137323011/2/
Amber Heard's Appeal Brief
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/620953526/
posted by mikelieman at 2:16 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Some resources:
Judgement of the Queen's Bench of the High Court of Justice
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Judgment-FINAL.pdf
The "Statement of Facts" from Heard's counter-claim.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/sites/circuit/files/assets/documents/pdf/high-profile/depp%20v%20heard/cl-2019-2911-def-counterclaims-8-10-2020.pdf
Amber Heard Appeal Designation of Assignments of Error (Basis of Appeal)
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23131065/amber-heard-appeal-outline-designation-assignments-of-error.pdf
Amicus filing in appeal
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/137323011/2/
Amber Heard's Appeal Brief
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/620953526/
posted by mikelieman at 2:16 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Women's internalized misogyny is nothing new; it's just being amplified by the technology. Sometimes I think it's a manifestation of the Just World Fallacy - I can imagine it could be comforting to think, "The horrible things happening to that woman could never happen to me. It must be all her own fault."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:27 PM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:27 PM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
"Intelligence" tests.... (Maybe that was the wrong term
I'd be happy if news sites comments sections required a brief hurdle to get in. Want to make a comment on election results in Ruritania? Click here to locate the country (to within 500 km) on a map, or type in the surname of the incumbent prime minister (mentioned at the beginning of the second paragraph of the story you are trying to comment on).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:33 PM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
I'd be happy if news sites comments sections required a brief hurdle to get in. Want to make a comment on election results in Ruritania? Click here to locate the country (to within 500 km) on a map, or type in the surname of the incumbent prime minister (mentioned at the beginning of the second paragraph of the story you are trying to comment on).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:33 PM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
That sounds like a barrier to "engagement" so there's no way that'll willingly happen.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:55 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:55 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Well and there was clearly a lot of money behind pushing his case online. I was absolutely inundated by it despite no interest whatsoever and some of that was sponsored posts.
posted by joannemerriam at 3:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by joannemerriam at 3:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
I've had the exact opposite experience from what's described in the article or alluded to in a bunch of comments above. Every single word I've heard or read about the Depp-Heard trial (like this article) has been from a viewpoint either tacitly or explicitly supporting Heard. The only way I've encountered the pro-Depp coverage is secondhand, hearing about it from a voice that was pro-Heard.
I live my life in a vivid blue media bubble. In some ways I'm sure that's crippling. It was good for my sanity during the trial drama. It's making me feel weirdly out of touch now.
posted by gurple at 3:45 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
I live my life in a vivid blue media bubble. In some ways I'm sure that's crippling. It was good for my sanity during the trial drama. It's making me feel weirdly out of touch now.
posted by gurple at 3:45 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
The wild thing about the trial was that I had female friends who were consistently on the side of #MeToo accusations by women, except for this one. To this day I still don't really understand why. I don't think they're all secret anti-feminists.
Almost all of the anti-Heard people in my life are women. And I spent a couple of weeks asking them about why they felt the way they felt, rather than trying to argue them out of the feelings (a task which I knew I wasn't up to).
I came away with basically three observations, all of which were universal to-a-tee with all the people I asked this about. And they seem to reflect articles about these phenomena too.
First, people in abusive situations often show their absolute worst sides—not surprising, because they're pushed to places of extreme stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. But that plays to an abuser's advantage, because they can easily decontextualize their victim's behavior and create a bullshit narrative where the victim is the one doing the worst and most toxic behavior. Add a multi-million dollar propaganda engine into the mix, and... well, Heard was kinda fucked.
Second, women in these situations suffer from the amplification effects of misogyny. (I just read an old MetaFilter comment about this, but can't remember where I found it.) It's not that people go "fuck women" right off the bat—it's that they unconsciously magnify all of a woman's bad behaviors while unconsciously excusing a man's behaviors. Our cultural narratives play into that in a major way: "irrational/emotional/difficult girlfriend" is one trope, and "sadsack man lashing out because nobody understands his feelings" is another. People get pushed towards "archetypal" understandings of events, they don't question those archetypes, and suddenly everything that happens gets heavily filtered towards those lenses.
Third and most complicatedly, almost all the friends I asked about this had been in emotionally toxic relationships themselves. And they all more-or-less said: "Amber Heard reminds me of my [ex and/or parent]." Which I think comes back to there being a major difference between acting poorly constantly and unprovoked versus acting poorly because your abuser is fucking with you, but it's more complex than that. Some of the most difficult friendships and relationships that I've had are with former victims of abuse—it's an experience that makes you literally unhealthy, and can really screw with your ability to emotionally self-regulate or negotiate complex social situations. And people who've dealt with those dynamics—which I'd bet is more common among women than among men—are going to struggle when presented with someone who reminds them strongly of somebody else who did them harm.
On a petty level, I think it's universally relatable to feel instinctively bad about someone who reminds you of someone else you have rough memories of. On a less petty level, I think that abuse creates people who are likely to rub others the wrong way—I mean, that's what cycles of abuse are. One of my closest friends has been through some major shit, and I love her to death, but it means that once every couple of years she winds up treating me in ways that I'd find absolutely intolerable coming from anybody but her. And early on in #GamerGate, for the first 36 hours or so, I struggled a lot because Zoe Quinn reminded me so palpably of an extremely awful relationship I'd just gotten out of that it took an ex-MeFite to nudge me and go, "Dude, please get out of your head and look at which of these two people is acting like an above-and-beyond monster," a push that I honestly needed right then and there.
Depp's social media machine blurred the difference between "if/then," eliminating the narrative of which person caused which thing to happen. Amber Heard yelling "savage" things at Johnny Depp right after he'd physically assaulted her or emotionally barraged her is a much different circumstance than Amber Heard just abruptly going ballistic on some poor sweet dumpster possum. And I think that the decontextualization did more than just both-sides the narrative: it gave a lot of individuals with their own bad experiences room to identify Heard with their own unhappy experiences. Partly because that difference between "contextual shitty behavior" and "spontaneous shitty behavior" got blurred, and partly because I think there are probably just a lot of abuse victims in the world, many of whom struggle with shadows of their past and re-enact learned behaviors well past the circumstances where they learned them.
