People on the Internet

People on the Internet are assholes.

I pride myself in the fact that I don’t let much get to me. You don’t like me, fine. Your loss. I don’t think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I bring enough to the table to at least get a seat if you catch my drift. If you are playing against me in hockey, soccer, jai-alai, synchronized swimming, whatever and you are mean to me, why would I care. I have my share of people I don’t like, some for valid, some for very invalid reasons.

Like all blogposts this raises a big “so-what?” In general people can attack me for a myriad of reasons and it will roll off my back, if you attack my intelligence that is a completely different matter. If you call me a moron on a website message board you will definitely raise my ire.

Global-warming, global climate change, or whatever they are calling it this week is something that is controversial whenever it is raised in threads on the internet. My personal thoughts on the matter are not particularly germane to the following discussion, but I will share them anyway. I think that man has, and will continue to impact the world at large, including the climate/weather, etc. However, I also think that man is but a cog in a complicated Rube Goldberg machine. How much that cog turns the machine is still undefined.

I made what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement, that scientists have often been wrong in the past, what’s to say that they are right this time, or something along those lines. If you had to look at that statement and pick out what would be the big spoon that stirs the shit, what would it be? Wrong, the thing that made me a moron was that I said that scientists have often been wrong in the past. Apparently that’s not true.

I gave a few examples, some of which were good, and some of which were admittedly kind of weak. I found one that I thought was a slam dunk. There was a scientist in the 1800’s what stated as a fact (not as a theory, but as one of the building blocks of one of his theories) that the atom is the smallest particle of matter. That means he was wrong, right? Apparently not. He wasn’t wrong, he was uninformed, or his study was incomplete. I tried to point out that this is catch-all that basically means that scientists will never be wrong. I brought up the example that Thalomide was approved for use and was later determined to cause birth defects. However the scientists weren’t wrong, they just extrapolated the data incorrectly.

I was also strung up on the word often. Maybe it was a poor choice of words, but I stand by it, if for no other reason if those in a debate can move the goal posts to fit their argument, so can I. Often, in and of itself, is not defined, and can basically be used as one sees fit once a sample size crests three instances. One of these douche-bags asked if I would say that the Jets often win the Super-Bowl. The obvious answer is no. However I countered with would you say that Brett Favre often throws interceptions? The answer there would probably be yes. Surprise they are close to the same percentage of occurrences. The definition of often, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Another great point was that I was uninformed on all climate based things because I used things like Time, Newsweek, etc. as sources of information. By that definition, 99.9%+ of all people that have even heard of global warming are “uninformed.” I was actually agreeing (partially) with this douche-bag, but he thought I wasn’t, so I was uninformed. When I pointed out that the % of people that are, by his definition, “informed” is statistically insignificant he said I didn’t understand statistics. I then showed him how the “informed” group represented less than 1/100 of a percent, which is statistically insignificant. He didn’t care whether people were informed or not, unless they disagreed with him. People on his side didn’t need to be knowledgeable, only those who disagreed with him.

The beauty of the internet is that it is anonymous, the draw-back is the same. You can be an asshole with absolutely no worry of consequence. The internet is full of assholes. I should know, I’m an asshole and I’m on the internet.