Week 34-3: Tosh-é.0

[the_day_setup]

I had posted an entry on this same topic on Friday. A few hours later, I took it down. It was far too long and, as such, was too prone to being partially read / partially misread-- an idea I did not like, given a rather sensitive topic.

porn_this_way got in touch with me, and had apparently read what I'd written before I'd removed it. The resulting fun back-

Comments

[the_day_setup]

I really have no idea if Tosh's joke sucked or not; maybe more info has come out, but last I checked it was basically one person's Tumblr account against the world. That's one thing that really bothers me about this. You had a huge crowd of people who were willing to jump all over Tosh, demand his firing from Tosh.0, etc., on the basis of one layperson's word. At the time when all this happened, it could have been an angry Tosh ex who had never actually been in the club or heard any of this stuff, but there were so many people willing to jump in and "fight the good fight" on the basis of those words.

I've long thought that the Internet's self-publishing facility is a beautiful thing for humanity, but increasingly I'm not so sure of that at all. I *am* pretty convinced that it's enabling people with all the wrong ideas to collaborate and "corroborate" and whip themselves into a frenzy over this or that non-event, just as it's enabled smart people to get more things done together. I'm not necessarily speaking of *this* event, I'm thinking more of things like the birther movement. But I see spooky parallels here for certain.

With Michael Richards, there was video proof of what was said. And the whole world pretty much looked at that and said, "Yyyyyeah."