The biggest problem, as I see it, is that it reinforces Trump and the alt-right's low-rent trolling. They really want nothing more than just to upset people. Rightfully, this meme should upset no one. But then CNN and a bunch of others posture like they were physically threatened with assault and this is an egregious norm violation as opposed to calling it what it really is, which is tawdry trolling. The correct response is to call the President a ****ing idiot, not a menace -- at least in response to this tweet. There's nothing really menacing about that tweet. It's amusing solely to morons who think the President and cable networks are in some grand morality play and the President 'wins' with a cosplay beat down.

By letting Trump be some menacing rule-breaker by posting lame gifs, you just give and his idiots the victory they sought: you're upset, lol, the end. And it took them almost no effort.

Whether that's a big problem, I dunno. To me it just seems like everyone in this whole circus is a clown.

Yeah, the left is buying into the right's framing of this story. WAAF I guess.

The wrestling tweet is pretty irrelevant at this point. The anti-Jewish tweets are menacing, though. The guy didn't delete his internet and apologize over wrestling tweets.

HanAssSolo seems the optimal play.

Created 7 hours ago.

Is the guy's identity newsworthy or not? If it's not newsworthy, why even consider publishing it? If it is newsworthy, why are they holding it back? If it's because they think it would jeopardize his safety to publish his name and that outweighs the news value, why does that decision change if he wasn't actually sorry in the first place? It's beyond obvious that a lot of the CNN outrage is disingenuous or made up, but it's also true that they didn't do a very good job. CNN has always been, and will continue to be, terrible, even when Trump or alt-right trolls are attacking them.

News organizations were doxxing people before it was even called that, I don't know how this is any different from that.

What's funny is that the gif actually plays perfectly as deep and cutting mockery of the symbiotic relationship between Trump and the debased mass media of the day, with them engaging in endless performative feuds that boost Trump's popularity with his base and power media clicks and subscription drives. I mean, the point of the gif is that Vince McMahon isn't *actually* getting beaten up. Trump isn't *actually* hitting him. They're just play-acting to engage the emotions of the audience.

You know what, I am now just going to treat this as the canonical interpretation of that gif and accuse anyone who disagrees with me of the intentional fallacy.

The worst part of CNN's behavior is how Trumpian it looks:

- thin skinned reactive outrage to petty slight
- threatens offender who tried to humiliate them, declare themselves ultimate winner and arbiter of situation after receiving a grovelling apology

Whenever someone accuses me of that, I thank them for agreeing with me.

Honestly surprised it wasn't snapped up years ago.

THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT

You could probably make an argument that he would be more likely to be an actual threat if he goes back to this kind of posting after getting caught and faking a huge apology. But CNN should have just published his name and avoided this quandary. Trying to be nice doesn't win you any points.

Although I didn't say it as succinctly, this is EXACTLY what bothers me.

I don't think Donna Rice was even given the option to apologize and stop ****ing Gary Hart. Neo-Nazi privilege, I guess.

It's like the kid who is beaten up by his dad that goes on to be an abuser themselves later in life. It's like CNN is victimized by Trump's ritual dominance routines and so found some Reddit user to debase to recover their stolen honor.

I think this is wrong. CNN likely loved that meme. They are out for ratings and a highly visible feud with a deeply unpopular POTUS is great for them. Looking into the origin of the meme was likely just a way to keep the story going.

That probably makes CNN look worse, though.

No organization likes to have a poster made with pictures of its employees who are Jews. That is the kind of thing that gets the top brass of an organization involved. For that alone they should have published the guy's identity even though he no doubt balled his eyes out when he called the reporter back to say he's sorry, had issued an apology and deleted his account, and that he was just a troll addicted to ****posting on the internet for lulz.

That said, CNN seems to have lost the gamergate demo and Fox News crowd and won the rest of the world. I'm sure they're fine with that trade.

Your canonical interpretation is accurate and, of course, pretty ironic. We're pretty much living in a movie at this point, but with real consequences.

CNN literally put a paragraph reserving the right to dox this guy IN THE STORY man.

I absolutely would not have a problem with CNN just like, publishing his name. It's maybe not super newsworthy but yolo get them clicks.

But allowing that there wasn't a quid pro quo, ****ing CNN wrote that there was! Change the ****ing article if the plain English doesn't reflect reality.

the alt right is pretty crazy stuff. but i would challenge some ppl around here to ask themselves if they have ever seen opinions that would be equivalent to an alt left? have you ever seen anything like that on this very forum even?

just to mention a few things on the top of my head, there are ppl around here that believe that GOP are evil sadists. or that GOP are actively trying to kill people, particularly poor people. and some ppl view the senate as an illegitimate democratic institution after the SC judge norm violation. or they condemn or prejudice or ridicule people of religion and the white working class people, particularly males. religious people are frequently viewed or described as brainless or the pest of the earth.

so i would take a look at the environment i find myself in and ask if there are opinions floating around that arent challenged enough. we go crazy whenever we see something from the alt right (for good reason) but when there are radical left wing opinions we sort of just shrug at it and let it pass without the proper amount of resistance. i would say that this is a bit selective behaviour. i think alot of white working class people have tougher struggles than alot of the educated and intelligent people around here are aware of, so i would be careful to condemn whole groups of people like this.

Flame,

einbert got a whole lot of criticism on this board just a few days ago. He wasn't accused of being the moral equivalent of Mike Cernovich because, well, he isn't.

thats correct, and i quoted him myself. but hes just one part of the story. and i admit to have had pretty radical opinions myself in the past so im not trying to "hammer" the forum here. just pointing out that we go crazy at the alt right when we see them, but sometimes we let radical left opinions float around here and we dont always care too much about it.

I may not be best placed to observe, but I don't recall ever seeing so many Americans willing to self-identify as socialists, or at the very least acknowledge favouring 'socialistic' policies. If you wanted to call that 'the alt-left', I wouldn't argue, but it seems pointless, besides smacking of reflexive both-sides-do-it-ism.

Functionally, they are. And it's not as though they don't know that. So we can briefly reflect on the ethical significance of malice versus indifference, before shrugging that both are ******* positions anyway, so who cares.

By the way, journalistically I'd be shocked if the Washington Post held a story with incontrovertible evidence of Trump collusion with Russia. MAYBE for a day or two, but we're talking about possibly the biggest news story in American political history. We're talking about a news story that, in and of itself, could lead directly to impeachment within days.

The only way I think they'd hold that is if the IC said, "Your story is going to make it easy for Russia to identify an asset we have who is still in Russia," in which case I could see them holding it for how ever many hours/days were needed to get the asset out. Even if the IC said they wanted time to follow additional threads and implicate more people, if Trump was already implicated there is no way they'd hold it... because if they got it, someone else could get it, and that outlet would be even less likely to hold it.

When the Washington Post, CNN, the NY Times, whoever, has incontrovertible evidence of collusion with Russia, you will hear about it from them within ~a day of their finding out.