Brummett Decries Harsh Words From Bloggers

"With great power comes great responsibility"

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"Not all anonymous posters on blogs are creepy, cowardly, bitter, mean, vile, crude and consumed by ignorance, intolerance and hate. It's just that the very nature of this free-speech forum seems to lend itself to persons tending toward some or all of that." writes Brummett in his latest.

I tell you I want to write about other things, such as the recent spate of school-takeovers and near-take-overs by the State Board of Education. The Decatur case is one. The educrats have gotten laws passed where every newly elected school board member is required to attend their "training" before they can assume office. My reports are that the "training" largely consists of telling them to shut up and let the superintendents run the schools in a PC manner, and pounding in their head what terrible consequences can flow from giving their administration professionals a hard time. Then, when administrators blow it and loose control of the finances, who does the state hold accountable but the very same local school board they bludgeoned into kow-towing to their administrators!

That is the kind of stuff I want to write about, but Brummett keeps pulling me back like some anti-logic magnet of darkness. I'd like to talk about how we can get the trains to run on time, but the spectacle of the train wreck that is Brummett's writing draws my gaze instead.

I stare open mouthed at reading him complain of the "creepy, cowardly, bitter, mean, vile, crude and consumed by ignorance, intolerance and hate" of other's writing. It's like the pot calling the snow-bank black! Brummett seems to have a problem with people other than him acting this way, and his problem seems to center on the fact that many bloggers use anonymity to avoid blowback for their attacks.

"A blog is an online site available by a mere click of the mouse to people with nothing better to do than sit around all day and read it and post anonymously, and publicly, in response to items on it.

These posters make up pen names. They write the most despicable and bogus things about named people. Then they hit the send button and, cloaked from liability for their words, commence re-picking their noses." he writes.

While I am not defending bogus attacks, I do want to point out that there is more than one way to be cowardly when writing "fighting words" about others. One way is to use anonymity, as in vandalizing someones car when they are not there to confront you for it. Another way though, is a bully picking a fight with someone where the bully knows their firepower is so greatly disproportionate to the targets that the victims simply can't protect themselves from the bully's attacks, and have no way of launching an attack that could seriously harm the bully.

Such is the case for an editorialist who has a paper read by 100,000 readers. They can savage people with near-immunity from harm. Their victims have a pea-shooter, they have an RPG. Because of their firepower and the credibility of the platform they launch these attacks from, the amount of harm they can do from even one misleading disparaging column is greater than an anonymous blog poster can do in a decade. With great power comes great responsibility. It is one thing to abuse that power, but then to use it to heap scorn on others for doing the same thing on a tiny scale, who have not sown a tithe of the bitter seed he has sown, is unconscionable.

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