A foray into reflections on the "blogosphere"? What?

I've been having problems with blogs lately. Some of the fuss over at Tenured Radical gets repeated The Combat Philosopher (who, by the way, has an interesting post about some environmentally despicable things happening - among a host of other despicable things, of course - in New Orleans).

This all seems uncomfortably similar to what happened in Wesleying's post - itself mainly a link to a Wesleyan Argus article - about an incident involving the Middletown Police violently attacking a student of color outside of a party. The comments section was flooded with idiocy from people all too willing to use the internet as a way to shed their humanity and somehow argue that justice has been served with the attacking and pepperspraying of a student who they don't like.

Assholes.

(It makes me glad that my blog isn't heavily trafficked - not that my daydreamy self-indulgence is particularly inviting to inflammatory remarks. Though I have a livejournal that got some idiocy visited upon it by people who chose not to identify themselves - apparently, criticizing racism in the classroom is not good, oh, and something about how liberals are dumb, too. right)

I recently sent an email to The Gothamist, pointing out that while they're a convenient news source, their overall quality goes down as soon as somebody clicks on "Comments" and is exposed to a veritable bevy of racist and sexist remarks, particularly any time Al Sharpton is mentioned, and frequently when he isn't.

Remember when about a month ago, the New York Times broke the news about how people use the anonymity of the internet to act in ways that they probably wouldn't 'IRL'?

It makes me wonder if, as more and more of people's communication and interaction takes place through the internet (as it has for a chunk of people in this world), people just become worse human beings.

Today, it was rainy, and people bumped me in the face with their umbrellas, but I wrote poetry and picked up an Italo Calvino book. Kurt Vonnegut died recently. There - I waxed blogoriphic, as I am wont to do, so as to keep this post consistent with my others.