Newsstand: February 9, 2010
Duly Quoted: Adam Giambrone
Bob Kinnear isn't Greg Kinnear
Newsstand: February 8, 2010
Scale Model City, Actual-Size Grime
It's not just you, Random Internet Guy.
Commenters at the sites of the CBC, Star, Post, Globe, Sun, and CP24 all engaged in frantic debate about the possible resolution of the Toronto city workers' strike. By "frantic debate," we of course mean "endless name-calling, mostly anti-union."
To be fair, there was a small and devoted minority of CUPE supporters, some of whom were involved in a devoted round of nose-thumbing at their ideological foes. They were, however, outnumbered at least twenty-to-one by the howling monkey brigade that populates the comment section of Toronto's news media sites, who all apparently remember Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 like it was yesterday and cannot understand why David Miller wouldn't do such a thing. (Answer: it would have been completely illegal.)
The comments helped balance out mainstream media coverage that was depressingly even-handed and not insane, which was disappointing after a month of pretty much everybody in the city treating a relatively short garbage strike like it was the Bataan Death March. (Something that the rest of the country has not missed and that, combined with the infamous "Toronto has to call in the Army to deal with snow" incident, has sealed our national reputation as a city of wimps.) After two weeks, Torontoist started looking under the bed regularly for the plague of flesh-eating death rats that were supposed to arrive in the city in waves, tempted by our tasty, tasty garbage. But there were no death rats. Except possibly on the internet.
Because on the internet, not only are there death rats, but... well. There are commenters.
He's Going to Escape to the Capitalist Paradise of Kenora!
I Guess "Tact" Wasn't Something They Covered at the Union Meetings
Some People Still Haven't Had Enough Time to Get Over the Tamil Protests, I Guess
I Am Of Course Speaking to You, Internet Garbageman
It's Not Easy Summarizing Proust for a Living, You Know
Nothing Could Go Wrong with Outsourcing Policing to a For-Profit Company!
PAYBACK HAS SPOKEN
Yeah, You Unions, If It Weren't for You We'd Have All Those Jobs That Went to China! Being Paid As Much As They Make in China! With All the Labour Protection That They Get in China! Wait, What?
Because Being a Cop Is Just Like Being a Security Guard
I Bet a Long, Rambling, Vaguely Drunken Rant from a Union Member Is Exactly What Will Convince People of the Validity of Your Cause
Now That's What I Call Smoove, Baby
Because That Sure Worked Out Well for the NHL
Proof That There Are In Fact People Who Read Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg and Who Took It Seriously
These Spoiled Brats with Their "Sick Days" and "Wage Increases" and "Not Being Whipped!" Well When I Was Working As a Garbageman They Started Every Day Off with a Good Whipping to Wake You Up! It Was Better Than a Cup of Coffee
Like Our Heroic Troops, Buddy
"John Tory. He Couldn't Beat Dalton McGuinty in an Election, but He Can Run Toronto!"
...And Then the Bavarian Illuminati Reap the Rewards! You Can Read About It at My Website!
Huh, I Didn't Know e.e. cummings Read the Sun
But I Guess It's Not Too Surprising That a Ron-Paul-Style Gold Bug Reads the Globe
...Well, Yes, Actually, You Do Need To Say More
Hey, Remember When Mel Lastman Said He Didn't Know What the World Health Organization Was? Or When He Made Cannibalism Jokes About Kenya? Good Times
I'm Sure in More Than a Century of Labour Law Nobody Has Ever Thought of This!
I Would Totally Handle Bags of Shit for a Living If You Paid Me Two Dollars More Per Hour
Get It? It's Like What They Do Except the Opposite! I Kill Me
Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?