And a part of the challenge of situations like this is that it's hard to "present facts" to someone whose opinion is rooted in emotional memory. One reason I didn't bother to try and argue with these friends of mine, after their initial reactions to me, was how clear it was that they'd interpret any attempt to say "I don't think Amber Heard is the abuser here" as some variant on "I don't think you were ever abused." How do you show respect and empathy for someone's lived experience or inner demons without agreeing to the conclusions that said experience/demons lead them to? It's difficult. And I relate, because the abuse I dealt with is an order of magnitude less brutal than what I know some of these friends have dealt with, and I still struggle in situations that seem to mirror it in any way.
In short: I do think it's misogyny on some level, but I also think that this situation was unusually difficult to parse information about and influenced by a massive propaganda network and pushed sensitive buttons for a lot of people. It's misogyny, in other words, but it wasn't strictly an "anti-feminist" thing: every one of the women I knew who was pro-Depp accused Amber Heard of "ruining" #MeToo for other women, or of making it harder for people to "believe women," or of setting feminism back in general. That both makes this situation more fraught, and, unfortunately, suggests that shitheads are discovering a playbook for appropriating feminist rhetoric to mask their bad behaviors and denounce their victims. I'm very worried about how that will affect the progress the #MeToo movement has made: destroying a movement's credibility is a lot easier than opposing it outright, and has more-or-less the same effect.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [62 favorites]
Almost all of the anti-Heard people in my life are women. And I spent a couple of weeks asking them about why they felt the way they felt, rather than trying to argue them out of the feelings (a task which I knew I wasn't up to).
I came away with basically three observations, all of which were universal to-a-tee with all the people I asked this about. And they seem to reflect articles about these phenomena too.
First, people in abusive situations often show their absolute worst sides—not surprising, because they're pushed to places of extreme stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. But that plays to an abuser's advantage, because they can easily decontextualize their victim's behavior and create a bullshit narrative where the victim is the one doing the worst and most toxic behavior. Add a multi-million dollar propaganda engine into the mix, and... well, Heard was kinda fucked.
Second, women in these situations suffer from the amplification effects of misogyny. (I just read an old MetaFilter comment about this, but can't remember where I found it.) It's not that people go "fuck women" right off the bat—it's that they unconsciously magnify all of a woman's bad behaviors while unconsciously excusing a man's behaviors. Our cultural narratives play into that in a major way: "irrational/emotional/difficult girlfriend" is one trope, and "sadsack man lashing out because nobody understands his feelings" is another. People get pushed towards "archetypal" understandings of events, they don't question those archetypes, and suddenly everything that happens gets heavily filtered towards those lenses.
Third and most complicatedly, almost all the friends I asked about this had been in emotionally toxic relationships themselves. And they all more-or-less said: "Amber Heard reminds me of my [ex and/or parent]." Which I think comes back to there being a major difference between acting poorly constantly and unprovoked versus acting poorly because your abuser is fucking with you, but it's more complex than that. Some of the most difficult friendships and relationships that I've had are with former victims of abuse—it's an experience that makes you literally unhealthy, and can really screw with your ability to emotionally self-regulate or negotiate complex social situations. And people who've dealt with those dynamics—which I'd bet is more common among women than among men—are going to struggle when presented with someone who reminds them strongly of somebody else who did them harm.
On a petty level, I think it's universally relatable to feel instinctively bad about someone who reminds you of someone else you have rough memories of. On a less petty level, I think that abuse creates people who are likely to rub others the wrong way—I mean, that's what cycles of abuse are. One of my closest friends has been through some major shit, and I love her to death, but it means that once every couple of years she winds up treating me in ways that I'd find absolutely intolerable coming from anybody but her. And early on in #GamerGate, for the first 36 hours or so, I struggled a lot because Zoe Quinn reminded me so palpably of an extremely awful relationship I'd just gotten out of that it took an ex-MeFite to nudge me and go, "Dude, please get out of your head and look at which of these two people is acting like an above-and-beyond monster," a push that I honestly needed right then and there.
Depp's social media machine blurred the difference between "if/then," eliminating the narrative of which person caused which thing to happen. Amber Heard yelling "savage" things at Johnny Depp right after he'd physically assaulted her or emotionally barraged her is a much different circumstance than Amber Heard just abruptly going ballistic on some poor sweet dumpster possum. And I think that the decontextualization did more than just both-sides the narrative: it gave a lot of individuals with their own bad experiences room to identify Heard with their own unhappy experiences. Partly because that difference between "contextual shitty behavior" and "spontaneous shitty behavior" got blurred, and partly because I think there are probably just a lot of abuse victims in the world, many of whom struggle with shadows of their past and re-enact learned behaviors well past the circumstances where they learned them.
And a part of the challenge of situations like this is that it's hard to "present facts" to someone whose opinion is rooted in emotional memory. One reason I didn't bother to try and argue with these friends of mine, after their initial reactions to me, was how clear it was that they'd interpret any attempt to say "I don't think Amber Heard is the abuser here" as some variant on "I don't think you were ever abused." How do you show respect and empathy for someone's lived experience or inner demons without agreeing to the conclusions that said experience/demons lead them to? It's difficult. And I relate, because the abuse I dealt with is an order of magnitude less brutal than what I know some of these friends have dealt with, and I still struggle in situations that seem to mirror it in any way.
In short: I do think it's misogyny on some level, but I also think that this situation was unusually difficult to parse information about and influenced by a massive propaganda network and pushed sensitive buttons for a lot of people. It's misogyny, in other words, but it wasn't strictly an "anti-feminist" thing: every one of the women I knew who was pro-Depp accused Amber Heard of "ruining" #MeToo for other women, or of making it harder for people to "believe women," or of setting feminism back in general. That both makes this situation more fraught, and, unfortunately, suggests that shitheads are discovering a playbook for appropriating feminist rhetoric to mask their bad behaviors and denounce their victims. I'm very worried about how that will affect the progress the #MeToo movement has made: destroying a movement's credibility is a lot easier than opposing it outright, and has more-or-less the same effect.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [62 favorites]
The role of the live televised coverage of the trial is kinda unremarked on her? The social media landscape enables a lot of the behaviours in question, but so did the way this trial was broadcast, second-for-second, straight to people's TVs and phones.
