I feel very torn about dog park lady. She was obviously having some kind of mental health meltdown & the victims of that were an innocent guy & a cute little doggie. But no one died & she's lost her job & been doxxed. 1/a few https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/1265083397740859399
I don't think I've ever behaved quite that badly, but I have lost my temper a few times & the idea that that one moment would be seen as the defining moment of my life & might cause me to lose everything is terrifying & seems inhumane. The phone camera shifts the balance of power
It allows us to condemn individuals on the basis of a single few minutes. It allows us to condemn entire demographics on the basis of the bad behaviour of a single individual (as @antihero_kate has often pointed out). I don't like this kind of scapegoating.
Maybe the woman is completely and irredeemably evil. I certainly thought everything about her behaviour during that fragment of time was unhinged. But don't we make *ourselves* more evil by gloating over a new online victim? It's morally degrading. To US.
Incidentally, when I say the camera "shifts the balance of power," obviously sometimes that's good! It prevents people from getting away with things. I'm OK with the guy having filmed her: she threatened to report him; he had evidence that he'd done nothing wrong.
It's the pile-on that is terrible. We need to stop this kind of stuff.
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