"if it's good news, it must be someone else's"

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

About Discussion Threads (and I'm not talking about conversation clothes)

I used to belong to the blogging community, Blogcatalog. It's what many might consider being part of the blogging experience. Part of the belonging requires participating in discussion threads. A discussion thread occurs when a community sibling poses a thoughtful question to which the Blogcatalog family responds in serious and insightful ways, thus creating a thread of intelligent dialogue.

Well, that's the idea anyway.

But in practice, instead I am reminded just how doomed the human species is.Thoughtful inquiry and coherent discussion have never been the mainstay of any online forum I've ever run across, so it's not just Blogcatalog. There are plenty others. In fact, it's better than most and yet it still succumbs to the insanity of internet human interaction.

Exhibit A:

The following was a real discussion question: do single men respect single women who give them oral sex?

(I remember think, Holy cow! Thanks for asking because i can't think of a more pressing matter!)

Apparently, this was a troublesome conundrum for a probing female questioner, who had heard from one of her male friends that, sad to say, "disrespect was the only result". Don't get me wrong. I'm sure the questioner was a swell gal who most likely was just trying to work through an indiscretion or two. We all have them. Hell! I have a boat load. But given what was going on around us—you know, the collapse of the world's atmosphere and Justin Bieber and all—this just seems like small potatoes, so to speak. But as small as these potatoes are, the discussion that it ignited turned into a banquet for the boorish; a feeding frenzy of the frenetic, if you will; a jamboree for the rock-from-under, crawler-outers.

The content and attitudes that oozed from the depths of the Internets were striking in both tone, misspellings and idiocy. The only explanation for this virtual insult to sensible civil discourse is that internet anonymity in the hands of unsocialized earthlings can only spell trouble with a capital "T", that rhymes with "D", which stands for "Discussion Threads".

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