Taking it personally

Righteousness does not mean self-righteousness. A blog from the New York Times.

The article doesn't really concern me, it's the comments underneath. The vituperative nature of nearly every blog is troublesome. It's not just that people have the ability to carelessly insult others on the internet, it's that people reading these comments take them personally. A dialog is basically impossible on this "democratic" forum, because everyone just trenches in to their position, baffled and infuriated by how wrong every one else's view (but their own) is. They are all, more or less, saying the same things, over and over again, just directed at the opposite side.

Now, don't get me wrong, dialog is not always the most effective solution to a problem (like, for instance, the failure of dialog) nor is it always necessary, but arenas as this, where the worst of each country is displayed, just pushes us all further and further into nationalism, the type that could easily destroy the progress the world community has made as community since the end of World War II.

The most ridiculous thing is that basically everybody's point is stupid. I don't have the time or space (I guess I do have the space) to refute all of this, but basically, the Americans are all openly harping a country they still think of as being the U.S.S.R., and the Chinese people are all defending their country and pretending like nothing's wrong with it. Some Americans take the reverse position, of course, and are even more cynical than the Chinese, but this is even worse. There are points to be made on both sides, and nobody makes them at all, and when they're (rarely) made, people respond to other mistaken posts in a way that shows they often didn't understand the post in the first place!

The other thing that frustrates me is that everyone acts like blog comments are representative of the general population, and that each post were being written by the collected will of the american/chinese people.

Ha. I guess I'm guilty of that too.

Well, for those of us who are willing to listen and dialog but still rebuke, China has an authoritarian government. The United States has a lot of idiots.