Gay left-wing immigrant praised by Mail readers
Stop rubbing your eyes. Stop it! It's actually true. This is the story:
and the comments haven't been overwhelmingly negative. Is it the Christmas spirit infecting the Mail commenters? I don't know, but look:
I know. Isn't it? Disappointing about the 'Londonistan' under Gary's comment, but I suppose you can't have everything. Oh, and before you get all misty-eyed at this display of warmth and affection for Tatchell, I have to tell you that these weren't the only comments under the story. Some happily advocate smashing people over the head if they don't agree with you:
OK Roger, well it appears you're 'sticking your neck out' with that comment, so I'm perfectly within my rights to come around your house and bash your brains in with a rusty spade. Is that all right with you? Or is it only other people that those rules apply to?
Also:
Ah well. You knew it couldn't last, didn't you?
Thanks to Alex for the tipoff!
BBC Have Your Say: Genocide, why not?
The question asked is the family-friendly public-service debate: should homosexuals face execution?
Chris in Guildford agrees that this should be imposed in the UK. He also says that gay people should be taken away to a remote island to die out.
That's my licence fee paying for him to say that and have it broadcast nationally. And that's the most recommended comment. Oh, how proud I am of the BBC, and the British public, right now.
*update* That comment has gone now, which is something I suppose, although it did pas through moderation in the first place, despite appearing to break the house rules on homophobia. This one is still there, to keep the state-funded hatred going:
Rape and drunkenness
Sometimes the chimps' tea party of Mail story comments needs to be broken up, and the shutters get pulled down pretty rapidly when things get out of hand. I say 'out of hand' but when comments have been approved by a moderator, and then suddenly the plug gets pulled on all of them, you have to wonder why.
Anyway, this story's headline is the first 'wtf?' moment among many:
Maybe I am a silly woolly-headed disgusting liberal idiot, but my response to that is: well, yes. Forcing someone else into sex is rape, and it doesn't matter whether you're pissed or not when you do it. And it's not as if rape is something like buying kebabs, pissing down an alleyway or vomiting in someone's front garden: it's one of the most serious crimes there is. But note the use of quote marks to imply there is some doubt over whether forcing people to have sex with you is rape or not.
The URL gives another clue to the original story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235743/Drunk-men-force-women-sex-rapists-use-alcohol-excuse.html
as the first headline was "Drunk men who force women to have sex 'are rapists and cannot use alcohol as an excuse'". Which is about the same thing, except the focus has switched from forcing someone into sex in general to forcing someone into sex in the context of a pre-existing relationship - again, something which in my bleeding-heart mores is rape, and about which there isn't a tremendous amount of debate. But perhaps I'm wrong. Well, I'm not as wrong as some of the people who originally commented on the story, I can say that with pretty much nailed-on certainty, but we'll get to them in a minute, what few of them I was able to capture before the Mail panicked and dropped all the comments.
The story seems fairly uncontroversial, to be honest,
though as we saw yesterday with the (fairly) positive immigration story, you don't need bells and whistles to attract people with rather poisonous views on things - especially if you've got a history of courting them.
Now, the poll in the article looks like this:
]
at the moment. That's pretty much as I would expect it to be, though of course I would probably hope for more people to see forcing someone into sex as being rape, but given the context of the website where it was held, not too bad. Still, the comments were something else. I'm glad they're gone, because some of them were jaw-droppingly appalling, but here are some highlights, if you can call them that:
and those weren't even the worst. Others called for the entire repeal of rape laws. It makes me wonder whether these stories are floated around in order to whack the hornets' nest with a big stick, then they get the dozens of clicks thanks to people being allowed to write in electronic green crayon their numbskull views, and then the plug gets pulled because those comments (which have been sent through a moderator, let's remind ourselves, and were deemed acceptable for publication) have got out of hand. It's a win-win situation, isn't it? Unless you regard it important for there to be decent and rational debate under your brand banner, of course, which it would appear that the Mail don't - until such time as they deem it necessary to wash their hands of the slew of awfulness, and pretend it never happened.
Thanks to Sadie for the tipoff.
Batshit insanity at the Express
It's not often that I find myself paddling through the murky effluent of the Daily Express Have Your Say section in search of insightful comments, but it's always worth knowing what the readers of the self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Newspaper" think about the burning issues of the day. Whether these people really represent Express readers is a moot point; whether they represent a truly disturbing batshit insane cross section of the most wearyingly thick people in the world is not.
The debate is this:
That introduction sets the parameters of the debate. It says that punctuation isn't important, for example, and points out that CAPS LOCK is more than welcome. It says that you can assert stuff like "Kids don't even know Christmas is about Jesus" without anything whatsoever to back it up. It's aiming high. The majesty of some of the political and theological analysis is quite breathtaking.
