Comment This

I’m beginning to wonder why virtually every site on the web has to have a comments or feedback function. Democracy and listening to the vox populi is all well and good, but let’s face it. Most of the people posting comments on YouTube, Yahoo, or even CNN are blithering idiots.

Take, for example, the comment I saw on a CNN story about the Deep Horizon oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m not going to reproduce this gem of a post verbatim, because I can’t bring myself to massacre the english language that badly, even in a direct quote, but the fellow essentially said everyone was making far too big a fuss over the spill. He wanted to know how it could possibly be a problem for something that is in the earth to be on top of the earth. Seriously.

I suppose this guy wouldn’t mind if someone were to dig up some uranium and spread it around his front lawn. Or open up a vent and allow some hot lava to fill up his living room.

And of course, every time somebody makes any kind of inane comment, somebody else has to come along and call him a fag, or an idiot, or a communist, or (worst of all) a liberal. And then someone else chimes in and fans the flames, and they’re off on a pinhead race.

Part of the problem, of course, is that for many years, so many people who haven’t had a single coherent thing to say in their entire lives have been paid good money to bloviate like the gasbags they are on radio and television. They make it look easy and fun. Their gibbering opinions and speculation have almost entirely replaced actual news reporting.

Of course, in the rare instance when someone with a modicum of intelligence and perception takes the time to offer a few sage words, he or she will also be jumped on and called a fag, an idiot, a communist, or whatever.

And then these websites all put up that TalkBack button, giving every nitwit with access to his mother’s PC the idea that somehow, everybody wants to know what he or she thinks. I’m sure that’s a powerful lure for them, since in their daily lives all anyone ever says to them is will you please shut the fuck up. So they click away, furrow their overhanging brows, and hunt and peck up another masterpiece of jackassery.

It’s all a gigantic waste of hard drive storage space, computer processing power, and network bandwidth, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, I know. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

I could be wrong about this, but I’m not.