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Monday, February 21, 2022

Is No One Going To Say It?

Most nations on earth are in Instagram (IG), and it doesn't matter what color, status, class, background, age or gender.

IG has this feature where users can use filters to alter what they look like. Yes, this is the same girl above but what she actually looks like.


If we look at a few IG filters, such as the Make up vs. No Make up, the Internet vs. Reality or the Filter vs. Reality, we will notice IG users drooling over their "doctored" images and ashamed or upset over what they actually look like.

Not Surprising

But this is not what is bad about this phenomenon and our need to go viral culture.

What is both sad and mad is that social media has been added to our list of influences regarding what is considered as the norm or the standard for what is beautiful or desirable. Actually social media is the biggest influence.

Biased

The filtered or doctored images changes dark skin tone to light, wide, thick, flat noses to thinner, higher, thick eyebrows to thinner and it changes the shape and the color of their eyes, length of eyelashes and other special "make over" effects.

Cultures all over the world look at light skin, high nose, light color eyes, almond shaped eyes and anything they don't have as beautiful -- deciding their standard of beauty for them. 

Filter  vs  Reality

And this new culture starts them off young, kids now look at themselves as not attractive if they don't fall into this social media standard of beauty.


And it doesn't matter from what country, the "standard" of beauty is the same for everyone, however impractical or unattainable it is.




With everything else everyone is going through, adding this biased thinking and stereotype of beauty will add more issues into most people's already full plates of things they have to deal with.

IG, Tik tok, Reels, Shorts whatever we may call it, everything online and social media is promoting a bias and everyone is biased, even without admitting to it.

We don't need to, the demeanor and the facial expressions speak volumes. 



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Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Whoopi Suspended After Insisting Holocaust is Not About Race


First off, I didn't know The View is still on air. In fairness, I haven't watch TV in years,. Watched the news on TV for a handful of weeks as they were first reporting about the pandemic mandates around March of 2020. But quit watching even that.

Open Discussion

The View is a good television concept as they try to make it appear that people from different backgrounds and persuasions can sit side by side and talk about their views on whatever topic can make their ratings go up.

The issue though is that this is dependent on what agenda the TV station is pushing and who they are putting on as hosts.

Whoopi and other The View hosts have a long history of foot in mouth disease.

And I guess there is just so many times you can fit another foot in there without someone doing something about it.

Freedom

In America, everyone loves their freedom. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences.

Main stream media has focused on Whoopi's apology afterwards which is to be expected.

If you are like me and do not know what happened, let us watch the cringey moments and how the other hosts of the show were reacting to Whoopi's insistence that they were all missing the point of what the holocaust was really about. And that it wasn't about race because it was white on white


Racism

That was her point of view and she spoke about it over and over, insisting all the others have missed the real point -- the holocaust is not about race.

The point is she is assuming what Hitler and the Nazi leadership were thinking.

Color

And all of us were assuming what Whoopi was thinking too. Except we know what she was thinking because she said it not too many times. To her, race is about color. It really isn't surprising because we are all biased (whether we admit to it or not). 

But race isn't really all about color, white people of many European countries regard white people from other European countries, territories or other people groups as inferior to their own "race".

People of certain Asian countries think the same of people of other Asian nations or Asian backgrounds, the same as among people of different African countries and people groups, Arab groups, North American countries and South American countries, yes even if they all look the same and have the same skin color.

Offensive Topics

The holocaust has always been a hot topic and it still is. This is the same for many others which different people look at differently.

If anything though, the decision to suspend her is a good thing for television and The View.

For one, at least people would know that show still exist and two even though the real topic of their discussion was hijacked, I think it was basically about the banning of certain books in schools, people who are still watching TV now have the opportunity to hear that racism is not merely about skin color.

That and yes, there is only so many times a TV personality can say something wrong before someone will jump in and do something about it. Even though we know it is for ratings. 

We all have our own views but sometimes these views are only correct in our own minds. But we wouldn't know that unless we hear of other points of view from others who are from different backgrounds and different biases.