You might look at that and think to yourself: what the hell? But that's really not unrepresentative of the debate, which quickly veers off the idea of Christianity. It's not even as if these people can manage to talk about the thing they're meant to talk about: they're all so vein-poppingly angry about Gordon and Darling and NuLieBore that they have to mention their rage at every available opportunity, regardless of the topic that's actually up for discussion.
Well, that's a bit more like it, isn't it? At least Christianity gets a look-in with this comment; it's almost slightly relevant to the discussion question. As ever, the Express messageboard obsession with Blair and 'mass immigration' dominates everything else, as well as a dig at people who are on benefits, so all in all, a marvellous comment.
That's quite beautiful, isn't it? The anger is there, the roaring froth of indignation; there's also a lovely touch of 'white people are the real victims', which is an essential ingredient of these Daily Express debates. I always enjoy the portrayal of New Labour as Marxists as well; delightful.
'One_of_the_seven_dwarves' has a simple solution to problems such as the PC Brigade and people who believe in global warming: kill them. Quite an elevated level of debate here, which might give you a tiny clue as to why a lot of Express stories don't allow comments.
Well, I'd like to see you argue against that. Go on, try. I bet you can't! I bet you can't fight your way out of that intellectual labyrinth.
Yes. I think that's answered the question about Christian values very well.
If in doubt, go with a dictionary definition. That way you win the debate! It's like calling in a YouTube link to prove your case.
Reading these Express discussions gives you a wearying feeling. These people know they're meant to be angry, but they can't quite aim it in the right direction. They know Gordon's bad and Blair was bad, but they're not quite sure why, except they might be Marxists, and it's got something to do with the PC Brigade and white people feeling like strangers in their own country. But generally it just seems to be an electronic day centre that's open for those cold hours when the library might be closed and the Wetherspoon isn't open yet. It's bewildering and slightly demoralising to wade through all this. Is this really the freedom that the internet gave us - freedom for this? Ah well. At least if it keeps these people happy, then that's something. Obviously, it demolishes the Express brand and makes it appear even more laughably inane than it already was, but perhaps that's no bad thing.
(Almost) positive immigration story
At the weekend I looked at how the Mail sometimes misses out on positive immigration stories and wondered why that might be. Today's story in the Mail, well, it's kind of positive, but... you'll see.
We can argue about the word 'tolerance' and whether a society really needs to 'tolerate' its own citizens another time. But this would appear to be suggesting that British people are liberal and welcoming of other cultures... not what the 'silent majority' who patrol story comments are likely to say. Still, I think it's something to be proud of. Obviously the story is illustrated by two women in burkhas, because otherwise we wouldn't understand what Muslims are, but perhaps it's a start. I don't want to be accused of ignoring positive Mail stories about immigration, because it would seem that this is one. And how heartwarming to know that the British are the most liberal and culturally grown up in Europe, according to the report. Isn't it? Well... we'll come to that.
Also, here's what appears to be some more good news about British Muslims:
I wonder if you could connect the two facets of the story - Brits are the most liberal and culturally welcoming nation in Europe, and in return, Muslims who come here feel more British than they do in other countries. It's not beyond the realms to suggest that.
Well, so long as the Mail don't go to Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch for a quote, then this story sits perfectly as an example of balance. All they need to do is just leave the evidence as it is - after all, when Green pipes up with his anti-immigration bollocks, the other side of the argument doesn't ever get a look-in at all, so it's not as if he's needed in this story. It's balanced as it is by existing in the first place. Brilliant. So, as long as he doesn't turn up, this will be a fair and balanced... oh.
Ah well. It couldn't last, could it? Nevertheless, this is a story which suggests that (a) people in Britain are liberal, welcoming, culturally intelligent and decent, and (b) British Muslims are more patriotic than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, perhaps even because of that attitude they experience from other Brits.
And if I ended it here, then you could say fair play to the Mail. But you know and I know I'm not going to end it here, don't you?
That a sentiment such as 'live and let live' should be voted negatively by readers of this article suggests that the Mail's readers aren't representative of the 'tolerant' Brits depicted in the article itself. Want to know what kind of comment gets voted positively? Well, you asked for it...
You get met with a wall of resistance. It can't possibly be that British people are tolerant, say these readers; it's all a big Lib-Lab-Con conspiracy to deny the silent majority. In their world, everyone has the same view as them, everyone is entirely hostile towards other cultures, and it's all a big political conspiracy to stop the vast majority from being represented.
