The virus

from the wikipedia page for virus

There are names I could write here of people you’re probably heard of who are professional trolls.  They say things which are designed to offend and provoke and irritate and outrage.  Then those things (and the person’s name) are spread by people outraged and irritated and provoked and offended.

The Twitter-era disease of spreading bad stuff in order to roast/be outraged by it.  It’s like a virus that spreads every time you complain you are sick.

This is not really a profound or insightful observation.  But every day I see smart people who I like filling my Twitter timeline or my Internet with sickness and poison in their effort to combat sickness and poison.

Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.  (Feels like even discussing this could form part of the problem).  The President himself is one of these characters, which makes this problem almost too baffling to contemplate.

There are many lesser demons however where I don’t understand why I’m constantly being exposed to their bad takes, even if it’s in the context of making fun of them or “destroying” them.

It seems like an Internet specific problem.  I don’t feel like people used to seek out unusually dumb editorials just to light them up.  Maybe they did.  Harder, though.  The free instant worldwide publishing era was bound to have diseases as well as benefits.

Cable news is a whole other category of this, one big sewer of this disease, far as I can tell.

An unhealthy sitch!  I don’t know what the solution is, except some self-discipline to ignore and keep moving.