|
4aacb33
|
Judge Ted Poe's critics--like the civil rights group the ACLU--argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and the Ku Klux Klan's America--it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
14bd31d
|
There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
5f54cf8
|
So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?" I asked. "It was completely deliberate on my part," he replied. "I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
2d986eb
|
Clive's point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners--young, black--have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time--bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
8949f37
|
character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done." "What had she done?" I ask. "Shoplifting," says Tam. There is a silence. "People have their own little guilt trips," says Tam. "They look around. 'Who's a beast? Who's a pedo?' Now it's on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, 'Oh my God! He must have been cr..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
bde64af
|
if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
f2407d6
|
In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
ffefa84
|
This is bizarre," Dan said. "I find it really strange--the way you're approaching this. You must be one of the very few people who have chosen to come on Twitter and use their own name as their Twitter name. Who does that? And that's why I'm a little suspicious of your motives, Jon. That's why I say I think you're using it as brand management."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
142ab4c
|
the problem with Google is that it is forever evolving - adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
a34fd97
|
He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success." It"
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
450bddf
|
The alt-right's small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that's changed is that one of Alex's fans -- one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke's audience -- is now the Republican nominee. But if some disaster unfolds -- if Hillary's health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive -- and Trump gets elected, he could bring Ale..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
359d849
|
He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others. I
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
e20b7f6
|
I spent a few hours with Mercedes. She was, on the surface, quite troll-like--a lover of jubilant online chaos. She told me about her favorite 4chan thread. It was started by "a guy who's genuinely in love with his dog, and his dog went in heat, and so he went around collecting samples and injecting them into his penis and he fucked his dog and got her pregnant and they're his puppies." Mercedes laughed. "That's the thread I told the FBI ab..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
f218e2d
|
It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling', for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
a6f69f6
|
He hosted a series of lunches - Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon - for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
6a7704a
|
Michael Fertik took me for dinner and talked to me about the criticism people often level at him, that 'any change of search results is manipulating truth and chilling free speech'. He drank some wine. 'But there is a chilling of behaviour that goes along with a virtual lynching. There is a life modification.' 'I know,' I said. 'For a year Lindsey Stone had felt too plagued to even go to karaoke.' And karaoke is something you do alone in a ..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
3657b8a
|
And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
d9a9ded
|
Maybe - as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me - they're turning social media into 'a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.' We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this - for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
327cd06
|
And of course the misuse of privilege is a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But a great number of people who hadn't just been in a train crash were now accusing a woman who had just been in a train crash of being privileged. The phrase 'misuse of privilege' was becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we chose to. It was becoming a devalued term..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
3bac1a5
|
He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene. Bob
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
a01bc74
|
It seems to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating t..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
1a78e4d
|
Glenn Beck did not fall into line. He told his listeners that Trump was a "dictator in the making."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
efa4316
|
It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together--Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
a1090f7
|
our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
9763314
|
Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
de49e3a
|
In fact ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I've been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
c0b6c30
|
The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or . . .' Mike looked at me, '. . . you write a third s..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
2406328
|
Then I get worried that if anyone is really paying attention to Happy's predilections, they might become wary of his wholesale compassion and suspect him of being an imaginary character, created by a journalist, to trick businesses into inadvertently revealing their data-trafficking practices. So I untick tigers.
|
|
junk-mail
mosaic
|
Jon Ronson |
|
27df268
|
Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risque thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore. "I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment," he said. "It's horrible." He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
742f85b
|
How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life." I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
073aa82
|
In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
a648836
|
Jim returned from his journey in 1979 and wrote a confidential paper for his superiors. The first line read, "The U.S. army doesn't really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful." A disclaimer at the bottom read, "[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now." This was Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion Operations Manual."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
4293096
|
All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: "I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don't know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer." And Goebbels: "Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
550d816
|
He hosted a series of lunches--les dejeuners du mercredi--for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with, he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking. All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
4fa7675
|
In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
4320b50
|
Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
5313cfe
|
I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.' He
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
9400a35
|
She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. "I got nothing," she told me. "No replies." I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this--that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back."
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
45dab1b
|
This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad," he said. "I faked it." He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. "I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they're not getting any results. So I thought I'd get some action going." He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movi..
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
d0f70b0
|
maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
49095e2
|
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
ad20875
|
Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
b93e114
|
the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was "the desire to run away from slavery" and the cure was to "whip the devil out of them"
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |
|
57c77b8
|
I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn't the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine's crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like 'Don't wear short skirts'. It felt like victim-blaming.
|
|
|
Jon Ronson |