And if that was where it ended, then I would be in happy accord with Beard and Dent and Moran and the others in their condemnations, even if I were to add the rider: well, yes, that’s Twitter — there are some really mad people out there, and they all are allowed a voice. But it’s not quite so simple as that because, underneath, what most of them are really complaining about is that the benighted hoi polloi are allowed to comment adversely and express their annoyance at the largely fatuous beliefs which attend to this gilded circus of well-heeled bien pensant bores. The great unwashed keep demanding to have their say. ‘So you’re very keen on this fracking business?’ And they believe, these bores, that they are being victimised as a consequence of their race or their gender, because their entire worldview is comprised of a Manichean split between victim and oppressor, and they are always the oppressed. So Mary Beard believes she was vilified because she is a woman, and the Huffington Post columnist Mehdi Hasan believes he is being victimised because he is an Asian Muslim and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, another Indy scribbler, believes she is being victimised because she is an Asian woman. But none of this is really true, in the main. People say horrible things to them all because they dislike them for what they believe in, pretty much. Not many people, either. Most just contest their points of view, sometimes forcibly. But others lapse into personal abuse, often picking upon the most immediately identifiable features of their adversary, while a tiny minority of online sociopaths issue the vilest of threats. Hell, I cannot remember a single month in the past ten years when I haven’t been threatened, while being abused for my hideous appearance is an almost hourly occurrence — and I don’t go on Twitter: like Caitlin, I’ve imposed a boycott on the thing, except mine is a lifetime in duration. But I do not think the threats are really the main cause of this disaffection with social media within this tiny and terribly pleased-with-itself elite. Look at another of them, Charlie Brooker, who is giving up his regular Guardian column at least partly because he doesn’t like the contributions from readers posted beneath his usually entertaining observations. It is all right for Charlie to stick the boot in; OK for him to call people a ‘cunt’ when they disagree with his views (it was me, as I remember, who was the cunt). And it’s perfectly OK for Caitlin to tell Aids jokes, bandy about the words ‘spazz’ and ‘tranny’ and ‘mong’, but she’s not happy when the nastiness is directed back at her. Typical...free speech, apparently, is only a right afforded the elite and their point of view.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 15:32:24 +0000
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