“These HATE WORDS are meaningless and in no way are they a real indicator of hate. This hatred map thing is so stupid that it boggles the mind. It’s so stupid that it has become the dreaded Facebook “share” and there is nothing more incredibly stupid than a Facebook share. Once you become a Facebook share it means you’ve lost all credibility and the only way you can get any attention outside the world of Academics is to try to get “likes” on Facebook. That’s pretty sad.” [Damien LeGallienne, editor of TheDamienZone.com].
Geography of Hate Map is Wrong and a Virtual Hoax.
[Damien LeGallienne, Brussels] There’s this thing floating around the moronic pages of Facebook. It’s a specialized map of the USA that allegedly shows the amount of hate speech that generates from different areas of the USA via Twitter. The trouble is that this is a huge crock of dog end, and since it’s a stupid and meaningless and silly and self-serving bowl of stupidity, every idiot on the planet is “sharing” it on Facebook. It’s what I like to call a “virtual hoax” because it’s not a hoax per se, but in reality it’s the worst kind of hoax. Let me explain.
Supposedly, this “map of American hatred” was part of a larger (and probably just as stupid) project by somebody named Dr. Monica Stephens of Humboldt State University — a kind of hippy dippy school way up there at the top of California where the “very average” students are all in tune with nature and filled with the wisdom of the owl and the mighty wolf. Do you get the picture?
According to RateMyProfessors.com, where a rating of 1 is terrible and a rating of 5 is great, The average professor at Humboldt has a rating of 3.9. Dr. Monica Stephens’ rating, however, is ZERO point ZERO. She doesn’t even have a vote — in other words, students don’t care about her, or like her, or even hate her enough to cast a vote. Of course, as soon as this article is released the students will climb down out of the redwood trees and stop counting owl eggs long enough to give her a perfect score.
So anyway, the unloved and currently unrated Dr. Monica Stephens is doing this GEOGRAPHY OF HATE map thing as part of her class on Advanced Cartography. In other words, if you know how to read between the county lines, Dr. Stephens wants to make maps that will prove that middle Americans and Christians are evil, racist and homophobic, and she’s dragged in three hapless foot soldiers to do her dirty work. I won’t give out the names of the undergrads she is trying to indoctrinate into this policy of inventing hatred because they’re just kids and maybe one day they’ll go to a real school and get the heck out of that campground that masquerades as a University,
Okay, why did I just call it “invented hatred” and what’s the deal with that?
The Facebook “share” that is going around (the Hate Map of the USA) claims that the students — the aforementioned foot soldiers who are unwittingly taking Dr. Stepehens’ course in HOW TO BECOME A MISFIT — sampled (they say) 150,000 tweets from various Twitter accounts. How they came upon these tweets is kind of shady but that’s another story, but sharing in the blame for all of this dumbness is the University of Kentucky and its DOLLY project — whatever that means.
From these tweets, the Future Misfits Club of Humboldt University — I mean the students of Dr. Stephens — went through a bunch of words that they call “hate words” and these hate words were measured by their frequency of usage in tweets across America. It doesn’t make sense — and let me tell you why.
These are the hate words they used – The N word in its real form and various forms, bitch, fag ( and all variants) homo ( all variants) queer, dyke, darky, gook, gringo, honky, injun or Indian, monkey, towel head, wigger, wetback, cripple, cracker, honkey, fairy, fudge packer, tranny.
Okay so there’s the list of words they looked for and they say they counted how many times these words were used in a derogatory way. Okay, so already this is unscientific and stupid and subjective and dumb. This map of hate is a hoax but the trouble is that it doesn’t know it’s a hoax. It seems to be based in real science — but it’s not, you stupid monkey. Ooops, I just used hate speech. Perhaps if I were a wise old Indian (more hate speech) I would have known better than to believe this dumb map. But you understand because, “you my n***a” right, bi*ch? <— Are you catching on to what I’m getting at yet?
Here is the thing. Young people of all races and religions use the hate words all the time on Twitter. They call each other the N-word and all the other words on the list and they mean NOTHING. Dr. Stephens might know how to teach Stupidity 101 really well, but she herself should take a few courses in the evolution of language or language usage. What is being translated as hate speech in this sickening study is really just modern day teen speak and the lexicon of Twitter and texting. It has nothing to do with the opinions of any vox populi — it’s an illusion of hatred. Do you understand that? It is an ILLUSION.
These HATE WORDS are meaningless and in no way are a real indicator of hate. This hatred map thing is so stupid that it boggles the mind. It’s so stupid that it has become a Facebook share, and there is nothing more incredibly stupid than a Facebook share. Once you become a Facebook “share” it means you’ve lost all credibility and the only way you can get any attention outside the world of Academics is to try to get “likes” on Facebook. That’s pretty sad.
So anyway, they looked at where these words originated with more frequency on Twitter and they created this map — and it makes no sense. It’s not real — it means NOTHING.
