Category: social media

Which social medium is most useless, annoying, or harmful?

February 23, 2020 • 12:15 pm

And here’s another poll to while away the time. This came to me when I was watching a television show yesterday about Chicago food and it praised a restaurant for having “Instagrammable food”. That immediately turned me off. Yes, food should be pretty, and yes, I do post pictures of what I eat in restaurants, but putting food pictures up is not the main reason I eat. And I’m well aware that for many people—especially the odious “influencers”—Instagram is nothing more than a way of showing off, either showing what you look like or showing what you consume (the latter to get goods and money).

I have no use for Instagram, and almost never look at it. I like Facebook simply because it allows me to connect with my friends (mostly real friends, as I don’t accept friend requests from somebody I don’t know or who doesn’t look like someone who could be my friend). Further, Facebook has lots of cool cat and other animal photos; in fact, I follow nearly as many animal-related sites as I do “friends”. Twitter I use to put up links to the posts at this site (and call attention to photos or articles that I think might interest people but don’t warrant a post on this site, but I don’t follow anyone there because I don’t have the time. And Twitter fights are about the most unproductive thing imaginable. I’ve never seen anybody change their mind in a Twitter squabble, and the site seems to bring the worst out in people.

My vote for the most useless social media site is Instagram, as it’s Solpsism Central; and my vote for the most harmful one (in terms of stirring up trouble and fostering hatred and division) is Twitter. That doesn’t mean that Twitter, on balance, reduces social well being—only that it does more to injure well being than other sites.

But here, you vote. And if you don’t want to vote, weigh in below.

The first poll is about which site is the most “useless”, that is, adds the least value to the planet:

And another poll. By “harmful” I mean “on balance, creates the greatest reduction in well being or the least total improvement in well being”.

And post comments below.

 

Tom Chivers has a theory about the latest Dawkins kerfuffle

February 19, 2020 • 1:00 pm

Tom Chivers is a journalist and science writer who, like me,  was taken aback by the negative reactions to Richard Dawkins’s recent tweet about eugenics. (Remember? Richard said eugenics would “work” in the sense of changing population means in humans, but immediately added that he was against it.) Now, at UnHerd, Chivers has proposed a “theory” to explain the dichotomous reaction. (It did seem pretty dichotomous, with lots of people understanding what Richard was trying to say but a big number demonizing Dawkins for “favoring eugenics.” There were a few, like me, who understood what Richard was saying but thought he should have said it in a longer piece rather than vomiting it out on Twitter. Or not said it at all.)

First, an earlier tweet from Chivers in which he expressed the rudiments of his idea:

 

Click on the screenshot below to read Chiver’s theory, which is his:

So Chivers’s idea, which is his, is that there are two types of people: the “high-decouplers”, which, in a statement like Dawkins’s, can easily separate the “is”s from the “ought”s. They can see that he’s making a statement about the malleability of human traits to artificial selection and, at the same time, realize that this doesn’t mean Dawkins favors such intervention.

Then there are the “low-decouplers”, which couple Dawkins’s “is” statement with his “ought” statement. (I’d prefer to call the groups “couplers” and “uncouplers”.) These people embed Richard’s “eugenics would work” statement in a political and cultural milieu, and are unable to separate them. Ergo Richard, by saying “eugenics works”, is somehow justifying Nazism. That isn’t an exaggeration, as you can see if you’ve followed the pushback.

As an example of a low-decoupler, I posted a tweet from a scientist who called Richard a “clown” who was “supporting eugenics” and deserved to be denounced. When I asked in my post if that scientist actually read what Richard wrote, I was denounced by the person (a woman) as a “sexist asshat”. (The exact wording was “So in addition to ‘Fuck eugenics’ and “Fuck dawks,’ I’d like to add, Fuck Jerry Coyne you sexist asshat”.) That, I realized after reading Chiver’s piece, was double “low-decoupling”: not only was the person unable to decouple Dawkins’s “is” from his “oughts”, but was unable to decouple my mild criticism of her from the presumption that I was a “sexist” (and an asshat, too). What would imply I was a “sexist” beyond her own sex?

So here’s Chivers’s take (a quote, not the full piece):

I have a rule that I try to stick to, but which I break occasionally. That rule is “never say anything remotely contentious on Twitter”. No good ever comes of it. Arguments that need plenty of space and thought get compressed into 280 characters and defended in front of a baying audience; it is the worst possible medium for serious conversations.

. . . The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

. . .That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other.

. . . But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.

