prophecyformula:

nostalgebraist:

reinderdijkhuis:

Let’s all stop sharing the hat-tipping Fedora guy meme, OK?

I always wondered who that guy (recognizable in the caricature above) actually was!

On the one hand, I feel like the question of how cool this guy actually is ought to be orthogonal to whether people should share this meme.

On the other hand, Gordon Crisp is a precious cinnamon roll and so, it seems, is Jerry Messing.

In response to your first hand: sure, but there’s a certain wonderful/horrible irony in the way that people sharing this meme are decrying the insensitivity of the hypothetical person the picture evokes, yet in doing so are being insensitive to an actual person who is nothing like the hypothetical one

I guess I want to say that this is exemplifying some broader lesson about archetypes vs. people – “I hate this particular guy, who was totally the fedora guy archetype” is one thing, but “I have learned to hate the fedora guy archetype, whether or not I have ever met anyone fitting the description” is getting into weirder, more circular territory

Like, maybe this is atypical, but I have met a lot of nerds in my time, and while I have seen a huge amount of fedora discourse, I have only met maybe one or two guys max who actually wore fedoras, and none of them fit the “insensitive reddit atheist” description

Sometimes I wonder whether these sorts of archetypes do more harm than good not just because of the body-shaming etc. elements, but because they don’t actually help anyone identify which people to avoid?  I suspect that there are many people out there with fedoras in their hearts but few of those have corresponding fedoras on their heads, and so forth

(via epistemic-horror)