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Wherein I ramble about books, movies,
music, TV shows, my life, and occasionally, hot emo boys.
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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Anonymosity
Today, you lucky bastards, you get a free rant.
There's an online epidemic where people feel free to trash talk all over the place. I call it anonymosity. In real life, if you get in someone's face, you might well get your ass kicked. Or worse. Lacking the stones for a true confrontation, there's a breed of cyber warrior who will talk shit and then refuse to sign his / her name to it. Or even whatever online handle he goes by. Talk about cowardice.
I'm not going to repost the comments but you can look on Pub Rants yourself if you want. Toward the bottom, we get a bunch of jerkoffs going to town anonymously. I know this has been discussed before on various blogs, but I feel like saying it again. I don't care how full of shit I think you are, I will respect your right to state your opinion as long as you have the courage to sign your name (or handle) to it. Because then people can hold you to what you've said. I don't believe in lack of accountability. If you play according to this program, you have no need to be consistent, no need to be logical. Because you're anonymous, nobody can compare what you said today with what you said yesterday. I don't get this phenomenon.
What's it about? What's the point?
They hate the people that post on Pub Rants? See them as drooling sycophants? Okay, fine. But what's the point of getting on the blog and vomiting up all that hate? The cult of anonymosity is growing, folks. Please don't join. If you want to hate somebody, have the guts to own up to it.
There's an online epidemic where people feel free to trash talk all over the place. I call it anonymosity. In real life, if you get in someone's face, you might well get your ass kicked. Or worse. Lacking the stones for a true confrontation, there's a breed of cyber warrior who will talk shit and then refuse to sign his / her name to it. Or even whatever online handle he goes by. Talk about cowardice.
I'm not going to repost the comments but you can look on Pub Rants yourself if you want. Toward the bottom, we get a bunch of jerkoffs going to town anonymously. I know this has been discussed before on various blogs, but I feel like saying it again. I don't care how full of shit I think you are, I will respect your right to state your opinion as long as you have the courage to sign your name (or handle) to it. Because then people can hold you to what you've said. I don't believe in lack of accountability. If you play according to this program, you have no need to be consistent, no need to be logical. Because you're anonymous, nobody can compare what you said today with what you said yesterday. I don't get this phenomenon.
What's it about? What's the point?
They hate the people that post on Pub Rants? See them as drooling sycophants? Okay, fine. But what's the point of getting on the blog and vomiting up all that hate? The cult of anonymosity is growing, folks. Please don't join. If you want to hate somebody, have the guts to own up to it.
Labels: rant
Specifically, though, I was referring to going to somebody's blog (that you don't know IRL) and talking a bunch of shit that you refuse to back up by leaving a way for it to come back on you. I know people use handles on the Internet and that's a good idea, but if you don't even do that, then you have little to no credibility because you can say one thing today and sing another tune tomorrow. How can we take that seriously?
I couldn't agree more, Annie. If you're unwilling to put a name to what you've said, it is definitely something that should have been left unsaid.
In addition, the main beef seemed to be with ass-kissers. Okay, I'll admit, there's been a time or two I've seen comments that come across as 'kissier' than I'd ever be, but so what? At best, all it does is give agent K's ego a bit of a stroke. It ain't gonna make your submission beam out of her computer bathed in golden light.
I was thinking that myself, almost verbatim. If you can't put your name to it, then there must be shame to it.
That's what anonymous is all about - people feel safe to say what they like, thinking it will never come back to haunt them. Oh, but Karma has many mysterious ways of coming back to bite someone in the ass...
In the case of this agent - I'm not familiar with Pub Rants, although I've now bookmarked it - I don't think she has anything to worry about. The whole things smacks of fan club members coming to bash against their rival team. You see the same kind of crap pop up on writer's sites all the time. If I were the agent, I'd change my blog settings to block anonymous comments, and start hitting the delete button on some faceless comments.
Might be a buncha "punks" from some other agents blog. *laughs* It's like "tp-ing" a rival's house. That's pretty funny, thinking about it that way. Is the next step Texas cage matches to decide who gets the client? "My agent can beat up your agent?"