Chivers also explains that Dawkins’s tweet, which seemed to appear out of nowhere, was actually aimed at Andrew Sabisky, a nasty piece of work and a former advisor to Boris Johnson (he appears to have just resigned over racist remarks).

At any rate, Chivers gives some other examples of quotes from people who were demonized because the proper decoupling wasn’t done. Some of those quotes are harder to parse, and Chivers seems to have some sympathy with the victims.  As he says “I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry.”

Well, the “coupling/decoupling” dichotomy is useful, I think, but hasn’t helped me understand more deeply why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. They were angry because they deliberately misinterpreted what he said—either that or they couldn’t read or were just thick. What puzzles me is why so many people were and are so eager to demonize Dawkins. Jealousy is one reason, I suppose, but I don’t think that quite covers it. After all, there are psychological reasons for a seeming inability to decouple that the theory doesn’t cover.

Chivers argues that it’s easier for scientists to decouple because they’re “used to taking things apart,” but I don’t buy that, either. It is those who are enraged by Dawkins—and they include many scientists, who have demonized him for his tweet)—or are determined to bring him down, who can’t decouple in this case. How bright do you have to be to understand that Richard was talking about the efficacy of artificial selection and not that it should be used in humans? Is that so hard—especially when Richard immediately explained what he meant in other tweets?

I will probably use the designations of “couplers” and “decouplers” in the future, as it’s good shorthand for people who link (or don’t link) things that shouldn’t be linked. But I don’t think that giving these groups names helps us understand them or their motivations any better.

Dawkins makes a tweet

February 16, 2020 • 2:30 pm

UPDATE: Crikey, there’s a whole Twitter “event” devoted to Dawkins’s tweet. People can’t wait to jump all over him.

______________

When Matthew sent me this new tweet from Richard Dawkins this morning, I thought “Oh no! I know what he means, but there are a gazillion people out there ready to misinterpret it as an endorsement of eugenics.” And Matthew said, “Yeah, and everyone’s going to jump on that word ‘work’.”

Yep, what we predicted happened.

I didn’t read Richard’s followup (below) until a few minutes ago, and I don’t know whom he was arguing with, but his tweet was clearly intended to show that many human traits are heritable—that is, they would respond to artificial selection, which is what eugenics is. (In “negative” eugenics, you cull or prevent from breeding individuals with undesired traits; in “positive eugenics”, the other side of the same coin, you breed from individuals with desired traits.) As I’ve written before, nearly every artificial selection experiment conducted, on a gazillion different species, has been successful: the mean value of the trait has changed in the direction the experimenter wanted. (Two of the few unsuccessful experiments have been mine: attempts to select for directional asymmetry in flies.)

Artificial selection will work if a trait has any positive heritability, that is, if any proportion of the total variation in a trait among individuals in a population is due to genetic variation—what we specifically call “additive genetic variance” in the trade. And virtually all morphological or behavioral traits have some positive heritability.

Look at domestic dog breeds, for instance. All of them descend from the wolf, yet all the huge variety of their traits: the variation in their size, their shape, their color, and even their behavior (retrievers, border collies, etc.) have come from selecting on traits that have a positive heritability. As Darwin said in The Origin, “Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

That happens to be true. And it would be true of humans as well if we were able to select on them. Have a look at this paper, for instance (click on screenshot, and if you can’t get it, make a judicious inquiry or use the legal Unpaywall app on Chrome):

From the discussion:

We have conducted a meta-analysis of virtually all twin studies published in the past 50 years, on a wide range of traits and reporting on more than 14 million twin pairs across 39 different countries. Our results provide compelling evidence that all human traits are heritable: not one trait had a weighted heritability estimate of zero.

Not one! They take into account “shared environment” causes of correlations as well. And behavioral traits are among these. The heritability of IQ, as I recall, is about 50%, so if we wanted to improve the IQ of humans, we’d just let the smartest ones breed, and lo, we’d get a fairly substantial change in a few generations.

Should we do that? Hell, no!!  Nobody wants to go back to the era of eugenics, when “feeble-minded” people were sterilized in America and all kinds of mentally disabled people (as well, of course, as non-Aryans like the Jews, who were deemed to have “bad genes”) were killed by the Nazis. But we still practice a mild form of negative eugenics today, in the form of genetic counseling and selective abortion, to prevent couples from having children with deformities or genetic disease. That’s not to improve the population’s genes but to allow couples to have healthy babies. We do no large scale eugenics, positive or negative, to improve the population, and that’s the way it should stay.

In general, no biologist that I know wants to return to the bad old days of wholesale eugenics, which involved not only killing or sterilizing people but demonizing whole groups for their genetic endowment. So I understood what Richard was trying to say.