I definitely also think there’s a dimension here that’s characteristic of mass media, not just social media, although social media amplifies it by its participatory nature. The term “parasocial” gets bandied about a lot but I think we can use it here. Johnny Depp is a (perhaps diminishingly, but still) charismatic performer of beloved characters. He has fans, both casual and hardcore, a lot of whom are women, and they’ve been fans since they were kids. It’s just more comfortable for a lot of people to accept him as the victim, and I’m sure his PR and legal teams knew that this was a button that could be pressed.
posted by atoxyl at 4:12 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I definitely also think there’s a dimension here that’s characteristic of mass media, not just social media, although social media amplifies it by its participatory nature. The term “parasocial” gets bandied about a lot but I think we can use it here. Johnny Depp is a (perhaps diminishingly, but still) charismatic performer of beloved characters. He has fans, both casual and hardcore, a lot of whom are women, and they’ve been fans since they were kids. It’s just more comfortable for a lot of people to accept him as the victim, and I’m sure his PR and legal teams knew that this was a button that could be pressed.
posted by atoxyl at 4:12 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
how anybody who paid attention to the trial at all could conclude that one person in that relationship was the true villain and the other was just an innocent victim
Interestingly, that is not at all what the trial was about.
posted by praemunire at 4:46 PM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
Interestingly, that is not at all what the trial was about.
posted by praemunire at 4:46 PM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
Mod note: A few comments flagged for noise have been deleted. Please take a step back if you've been engaging in a back-and-forth with other users.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 5:02 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 5:02 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
The anti-Heard lobby made me question whether I was mistaken in thinking that he was clearly the abuser but I concluded that abuse is often (always?) about power and he has more power than she does. I was upset about the verdict for a number of reasons, including that I don’t understand how you can defame someone in such vague terms. I hope she’s successful in her appeal.
posted by kat518 at 5:30 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by kat518 at 5:30 PM on November 30, 2022
Still doing endorsements, even!
He is very much still a spokes model for Dior in Japan, where he excels in their brand of celebrity being paid millions to mumble something that a marketing exec thought was deep. He's also in a film about industrial waste poisoning the town of Minimata, which, damn, I do a section about the incident in my class, and had thought about using the film until I saw he was in it.
Fun fact, presented as trivia in IMDB:
posted by Ghidorah at 6:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
He is very much still a spokes model for Dior in Japan, where he excels in their brand of celebrity being paid millions to mumble something that a marketing exec thought was deep. He's also in a film about industrial waste poisoning the town of Minimata, which, damn, I do a section about the incident in my class, and had thought about using the film until I saw he was in it.
Fun fact, presented as trivia in IMDB:
Was voted as one of the top 5 Fan Favorite Movies at the 2022 Oscars Ceremony. This came as a large surprise as the film had not grossed over $2 million at the world wide box office.Meanwhile, the user reviews of the film come off as the sort of sad old brigading bullshit: "Welcome back, Mr. Depp!" and "Depp is a true star" type shit, along with the old disingenuous chestnut: "I wonder why mainstream media and twitter blue checks ignore this movie."
posted by Ghidorah at 6:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
saw a Guardian article recently with Helena Bonham Carter defending both Depp and Rowling
I've never been a particular fan of HBC and now she's given me a reason to put her on my "problematic" list.
I kinda figured Depp or his lawyer team had some kind of tech connections that were pushing his side of the story.
So did I. He also seems to have enough connections in Hollywood to pretty much kill what little there was of Heard's acting career.
At the time of the trial I also noticed a few of Depp’s movies at the top of the suggestions on Netflix.
Yeah I remember noticing that on Netflix and at the time figured it was simply increased curiosity due to the trial. Maybe not?
Meanwhile, over on Amazon Prime, Depp was briefly included in Rihanna's recent Savage X Fenty fashion show and many of her fans were not happy about it. Rihanna has been a highly publicized subject of domestic violence herself and it makes no sense that she would help prop Depp by having him model some of her mens' lingerie line. I've wondered if it was another instance of Depp being able to wield power in the entertainment industry that Rihanna didn't have enough clout to override. (Though one might ask what he'd hope to gain from marked exposure to the Savage X Fenty fanbase, largely made of up Black women.) The official word is that Rihanna invited him but that PR slant also might be evidence of Depp's influence.
posted by fuse theorem at 6:52 PM on November 30, 2022
I've never been a particular fan of HBC and now she's given me a reason to put her on my "problematic" list.
I kinda figured Depp or his lawyer team had some kind of tech connections that were pushing his side of the story.
So did I. He also seems to have enough connections in Hollywood to pretty much kill what little there was of Heard's acting career.
At the time of the trial I also noticed a few of Depp’s movies at the top of the suggestions on Netflix.
Yeah I remember noticing that on Netflix and at the time figured it was simply increased curiosity due to the trial. Maybe not?
Meanwhile, over on Amazon Prime, Depp was briefly included in Rihanna's recent Savage X Fenty fashion show and many of her fans were not happy about it. Rihanna has been a highly publicized subject of domestic violence herself and it makes no sense that she would help prop Depp by having him model some of her mens' lingerie line. I've wondered if it was another instance of Depp being able to wield power in the entertainment industry that Rihanna didn't have enough clout to override. (Though one might ask what he'd hope to gain from marked exposure to the Savage X Fenty fanbase, largely made of up Black women.) The official word is that Rihanna invited him but that PR slant also might be evidence of Depp's influence.
posted by fuse theorem at 6:52 PM on November 30, 2022
Intolerance and prejudice are not caused by a lack of intelligence.
