What the internet brings us.

It brings people the ability to sit in a room somewhere, attached to their computer like it was a morphine drip and spend innumerable hours hurling invectives back and forth at one and other. The surprising thing is we don’t hear of people being shot, maimed or murdered on a daily basis because of something that sprung from an argument conducted on a message board.

Someone was recently telling me a story about a woman who had her own website and was so taken aback by the comments threatening violence to herself and her family she shut the site down and contacted the police who (rightfully so) took the matter quite seriously. At the other end of the spectrum is the current War of the Words raging between Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison (and their various acolytes) over at the Beat.

There is that clichéd image of how nasty and gossipy teen age girls can be but in this case it seems like there is a lot of testosterone in the thread basically with much the same result. This is one of those moments I am so very glad not to have an interest in the winner.