NOTE TO DR. MONICA STEPHENS — Kindly note that drawing maps of invented concepts and making a map of American hatred is mentally sick and unhealthy and just plain stupid. Also, incidents where celebrities and left wingers and right wingers in the past have wished AIDS on people and or DEATH on each other via Twitter are not included in your map because the area in and around Los Angeles is a cheerful and happy sky blue.
Naturally it’s impossible to see the right wing hatred on your map because the map is carefully invented to make it look like all Red State people (the misconception of Republicanism) are hate speakers. Pretty craft, eh?
Yeah, so ALL Conservatives lurk in that red haze of hate you’ve invented, but Hollywood and left coast liberals are looking up a at clear blue sky. But—uh—they use hate speech all day long, but it’s the hate speech of grown up idiots — not the casual texting language of dopey teenagers. How stupid can you be? You are really dumb — seriously.
Hate speech is when someone says, they want to kill or injure or exterminate someone because of their color or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation. It is not the lexicon of a clueless twittering teen population. This map might work as a map of the emergence of a new kind of electronic language usage, but it says nothing about hatred. YOU CAN’T MEASURE HATRED! CATCH ON?
If you have the title of “Doctor” in front of your name, shouldn’t you be aware of the flaws in this silly project? Don’t you have a duty to teach your students the difference between cartography and propaganda and your own personal frustrations and hatreds? If I were President of Humboldt, I would fire you so fast that you’d have to dig up your map that shows people the places where colleges are more tolerant of stupid professors. Maybe they’ll hire you — or perhaps you are right where you belong. I’m sorry for your students if that’s the case.
From the desk of Damien LeGallienne.
COMMENT ALL YOU WANT. CALL ME NAMES OR HATE ON ME. I MAKE IT REALLY EASY. I DON’T EVEN CROSS CHECK EMAIL ADDRESSES.
You do realize that she has a zero for Humboldt because she only started teaching there recently right?
She is a relatively new professor in general, and even at her previous school, she only has two reviews, one great review, and one terrible; hardly conclusive.
Also, you are good at straw-manning. You make their claim for them, that they are attempting to map hate, when in reality it only claims to map usage of words. You have chosen your own value assessment of that. They didn’t claim to map actual hate, as you claim.
On another note, this “DOLLY project — whatever that means.” 5 seconds of googling tells you exactly what it is, and even describes the “shady means” they used to go about getting their tweets.
just saying..
I don’t give a shit if she’s been teaching at Humboldt for 3 seconds. She has a ZERO and that’s good enough for me. She’s new at her job? Mon Dieu! That’s a shocker? As if I hadn’t already figured that out.
Also, as per your claim that I am straw-manning this, the truth is that the study is being pushed about mercilessly in social media as a catchy-edgy-quirky topography of hate in the USA. If you think or try to pretend that it’s just a represntation of words, your living in a delusional state. My values have nothing to do with what I wrote. If it came down to my values I would have dismissed it as childish and stupid and I wouldn’t have put an ounce of effort into it.
It is what it is — and as far as the Dolly project goes, I looked into it and dismissed it as boring and annoying and childishly unscientific. So, because of my values inasmuch as how I value my own time, I dismissed it. I’m not here to shill for crazy, attention-starved crackpots. My purpose is expose stupidity and dumbness and I never fail in that regard. You should be flattered that I wrote about this insanity you seem to hold in such high esteem. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and there’s nothing wrong with being dumb. Being dumb, and passing as intelligent, is however, an entirely different thing.
Damien Le Gallienne DDM (Damien Direct Mail)
Editor: TheDamienZone.com
Brussels. Belgium
Dallas, Texas, USA
New York, NY USA.
Apparently, you don’t realize how rate my professor actually works, because anyone that is a newer professor at any university will have a 0. People actually have to have had a class with her. I said she was new there, and “relatively” new overall. Again, she has a score from an earlier school if you look, but again, it was hardly conclusive (in either direction; admittedly, it certainly isn’t a good score, or a bad one? lol).
But anyway, the fact is, how it is being billed by third parties on social network sites is hardly a fair evaluation of the work itself. Because it “isn’t worth your time” to even look at the methods used to gather the data, you are left impotent to create constructive critique of the actual work nearly anywhere in your post. Instead, you favor personal attacks for the vast majority, which strikes me as a little dumb…
The one point of critique that you could have actually expanded on that had actual value was the perceived subjectivity of the coding of tweets as “derogatory.” I agree that this is a potential failing of the study. But, it is a challenge to the data that can be overcome by repetition, and the inclusion of a rubric of sorts that defines how and/or why tweets are coded. For all I know, its in there. I haven’t actually seen the real work on this. Ironically, I was sent a link from a friend to your version first, not the real one. this map could easily be a quantitative start and part of a potential larger quantitative and qualitative study they could do in order to increase accuracy and precision. Science builds on itself, and is never perfect.