Media illiteracy is not caused by a lack of intelligence.
I'm kind of disturbed by some of the comments here.
There's a distinct taste of "well, if they were only as clever as I am, they'd obviously agree with me."
posted by Zumbador at 6:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
Media illiteracy is not caused by a lack of intelligence.
I'm kind of disturbed by some of the comments here.
There's a distinct taste of "well, if they were only as clever as I am, they'd obviously agree with me."
posted by Zumbador at 6:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
people with lower levels of intelligence managing their own computers or the Internet and participating in these online systems.
Sorry, what? Between this and the intelligence test comments (again, what?) this is starting to sound suspiciously, well, eugenicist. And we all know what the endgame of eugenics was, right?
(On preview: what Zumbador said)
posted by basalganglia at 7:03 PM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
Sorry, what? Between this and the intelligence test comments (again, what?) this is starting to sound suspiciously, well, eugenicist. And we all know what the endgame of eugenics was, right?
(On preview: what Zumbador said)
posted by basalganglia at 7:03 PM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
Haven't rtfa yet, but I am sad to say I saw a Guardian article recently with Helena Bonham Carter defending both Depp and Rowling. : /
Fully on brand for everyone involved. The Guardian is a transphobic rag, and no surprise that the TERFs are getting more bigoted a from palling it up with their new far right friends.
But "computer in every pocket" does imply "computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that.
I think a lot of people probably thought that without the implicit it explicit threat of physical violence that in person carries with it, they (and their other nerd friends) could totally wreck the jocks in sparring in text. They just overlooked that the same jock still goes to the same school, the same bullies will still be in your offline life
(And they dramatically overestimated their own ability at debate "combat")
posted by Dysk at 7:53 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Fully on brand for everyone involved. The Guardian is a transphobic rag, and no surprise that the TERFs are getting more bigoted a from palling it up with their new far right friends.
But "computer in every pocket" does imply "computers in the pockets of all the assholes," so IDK how we missed that.
I think a lot of people probably thought that without the implicit it explicit threat of physical violence that in person carries with it, they (and their other nerd friends) could totally wreck the jocks in sparring in text. They just overlooked that the same jock still goes to the same school, the same bullies will still be in your offline life
(And they dramatically overestimated their own ability at debate "combat")
posted by Dysk at 7:53 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think a lot of people probably thought that without the implicit it explicit threat of physical violence that in person carries with it, they (and their other nerd friends) could totally wreck the jocks in sparring in text. They just overlooked that the same jock still goes to the same school, the same bullies will still be in your offline life
Or it turned out that the nerds were just as (if not even moreso) petty, vicious, and bigoted as the people they railed against.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Or it turned out that the nerds were just as (if not even moreso) petty, vicious, and bigoted as the people they railed against.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Also that. But then they weren't the victims so it was fine!
posted by Dysk at 8:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 8:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Women uphold the patriarchy, that is how it freaking stays in place.
For all the truth in this observation, it is obviously incomplete. The behaviour of some women may demonstrate the full triumph of the structures of oppression, where members of the oppressed group begin policing themselves, and foundational power structures are as a result elided from view; but jumping from there to saying that women as a group uphold and maintain patriarchy is really a bridge too far.
I have come to loathe Depp over this, the trial, his viciousness, etc., and if anyone reminds me of an abuser it is him reminding me of mine (the smirk, the faux "coolness", the whole eye-rolling discourse of Look at the Crazy Bitch) and just like that my heart rate is up and I'm grinding my teeth. This case did bring up a lot of pain for a lot of people, and I'm still firmly on the "side" of Heard. I was appalled at the verdict and I hope it is struck down on appeal.
posted by jokeefe at 8:34 PM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
For all the truth in this observation, it is obviously incomplete. The behaviour of some women may demonstrate the full triumph of the structures of oppression, where members of the oppressed group begin policing themselves, and foundational power structures are as a result elided from view; but jumping from there to saying that women as a group uphold and maintain patriarchy is really a bridge too far.
I have come to loathe Depp over this, the trial, his viciousness, etc., and if anyone reminds me of an abuser it is him reminding me of mine (the smirk, the faux "coolness", the whole eye-rolling discourse of Look at the Crazy Bitch) and just like that my heart rate is up and I'm grinding my teeth. This case did bring up a lot of pain for a lot of people, and I'm still firmly on the "side" of Heard. I was appalled at the verdict and I hope it is struck down on appeal.
posted by jokeefe at 8:34 PM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
Dude here, I fell into the "both probably terrible people" camp at the time. But I can say, I had an absolutely visceral response to that one recording of Heard. It was spot on for my mother and it took a lot of poking from my wife to not fall straight into anti-Heard camp just from the flashbacks.
So yeah, I'd support the idea that abuse short circuits a lot of logic circuits.
posted by pan at 9:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
So yeah, I'd support the idea that abuse short circuits a lot of logic circuits.
posted by pan at 9:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
how anybody who paid attention to the trial at all could conclude that one person in that relationship was the true villain and the other was just an innocent victim
Agreed. Codependency is a very complex issue, even the relationships involved are not able to realize it.
posted by Brian B. at 9:32 PM on November 30, 2022
Agreed. Codependency is a very complex issue, even the relationships involved are not able to realize it.
posted by Brian B. at 9:32 PM on November 30, 2022
I think there's also the "man bites dog" thing. No one is surprised by news of a male actor turning out to be an abusive asshole. There have been songs and movies and plays about predatory stars since mass media became a thing. But if the story is instead that such a man accused of being an abuser is himself a victim, suddenly you have a dramatic turnaround narrative that gets the clicks. The positive reinforcement loop really aided Depp's media push, in my opinion.
