Outrageous Twitter Quotes

So whenever that brittle voice of dissatisfaction emerges within me, I can say "Ah, my ego! There you are, old friend!" It's the same thing when I'm being criticized and I notice myself reaching with outrage, heartache, or defensiveness. It's just my ego, flaring up and testing its power. In such circumstances, I have learned to watch my heated emotions carefully, but I try not to take them too seriously, because I know that it's merely my ego that has been wounded--never my soul It is merely my ego that wants revenge, or to win the biggest prize. It is merely my ego that wants to start a Twitter war against a hater, or to sulk at an insult or to quit in righteous indignation because I didn't get the outcome I wanted. "At such times, I can always steady my life one more by returning to my soul. I ask it, "And what is it that you want, dear one?" "The answer is always the same: "More wonder, please." "As long as I'm still moving in that direction---toward wonder--then I know I will always be fine in my soul, which is where it counts. And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it.

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

No matter what you do, no matter what you say, someone out there will proclaim how outraged they are, because they think it's their job to be offended by every God damn thing. It makes people feel important. It makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel like their opinion is relevant.

Twitter is the perfect platform for the permanently outraged who want to express opinions through short statements without having to engage in proper arguments or defend positions.

There was no Internet, no way to raise outrage via a Twitter campaign, no digital cameras with which one could take a photo and send it worldwide in seconds.” And that left Ravensbrück abandoned and dismantled, forgotten.

The common story being told by many people, especially in the outrage mob Twitter-sphere, is that their opinion is true simply because it is their truth. There is no sense of shame whatsoever in their inability to explain why they hold that opinion

Making a nation awesome takes more than just Twitter outrage, street protests and a toppling of governments in elections. It asks for a fundamental shift in societal values, culture and habits.

Twitter is not a place where people lose limbs. Social media cancellation rarely has violent consequences, and the casualties of war do not at all compare to people's hurt feelings and damaged reputations.

You have a duty to accomplish something every day. You have a duty to live up to your best self, the person you want to be, the hero archetype that you admire. You have a duty to embrace shame and learn from it. You have a duty to be polite, thoughtful, patient. You have a duty to overcome your hardships and not wallow in self-pity. You have a duty to contribute, even if your contribution is small. You have a duty to be on time. You have a duty to do your job, even if your job sucks. You have a duty to stay healthy, both for yourself and so that you do not become a burden on others. You have a duty to be part of the solution, not the problem. In other words, don’t join the Twitter mob. You have a duty to try hard not to offend others, and try harder not to be offended.

As Trump marches on to the rhythm of near-daily twitter rants, daily outrages, and weekly embarrassments, it remains unimaginable—even if it is observable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the commander in chief would use twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a ‘very stable genius’ verges on the impossible. This can’t be happening. This is happening – The thought pattern of nightmares and real-life disasters has become the constant routine of tens of millions of people. Every Trump tweet, televised statement, and headline causes a form of this reaction. If the word ‘unthinkable’ had literal meaning, this would be it: thinking about it makes the mind misfire; it makes one want to stop thinking. It brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: ‘certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,’ she once wrote. ‘This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.’ The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. It is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy, and the restrained tone of the media compounds this feeling by failing to acknowledge it.

Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain. If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.

Now that society is immensely safer, kinder, and better for children’s aggregate survival, we complain vehemently about proper pronoun usage and disrespectful remarks on Twitter.

All the experts proved what we’ve all known all along. That they are full of shit. They all got it so wrong they needed cover and when they saw something, no matter how asinine, it became gospel to cover their abject failure. Still, the left wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long. First it picked up the Russian spy story and started pushing it to every devastated reporter who would listen. Then it did everything it had told us the Trump supporters would do if Hillary won. Think about it. For weeks leading up to the election, we had been hearing about all the horrible things Donald Trump would force his supporters to do if he lost. DJT wouldn’t accept the defeat they were all so sure was coming. The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran many articles warning us about the chaos that was about to ensue. According to popular opinion, Trump supporters were going to riot in the streets, refuse to accept the results of the election, and begin some kind of underground coup against the duly elected president, Hillary Clinton. They would start a second civil war. The streets would become absolute anarchy. And when things didn’t go the way the Democrats had wanted them to go, what happened? Let’s see. They held riots in the streets. (Check.) They refused to accept the results of the election, cooking up one of the strangest spy-movie stories I’ve ever heard in order to maintain their collective delusion. (Check.) Then they formed an underground group of online keyboard warriors called “the Resistance,” dedicated to taking down my father one stupid hashtag at a time. Prominent journalists, liberal activists, and actors have all identified themselves as proud members of “the Resistance” on Twitter. When I’m attacked by an outraged mob online, their voices are usually among the loudest. (And Check.)

Left unchecked, the brain's reward system for moral indignation leads to the Spanish Inquisition, to witch trials--and to what goes on daily on Facebook and Twitter. Outrage keeps us engaged better than almost anything. This engagement allows social media apps to sell more ads, fueling their bottom line. IN priming our natural outrage, an impulse that evolved to keep us alive, social media apps have us tearing each other apart. Like dope dealers--just peddling outrage.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t angry, but like most of my colleagues, there had been no particularity in my outrage. That was a constant thing, like cigarette smoke, so present I barely noticed. I was furious instead at everyone who announced their indignation after ignoring a four-year parade of coffins. It couldn’t have been the blood that shocked, because blood had pooled on the streets for years. It was the casual pull of the trigger. There was no space for an alternative narrative, no time between the gunshot and the thump of a dead body to claim the dead man pulled a gun, no room to say he deserved it, she deserved it, that all of this was just propaganda. These were the only facts available. The child, confident her father was a cop, the cop asking the mother and son if they wanted to die, the gun, the trigger, once, twice, again, both dead in an instant. “This is not who we are,” read a last Twitter post. This was exactly who we were.

fabric. With many big problems cured, reduced, or eliminated, our small problems have been elevated remarkably in our public discourse. Now that society is immensely safer, kinder, and better for children’s aggregate survival, we complain vehemently about proper pronoun usage and disrespectful remarks on Twitter.

I understand twitter trolls for what they are, rather sad people with nothing better to do. I have this image of them sitting there waiting to be outraged.

For the Resistance, the only organizing principle is: Which position will be worse for Trump? Is Russia a colorful country with a noble history of giving socialism a try—or the most evil regime since Nazi Germany? Do I enjoy coarseness in popular culture—or am I a hothouse flower offended by dirty language? Am I enraged by the idea of the government secretly spying on American citizens—or is that a vital part of national security? Is it outrageous that private communications of the Democratic National Committee were publicly revealed (on WikiLeaks) during a campaign, or is it totally fantastic that a secret recording of Trump (the Access Hollywood tape) was blasted all over the world a month before the election? Is transparency in government something that I support, or do I think Trump has got to get off Twitter—a novel and independent thought that has occurred only to me? In that environment, we may give Trump more than the usual latitude if he acts as if he’s under siege. He is under siege. Is he unhinged? No, he’s hinged, fighting back against the left’s infantile, knee-jerk reaction to everything he does. Instead of governing, Trump is spending his presidency refuting questions like “Did you boil and eat a small child today?” It’s one ginned-up, fake story after another. And the people doing this are the most corrupt and conflicted in the history of the world—James Comey, Robert Mueller, Brian Williams, George Stephanopoulos, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and on and on.