Snarkout writes: I thought this was a shockingly thoughtful response from a kid who went viral on TikTok (and got doxxed, called a sociopath, etc.) for not performing excitement properly when his girlfriend played him a surprise visit. He's just some random college student, which makes it all the more surprising that his response wasn't just screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE?" over and over again, which is how I would have rolled.

Heebie's take: It is a really measured, thoughtful response! And JFC. A 20 second TikTok clip gets analyzed at the pixel-level by a massive hoard of people who are enjoying playing forensic detective. It's basically conspiracy thinking - "if we can only zoom in far enough, and see the slant of the handwriting or the tilt of the posture, then we'll KNOW".

I think there's a couple things at play:
- strangers on social media feel make-believe, and so it doesn't seem like a real person who is being hurt.
- any one person's restraint is not going to stem the tide of social-media-locusts preying on the situation, so why not join in the fun.
- People are incredibly uncomfortable with ambiguity and not knowing, and not being able to know. So they sublimate into this body-language and zoomed-in-pixels way of ascertaining knowledge that can't actually be determined. It's proving to yourself that you can know everything, after all, given enough time and energy, because you secretly dread the notion that you can't.

However, I have no fucking idea what to do about it. I think the only solution would be to develop a societal norm that this harms people. And given Republicans, we no longer have the ability to get everyone to agree on a societal norm, because its existence gives them a wedge with which to pwn the rest of us.

If I post all my links right now, then I won't have anything saved up for tomorrow, but that's just the kind of reckless stunt I'm willing to pull. None of them quite seems sufficient for a post on its own.

1. This article is from 2012, the story of Korean rapper Tablo/Daniel Lee who was doxxed because a rabid online group was fixated on the idea that he'd lied about his academic degrees from Stanford. When Stanford verified his claims, the mob decided he was impersonating the real Daniel Lee. The end of the article is satisfying because it reveals who the two primary jerks were who were responsible for the shitstorm.

via

2. Apparently schizophrenia is a risk factor for worse outcomes from Covid on the same level as diabetes. Not a risk factor for catching it, but for it turning out badly. This article is about some of the links between viruses, immune responses, and mental illnesses. It reminded me of the PANDAS conversations we've had here.

via FF Pocket

3. I'm interested in the fact that the Michigan shooter's parents were taken into custody. I guess I'm hungry for any possibility of an avenue that makes a legal case that adults can be negligent in ways that lead to shooting deaths by other people.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe seven.

Yeet the Rich writes: While looking up definitions of moral panic, I stumbled upon this study in which "it was found that different types of metal fans exhibit different moral reasoning styles dependent on their metal sub-genre identification."

I'm not sure if I should be surprised to learn that there's evidence that your musical preferences and your moral reasoning are related to one another. The idea that consuming art can help you to be a morally better person goes back at least to Shelley, and probably back to some ancient thinker I don't know about. But what else could we learn from further studies of this sort of thing? Which genres of art and entertainment really appeal to the worst kinds of people? Is there any way to find a causal relationship here - does being a fan of something shape your moral reasoning in some way, or do people just gravitate towards entertainment that reflects the sort of person they are?

Heebie's take: This study focuses on heavy metal:

Often, more extreme lyrics are meant to be counter-cultural by embracing taboo topics and themes, and even without that intentionality, they're likely to be perceived that way within a broader, non-metal cultural context [20]. Music fans in general frequently listen to music because it relieves stress, and that effect is all the stronger when the individual chooses the music that they listen to due to the fundamentally important role of personal preferences [21]. This may also extend to other forms of consumptive media, as it has been found that violent media can often be used as a coping mechanism to deal with pre-existing stressors [21]. Additionally, in the specific case of metal music, it has been found to serve as a buffer for death anxiety [22]. Further, even though metal music is stereotypically associated with negative emotions and behaviours, metal music fans can have lower levels of depression and anxiety than the general population [23], and negative behaviours from members of music cultures are often associated with the behaviour of peers rather than the music itself [24].

That all sounds reasonable to me - that metal is about stress relief and and death anxiety, and transgression of society that's perceived to be too rigid.

For a general link between morality and musical preference, I can believe there'd be a correlation for a portion of people, but I'm very skeptical that there will be an causal trend in any particular direction. That is, many people don't listen to lyrics. Many other people listen to lyrics. Most people listen sometimes and don't others, for reasons entirely unique to that person. Most people seek out music according to their mood, but music also can induce a mood. Our moralities are way mushier than we like to believe. A lot of time our sense of morals is just an underlying mood or belief, and stringing words together to sound like reasoning.

The closest thing in my personal experience is that I found it very difficult to push back against the casual misogyny of 90s music when I was a teenager. I couldn't handle the nuance of saying "A good song with bad parts" - I felt like I had to embrace the entire song or discard the entire song. As a result (of this but also many other things), I embraced a lot of misogyny that ended up being pretty unhealthy for my psyche.

I am a bit primed to diagnose things as being moral panics due to binge-listening to Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall.

That said, these flash theft mobs have got all the trappings of one. Which is to say that surely it has happened at least a few times, but now it taps all sorts of things that the olds feel nervous about, like that tick tock app, and the teens. And the solution will be to over-define it so broadly that lots of mundane theft starts to qualify and then increase penalties and crack down disproportionately hard in ways that land on young minority kids. (Or maybe it will fizzle out.)

I heard about this for the first day the other time, and the person said (breathlessly, I'm sure) that the phenomenon has been linked to gang activity, at which point I decided the whole thing can't possibly be real.

This captures an interesting phenomenon.

too late https://t.co/FpldkorNIa

— Marshall Steinbaum 🔥 (@Econ_Marshall) December 3, 2021

A lot of people seem to believe that as long as things can get worse, we can't call them bad. But they're already really bad! (And this is independent of global trends of increasing prosperity and health, and setting aside all the bad stuff that we all know has been bad all along, like racism and widespread poverty...) Global warming is already wreaking havoc. Our government is already very corrupt. Some states genuinely have de facto one-party rule. We really did have Donald Trump (Donald Trump!) as president. He really did try to overturn an election, with lots of institutional support. There's a long list of bad things that might have been preventable that nevertheless came to pass, and maybe folks are so loathe to be defeatist about what's left on the list that they wind up acting like we're still girding for battle, when we've been losing for a good long time.