Bear With!

There are some people I take an instant dislike to. I know I shouldn't and many times actually verbal discourse with someone about whom I have made such a hasty judgement reveals them to be perfectly normal or indeed actually quite likeable. However, there are some people who build up a catalogue of misdemeanours which over time render them unlikeable. Unfortunately the Internet is rife with both types of people which is why I never really comment on anything. The keyboard, various wires and the amorphous collection of servers that separate your average casual browser of news and blogs seems to give them courage to troll and flame without any of the consideration that even the most ribald of conversationalists would give for someone they met face-to-face yet who they disagreed with. A sensitive soul like me would be reduced to jelly by just one of the milder ripostes that punctuate cyberspace discourse.

Ad hominem attacks just to destroy the character of an online commenter are rife - it seems a badge of honour to use the most horrible slander (I suppose technically it is libel) giving the impression that that the author is some sort of shaven-headed football goon or a slathering red militant with a badge saying "This Keyboard Kills Fascists!". (As you can tell I live in a small hut perched a-top Vince Cable's fence). However, thinking about it and matching up some of these tools with videos, I have determined that in reality the worst of them are actually the quiet kids from school who have grown up seething with years of abuse about their haircuts, their funny voices, their obsessions and everything else that makes us different from one another, until they have found the safe medium with its remote bunkers from where they can lob stones and mud at the bullies without fear of being beaten up in return. If you want to be Freudian about it you might determine that a lot of their abuse casts light on their own fears about themselves as well, though I'm not sure how much that would stand up to scrutiny.

I would link to some of the muddy cyberswamps which are populated by these squeaky-voiced children but I think it would be more fun for you to have a guess at who I mean. It is possible to be quite right or left wing without being childish. The trouble is that these guys are well aware of the specific criticisms which can be held against them and spit them back in the face of any disagreement. Any dissent is straight away labelled as one of the usual phrases - ad-hominem - useful idiot - straw man argument and others. There is no debate, only offence. I suppose it gels with the ever-increasing drive towards facelessness in society - the fact that interaction is now almost all through technology - outwardly society in developed countries looks like a lot of electronics talking to itself with a few organic microbes floating around inside it. It smacks of a collective autism, the removal of social clues. The future is antisocial.