Friday
February 4, 2000
Revealing
The Internet revolution has shortened distances and allowed expressing
opinions by most anyone including the ignorant ones. With a keyboard, hiding
behind their computers and their anonymous name and bogus aliases, they
spew the venom of their ignorance and inadequacies in ways that they would
not dare do in person, and if they did, it would only be in the safety
of gangs of thugs like those who have infected and polluted streets of
Iran for so many years, those whose weapon for imposing their views is
not reason, but clubs and robotic slogans and threats.
This Internet revolution has helped shorten some people's fuses and
given them a way to shoot their mouths off quickly, without putting too
much rational thinking behind their rapid firebacks, with seeming impunity.
Some have been conditioned in typically low quality chatrooms and newsgroups,
which collectively have the cognitive value of a broomstick. In those
newsgroups and chatrooms the prevailing mindset seems to be how much you
can type without waking up your brain, how loud you can yell to compensate
for the lack of substance behind your say, and to what ridiculous extents
you can take arguments that go on ad-infinitum.
From time to time you can see the same mindset creeping into Iranian.com.
You can see it in how people react to articles, how they feel entitled
to debasing and insulting authors of those articles or the publisher of
the magazine and whole groups of people of a belief system in the process.
Their protestations amount to something to the effect of "I didn't
agree with your viewpoint therefore your mother is a whore" or "I
didn't like the article that you published, therefore you're a sag
Bahai."
Some, who are actually more civilized (though not anymore convincing)
than the previous group, cancel their subscription because the magazine
"reported" (not "selected", but "reported")
the results of a survey. "I cancel my subscription because people
elected someone other than whom I liked as the man of the century."
Hmmm.
I do hope that the people who canceled their subscription to this magazine
because it reported the selection of a "communist like Mossadegh"
would do the same for the Time magazine as well for it has selected
(not "reported" but actually "selected") quite a few
real communists and fascists such as Hitler (1938), Stalin (1939 and 1942),
as well as some neat people like Lindbergh (1927) and Gandhi (1930). Oh,
incidentally, it also selected Mossadegh for 1939, not to mention Ayatollah
Khomeini in 1979. I do hope that these people also stand up to every magazine,
TV station and movie studio that overtly and covertly spews hate and vilification
against other nationalities including Iranians.
Maybe it's not so bad that this Internet revolution has happened. It
exposes the ignorant ones in their full cyber-glory.
Hamid Taghavi
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