Flags With Twitter Quotes

Each time that a terrorist attack takes place in some Western city, nauseating hordes of cowards do one of two things: 1) Change their social media handles to the flag of the country that was attacked 2) Share a hashtag on Twitter to signal their solidarity with a given cause

Relationships work out better when each person has a productive life outside of their relationship. It’s always a red flag when someone’s sense of happiness is dependent on the relationship. This typically means they are in the process of healing or stagnant & not healing at all.

Everyone has a bit of “Tumblr teen” in them, self-reflexively announcing their social positions as a buffer against the now-cartoonish refrain to “check your privilege.” But while plenty of white people will flag their own whiteness, eagerly so in some cases, these admissions are curiously conditional. When the news broke that several high-profile parents were implicated in a conspiracy to illegally finesse their children into prestigious universities, publications (from Refinery29 to the Atlantic to Vox to, somewhat ironically, U.S. News and World Report) took care to name the collaboration of class and race that enabled such entitlement. On these particular bad actors, my Twitter feed was mostly on the same page. However, once people began reporting their own stories of educational fortitude, the material value of whiteness was suddenly less germane to the conversation. Unlike the children of celebrities, the people I followed implied, they had worked hard and earned it wholesale. It seemed the whiteness of celebrity children worked according to the rule, while everyone else’s whiteness was the exception. The gap between knowing and naming, let alone reckoning, remains vast.

Amazing how quickly those thin blue line flags turned into weapons against the police, almost like the only true ideological commitment is to white supremacy & literally nothing else (1/6/2021 on Twitter)

In 2014, one is as likely to encounter trollish behavior on Tumblr or reddit or Twitter as on 4chan, some of which flags itself as such via subtle memetic references and some of which does not. Some self-identifying trolls don’t even bother trolling anonymously.