You could argue that the Mail doesn't help itself by portraying Muslims as women in a burkha, who are a tiny minority of the British Muslim population - which draws the inevitable reaction from some commenters. But on the whole this is a positive story, and one to be welcomed. Shame about the comments, of course, but then the Mail has courted these kind of readers for a long time now - not necessarily 'readers' representative of Mail readers, you could say, but people who seek out immigration stories in order to splatter the comments with an bowel evacuation of nonsense and hostility. Maybe articles like this are a step in the right direction, though. The cynic in me says "Yeah, until tomorrow", but we'll see.
A climate of grumpiness
Is there something about sitting behind a keyboard that turns an ordinary, normal, reflective individual into a knee-jerk-reacting, I'll-do-what-I-wanting, I-hate-Nu-LieBoreing, grumpy, growling twit? I don't think that there is. I'm sitting behind a keyboard, after all, and I don't think I'm any of those things. Yet read pretty much any news story nowadays and you can be pretty sure of what kind of comments are going to pop up.
Is there some part of the mainstream media that doesn't reflect the misanthropic unpleasant retired/unemployment hatesprayer who is scared of Muslims, doesn't like Labour, would prefer it if we closed our borders and wants the right to smoke in babies' faces because it never did him (and it's usually a he) any harm? I don't think so; I'd even contend that these people are over-represented in the mainstream, particularly in those newspapers I like to write about so much.
Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. Maybe I should face the uncomfortable and pressing truth that these people say I should face: that what they're saying is just what everyone's thinking, that most people are delighted with thinly veiled racism because you can't say anything nowadays for fear of the PC Brigade burning you at the stake and pissing on your grave, except they can't, because the elf'n'safety Brigade would get there first and have to conduct a risk assessment on the murder scene before it took place.
I link this kind of particular stroppiness to an attitude that's about asserting a kind of impotent rage; that's about trying to rage on internet comments, because that's the only place they might feel they're capable of having an impact. These are people who want the right to smoke wherever and whenever they like, because they want to, and they don't care who it pisses off; these are people who want the right to pollute as much as they like, because they want to, and they don't care what damage it does; and these are people who want the right to offend whomever they choose, because they want to, regardless of the effect it might have on other people's feelings; you could call it libertarianism, if you like, or you can call it being a selfish bastard, if you prefer that. Everywhere, to them, it seems there are restrictions on their behaviour and everything they want to do is being denied them. They see themselves as an oppressed minority, but at the same time the silent majority.
I say all this in regard to attitudes towards climate change. On the one hand you have this, dozens of scientists backing the notion of man-made climate change; on the other, you have this,
the majority of people in a debate deciding against it. Is science particularly bad at getting its point across, are people just unwilling to change their lifestyles in order to save the planet, are people unable to link actions with consequences, or what is it? Or is it all a big con, as the brave battlers of the Express, Melanie Phillips and her list of 'distinguished scientists' (including Alan Titchmarsh) and our friends in the online comments would have us believe?
Which brings me to a textbook weather story in the Daily Mail, predicting cold weather in winter. Which naturally brings about the classical kneejerk:
Although to be fair there are a few more comments than you might expect not only knocking the story as the patent flimflam it is but also raising the valid point that a few cold days in a cold country in winter is not necessarily the smoking gun that proves than man-made climate change definitely isn't happening and never will:
But it seems there's little danger of much balance. Is it that the British are naturally conservative, sceptical of science, inert, unwilling to change their ways, grumpy, misanthropic and nasty towards anything that might stop us doing whatever we want? Science doesn't seem as split about climate change as these polls would have us believe. So what can we believe? That most people are sceptics, or that the scientists haven't done a good enough job selling the science? It's strange, though, how unsceptical people on these websites appear to be when it comes to misleading immigration stories, so willing to accept the inevitable doom that will come from foreigners coming to Britain; yet unwilling to accept a different dystopia, in which the world's climate changes dramatically and disastrously. I wonder which will turn out to be the real problem in the future, and whether we'll have fought the right battle.
First!
There are few things worse than 'first!' - but I think that shoehorning in a 'Liebour' underneath the Spectator's coffee house blog admin apologising for technical difficulties must shine out as one of the most pitiful examples of website commenting ever:
Worthy of the sort of applause you might give for a single down to third man.
Relatedly, I'm also on the lookout for the most inane web comment of the year, given that it's Christmas and so on. Don't be naughty and say one of mine, now. I'm looking for something so thunderously stupid, so spectacularly anti-logic, that it's brain-explodingly bad. I did a quick straw poll on Twitter and found some marvellously awful examples, like this:
(Thanks to Bellamack for that beautiful example)
So that's the competition. Find me the most truly witless thing that's been written as an internet comment all year. The winner gets, er, well I'll think of a prize, but it'll be great*. Stick it in the comments or email me a screengrab.
* It may not be great really
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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