I'll believe his defense if he marries her.

I like this discussion of a viral tik tok from last year:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5720730/mathematician-comes-to-defence-of-tiktok-teen-blasted-for-saying-math-isn-t-real-1.5720731
Teenager asks if math is even real. She gets mobbed by people saying kids these days. But those who really understand math say these could be hard questions. I don't know if math is real.

Plato asked that, didn't he.

I thought it was birds that weren't real.

That's why I won't eat McNuggets.

What do you expect with almost a billion people with internet access and only this one piece of digital content to keep them entertained?

People really do seem to enjoy self-appointed roles as social police.

It feels like everyone wants to be the star of their own true crime podcast. (I'm guessing this was part of the original appeal of QAnon?)

Also, Only Murders in the Building.

Does society even exist? Certainly norms do (see here & ) or at least did. There may be only one left.

I guess Couch Guy is sort of lucky that he wasn't in a position to be fired from his job, or to lose his standing as a public figure, because of this mob nonsense.

Stuff like this makes me feel, alternately, that I can't imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person who participates in these bizarre internet mobs, and that maybe just caring about the difference between truth and falsehood is already enough to make me weird and alien to most of humanity.

Math and birds aren't real

I just read the linked article and it is does make more sense after I watched the linked Tik Tok. Without that, I would think, "oh, another story of crazy mob behavior on the internet, ho hum . . . " But the Tik Tok is both (a) short enough, and ambiguous enough to allow multiple readings and (b) clearly a private moment in the lives of these two random people that I've never met and won't meet.

I've been thinking a lot lately about, "what is and should be the relationship between readers/viewers and people they see on the internet?" There's a sense of shared intimacy without actually knowing them and that's a weird dynamic.

Yes, they were treated badly by the random viewers on the internet, and that's unfortunate and predictable (as he says), and I was glad I read the story..

I'm seeing an emerging norm by smarter people on Twitter that we should all avoid singling out random non-public figures on social media for any reason other than them manifestly hurting people, as opposed to just making mistakes. (And the "hurting people" should not be on the foundation of crowd-sourced detective work.) This even extends to big accounts needing to be judicious when dunking on things said by small non-pseudonymous accounts, since that often prompts worse behavior by the big accounts' followers.

(And in this framework - yes, we probably should have exercised more restraint in the case of Justine Sacco, which was not my sense at the time.)

Only math and birds are real.

The telephone game of social media posts seems to reliably blow things up. People post vague misgivings which others less close to the subject seize on and build on into much more.

Here's an example not with a person, but with a piece of legislation. There was a proposed law in California to write into law journalists' constitutional rights to cover marches, rallies, protests, etc., by banning various common forms of common police harassment against them in those situations.

In addition to those other reforms, it also specified that journalists had the right to enter areas police had closed off. An early amendment inserted "with authorization from a commanding officer on scene" to qualify that right. One activist group felt this was a bad amendment and campaigned unsuccessfully against it. Their tweets were punchy and to the point, which made sense, it was their sincerely held belief. But if you all you read was those tweets that focused on that amendment, it read like the entire bill was a step back restricting journalists' access from the status quo, when in fact it was a major step forward from current practice, even (I believe) on that issue of access to closed areas. As amended, it continued to be supported by journalists, ACLU, etc., and opposed by all the cop groups and no one else, and it successfully passed into law.

I must admit to being utterly confused (and unwilling to investigate beyond reading the article and watching the video).It's not even clear to me when he actually realizes what is going on.

Pretty nuts.

Now I have watched the linked video and whaaaa? His response doesn't even seem slow to me.

we should all avoid singling out random non-public figures on social media for any reason other than them manifestly hurting people, as opposed to just making mistakes

Some of you may remember me getting all pissy about the Kidney Person discourse a couple of months back because in that case one of the two people getting trashed on the internet is a friend. I'm sorry to report that in the interim, after that story's 15 minutes of internet fame had ended, she (the author of the disputed short story) did in fact get fired for it (as had been the goal of the kidney donor, for years).

So, yeah. I'm glad the Couch Guy seems to have landed on his feet, and I agree that this kind of thing is No Good and internet mobs should leave people alone.

Oh, and the asshole reporter who should never have written the Bad Kidney story in the first place has cashed in further by optioning the rights for a film adaptation.

OP: "horde," not "hoard."

The people are all stacked up in one apartment leaving only narrow aisles between them.

