Sfdebris.net

Wil Wheaton joins the long, long list of people on every side of every issue who stick their foot in their mouths via a tweet.

Modified "infinite monkey hypothesis"---on a long enough tweeting timeline, everyone on your tweeter feed will be offended.

{edit, providing link....and not supporting or denouncing Wil, other people can flame it out if they want. just observing that it seems like having a Twitter account, especially if you have any type of fame, creates more headaches than its worth. ymmv}

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -Ryan.html

WW blocked me on more than a year ago because I tweeted his reading of Ready Player One was appropriate for the unlikeable nerd protagonist.

Link?

technobabbler wrote:Wil Wheaton joins the long, long list of people on every side of every issue who stick their foot in their mouths via a tweet.

Modified "infinite monkey hypothesis"---on a long enough tweeting timeline, everyone on your tweeter feed will be offended.

Context?

The latest (as of this moment), after someone shot up a church, Paul Ryan tweeted the usual "they need our prayers" stuff.

Wheaton responded, "The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything they'd still be alive," along with an expletive aimed at Ryan calling him a flexible cloth container of excrement.

I hear Wheaton apologized afterward.

Wheaton being a jerk on twitter isn't exactly a new phenomenon.

Eh, I can understand it. It's insensitive maybe, but it's born of a fuming frustration with a country where mass murder by a single gunman is such a common phenomena that every senator seems to have a script for it that they just update with new names and places. =/ It's especially frustrating to see "thoughts and prayers" from people who have the power to ACT in order to change this and consistently do nothing.

Also you get points off for not including a "Shut up, Wesley!" joke.

I've never understood the vitriol toward this expression of sympathy. But given that the action you want out of the politicians would further erode the liberty of everyone in this country because you think it will make you feel safer, I'd rather they just kept sending their thoughts and prayers...

Admiral X wrote:I've never understood the vitriol toward this expression of sympathy. But given that the action you want out of the politicians would further erode the liberty of everyone in this country because you think it will make you feel safer, I'd rather they just kept sending their thoughts and prayers...

At best it's an empty gesture, at worst it's a hypocritical joke that mocks the victims, especially when the background is like it is.

Madner Kami wrote:

Admiral X wrote:I've never understood the vitriol toward this expression of sympathy. But given that the action you want out of the politicians would further erode the liberty of everyone in this country because you think it will make you feel safer, I'd rather they just kept sending their thoughts and prayers...

At best it's an empty gesture, at worst it's a hypocritical joke that mocks the victims, especially when the background is like it is.

Exactly this. The saying 'thoughts and prayers' is entirely meaningless unless is backed up by some tangible action. You could train a parrot to say it, for Christ's sake. They could at least send a card of condolences- that's something the people who are grieving could actually point to as an actual thing. (btw before I go on, yes, I'm an atheist, and I recognise that the victims of the tragedy weren't, but to paraphrase a great man, I'm just a commentator with an opinion).

Also, linking to the Daily Mail? Seriously? You could at least have linked to an actual newspaper.