Never write angry.
Never write angry.
Never, ever, write angry…..
Otherwise the world ends up just like that one described by this guy.
This post is dedicated to to all the learning impaired folks who just love to run opposing views into the ground.
This no longer American beer is for you!
The horribleness of commenters isn’t really a mystery: Internet anonymity is disinhibiting, and people are basically mean anyway. Nor is it a mystery why the people who run websites put up with commenters: the economic model for Internet content is based on advertising, which means it’s based on traffic volume, and comments mean traffic. They’re part of the things that make online publishing work. TIME.com enables comments on its blogs, including mine.) It’s just hard to tell whether they’re ruining the Web faster than they can save it.
Commenters tend to respond with surprise–they’re shocked, shocked!–when people call them on being not nice. In their social universe, this kind of rhetorical slap-fighting is just how you do business, and anybody who feels otherwise is thin-skinned and humorless. As lame and self-serving as this excuse is, we can learn something from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness. The other is a kind of communal game in which whoever is cleverest and pushes the most buttons wins.
Much like the fact that drive-by commenting on the Internet enables any number of cranks and malcontents to come out of the woodwork, it also allows for people to engage in cognitive dissonance to their heart’s content.
The whole idea is that you form a community with self-affirming views and then censure/censor/berate anyone that comes along with something that does not match your particular worldview. Establishing this sort of thing allows you to take pot shots at the opposing side without saying anything substantiative, ignore all evidence you deem contrary to your own, and generally feel better that your decisions and opinions are far superior to anything else known.
There is another word for this, that being egocentrism.
What kills me about the people you’re talking about here is that they belong to a certain class who is convinced of their own moral, doctrinal, tactical, and intellectual superiority – a fraternity who I might (humbly) add is the same gang of bozos who have (for the last 100 years) insisted that “our boys will be home for Christmas.”
The fact of the matter is that through allowing then SecDef Rummy to micromanage every aspect of the planning (?) that went into the Iraq war, refusing to listen to any other viewpoints other than those internal to the administration, and refusing to engage in any serious and rational debate, we’ve created the current situation.
Furthermore, I think I might add this from none other than Herman Goering: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
That ought to sound familiar. Specifically, (his assertion) why Phil Donahue lost his job.
All of this is intended to point out that a combination of an inability to listen and egocentrism gives rise to a specific class of Internet Tough Guy with an agenda and a burning desire to let you know how you ought to think. These aren’t trolls, just jerks, and they seem to be multiplying.
(By way of disclosure, I harbor no ill will toward Blackfive. I find their opinions amusing, sort of like how my cat amuses me when he sticks is face in the water dish and then is perplexed as to how is fur got all wet, and a valuable source of intelligence insofar as what the right wing is up to at the moment.)