my Instapundit comment, transplanted here

I recently wrote the following comment over at Instapundit:

PJ Media article headline: "Why We Can't Let Amber Heard's Melodramatic Whining About Internet Abuse Close American Courtrooms"

Yeah, I saw she was supposedly upset about how she's being trashed online. Well... she's American, so she'd better toughen up. (I suspect it's all crocodile tears, anyway. Psychopaths can only mimic shame.) Plenty of American stars who get trashed wear their bad reputation like a badge of honor and strut around proudly. Look at aging Madonna, who owns her slutty past and is even empowered by it.

Quite a contrast with what happens here in Korea, where TV and movie stars will commit suicide if they get hounded by so-called "Netizens." In Korea, a young, good-looking female star gets caught cheating on her boyfriend; she's declared a whore by the online public, and in shame, she quietly hangs herself in her walk-in closet, leaving behind an apologetic note. This is because Korea has a group-first, hive-mind culture, and getting ejected from the hive mind (they use the term wahng-dda shikida, i.e., making someone an outcast) is worse than death. Nothing is as terrible as rejection because what is the drone without the hive?

American society may be changing, but we Yanks still largely think of ourselves as fundamentally monadic—separate and individual. Societal rejection can hurt us, yes, but not to the extent that the same rejection hurts a Korean.

In the end, Amber Heard is still young and, I guess, fairly good-looking (although she's a godawful ugly-crier); her career will pan out just fine once the public forgets all this. In the meantime, yes, we should ignore her dramatic whining. (For what it's worth, I'm not actively following the Depp/Heard case; it's just that a lot of the YouTubers I watch happen to be talking about it.) I have to say, though, it'd be nice if she really felt all the social pressure against her and did the Korean thing. Garbage person.