XPost: alt.tv.south-park, rec.arts.tv, alt.whine
From: weberm@polaris.net

On Feb. 13, Marvel writer Dana Schwartz tweeted what she thought was
mild criticism of South Park. "In retrospect," she tweeted, "it seems impossible to overstate the cultural damage done by SOUTH PARK, the
show that portrayed earnestness as the only sin and taught that mockery
is the ultimate inoculation against all criticism." Schwartz was
quickly received a barrage of criticism via tweets, e-mails, blog posts
and even YouTube videos. "If you stand for anything online, someone
will find a way to tear it � and you � down," Schwartz writes in The
Washington Post, reflecting on the experience. "The trolls, the game- theorizers, the 'both sides are equally bad' cynicism that had spread
from the 2016 election into today � all of it had a flavor too familiar
to me, a TV and comic-book writer who spent her middle-school years
watching Comedy Central too late at night: It was the ethos of South
Park.� Schwartz adds that her opinion wasn't something that critics
have written about before, but with less outrage. So, Schwartz adds,
"when I tweeted some of this casually on my way to work, I wasn�t
expecting the tsunami I unleashed. By my lunch break, massive alt-right accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers had sicced their
sycophants on me, claiming that I was trying to "cancel South Park." By
the time I got home from work, nearly half a dozen videos on YouTube
had popped up like poisonous mushrooms, in which men raged that I was a
fat, ugly social-justice warrior liberal snowflake who couldn�t take a
joke. If you�ve never experienced online trolling, there�s not much I
can do to describe for you what it�s like. In the abstract, it seems
like it shouldn�t be able to hurt you. In reality, it�s hundreds of
thousands of people calling you an idiot, a bitch and worse � tweeting
at you faster than you can block them. You�ll receive emails, a good
chunk of them death threats, nearly all the rest vicious anti-Semitic
slurs. You�ll get notifications that strangers are trying to hack into
your personal accounts. People will bombard your employer with
complaints to get you fired from your job. All the while, you�re
implicitly barred from publicly sharing what�s happening to you lest
people criticize you for a) whining or b) making it all up for
attention. I didn�t call for South Park to be canceled. I didn�t even
say I hated the show! But the nuances of my point didn�t matter.
Painting critics as prudish, finger-wagging scolds is the go-to defense mechanism for those who subscribed to the show�s fragile worldview.
They have to be the brave victims, the enlightened underdogs under
attack by the hectoring, anti-freedom censors."

--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)