Samantha Brick - Journalist: 'Why women hate me for being beautiful', It's not easy being Samantha Brick. The France-based journalist explains in a column for the Daily Mail that while her 'lovely looks' often result in showers of gifts from random men, they only lead to hate from women who feel 'threatened' by her sheer beauty. Meanwhile, Internet commenters have roundly mocked Brick since her article was published.
Which is sadder: a woman who thinks she is beautiful even though she is actually average-looking, possibly even plain, or the swarming together of thousands and thousands of people to ridicule and heap bile upon said silly woman? Yep, it’s the latter. Samantha Brick, author of an ill-advised article in today’s Daily Mail headlined “Why women hate me for being beautiful”, might be a bit daft, but the outrage currently being dumped on her is downright nasty. As is so often the case these days, the ugliness of the Twitterstorm against a Daily Mail article has superseded the ugliness of the article itself.
It happens all the time. You read an article and think to yourself “That’s not nice”. And then you glimpse the rising up of the Twitter hordes to denounce said article as dumb, evil, demented or whatever and suddenly the article itself starts to look almost harmless in comparison. That was the case with Jan Moir’s piece on the late pop singer Stephen Gately. It was a horrible column, but its horribleness paled into insignificance in comparison with the twitch-hunting of Moir, the mass reporting of her to the Press Complaints Commission, and the denouncing of her as “fascistic” and a “witch”. It was also the case with poor Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old student who started writing a gap-year column for the Guardian but gave it up when, in their hundreds, Guardian commenters ruthlessly and relentlessly mocked his silly teenage pretensions. Yes, Gogarty’s writing wasn’t great, but at least he had the excuse of being only 19 years old. What excuse did grown-up Guardian readers have for aiming ugly abuse at a teenage wannabe writer?
And now it is happening with Samantha Brick. Stupid article, yes, but the Twitterstorm against it is infinitely more wicked and pathetic. Brick should change her name to “Prick”, say the Twitter hordes in their thousands. She is ugly. She is stupid. She is a bitch. She must have a “beer mirror”, says one tweeter, if she imagines that she is pretty, because in truth, say hundreds of tweeters, “she is a dog”. Nice. So Samantha Brick is self-deluded. Big deal. Lots of people are. An individual’s self-delusion is nothing compared with collective spite and collective bile, with the ganging together of bedroom-bound and office-bored tweeters looking for another easy target to rage against.
Once again, the Twitterstorm is turning out to be worse than the thing at the centre of it. Never mind asking “What kind of person writes an article saying how beautiful she is?” It would be far better to ask: “What kind of people get a kick out of joining a temporary gang of online haters and unleashing nastiness on one woman? What is it about the era we live in that means these kind of Twittermobs can emerge with such speed and ferocity? Why do so many tweeters allow themselves to be dragged unthinkingly into the tweeting or retweeting of obnoxious comments?” The Twittermob, so desperate for a cheap moral thrill and so keen to express its fleeting and flimsy adjective-heavy outrage, is a lot uglier than Samantha Brick.
'Star Trek' Actress Grace Lee Whitney Dies at 85, Grace Lee Whitney, the on-screen character who played Yeoman Janice Rand on the first Star Trek, passed away Friday. She was 85. Every USA Today, child Jonathan Dweck said the star passed on of common reasons at her home in Central California. Whitney depicted Captain Kirk's collaborator for eight scenes of the first 1966 TV arrangement before she was composed out of the script. At the point when Star Trek was renewed as a motion picture establishment in 1979, the performing artist returned as a boss frivolous officer in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Her last appearance as Rand was in 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. William Shatner, who played Whitney's onscreen manager, tweeted Monday: "Sympathies to the group of Grace. She was a consistent sparkling grin throughout the years each time our ways crossed." Every NBC News, Whitney was a customary at Star Trek traditions around the glob...
Massachusetts beach brawl, A massive brawl broke out at Revere Beach, Massachusetts, on Sunday that involved between 100 and 200 people and had police from across the region rushing to the scene. The Mother's Day melee at the popular beach just north of Boston apparently started when two women began fighting, Mayor Dan Rizzo told NECN. He said their boyfriends joined the fight, which then snowballed into the brawl. The station reports that 12 people were arrested. WHDH reports that the brawl began over a stolen handbag. Police made an arrest over the incident, but it drew a crowd which then turned violent. One witness told the station that a girl involved in the fight punched a police officer in the face. "It just kept building and building and more people getting upset about their friends being taken into custody," another witness, Tyler Wade, told WHDH. The fight escalated from there. "Everybody started screaming people were throwing full cans of coke ...
Royal wedding more than 24.5 million UK viewers, Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal Wedding was watched by more than 24 million terrestrial TV viewers in the UK, according to overnight estimates from industry body Barb. The BBC achieved a large share of the UK viewing figures for Friday's (April 29) ceremony, with a peak figure of 20 million tuning in to the corporation's broadcast of the Westminster Abbey service. More than 34 million people caught at least some of the Royal Wedding coverage through the BBC, including on its iPlayer service, reports BBC News. Sky News said it had a peak of 661,000 viewers at the start of the wedding ceremony, while BBC Two, Channel 4 and Five only made up 1 per cent of the audience as the nuptials began. William and Kate's service is now in the all-time top 10 programmes in the UK, but drew less viewers than the 1966 World Cup Final (32.3 million) and Princess Diana's funeral in 1997 (32.1 million).
