Thank you, Thank you!

Thank you, cowardly anonymous commenters for so perfectly proving my point about your thuggish and abusive and yet oh-so-timid nature. More than anything it’s clear you can dish it out, but you can’t take it. So many of you act like little playground crybabies when you’re the target of criticism, SO upset that your self-evident cowardice is being exposed. It made me laugh over and over again.

By the way some of you seem to have reading comprehension difficulties as well and missed the point that it is the hostile abusive commenters whose anonymity I was calling cowardly –  not the ordinary commenter who disagrees. Talk back all you want but don’t be so infantile and timid that you won’t use your own name when you’re sounding so bold and brave and bullying.

And in addition many seemed to have trouble grasping the concept that I already put my name behind my opinions, I already “practice what I preach”. All I’m asking you cowardly bullies to do is to have the courage to put your name behind your opinions. Of course, since so many of you are so fearful of the very idea, it’s more than likely you’d falsify your names, and so I threw out the idea that one way of verifying your identity would be including a phone number, not to be published, but so that the idea of random checks would inhibit you from smuggling in your frothings under someone else’s real name. Believe me I have no desire to talk to you on the phone. As it is I see little characterological difference between anonymous commenter abusers and the anonymous phone call perverts.

And speaking of character, I have to admit I didn’t think my already low opinion of the anonymous commenter coward could sink any lower until I realized there were actual pro-Nazi anti-Semites among you. Here’s an example. Tell me are you proud to be associated with this commenter:

MiamaMan
[email protected]
Submitted on 2009/05/19 at 5:27am
vivo:

“I know your name. Callate la boca.

Ihr name ist Jud Süss, ein mitglied der Ewige Jude.

Sie sind ein Troll, schweinehunde. Ihre vorfahren leider entkam Eichmann”.

How many of you are going to write in to dissociate yourselves from this Eichmann-lover (and he–or she–isn’t the only one). How any of your are going to wonder how it feels being in such close communion with a sicko like that. Why is he on your side? Why are you on his side?

I haven’t gotten through all the comments,so this is my first reaction to a sampling. I’m enjoying the dish it out/can’t take it responses so much it will take me a while and I reserve, as I’ve repeatedly said on this blog, the right not to post abusive, bigoted comments especially when they are (as they almost always are) cowardly anonymous spittle flecked effusions. But be patient, I could feature yours in my next post on the subject.

Thanks also for demonstrating what profiles in courage you are, those of you who are afraid of attaching your name to your insults because someone in your business or your neighborhood might identify you. I wonder what would happen if you all stood up for yourself and showed you were proud of your views rather than crouched in dark corners throwing spitballs and then ducking behind the cupboard. You know the famous saying of Patrick Henry*: I guess for you it’s “Give me liberty or give me a witless screen name I can hide behind.” Anyway, anyone who doesn’t have the self-respect to put his name behind his abusive insults, is, and always will be, a coward in my book.

So once again thank you for validating my thesis that anonymity is what turns the web comment community from a forum for free expession to digital lynch mobs. You can actually see the lynch mentality growing in the comments as you cowards all whip yourself up to a frenzy of rage, anonymous of course, cursing through your masks like Klansmen with Tourettes, trying to show how brave you are behind your masks.

Not being a conservative I can’t tell for sure whether this is what conservative “culture” looks like in the raw, but I seem to keep hearing conservatives constantly mouth off about (others) “taking responsibility for their actions” (LOL: you can’t even take responsibility for your comments by affixing your name to them). Then there’s the conservative belief in the “values” of civilization and not “defining deviance down”. I wonder what literate intelligent conservative with a odicum of self-respect would want to be associated with the cowardly abusers among you. I think they’d flee in horror.

Cumulatively from the comments I elicited, self-defined conservatives are a sea of savages without values, literacy, and especially without a sense of responsibility. Some of them admitted to wanting to commit criminal acts against me. By the way,  my attack on anonymous cowards in the commentariat extended to the commenters on liberal blogs as well. My theory is that it’s not the politics but the anonymity that is the cause o the devolution. But is this what conservatism looks like once you get beyond the Buckleys and the Steyns. A bunch of vicious yahoos. (Look it up, I’m not talking about the website. Here I’ll help you: Google yahoo with Swift whom I’m sure few of you have read.

Speaking of Google I would say the one surprising fact that emerges from the murk of mindless hatred is the earnest concerns about Google. Here I admit I am conflicted about this. If you’re too timid for fear of Google consequences to put your name behind your abusive insulting comments then shut up, one part of me says. The other part of me suggests that maybe Google is a “new threat to freedom” in the sense that it has a panopticon (look it up) total surveillance inhibitory effect on free speech or at least one mode of it even by non- abusive, serious minded commenters. Some of you are so worried that your opinions will be googled and known it’s sad, but if you’re ashamed of them….we’re back to Patrick Henry* who, I suspect would be unafraid to be Googled.

Or should we never have thought of Google as a free speech promoter because of the fearful shaming effect it has on the timid. I know Jeff Jarvis thinks Google is like God, but maybe we’re now finding out it’s a very punitive God at least to some of its acolytes.

So thanks for giving me something new to think about–Google fear–a new reason to distrust Jarvis (he’s almost always wrong) always makes my morning bright.

.*Initially interchanged two of my heroes, Henry and Thomas Paine.