Internet Argument

I didn't want to write this entry for a couple of reasons. First, it is stupid o'clock now and I have another day of work to put in in a few short hours. Second, the things I'm about to talk about in this entry are seriously bugging me in a bad way, and I really do not like to write about bad things.

For the past few days, I made a series of mistakes. The entire series of mistakes can be reduced to this one common theme: I got involved in an Internet Argument.

An Internet Argument, for those of you who aren't that familiar with the neologism, is like the Myth of Sisyphus, in which an argument ad nauseum produces exactly zero (or even negative) results, no matter how much effort was put in to craft as good an argument as it is possible in the first place.

So I got trapped in one recently in a rather public way. Geocaching was supposed to be a relatively fun game where one went out to go find the myriad of geocaches armed with a trusty GPS receiver and a set of listings of geocaches that were hidden by other geocachers. In short, it's a game made and maintained by players for the players. I didn't get involve in any regional geocaching group till around two or three years since I first started, and since then, it has been a blast meeting up with other fellow geocachers and doing some of the tougher caches together.

New friendships were made and what-not.

I said `was' for good reason.

Ever so often, some rather... talented people take it on themselves to crown themselves as the local feudal lord equivalent of the community. Some example behavior include disregarding existing guidelines from the geocaching website, spam-bombing the entire island with low interesting-level caches, and in general, acting in a holier-than-thou-art attitude.

I was stuck in an Internet Argument with the most recent iteration.

This recent iteration basically came in on the scene, declared that geocaching in Singapore was ``not in high gear'', and proceeded to initially market themselves as the official regional representative. I didn't really care about anything other than the last bit, because I thought that it was rather deceitful.

And that was how a massive series of vitriol from this one person came about.

Needless to say, I was quite tired from that Internet Argument. I'm just angry now that we are allowing such... talented people to come in and thwack away at things that we like, with the sad part that we are powerless over it. If it is true talent, I feel less discontented.

It's the kind of weaselly snide-filled self-proclaimed elitism that annoys me the most. I don't usually wish harm on anyone, but for this entity, may the flames of eternal damnation smother ye for eternity for thy deplorable behaviour.

I was nearly involved in another Internet Argument.

Again without naming names, suffice to say, I don't think I can talk with this person any more. Said person has crossed into SJW territory---there is never a way to meaningfully respond to that.

Let me repeat myself: there is never a meaningful way to respond to a person who crosses into SJW territory.

I don't exist on ``social media'' to change people's thoughts, inspire people, or to do anything serious. I exist on ``social media'' because sometimes it is fun to discuss things, because the mundane can be incongruous at times, because using humour to poke fun at things demonstrates that we are comfortable enough with the topic at hand to not have to declare it as out of bounds for one reason or another to censor it.

Because declaring something as out of bounds doesn't really make it go away---it's just a way of pretending that it doesn't exist. Pretending that it doesn't exist doesn't really do anything except feed into a form of self-delusion.

I realised that it wasn't so much as the overly positives in other's lives that made me annoyed with ``social media'', it was the rather toxic environment from all the SJW-esque posts that were showing up. Sad to say, much of the SJW-esque posts came from a large portion of #cslounge, the nefarious echoing chamber of a self-selected group of... entities.

Excising them had been a good thing in my life. It went both ways actually---on IRC, they booted me off permanently; I cared earlier only because it was an addiction. Now that I'm away, I feel much better about myself. #cslounge and their infamous ilk scratched an itch I had a long time ago, but it's time to move on.

Everyone is so easily offended. Why should their offense stop me from talking about what I think is hilarious?

I think that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold all sides of a perspective in the head and be able to understand the merits of each side before drawing any conclusion, and that conclusions drawn must come logically from the consideration of all sides, no matter how ugly the conclusion may be. I think that was the intent behind the First Amendment made in the Bill of Rights back in the day in the US.

But I am obviously veering off on yet another tangent.

I don't think anything useful can be concluded from these observations, other than that people are easily offended, and easily offended people will be offended over the smallest of inscrutable of things, and when clear arguments are presented for one's case they will be summarily ignored or twisted out of shape just to suit the hidden agenda, ergo there's almost no need to engage with anyone who is easily offended in the context in which I use ``social media''.

Alright, it's stupid late, and I will retire to sleep.