Netiquette and Chelsea Clinton

Comment on WashingtonPost forum discussing Netiquette on WaPo forums--specifically, the vicious slanders posted as comments on an article about Chelsea Clinton: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/dot.comments/ 2008/04/chelsea.html

You don't necessarily have to screen postings beforehand, and I hope you don't ban noms de Web. But you should certainly blip outright slander and vicious diatribes of the sort I see here all too often. I keep wanting to say to such posters "You kiss your momma with that mouth?"

And as some other posters have hinted, I've seen some unhinged sorts simply flood a thread with one long posting after another, none even relevant to the site's topic.

I remember on a NYTimes forum (since closed) one far-left poster started cutting and pasting the lyrics to some political song over and over and over after someone criticized her for spamming the forum. It got downright bizarre.

And another guy kept posting the name, address, license plate number and phone number of some woman he had it in for, and did so in one forum after another, over and over. The guy was obviously a psycho. You'd have to be nuts NOT to deny nutcases like this a forum for their obsessions, up to and including blocking them.

My wife's on a forum for people with a certain medical condition, and one poster got banned for constantly posting pitches for an herbal "cure" she was selling.

This is the WaPo's website, and the WaPo has every right to require more or less civil discourse on it. If anybody doesn't like it they're free to set up their own Website, aren't they?

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As for Chelsea Clinton--I'm kind of dumbfounded by the vileness of some posters' messages. I've concluded that some people have become addicted to hate. It's a kind of high for them to send out this stuff. It's what a shrink would call "negative intimacy." Such people are terrified of normal human relationships because there you have to make yourself vulnerable to another person. They're too scared to risk that, but they want relationships, as do we all. So by hating with a blind fury they get a sense of relationship that risks nothing. Of course it's unsatisfactory, but it beats nothing in their minds.

These people go through life dealing out distress to everyone they touch. They're both pitable and dangerous. Most would probably do everyone a favor by going for a Darwin Award.

Chelsea Clinton herself probably has gotten a leg up by being a Clinton. But her command of intricate policy issues and rapidly growing aplomb in public forums are undeniable--this lady is really intelligent.

And I'm not saying this because I favor her mother. I don't, actually.

But even though I despise Bush the 2nd, I'm impressed by the career path his daughter Jenna is taking. She's obviously a good, genuine person, and her life reflects well on her parents, despite Bush II being one of the worst presidents in American history.

Amazing that ideologues (left AND right) become so flooded with hate that they can't give the devil his due. Or accord earned respect to the daughter of someone they dislike.

Hate junkies...