Should Richard have issued that tweet? Again: Hell no!! Richard knows (or surely must, just as Matthew and I knew) that there are many people out there ready to misinterpret what he says and would use it to imply that Dawkins favors eugenics—that he’s a latter-day Nazi. I see that it’s already happened.

Here’s someone else who didn’t get the tweet at all:

Crikey, can’t Dr. Blommaert read?

Further, a discussion about artificial selection in our own species or others should surely be more extensive and nuanced, not conducted in the medium of Twitter where you have only a few words to say what you want.

I see that Richard has already gone his usual route of trying to explain what he meant:

So what is Richard guilty of? Unwise tweeting! He’s not a neo-Nazi, and, knowing him, I know for sure that he’s not in favor of eugenics. But he should have learned by now to stay away from Twitter, at least on issues like this one.

Now I don’t know who he was responding to in the initial tweet, but it looks as if somebody somewhere said that eugenics wouldn’t work in humans. If they said that, they’re wrong, and Richard is right. But it doesn’t look as if his tweet was responding to anybody in particular (or at least I haven’t been arsed to investigate), and so he should have kept his thoughts to himself.  But it is, I suppose, useful to emphasize that we, like all animals, contain a reservoir of genetic variation for almost all traits, and that means that we could respond to artificial selection. But that should immediately be followed, for those eager to demonize you, by the statement that of course we shouldn’t artificially select on members of our own species. What’s possible is of course not identical to what we should do.

Bad optics, my friend Richard. But those of you ready to use that first tweet to demonize the man—please lay off. He may be a hamhanded tweeter, but he’s no Nazi.

 

What’s wrong with social media

January 22, 2020 • 1:45 pm

The headline below could come from The Onion, though it’s not really that funny, even as a satire. But it’s not a satire: it’s true.  (Other sites—as well as the tabloids—give the same report.)

You can read the story, from the entertainment site Kanyi Daily, by clicking on the screenshot below.

Excerpts:

A 19-year-old aspiring model, Chloe Davison has committed suicide after she failed to get enough “likes” on her photos on social media.

The selfie-loving teen hanged herself in her bedroom at her family home in County Durham, United Kingdom.

Her 20-year-old devastated sister, Jade said Chloe struggled socially at school and rarely went out with friends, instead staying indoors and taking pictures of herself for social media.

The social media obsessed teen thought she “wasn’t good enough unless she was getting likes,” which is why she relied on Instagram and Snapchat to feel good about herself.

. . .The pretty 19-year-old was often targeted by online trolls who would send her nasty messages and mocked her appearance.

Coombs said that too many people felt they could say whatever they wanted to the attractive teen because it wasn’t face-to-face.

. . . On Friday night, Chloe’s mum and sister returned home from a bar around 11:30pm, and found the teenager hanging in her bedroom.

Chloe had been taking selfies moments before she killed herself. When she was taken down, her hair and makeup were still perfect. She was wearing a new lingerie that she had been excited to model.

Here are two more pictures of the poor woman:

EurWeb, gives quotes from Chloe’s sister Jade:

“Social media isn’t 100 per cent the cause [for her death] but it was a big part because it’s too easy for people to sit behind a phone or computer and send nasty messages with no consequences.

“I sat with Chloe many nights when she was crying because someone had said something horrible.

“Chloe didn’t see what we saw. She was so beautiful inside and out and would have done absolutely anything for me, her baby niece and the rest of her family.”

Jade said her sister struggled with social anxiety and blames social media for playing a “big part” in her death.

“It’s such a shame people feel like the only way to be happy is to feel accepted on social media because it’s all fake,” she added.

Well, there are lots of interacting causes of this tragedy, including Chloe’s anxiety, but it’s exacerbated by a social-media culture that is probably too ingrained to fix. One factor, which reflects the behavior of both men and women, is equating a woman’s worth with her looks and her sexuality. In my view, that results partly from evolution, and isn’t really something introduced by Facebook or Instagram. Social media has simply exacerbated that trend because you can show yourself to, and get ogled by, by nearly everybody in the world.

We all know people on Facebook, for instance, who post frequent updates of themselves in lingerie or skimpy clothing, apparently to draw attention. This always makes me sad, especially when the person has many other traits that are interesting or likable, and don’t really need to show skin. Blame sexual selection, but at least—or so I’d like to think—people are educable in a way that can ameliorate this trend.

