Blog Comments & Email Mean NOTHING

While Glenn Greenwald is sometimes a little verbose for my tastes, he makes excellent arguments and the Logic Ref rarely feels the need to call foul on him. Today he makes an excellent point regarding the attempt to use blog comments (and sometimes hate emails) to prove something about what your political opponents think. In this case, the comments in question are related to the recent suicide-bombing in Afghanistan, and some people commenting that they wish Cheney had been killed or some other nonsense.

The usual suspects, shocked by such anti-american, hateful sentiments, broadcast them to the world as evidence that liberals are angry, venomous, and hate the USA. Sigh.

What these comments (and others you will find on conservative blogs, and on message boards whose subject matter ranges from horticulture to football) mean is that the internet is full of trolls. Nothing more. The internet is a relatively anonymous communication medium, and this has the effect of encouraging people to spew out things they would never express in person. This effect was the subject of a recent New York Times article.

Furthermore, it's just silly to collect the most ill-considered and offensive comments or emails you can find and use them to conclude that 'liberals,' a group that includes tens of millions of people in this country alone, are blinded by partisan hate. It's silly to use any small sample of a given group to make conclusions about the whole group. How would Malkin or the NRO people react if I were to conclude, based on Abu Ghraib, that all American soldiers are sadistic, sexually deviant torturers? 'Nuff said

Similarly, the fact that someone recieves hate email does not say anything about their political opposition; anyone with a modicum of fame (and certainly any blogger, or someone who's reputation comes from their work online, and who's email address is published) gets hate mail like the rest of us get spam. Michelle Malkin is particularly annoying in this regard as she constantly uses racist hate mail she recieves to malign liberals.

Say it with me now: the internet is full of trolls. The fact that one of them said something mean and nasty to you means exactly squat.


UPDATE:

Opponents of the administration's war efforts should realize that it would have been a very BAD thing if Cheney had been killed. Do we really want more nationalistic militarism stirred up by the assasination of our #2 by a suicide bomber?