Now I’m not one who believes in violence as a solution to problems. Generally it only makes things worse, whether we’re talking on a personal or on a global scale.
When I once suggested that a better way of conducting wars would be to have each country bomb its own areas, people looked at me as though I was insane, but it’s not only cheaper, it would be good for the climate because we’d reduce all those greenhouse gases involved in sending planes to another country. Simply, Country X who’s at war with Country Y would send a message saying that Country Y should bomb such and such an area, which Country Y would do, but in retaliation it would send a message back to Country X saying that it had to bomb an area of its own. After Country Y has bombed its own munitions factory, Country X bombs its own museum. Or whatever. Similarly, troops could vote on which of their comrades were shot by their own army after the other country asks for a number of soldiers to be shot. The public could be involved in a Big Brother type vote where they vote on which innocent civilians would need to be at the proposed site when it was bombed.
Someone told me that it was a ridiculous and insane idea, to which I replied that it made a lot more sense than all the time and effort and logistics involved in moving your defence forces all the way to another country. I mean how much did it cost the USA to move all those troops and equipment to Iraq? How much cheaper would it be if countries just agreed to bomb themselves?
Anyway, I do accept that the idea won’t be universally accepted and I do accept that most of my brilliant ideas are misunderstood… I guess I’m like the early years of the Abbott government where they told us that it wasn’t their policies that were making them unpopular, it was the fact that they weren’t communicating them well enough for the stupid public to understand how good they were!
Like when I suggest that the trouble with social media is that nobody gets punched in the face.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I like violence.
To explain what I mean, let’s consider the football. If I’m at the MCG, I can scream at the opposition ruckman a variety of insults and, even if he hears them and gets offended, he’s not likely to work out where they’re coming from, much less jump the fence and grab me by the collar for insulting his parentage. On the other hand, if I see him later that night at the pub, I’m unlikely to go up and say the same thing to him. Even if I was silly enough to do so, I would get the sense that I’d made a big mistake when he towered over me and asked me to repeat myself.
On social media, however, there are few consequences for abuse, particularly if one isn’t using one’s real name…
I was rather amused by some calling themselves “Stable Genius” who complained that someone else was a coward because they’d turned off comments on their post… mainly because all the Stable Geniuses were writing misogynist insults. I considered pointing out that it was easy to be brave when using a pseudonym but I was worried that they’d write back that they weren’t – they were using their iPhone…
Anyway, in real life, most people – even stable geniuses – get concerned when they see that someone is getting angry. It doesn’t always mean that they back off, but generally, people work out that there’s no point in continuing to argue if you’re no longer listening to each other or if someone looks like they’re going to turn nasty. On social media there seem to be large numbers of people who actively try to upset people.
While this isn’t confined to RWNJs, I did have trouble with a post from someone who argued that Albanese and Labor were pursuing the Marxist agenda of taking money from the middle classes and giving it to the rich the way Marxists do… I mean, was the person really that lacking in understanding of Marxism or was he just trying to upset Labor voters… Without going into the whole history of political thought, I would just suggest that they’d be very few Marxists in the current Federal government, and there’d be even less Marxists who’d be voting for Labor at the moment.
Whatever, it does strike me as strange the many of the people who referred to Twitter (sorry X) as a sewer were often guilty of the sort of abuse that they were calling out. “It’s not safe for us on this platform because of the vitriol coming from those feral, layabout dole-bludging greenie socialist inbred scum who haven’t worked a day in their lives!”
Like I said, I don’t condone violence. However when I first heard the German word, “backpfeifengesicht” meaning a face that needs to be slapped, the face of several politicians and commentators came to mind.
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