Empowerment

I try to avoid personal attacks but I am well aware there are people who join sites like this supposedly to debate things, but treat any questioning of their opinion, however constructive, polite and non-personal, as a downright insult.

Generally these are best ignored though unless you can still debate the topic with others on the same thread, it can look as if your attacker has "won" by having the last word.

I think some yearn for the comfort of a spurious certainty given by sharing by others who agree 100% with their beliefs on any given matter; so are frightened to find plenty who hold differing opinions. Frightened even more, to find that their opinion follows genuine ignorance of the topic: argued from a real mistake of fact or false logic.

I believe this is the social-media phenomenon often called the "echo-chamber", from which all analysis, differing opinions, corrections of errors and even basic logic must be excluded. To what end?

The late-18C became known as the Age of Enlightenment, when people started to question, study and appreciate the world around them, with both the Arts and the Sciences flourishing despite considerable social and political turmoil. Sometimes, listening or reading to some threads on site like this, or in the wider world of the politician, pundit and campaigner, I fear ours will become the Age of Ignorance.


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There is also a tiny minority of users frankly unable to engage in any proper discourse, so love to jump into conversations not to support a given opinion, offer a polite correction to a factual error or highlight a fact missed by the others; but to hurl gratuitous insults at individuals.

Seeing I was not the only victim of one particularly unpleasant bully in that way I reported him, and he was suspended, though I think he crept back some months later under a different nick-name.

(And different account? Don't forget the site managers have our IP addresses so in theory, might be able to block that to stop simply changing a user name to circumvent a ban.)

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The other way round, I try not to take insults too badly. There is no point in feeling hurt because some stranger anything from 8 to 8000 miles away, wants wilfully to be rude to you. Text messages are dangerous tools because it is too easy to hurt someone accidentally; but if I can see I was in the wrong I may be able to at least offer an apology.

Otherwise, I take some comfort from reflecting that it is the sender of the unwonted and deliberate insult who has the problem; and I wonder if such people also bully those around them in real life.