People are strange...

[BobProbst]

Germaine:

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/11/dont-flame-me-bro.html

FTFA:

"Recently there has been a sharp increase in the amount of abusive language on the New Scientist website. No, it's not because our writers have become degenerates, it's because we rolled out a new commenting facility on all articles, giving people the chance to share their thoughts and opinions across the site.

I am particularly conscious of this trend because, as the moderator, I keep an eye on all comments and have to remove any that break our House Rules. This means I read a lot of comments (826 last week) and while most of them are perfectly polite, there's a stubborn minority that are rude, intentionally provocative, or just plain abusive. It seems people will say things online that they would never say face-to-face."

 

[BobProbst]

Hmm . . . seems to be spreading:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/11/off-topic-please-excuse-my-reddened.html

Is it the apocalypse?

 

[Grimhelm]

I think the anger and destructive tendencies of our fellow men is indicative of very tangible societal breakdowns. I do not think that it defines the whole, but I think the problems are only going to grow worse if certain aspects of our "civil"-ization are not addressed.

 

[BobProbst]

Clearly ethnic cleansing is the only rational response.

 

[Grimhelm]

The problem with ethnic cleansing is that all the good cleaners are themselves ethnic.

 

[BobProbst]

T. I was trying to think of this a few weeks back and just ran across another story about it: http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php?n=Main.HomePage

"The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale."

 

[Fyrestryke]

Maybe Ron White was wrong. Maybe you can fix stupid. Or...at least filter it out.