Then of course there’s the obsession with “likes”. Apparently there’s something called “ratioing” on Twitter, though I haven’t quite figured out what it is. But it’s an index of how many people like your tweets (maybe it’s on Instagram or Facebook as well). But the sheer number of “likes” can be mistaken for love, as it was by Chloe. Again, I have no idea what to do about this save recommend therapy for those who fall prey to it.

And of course there’s trolling and bullying. As Chloe’s sister said, “She’d get hundreds of messages each day, mostly men asking her for sexual stuff, sometimes they were nice, but other times they told Chloe they wanted to hurt her.” This, too, is inherent in social media, with its cloak of anonymity and absence of face-to-face interaction. If everyone were required to give their real name, though I don’t know how this could be enforced, the amount of negative interactions on social media would drop drastically.

I’m no expert on this, but all of us know about the obsession with attention from strangers that’s rife on social media. I’d sound like an old get-off-my-lawn geezer were I to write any more. I just wish Chloe had found a good therapist who could tell her how to find her real worth.

And now my plane is two hours late—a mechanical problem—so I’ll read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (a terrific novel so far) and maybe prepare tomorrow’s Hili dialogue.

 

Ken Miller wants our government to embrace MORE Christian values

October 15, 2019 • 9:30 am

I cross-posted my post about Pompeo’s Christianity to Facebook, and, surprisingly, Ken Miller, a biology colleague and an observant Catholic, weighed in. Since this post is public, I don’t have any qualms about posting our exchange here:

The trick is, of course, that by “genuine Christian values,” Miller means “those Christian values that I like”. In other words, he’s embracing a form of the Euthyphro argument, because Miller’s “Christian values” are those that have nothing to do with the dictates of God or religion, but align with what he likes (and with what secular humanists espouse). Miller’s set is cherry-picked from all the Christian values, many of which aren’t so congenial but just as genuine.

I admire Ken for his work against creationism, and for the liberal social views he espouses above, but he simply doesn’t get to be the arbiter of what “genuine Christian values” are. And it’s a bit misleading to conflate humanistic “Christian values” with “Christian values per se”.

Watch that space; others may weigh in, or Ken and I might have further exchanges.

The New York Times responds to attacks on its writers by saying it’s the victim of a right-wing conspiracy to discredit the paper

August 26, 2019 • 10:30 am

Three days ago I reported about the decade-old tweets of New York Times senior staff editor Tom Wright-Piersanti, who when younger issued a spate of anti-Semitic and anti-Indian tweets that were pretty vile.  Although another Times writer had been fired for tweets just as bad, the paper also decided not to fire Sarah Jeong, a senior tech editor who also wrote a fair few bigoted tweets. (Her apology came with the excuse that she was just responding in a humorous way to the attacks she’d received as a “woman of color.”)

At any rate, I didn’t feel strongly about whether the NYT should fire Wright-Piersanti, but they certainly should let us know what they think about the issue. Now they have—twice. First, the paper’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, issued a statement, and the paper also has a long article on today’s site. Both pieces are in the screenshots below, and you can read them by clicking on the shots.

It’s sort of ironic that the response of the paper is to argue (correctly) that the attacks on Wright-Piersanti are part of a right-wing campaign by “Trump allies” to discredit the paper by finding a history of bad behavior of its writers. (This campaign is apparently orchestrated by Arthus Schwartz, a friend an “informal advisor” to Trump.) And of course it’s news to show that the Right is going after Times writers. But this isn’t Watergate: at least so far, there is no known involvement of Trump or anybody in government.  In other words, the paper is beefing that it’s being victimized by the same sort of tactics used by the Authoritarian Left to discredit its enemies, even though the paper itself is slowly joining the authoritarian Left.

The reason for the attack from the Right is presumably because the paper has been a constant annoyance to Trump and his minions.  And that’s almost certainly true, but if the discrediting of the writers is also true, then I lose some sympathy for the Times‘s beefing.  But of course a campaign to discredit the paper, conducted by people on the Right close to the President, clearly is news. It would be even more newsworthy if what the Right dug up on the Times were lies. But they apparently aren’t.

Well, read the statement and the article:

Sulzberger couches this in somewhat apocalyptic terms given that no involvement of Trump or government employees has been found. He also emits a lot of self-praise for the paper.

We published an article today revealing a coordinated campaign by President Trump’s allies to attack hundreds of journalists in retaliation for coverage of the administration. This unprecedented campaign appears designed to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with independent news organizations that have asked tough questions and brought uncomfortable truths to light.

