(via Twitter / @jes3ica: A few of my favorite react …)
After he died, Christopher Hitchen’s book “God Is Not Great” trended on Twitter (under the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat). Christians took it as an insult and then, among other outbursts, threatened to kill atheists.
Twitter then bizarrely removed both the trending topics “Hitchens” and “GodIsNotGreat”. However, they kept the trending topic #ReasonsToBeatYourGirlfriend, which was (sadly) trending nationwide at the time of the removal.
Stay classy, Twitter.
You log out of Tumblr for a couple days and you miss crucial moments. This screenshot is just a (typical American) case of unawareness, and it’s fucking embarrassing. Can’t be unexpected, though. There’s always ‘explanations’ of course:
1) These people are ignorant of who Christopher Hitchens was.
2) Not that these people should give a fuck who Christopher Hitchens was.
3) Someone should have explained who Christopher Hitchens was instead of deleting the hashtags to ‘calm down’ these people.
4) No one prominent in contemporary global culture is sexually attractive, straight, a charismatic intellectual/deconstructionist and explicitly irreligious. That’s a lot of conditions to meet for the average dumb fuck. The average person is usually too ugly or suffering from inferior education and emotional development, so they’re usually susceptible to cleverness and cuteness—the things they don’t have. (Grandmothers say outrageous things when they’ve lived too long.) Since she’s right, there’s a problem: no one’s perfect. Not everyone ‘famous’ has crossover appeal, the aforementioned qualities. Not to mention an ideal ‘proximity heuristic’ is kind of essential for propaganda, opinion manipulation, etc. (Unless you’re the Nazarene.)
5) These people are ‘religious’ fanatics. If America was a society of high culture cliques and Katy Perry dropped dead, was christened ‘singing voice of a generation’ in some obituary, “they” would have flipped a shit just the same. Christopher Hitchens and Katy Perry don’t possess the same cultural significance, yet both are/would be denigrated by their detractors in the precise moment. (We’ve already seen what happens with Christopher Hitchens when idiots get riled. America is a low culture paradise, so…how long for Katy Perry’s death until this thought exercise has real-world symmetry? Until Katy Perry is called “the voice of the century”?)
6) Ideological cults are a danger to mental health, but supposedly are essential for ‘coping mechanisms’, a source of confidence, and motivation.
7) Twitter decided not to have a public relations ‘faith issue’ play out in a media cycle.
8) Any kind of ‘tactless’ domestic violence humor problems (#ReasonsToBeatYourGirlfriend) and public relations religious trifles for companies aren’t comparable. (They probably are.)
9) This kind of bullshit is mentally exhausting, though next year will be more of the same. There’s an extra day of it, also.
