Namsog ran wild on The Standard yesterday;
Shame on you if you were dumb enough to encourage him.
Shame on you if you were dumb enough to encourage him.
Yesterday a thread on this site, entitled Venezuela Coup, was hijacked by a hyperactive right wing zealot who contributed more than one third of the 251 comments. That happens sometimes, of course: trolls—witless, unlettered trolls like the one creating such havoc yesterday—are a fact of life on the Internet.
Many people were appalled by the troll and vigorously refuted his nonsense. As one would expect, a few people—notably a former Cabinet minister notorious for his bumbling and his collusion with military coverups—supported the troll’s mad behaviour. But what I, and no doubt many others, found dispiriting was the alacrity with which the troll’s wild rhetoric and straight out lies were endorsed and amplified by a small number of self-described “liberals” and “leftists.” They sided explicitly with the troll, and by the end of the day they were abusing anyone who disagreed with them as “moonbats”, quoting (with approval) discredited liars such as the utterly repugnant British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and absurdly insisting that the elected President of Venezuela was a “stalinist.”
This ridiculous spectacle, of “liberals” first indulging and then parroting wholesale a nasty right wing troll, has been seen before…..