It isn’t stupid or dumb to try to attempt to create understanding of something, even if it can be done better. It’s stupid AND dumb (Ya, both at the same time) to think because something can be done better that its automatically a failure.
Are you living on Belgian time? It’s the middle of the night in the USA — depending on where you are.
Listen, Dan, you sound like a sincere and very smart guy, but whatever the goal of this study is or was or will ever be is forever tainted by the fact that it has fallen into the hands of mindless Facebookers who use it as tool to “prove” that the fly-over people of the USA are homophobes and bigots. Tonight I counted 164 shares on Facebook page alone. That means it will reach a million people in about a week, and each person will be progressively dumber and angrier.
No matter how you try to fix this incredibly flawed idea, it is ruined. Perhaps it fell into the wrong hands, but I can’t help but think that this was the subliminal agenda all along. Call me paranoid. And what’s with the word “tranny” on that list? People who use that word in a tweet are probably looking for one — and they don’t want to beat her up either. I get hate mail — really hateful stuff — and none of the “words” are in those hate mails. I will get a letter from a guy who tells me I “be his nigguh” because he likes my work. I’ll get another letter from someone who calls me a “F***g homo fa**ot” because he hates my work. Then I’ll get a letter from some nut who says he is going to track me down and kill me. Now, if those all came via Twitter, which one is the hateful one. I don’t like this new definition of the word hate — it’s pop science. Ain’t nobody got time for dat!
Repeating and re-repeating the data won’t change a thing because you’re just piling up more and more of the same stuff. No matter how you slice and dice this kind of study, it will only serve to divide people in various ways because 90% of people are too stupid to understand, and this is why I often make dumb personal attacks. When I am confronted by dumb people, I have to be as vicious as possible yet still make my point. We’re talking about people who don’t listen or learn. I might sound like I am making dumb personal attacks, but in reality I am being mindful to not bring a slingshot to a gunfight.
You guys should issue some kind of statement wherein you remind the world of Facebookers, that this map is not a map of hatred and it is not meant to point out the scenic routes of racism through which one can travel in a quest for justice and truth. If you do this, you iwll find that nobody will pay attention, or you will be bashed. When this happens, let me know. I will write the personal attack responses for you.
Thank you
Damien
“Hate” is just a politically-correct term for any view that a leftist doesn’t believe in. As soon as a liberal calls you a hater, sexist, homophobe, etc… you know they have lost the argument.
DJ — You should see the HATE tweets from people like Cher and Rosie and washed up old Ellen Barkin. They don’t use the listed HATE WORDS but they hate like mother****s.
In you examples of word usage, I would say that the rubric I mentioned would be useful. You are right to say that context is important. For me, the person calling you his “nigguh” seems positive, and not hateful, and the probably high intellectual behind “F***g homo f**ot” seems a bit hateful. Maybe I am subjective. But, Subjectivity doesn’t necessarily ruin science, as long as it is acknowledged and considered in the results, and the methods are transparent.
So if its facebookers that are dumb, why target the creator(s)? I think that the biggest reason I was compelled to respond is that I believe the exact opposite of your approach to “dumb people.” Viciousness is certainly not a weapon I think should be wielded in many if any contexts, particularly in a way that I perceived to be irresponsible and poorly aimed.
At the end, I am not sure if you are talking to me when you say “you guys should issue a statement.” If you were, I am afraid I am not capable of doing so myself, as I had absolutely no part in its creation or distribution.
Thank you though,
Dan
Okay Dan. all of my own perceptions pushed aside, it is indeed the facebookers who are the morons. That is why I think that the folks behind this — not you — should be wary of any acclaim they get from social media. There was a guy who called TV “a vast wasteland” — too bad he didn’t live to see Facebook. He’d have had a massive stroke.
thank you for your intelligent (very rare on here)contribution.
Damien
I have seen the crazy lefties tweets. Quite disturbing.
I would definitely more than agree that anyone should be wary of acclaim received merely from social media, lol.
haha.
Damien, greetings…
My impression of the map is that if you zoom out it blends and looks like the eastern
states are all red. If you zoom in for a more accurate close-up view, you see that
the main clusters are from rural towns. I suspect this is due to isolated groups of
people who fear “outsiders”. People in towns big enough to have internet access, but small
enough to still fear the unknown, like different cultures and beliefs.
It seems you are using the map for attention at your job, thats funnier than bored facebook people.
Aren’t there real atrocities going on around us?
You called a woman old and washed up, now you are on the map right next to Ellen.
Imagine if Ellen was your Mother or Sister… And remember these two things:
We see the world not always how it is, but how we are.
Also, how we do one thing is how we do all things.
If you see this map so perfectly, then you should be enjoying imperfections as character.
Same goes for Ellen, Myself, and you. We are perfectly imperfect, this way
we’re different enough to not get sick of ourselves.