Sometimes, It's Best to Shut Up
Meep looks at quitting after many people noticed you were wrong
A followup on my earlier STUMP post, How Not To Be A Dumbass: Media Innumeracy Edition, from waaaaaay back on Friday, March 6.
[This is a substack only post! Lucky subscribers, you!]
It seems that some people do not know when to shut up.
Let me detail - there were three people involved in this dumbassery:
Mekita Rivas, the original person who did not know to:
a. Divide two numbers
b. And that 500 million dollars divided by 330 million people is between 1 and 2 dollars per person. Not between 1 and 2 million dollars per person.
Brian Williams, who has a history of saying stupid things.
Mara Gay, NYT Editorial Board member. Who decided the point of the story was too much money in politics, which we will come back to by the end.
My understanding that the three people had different responses for being called out as idiots:
Mekita Rivas protected their tweets after various people made fun of them, and then added this to their bio:
Brian Williams just moved onto the next segment after various people made fun of him. As far as I can tell, he just dropped it.
Mara Gay decided to use her NYT soapbox to decry that she got made fun of.
Sometimes, it’s just about you
Of the three people, Brian Williams probably had the best reaction. Just move on. Twitter gets bored after a while. People make mistakes; what the hell.
But no, Mara Gay cannot let it go.
That “racist Twitter mob” also made fun of white guy Brian Williams. And the original person Mekita Rivas. And various people who agreed with the three of you. Because y’all are blatantly innumerate.
Fine, I will look at the NYT piece:
My People Have Been Through Worse Than a Twitter Mob by Mara Gay.
By “my people”, does she mean the NYT editorial board?
Unfortunately, quite a few Americans can tell you what it’s like to be the target of a Twitter mob over a gaffe. My great sin was trivial, harmless, silly. What’s it like when people are trying to cancel you for a math mistake? Weird, and maddening and painful.
I don’t feel like excerpting more than that. Seriously, you are on the NYT editorial board. You said something stupid on TV. Just move on. People will forget. (Eventually)
I am not going to excerpt any more of her piece. You can read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/opinion/racism-twitter.html
All three of the people, especially the original tweeter, came in for ridicule. All three didn’t notice that they were off by a factor of one million. That’s a pretty big mistake.
But Mara Gay went beyond the math mistake.
She has been mining some of the worst tweets making fun of her, to indicate that random people on twitter who nobody knows are the real evil. Not that someone on the NYT editorial board is opining on crap they know nothing about. [Not that that would be new.]
I mean, maybe the NYT editorial board is the underdog. But if it is…. it earned it.
Don’t Undercut Your Business
Mara Gay’s original takeaway was that there was too much money in politics.
Brian Williams was just blathering and made no point himself. Which is probably why it’s been easy for him to move on. He’s got some more empty blather to read off the teleprompter each night.
The original tweeter Mekita Rivas was mainly making the point that Bloomberg’s money had been wasted. If anything, it showed that money might be necessary, but it certainly wasn’t sufficient to getting enough votes to get many delegates. Tulsi Gabbard certainly didn’t have $500 million to throw around like chump change, and she also got some delegates from American Samoa.
Mara Gay was sitting in a chair at a channel whose whole purpose of being is to make money off of politics… and she says that there’s too much money in politics. She might want to ask the money people at the NYT how much in revenue from political ads they get. Maybe they were jealous of how much Bloomberg was dropping on video ads elsewhere.
Yes, I know, nobody involved was thinking too deeply, but perhaps some of the MSNBC folks may NOT be wanting to book the person who says “Don’t spend money on politics”. I guess Mara Gay may want to try the “If you don’t book me, you’re racist!” ploy with MSNBC, but they’ve got plenty of people to choose among. They’ve got higher ratings than CNN.
If You Were Wrong, One Option: Just Shut Up and Do Something Else
This is my one piece of advice to people in general: when you were wrong, sometimes it’s best to walk away and move on to the next thing.
Maybe apologize, or correct the record. It’s no big deal. People get things wrong all the time.
But if you want to say all the people pointing out that you were wrong is so, so bad. Well.
You are encouraging them to keep ridiculing you.
Heh.