The New York Times, which has distinguished itself with fearless and fair coverage of the president, is one of the main targets of this assault. Unable to challenge the accuracy of our reporting, political operatives have been scouring social media and other sources to find any possibly embarrassing information on anyone associated with The Times, no matter their rank, role or actual influence on our journalism. Their goal is to silence critics and undermine the public’s faith in independent journalism.

This represents an escalation of an ongoing campaign against the free press. For years the president has used terms like “fake news” and “enemy of the people” to demonize journalists and journalism. Now, the political operatives behind this campaign will argue that they are “reporting” on news organizations in the same way that news organizations report on elected officials and other public figures. They are not. They are using insinuation and exaggeration to manipulate the facts for political gain.

The statement goes on, lauding the paper and its writers for “braving this type of pressure daily to bring essential information to the public.”

Is this worthy of a statement from the editor? Who knows? It’s worth noting that the statement contains no specifics about the attack (the news piece does), and fails to mention Tom Wright-Piersanti, though the article below notes that “The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts ‘a clear violation of our standards’.”

But Sulzberger does say this, without giving specifics:

But I also want to be clear: No organization is above scrutiny, including The Times. We have high standards, own our mistakes and always strive to do better. If anyone — even those acting in bad faith — brings legitimate problems to our attention, we’ll look into them and respond appropriately. It is imperative that all of us remain thoughtful about how our words and actions reflect on The Times, particularly during this period of sustained pressure and scrutiny. We all play a part in upholding our commitment to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor.”

Fair enough. Let’s see what they do with Wright-Piersanti.

The much longer article in today’s paper:

An excerpt from the article:

WASHINGTON — A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

And apparently the campaign has hit home, for what’s below sounds like ideology (or rancor) bleeding into the news:

The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an “enemy of the people.” The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.

Journalism, he said in a tweet last week, is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.”

Well, consistent with Trump’s behavior, perhaps, but the White House denied that Trump or anyone in the White House knew about this campaign. If that’s true (and who knows?), then the two paragraphs above are not journalism, but part of a rancorous media war between the NYT and the President. And this, too, seems more like editorializing than news—and remember this is a news piece:

The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.

. . . “Two can play at this game,” he [Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Trump and friend of Schwartz] said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.

“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.

But who pretends that this campaign is “journalism”? What has happened is that the Right, stung by the paper’s coverage of Trump, has used the playbook of the Left to discredit reporters. Who cares if it’s journalism of the Times stripe? And, anyway, doesn’t the Times want to know about the history of its writers? After all, they’ve never said that such histories are irrelevant to the credibility of the writers; and they even apologized for what Sarah Jeong tweeted.

To be fair, if Trump or anyone in government is conducting a campaign against the press, I’d deem that clearly wrong, and an attempt to intimidate the free press that’s necessary in a democracy. In fact, Trump has been trying to discredit the liberal media from day one, and that’s wrong, too. But this may be an independent action of Trumpies, in which case I find it harder to criticize, especially if real information about the writers—information that’s useful to know—comes out.

I don’t have much of a dog in this fight, but I do find it ironic that the main journalistic organ of the Left is beefing about being a victim of tactics perfected by the Left: demonizing people by digging through their social-media history.

Never read Twitter comments

August 22, 2019 • 2:00 pm

The header above is sound advice for anyone who posts anything more controversial than cat pictures, and I almost never read comments under my tweets, which I usually don’t see anyway as most of them go directly to Twitter from my website.

But I made an exception for this one, which just confirmed the wisdom of the header.

I suppose the degree of incivility below is par for the course. But yet that very same day I’d tweeted TWICE about Trump’s stupidity, and yet people still say, “Go after Trump instead of getting those brown girls.” As if their being brown has anything to do with the issue, except for the benighted who feel that pigmentation is directly correlated with virtue.

“Now do Trump” says one person who doesn’t read. And of course I’m an Islamophobe, and quick to accuse those who merely criticize Israel of being anti-Semitic. (I’ve pointed out the difference many times.)

Note too the use of the word “tribe”, which is a real tell in this game. While one person defends me (“hypnotize” is the word Omar used to refer to Israel’s effect on the world), the degree of hatred of Israel—particularly by the Left—still amazes me. Why Israel rather than Syria or North Korea? You know why. And you can see the same sentiment in the comments on any article about Israel on HuffPost.

At any rate, all this does is confirm the wisdom of ignoring Twitter comments. For some reason, those comments form the epicenter of the Internet cesspool.

Oh, and no, I’m not upset at all; I’m used to this. It used to sting, but now it just makes me shake my head and utter the immortal words of the Wicked Witch of the West: “What a world. . . what a world!”