For myself, if it were just a couple that I knew, I'd think they both had a lot of issues to work out. When one of them uses his considerable power imbalance to set off a media circus around the issue to make himself the hero, it goes back to just one really big asshole. I've been avoiding Depp projects ever since; if Heard ever manages to get a project again, I won't necessarily seek it out, but I won't avoid it either.
posted by Scattercat at 10:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
For myself, if it were just a couple that I knew, I'd think they both had a lot of issues to work out. When one of them uses his considerable power imbalance to set off a media circus around the issue to make himself the hero, it goes back to just one really big asshole. I've been avoiding Depp projects ever since; if Heard ever manages to get a project again, I won't necessarily seek it out, but I won't avoid it either.
posted by Scattercat at 10:58 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
"Intelligence" is a very loaded word because of its clear association with IQ, which is frequently misused as a measure of personal worth in much the same way that GDP gets consistently misused as an indicator of national economic health. Metrics are all very well when kept in their place. Near as I can tell, neither of these ever has been.
Whenever I see somebody making a "lack of intelligence" comment in the context of a discussion like this one, I will generally seek to read that in a way that interprets what's being bemoaned not as an inability to score highly on an IQ test but as an excess of Bonhoeffer stupidity. The positions presented usually make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
Bonhoeffer stupidity is orthogonal to IQ - I have met Mensa members who are deeply Bonhoeffer stupid and people with severe intellectual disabilities who show absolutely no trace of it. Like IQ, Bonhoeffer stupidity has nothing to do with personal worth. But it does neatly characterise a particular mindset, one that's both socially destructive and very widespread, in ways that I think have a lot of explanatory and predictive power for various social phenomena.
In particular, Bonhoeffer stupidity is not innate but induced, and it seems to me that doing exactly that is the particular skill of the almost totally Bonhoeffer stupid con artists and grifters who run the world's most expensive PR consultancies. Once induced, it takes a lot of intensive, slow and patient interpersonal work to unpick it and much of the time that's sadly not feasible.
I think we're all a bit Bonhoeffer stupid some of the time, but some of us are a lot Bonhoeffer stupid almost all of the time. I also think it's an infectious thought form, and catching Bonhoeffer stupidity on one topic - the doe-eyed innocence of one John Depp, say - can predispose to further stupidity about others.
posted by flabdablet at 5:38 AM on December 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
Whenever I see somebody making a "lack of intelligence" comment in the context of a discussion like this one, I will generally seek to read that in a way that interprets what's being bemoaned not as an inability to score highly on an IQ test but as an excess of Bonhoeffer stupidity. The positions presented usually make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
Bonhoeffer stupidity is orthogonal to IQ - I have met Mensa members who are deeply Bonhoeffer stupid and people with severe intellectual disabilities who show absolutely no trace of it. Like IQ, Bonhoeffer stupidity has nothing to do with personal worth. But it does neatly characterise a particular mindset, one that's both socially destructive and very widespread, in ways that I think have a lot of explanatory and predictive power for various social phenomena.
In particular, Bonhoeffer stupidity is not innate but induced, and it seems to me that doing exactly that is the particular skill of the almost totally Bonhoeffer stupid con artists and grifters who run the world's most expensive PR consultancies. Once induced, it takes a lot of intensive, slow and patient interpersonal work to unpick it and much of the time that's sadly not feasible.
I think we're all a bit Bonhoeffer stupid some of the time, but some of us are a lot Bonhoeffer stupid almost all of the time. I also think it's an infectious thought form, and catching Bonhoeffer stupidity on one topic - the doe-eyed innocence of one John Depp, say - can predispose to further stupidity about others.
posted by flabdablet at 5:38 AM on December 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
It truly feels like empathy is dying, and women and LGBTQ folks are being made examples of the intentionality of just pure ruthlessness. What the hell humanity?!
The economy feels like it's teetering on the brink of going into the shitter. Inflation is up, the job market has cooled, there's a lot of general instability as a result of Covid, Biden can't just juice the market indefinitely with cheap money the way Trump was doing... lot of factors playing into it.
But yeah. When people feel insecure they tend to pull back on empathy. If we really do go into a recession, it's probably visible minorities who are going to feel it first and hardest. And you know that a whole bunch of people are waiting in the wings to fan the flames and exploit that otherness.
I don't know how to fix that; it seems to be almost baked-in to the American psyche. When the country gets insecure, a lot of people get mean, real fast.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:44 AM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
The economy feels like it's teetering on the brink of going into the shitter. Inflation is up, the job market has cooled, there's a lot of general instability as a result of Covid, Biden can't just juice the market indefinitely with cheap money the way Trump was doing... lot of factors playing into it.
But yeah. When people feel insecure they tend to pull back on empathy. If we really do go into a recession, it's probably visible minorities who are going to feel it first and hardest. And you know that a whole bunch of people are waiting in the wings to fan the flames and exploit that otherness.
I don't know how to fix that; it seems to be almost baked-in to the American psyche. When the country gets insecure, a lot of people get mean, real fast.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:44 AM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
In the '80s or '90s, we simply could not conceive of people with lower levels of intelligence managing their own computers or the Internet and participating in these online systems.
Case in point: it doesn't take scoring high on an IQ test to work with, or even enjoy working with, a crude command line interface on a text-only green screen in order to connect with like-minded folks on a pre-Internet dial-in BBS. All it takes is a strong interest in doing that, which drives a willingness to put in the time to learn how. The only thing that IQ is going to predict with even vague reliability is how much time is likely to be required.
Bonhoeffer stupidity, though, goes hand in glove with inflexible thinking and a general unwillingness to stretch one's own understanding past existing, comfortable certainties. That's going to make dealing with something as weird and abstract as a crude early computer, especially with the purpose of meeting nerds, unlikely to be of interest in the first place.
posted by flabdablet at 6:06 AM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Case in point: it doesn't take scoring high on an IQ test to work with, or even enjoy working with, a crude command line interface on a text-only green screen in order to connect with like-minded folks on a pre-Internet dial-in BBS. All it takes is a strong interest in doing that, which drives a willingness to put in the time to learn how. The only thing that IQ is going to predict with even vague reliability is how much time is likely to be required.
