Salocin

How politics brings out the worse in people

A weblog that I found quite by accident posted a two-line comment referring to a cartoon on Salon and ended up in pole position in a Google search for Why do you hate America so much?. Scary people then surfaced and commented!

The weblog in question is called Snappy the Clam, and all that was posted was a link to a funny Salon cartoon that makes a point about people's reactions to the debate on attacking Iraq.

Of course it's a cartoon, and so it's a caricature of reality, but the point being made is that whenever the current policy being followed in the US is questioned, the response is "Why do you hate America so much?". The implication is clearly that people who question the rigor, logic and/or wisdom of the administration's current actions get labelled as unpatriotic, and the cartoon indicates that it thinks this is not a good thing. The last slide of the cartoon is Benjamin Franklin and his famous comment that, "They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety", a point quite a few groups in the US are arguing at the moment.

But that's all irrelevant, because the comments on the board are all about whether France or the US is the more hateful nation. The comments are written in the most amazingly aggressive tone, and are all more or less off-topic given the nature of the original posting on the weblog. Reading through those posts, regardless of which side of the argument they are on, is quite an unsettling experience, since there's the most incredible lack of balance in what almost everyone on there is saying! Extremists have found a temporary home on the internet!