19: I understand that you're friends with one of the protagonists but your analysis of the legal issues seemed rather biased. See e.g.

Oh, and the asshole reporter who should never have written the Bad Kidney story in the first place has cashed in further by optioning the rights for a film adaptation.

So the NYT reporter is an asshole for telling an interesting true story using biographical details, but the author of the short story behaved appropriately in co-opting identifying details -- and even words -- from someone else's life.

I would be really, really fascinated to learn that the author of the short story shares your opinion.

Me, I don't have any problem with the short story author or the NYT reporter.

23: Writing for the public, cashing in, and using the legal system to your advantage are not objectively good or bad actions. What matters is the context: are you friends with the person doing these things or not?

20: heebie is storing up people who want to play forensic detective.

Kidneys aren't real.

24: I think you're being a bit credulous here. That piece is a pretty straightforward bit of advocacy.

And you know what? It's a good piece! I was interested in seeing the kidney donor's case sympathetically analyzed. People write stuff, and that's good!

But if you really interested in the relevant law, you could check here or here or here.

(Presented in reverse order of relevance to this conversation. The last one is most relevant, I think.)

Goddamn it, I was going to come here to post a bunch of puns to make you all shut up about the kidney story and I got to "renal-attentive" and knocked myself right out. The cure is worse than the disease.

Roughly 1/3 of the stars of Only Murders in the Building have a second-hand kidney.

27: I can't read the second link, but your third link does not even aspire to be an objective review of the issues ("white woman tearz!!!") and the first link basically shrugs and says it's very complicated.

I think donating a kidney should get you like 7 or 8 asshole passes and that such passes should cover light plagiarism and journalism. I can't remember who was doing the plagiarism though.

30: The first link was actually the one that I intended to highlight as relevant to us -- I got them backward. I thought the third one was interesting, but it only gets relevant on the copyright issues later on. I apologize if they didn't contribute anything to your understanding.

31: It was the other person. The crimes of the kidney donor were at most social.

I don't think making fun of a kidney donor should give you any passes, but if it turns out to encourage organ donation, I'll change my mind.

I had thought that one of the weaknesses of the otherwise good John Sandford thrillers was the unrealistic number of them that involve members of the arts faculties of Upper Midwestern universities turning out to be deranged sadistic murderers but the kidney business made me think that I owe him an apology.

Slightly off topic. A few years ago the family of a dying person tried to donate their organs on condition that they were used for a white patient. The NHS told them to fuck off. Was that the right response or should they have accepted the donation and just used the organs for the first medically compatible patient anyway, disregarding the relatives' wishes?

They did the right thing. First, allowing it to be believed that you could direct your organ donation only to white people is bad -- if that belief took hold, it could cause real problems. second, people are frightened and touchy about organ donation, so being completely truthful is necessary. If they know the NHS will lie about your racist restriction on who your organs go to, it's a short trip to believing they're going to kill you for your organs when you're not quite dead yet.

The article linked in 22 seemed fair and persuasive to me on the copyright law question, although my sympathies are with Larson (the author).

The first article linked in 27 mentions a surprising decision in which Andy Warhol's estate lost a copyright case to a photographer whose photo of Prince was used by Warhol in creating a typical Warhol-type portrait.

In hindsight, I guess Warhol really should have gotten a license to use the photo before he did the portrait. But the photo is nothing special, just a nice photo of Prince looking like Prince usually did in photos. Really, Prince himself, and whoever did his hair and makeup, deserve more credit for that image. It seems like a funny/weird result that copyright law ended up benefiting the photographer who was kind of just the middleman between Prince and Warhol.

LB is right, but I would support a policy of taking anyone who tries to restrict their organ donation that way and killing them for their organs.

There was an episode of MASH where a wounded soldier asked for only white-people blood became needed a transfusion, so they pretended they messed up and gave him blood from a black person. Using make-up and other stuff, they convinced him he was more turning black. He probably learned a lesson from this. The 70s were a different time.

During the Indochina war in the 50s, the French Red Cross could only get enough blood donors by assuring them that their blood would on no account be used to treat wounded soldiers. (Windrow, "The Last Valley".) I can't remember if they honoured the assurance but I think they did.

During the Indochina war in the 50s, the French Red Cross could only get enough blood donors by assuring them that their blood would on no account be used to treat wounded soldiers. (Windrow, "The Last Valley".) I can't remember if they honoured the assurance but I think they did.

That's a very long way to ship blood or patients back then.

Or maybe it was Algeria?