Bonhoeffer stupidity, though, goes hand in glove with inflexible thinking and a general unwillingness to stretch one's own understanding past existing, comfortable certainties. That's going to make dealing with something as weird and abstract as a crude early computer, especially with the purpose of meeting nerds, unlikely to be of interest in the first place.
posted by flabdablet at 6:06 AM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Hope this isn't too deraily, but I really like the concept of Bonhoeffer stupidity, I hadn't come across that before & it's a nice crystallisation of a lot of messy floating ideas I have about the subject.
I have a lot of Feelings (tm) about how we conceptualise intelligence and stupidity, and they're difficult to talk about because we don't really have the language.
I have some quite severe developmental disabilities, and in the strictest sense I have a low IQ; I score very low on IQ tests. But in everyday conversation, I clearly strike people as at least averagely bright, and probably a bit more than average. I have a degree. I'm a good writer. I can maintain thoughtful discussions about complex subjects.
I absolutely can't, however, do the kind of information processing and problem solving thinking that IQ tests measure. I can't follow simple instructions reliably, or hold much information in my head at once. Often I can't even figure out exactly what the question wants from me. It's a very specific type of intelligence that I just don't have.
I consistently confuse and frustrate people around me by persistently seeming like a clever person and functioning like a stupid one. "But you're so bright!" has been such a fucking refrain all my life that being called clever makes me panicky.
So, you know, I'm resistant to the whole concept of intelligence at this point. It seems clear to me that it's basically a useless concept. When people start making not-quite-jokes about how you should have to take an IQ test to be allowed internet privileges, or to vote, or whatever (no one in this thread, but I do hear it fairly often), I'm like...Well, I would not be allowed on the Internet in that case, but I am also obviously not the person you're imagining this would weed out. Your screening process has failed.
But at the same time, clearly patterns of thought and behaviour do exist that can only really be described as stupid, and we need to be able to talk about them, because it's politically and socially important. This seems like a good start! Thanks for introducing me to it.
posted by BlueNorther at 8:12 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
I have a lot of Feelings (tm) about how we conceptualise intelligence and stupidity, and they're difficult to talk about because we don't really have the language.
I have some quite severe developmental disabilities, and in the strictest sense I have a low IQ; I score very low on IQ tests. But in everyday conversation, I clearly strike people as at least averagely bright, and probably a bit more than average. I have a degree. I'm a good writer. I can maintain thoughtful discussions about complex subjects.
I absolutely can't, however, do the kind of information processing and problem solving thinking that IQ tests measure. I can't follow simple instructions reliably, or hold much information in my head at once. Often I can't even figure out exactly what the question wants from me. It's a very specific type of intelligence that I just don't have.
I consistently confuse and frustrate people around me by persistently seeming like a clever person and functioning like a stupid one. "But you're so bright!" has been such a fucking refrain all my life that being called clever makes me panicky.
So, you know, I'm resistant to the whole concept of intelligence at this point. It seems clear to me that it's basically a useless concept. When people start making not-quite-jokes about how you should have to take an IQ test to be allowed internet privileges, or to vote, or whatever (no one in this thread, but I do hear it fairly often), I'm like...Well, I would not be allowed on the Internet in that case, but I am also obviously not the person you're imagining this would weed out. Your screening process has failed.
But at the same time, clearly patterns of thought and behaviour do exist that can only really be described as stupid, and we need to be able to talk about them, because it's politically and socially important. This seems like a good start! Thanks for introducing me to it.
posted by BlueNorther at 8:12 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
The term I like to work with, instead of intelligence or stupidity, is attachment. When someone lets themselves get overly attached to ideas or feelings, they become a parrot: their sense of self is replaced by whatever they happen to be echoing. (The myth of Echo is literally about the inverse of a narcissist: someone whose entire substance is made up of repeating something else.)
You need to hold thoughts and feelings at a skeptical distance if you want to be discerning about them. In a sense, you're in conversation with them, listening to them while remaining separate from them. But that also requires you not to identify as those thoughts and feelings, because if you start thinking that a particular idea IS you, you become extraordinarily resistant to things which challenge that idea—there's almost a subliminal existential terror that, if that opinion or feeling ceases to exist, then you'll wink out along with it.
I think that what fucks our society up, ironically, isn't that we've been reduced to idle consumers. It's the illusion that we need to produce. We're expected to react, participate, and earn points, and get caught up in feedback looks where we're penalized both for not presenting ourselves at all and for presenting ourselves "wrongly," according to whichever hive mind feels what. Failures get you brigaded and harassed, and sometimes delay is failure, so we're given increasingly limited windows to reflect, consider, question, and seek alternative sources.
I got bombarded with anti-Heard stuff too. Enough that my initial reaction was: "Huh. Maybe she's just as fault as Depp is here! Maybe she's exploiting feminism. Maybe she's even... the bad guy??" But even as I had that reaction, I went: "Well, maybe. But I really don't know, do I? Let me see who feels differently, and why they're saying it." And I looked things up, I dug a little deeper, and I walked away thinking that Johnny Depp sure seemed like a piece of shit.
I don't mean to put my own friends on blast, but one of my anti-Heard friends is... I mean, she's very smart and really fun and just a total delight to talk to. But boy does she attach to things. The moment she feels something, that's the thing she feels. And the moment an opinion strikes her, that's the thing she's going to feel for years and years and years; you'd have to move a mountain to make her change her mind, and if she does change it, her new opinion will get lodged in her head just as fiercely.
I feel like this tendency towards attachment is what leads to the polarization and/or "political fandom" phenomenon. In a system where you're expected to react, react, react, react, there's just not room for much else. And while I'm not a both sides-ist by any means, I do think that there's no "right" way to feed yourself into such a system. If attachment is the problem, then leaping into the maelstrom because, if you don't, "they'll" win is ultimately perpetuating the problem. Especially if, as I suspect, any victory within such a system is going to ring very hollow.
Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing was a major eye-opener for me. Among other things, she talks about curiosity as a viral phenomenon: it's possible to open someone's mind simply by being open-minded and wondrous around them, which is a very different thing from argumentation or debate. Typically, the things which "stick" to us the most yell that there's no time to consider other things, and drive us to act in ways that instigate conflict and raise the temperature of a room (which is what makes them so "sticky" in the first place). In situations like that, it feels like the last thing that could possibly help is gentleness, patience, and curiosity. But in my experience, that's the only thing that lets you deal with people who've become overly attached to things—that, and recognizing that certain situations are sticky cesspits well before you get involved, so you know either to avoid them or approach them with caution. This trial was the cessiest of all possible pits, which is partly why I'm unsurprised that it went the way it went.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:48 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
You need to hold thoughts and feelings at a skeptical distance if you want to be discerning about them. In a sense, you're in conversation with them, listening to them while remaining separate from them. But that also requires you not to identify as those thoughts and feelings, because if you start thinking that a particular idea IS you, you become extraordinarily resistant to things which challenge that idea—there's almost a subliminal existential terror that, if that opinion or feeling ceases to exist, then you'll wink out along with it.
I think that what fucks our society up, ironically, isn't that we've been reduced to idle consumers. It's the illusion that we need to produce. We're expected to react, participate, and earn points, and get caught up in feedback looks where we're penalized both for not presenting ourselves at all and for presenting ourselves "wrongly," according to whichever hive mind feels what. Failures get you brigaded and harassed, and sometimes delay is failure, so we're given increasingly limited windows to reflect, consider, question, and seek alternative sources.
I got bombarded with anti-Heard stuff too. Enough that my initial reaction was: "Huh. Maybe she's just as fault as Depp is here! Maybe she's exploiting feminism. Maybe she's even... the bad guy??" But even as I had that reaction, I went: "Well, maybe. But I really don't know, do I? Let me see who feels differently, and why they're saying it." And I looked things up, I dug a little deeper, and I walked away thinking that Johnny Depp sure seemed like a piece of shit.
I don't mean to put my own friends on blast, but one of my anti-Heard friends is... I mean, she's very smart and really fun and just a total delight to talk to. But boy does she attach to things. The moment she feels something, that's the thing she feels. And the moment an opinion strikes her, that's the thing she's going to feel for years and years and years; you'd have to move a mountain to make her change her mind, and if she does change it, her new opinion will get lodged in her head just as fiercely.
I feel like this tendency towards attachment is what leads to the polarization and/or "political fandom" phenomenon. In a system where you're expected to react, react, react, react, there's just not room for much else. And while I'm not a both sides-ist by any means, I do think that there's no "right" way to feed yourself into such a system. If attachment is the problem, then leaping into the maelstrom because, if you don't, "they'll" win is ultimately perpetuating the problem. Especially if, as I suspect, any victory within such a system is going to ring very hollow.
Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing was a major eye-opener for me. Among other things, she talks about curiosity as a viral phenomenon: it's possible to open someone's mind simply by being open-minded and wondrous around them, which is a very different thing from argumentation or debate. Typically, the things which "stick" to us the most yell that there's no time to consider other things, and drive us to act in ways that instigate conflict and raise the temperature of a room (which is what makes them so "sticky" in the first place). In situations like that, it feels like the last thing that could possibly help is gentleness, patience, and curiosity. But in my experience, that's the only thing that lets you deal with people who've become overly attached to things—that, and recognizing that certain situations are sticky cesspits well before you get involved, so you know either to avoid them or approach them with caution. This trial was the cessiest of all possible pits, which is partly why I'm unsurprised that it went the way it went.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:48 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
I didn't follow the trial as I really can't be bothered with anything celebrity-related, but isn't there at least a small possibility that Depp wasn't the horrible abusive person that seems to be the automatic conclusion here?
posted by drstrangelove at 9:16 AM on December 1, 2022
posted by drstrangelove at 9:16 AM on December 1, 2022
No.
See every past discussion on Metafilter. See reputable news sites.
Maybe don't opine while leading with the fact you know nothing about the situation.
posted by sagc at 9:17 AM on December 1, 2022 [16 favorites]
See every past discussion on Metafilter. See reputable news sites.
Maybe don't opine while leading with the fact you know nothing about the situation.
posted by sagc at 9:17 AM on December 1, 2022 [16 favorites]
When someone lets themselves get overly attached to ideas or feelings, they become a parrot: their sense of self is replaced by whatever they happen to be echoing.
There are a lot of people who seem to have forgotten that words mean things (many such people work for Fox News). People working in that mode use words not to refer to things but as something akin to bird calls, assertions of membership of a social group within which it has become the custom to use those words in that way. Idiom as shibboleth.
This allows these people to function almost completely on autopilot, without ever really having to think, and to me it's the foundation of Bonhoeffer stupidity. It's easy and it's lazy and most of all it's cowardly. Just say what the group says and don't ever think about what you're saying or why and you can fool yourself into feeling like the group will have your back, even though the group is most of the way toward forgetting what "have your back" even means.
if you start thinking that a particular idea IS you, you become extraordinarily resistant to things which challenge that idea—there's almost a subliminal existential terror that, if that opinion or feeling ceases to exist, then you'll wink out along with it.
I think that's right. I also think too many of us have lost sight of our place in the biosphere as an apex predator animal completely reliant on the health of the rest of the ecology for our own; instead we chronically misidentify ourselves, at best as our own egos or souls and at worst as fucking Proud Boys or perhaps an entire State. Identifying as an Amber Hater is somewhere in between.
isn't there at least a small possibility that Depp wasn't the horrible abusive person that seems to be the automatic conclusion here?
No.
posted by flabdablet at 9:20 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
There are a lot of people who seem to have forgotten that words mean things (many such people work for Fox News). People working in that mode use words not to refer to things but as something akin to bird calls, assertions of membership of a social group within which it has become the custom to use those words in that way. Idiom as shibboleth.
