Very much. I have to believe that there’s some kind of payout and/or job offer at the end resulting in some kind of Move That Bus! feel good moment. If not, it’s just televised cruelty.

After a series of escalations, the punchline of every prank is apparently “Actually, you are still unemployed.”

That sounds mean spirited even for a typical prank show. 

“I couldn’t control you,”

And there are whole industries based on preying on these people and earning those sweet Dunning-Krugerands.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is.

I work with people caught in the criminal justice system for the past 13 years. Some of the more dangerous individuals I have worked with have adopted ideals such as this without the “gameification” factor. Ultimately, when an individual is able to view the “enemy” as an object, violence against that object becomes…

The idea that shit posting on 4chan and believing virulent versions of the prejudices that your great grandparents believed - this somehow qualifies as awakened and authentic thought?

Or, these types of articles work to delegitimize trans identities and experiences among allies and potential allies, thus reducing safety for all trans people and making it easier for fascists to harm trans folks with no protection from allies.

So what you’re saying is that a secret-ish group of many people who represent a significant portion of those who write the news in the US and who are passively or actively resistant to including trans perspectives in their group, despite the fact that they report regularly on trans issues and as a result have a…

As Harron pointed out, the fact that there is not much research and writing about trans issues means that what DOES get published carries a lot of weight and power with the average joe’s reading it. The fact that this cis person has irresponsibly become a sort of spokesman for “trans issues” (putting that in quotes…

Forsen’s claim that “I can watch what I say; I cannot watch what my community does” is valid up to a point.

No entertainer can ever be held fully responsible for the actions of one or more members of their audience; people are strange, and they take material meant for entertainment as a foundational/guiding principle…

“No, no, no, no. You cannot have both. I can watch what I say; I cannot watch what my community does. Are you fucking serious?”

What humors me is the people who want to die on this hill defending this crap.
Like, somehow, this will be the last meme that will be remembered...until exactly 14 minutes later.

Imagine being so emotionally attached to a Sonic the Hedgehog meme that you make a video trying to defend it.

It’s the new ‘blackface isn’t racism’ trope.

But when part of the ‘joke’ is claiming all Ugandans have ebola and live in mud huts then it is.

Are they doing it to honor or respect the traditions they’re copying? Are they doing it in a spirit that is true to the actual usage by the culture in question? Are they considering any context at all?

Imitating an accent for the sake of treating another culture as a joke is probably racist. But apparently this meme keeps going with explicitly racist jokes. So.

Yes, I’m sure a YouTube video with an unrelated “angry feminist” meme in the thumbnail will have a very reasoned approach to racism.