This allows these people to function almost completely on autopilot, without ever really having to think, and to me it's the foundation of Bonhoeffer stupidity. It's easy and it's lazy and most of all it's cowardly. Just say what the group says and don't ever think about what you're saying or why and you can fool yourself into feeling like the group will have your back, even though the group is most of the way toward forgetting what "have your back" even means.
if you start thinking that a particular idea IS you, you become extraordinarily resistant to things which challenge that idea—there's almost a subliminal existential terror that, if that opinion or feeling ceases to exist, then you'll wink out along with it.
I think that's right. I also think too many of us have lost sight of our place in the biosphere as an apex predator animal completely reliant on the health of the rest of the ecology for our own; instead we chronically misidentify ourselves, at best as our own egos or souls and at worst as fucking Proud Boys or perhaps an entire State. Identifying as an Amber Hater is somewhere in between.
isn't there at least a small possibility that Depp wasn't the horrible abusive person that seems to be the automatic conclusion here?
No.
posted by flabdablet at 9:20 AM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]
lol, read the British case if you want or something/go sealion somewhere else.
Why should we educate you, when you aren't trying to do it yourself?
posted by sagc at 9:46 AM on December 1, 2022 [9 favorites]
Why should we educate you, when you aren't trying to do it yourself?
posted by sagc at 9:46 AM on December 1, 2022 [9 favorites]
Like, you could... click on some of the links in this thread, if you want non-Mefite opinions?
posted by sagc at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2022
posted by sagc at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2022
Because Metafilter is all about the links, and if you could be arsed to read the UK judgement linked multiple times above, you'd stop this particular outbreak of Bonhoeffer stupidity getting a stronger foothold in your own thinking.
posted by flabdablet at 9:50 AM on December 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:50 AM on December 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
I have to admit, I tried to block the whole thing out.
This is also a win for Team Depp, which is aggravating, because of course you don't want to engage with the whole shitstorm. But all it took me was one mainstream media article about the trial maybe midway through to say no come on fuck Johnny Depp.
posted by chavenet at 1:34 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is also a win for Team Depp, which is aggravating, because of course you don't want to engage with the whole shitstorm. But all it took me was one mainstream media article about the trial maybe midway through to say no come on fuck Johnny Depp.
posted by chavenet at 1:34 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
isn't there at least a small possibility that Depp wasn't the horrible abusive person that seems to be the automatic conclusion here?
From a previous thread (visit it for working links in this comment):
He was also arrested for assaulting a security guard in 1989*; arrested for the above incident in 1994 which included an argument and screaming match; arrested for threatening paparazzi in London in 1999; sued by his bodyguards for being abusive to them in 2018; and sued for punching a crew member on the set of The Notorious BIG in 2018.
He has a history of being a violent fuckup and I can't believe there are people in this thread thinking Heard is the abuser.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:58 PM on December 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
From a previous thread (visit it for working links in this comment):
He was also arrested for assaulting a security guard in 1989*; arrested for the above incident in 1994 which included an argument and screaming match; arrested for threatening paparazzi in London in 1999; sued by his bodyguards for being abusive to them in 2018; and sued for punching a crew member on the set of The Notorious BIG in 2018.
He has a history of being a violent fuckup and I can't believe there are people in this thread thinking Heard is the abuser.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:58 PM on December 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
I think a lot of people wondering why there are so many women still supporting Johnny Depp forget that so many women grew up wanting to shag him. He's still their teenage crush.
posted by oneirodynia at 3:04 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by oneirodynia at 3:04 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have reasonably assumed that a lot of people are Team Depp due to him being a crush object, and also Amber is kind of barely heard of. Easy to stan the famous guy and slam the not-that-famous woman.
That said, I don't know how you could continue to have a thing for him after all of this shit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:30 PM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
That said, I don't know how you could continue to have a thing for him after all of this shit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:30 PM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
That said, I don't know how you could continue to have a thing for him after all of this shit.
Amen. Actually one of the long list of things that put me off him was marrying Amber Heard, who's 23 years his junior. She was under 30 but had been partnered before so it's not like the Leonardo di Caprio thing where they're all under 25, but still, old dude splits from his longtime partner and mother of his child to trade her in for a younger model is a turnoff. And that was without the history of violence, of which I was unaware at the time.
My take on what I saw of Depp in the new Harry Potter films was that Jude Law is a really good actor but even he couldn't sell me on attraction to/romance with Depp's character and not just because of the weird magic-Naziism-makes-you-ugly makeup and styling.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:33 PM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Amen. Actually one of the long list of things that put me off him was marrying Amber Heard, who's 23 years his junior. She was under 30 but had been partnered before so it's not like the Leonardo di Caprio thing where they're all under 25, but still, old dude splits from his longtime partner and mother of his child to trade her in for a younger model is a turnoff. And that was without the history of violence, of which I was unaware at the time.
My take on what I saw of Depp in the new Harry Potter films was that Jude Law is a really good actor but even he couldn't sell me on attraction to/romance with Depp's character and not just because of the weird magic-Naziism-makes-you-ugly makeup and styling.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:33 PM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Just saw an article on cnn.com about E. Jeanne Carroll’s defamation suit against trump. His lawyer Alina Habba is quoted as saying, “While I respect and admire individuals that come forward, this case is unfortunately an abuse of the purpose of this Act which creates a terrible precedent and runs the risk of delegitimizing the credibility of actual victims.” So this is the new playbook.
posted by anshuman at 7:11 AM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by anshuman at 7:11 AM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Concluding that Depp is an abuser is in no way an automatic conclusion. It's a conclusion that is based on the actual case evidence.
posted by rosiroo at 1:03 PM on December 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by rosiroo at 1:03 PM on December 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
Concluding that Depp is an abuser is in no way an automatic conclusion. It's a conclusion that is based on the actual case evidence.
See this Twitter thread, for example.
posted by jokeefe at 5:32 PM on December 2, 2022
See this Twitter thread, for example.
posted by jokeefe at 5:32 PM on December 2, 2022
For me it was an automatic conclusion, based on the actual case evidence, which struck me as leaving exactly zero wiggle room for any other conclusion. It's cut and dried.
posted by flabdablet at 9:46 PM on December 2, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 9:46 PM on December 2, 2022
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