But That Would Totally Disincentivize You from Making Any Income at All! It's Like There's Some Sort of Curve That Would Describe This or Something
The Endless Whining About Garbage Was Merely a Figment of Our Collective Imagination
I'm Pretty Sure They Would Have Mentioned That If It Were in the Agreement
I Read It in Das Kapital
And We Finish with a Sad Truth
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Ah, this post reminds me of one of my favourite Something Awful features. Only sadder, somehow. :P
I wrote a grease monkey script to kill comments at the Star and the Post. Clearly, I missed a few news sources. The comment sections of news are hilarious. I guess rabid racists and ignorant people need a place to hang out too.
Dude! That's awesome, I've been threatening to do that for ages... thanks for saving me the trouble!
So is SP1 also going to shut up Torontoist commenters? :>
I had plans to add Torontoist and BlogTO. Except, as you can see, I sometimes comment on both sites. Damn it.
There is a Greasemonkey script that blocks the commenters of your choosing on Torontoist, though I don't think it works with the new, threaded commenting system.
I guess rabid racists and ignorant people need a place to hang out too.
They do, but sometimes most of the time 4chan is getting DDoS'd so bad that the trolls spill over to every comment section and forum they can browse to...
Brilliant article
Yeah, that coming from you is like Mark Ferguson not admitting he set the deadline because the city was going to get more paramedics on the job. Hypocritical and misleading.
I'm being sincere!
This is why I love you guyeses.
To be fair, you should have added some from this very site...
From the Who Watches the Watchmen Garbage post:
Gauldar
This doesn't mean that we're going to see sanitation workers now flying around Toronto in giant blue penises does it?
Fucking brilliant!
I spend an inordinate amount of time talking about these 'howling monkeys'.
- internet garbageman
The comments on the Toronto Star website are like a daily trainwreck to me: they depress, sadden and anger me but I can't stop looking. I often have trouble reconciling all the bitter, uninformed, racist, xenophobic and hate-filled comments I see on Toronto news sites with the many progressive, intelligent and positive people I know personally in this city.
I tell myself that it's just an angry minority that posts a lot, but sometimes I worry that those forums are serving as a fermenting ground for negativity that may spill out into the real world. I'm all for intelligent discussion with varying points of view, but these comments are often entirely divorced from any facts or logic.
Thanks for posting this... I think.
I feel the same way. Can there really be such people in this city? Sad.
I avoid reading The Star now just because I don't want to be tempted to read the comments.
"Can there really be such people in this city?"
I've noticed that many commenters on Toronto news sites are from Alberta, or some other rural hellhole. They just want to make sure we know that they hate Toronto and disagree with us on everything.
Uh, just because I'm from Alberta, I have to point out that Alberta is not a "rural hellhole". It is, in fact, the second most urbanized province in the country. True, most of those city-dwellers live in suburban style communities outside the downtown, but then, so do most Torontonians.
Anyway, yes, this article was great. The degree of vitriolic dumbassery written about the strike really does make me wonder if we need a little more moderating online. You'd like to think that ignorant, ludicrously ill-informed people would hang themselves with their own ridiculous screeds, but in the case of the "fire them all and let the private sector sort them out" brigade, we just heard an echo chamber of reinforced ignorance.
Howling monkey brigade ineeed.
Well said, sir! Th only comfort I have is that there are safe havens (such as this site); bastions of reason which are protected from the screaming masses of ignorance and irrational anger.
In other words, thank god for blogs.
In a variety of instances I've noticed a common contemporary sentiment: 'democracy is fine - just not too much!' We all like democracy - so much so that 'democracy' is equated with the Good or Truth. Indeed, many so-called democratic states seek to impose democracy onto other states (often violently...e.g. Iraq). Yet, once there is a high-degree of equality in place that looks something like a democracy, it is often lamented. I think this 'problem' with comments on the Internet expresses this 'problem' with democracy really well.
Years ago the 'net promised to resolve the problem of only hearing from a bunch of 'talking-heads' and all decisions being made by 'experts.' The 'net promised we would all have our say, that we could all participate in discussions and hear the 'true' public opinion on various important matters. And now that we do hear from 'everyone,' we end up with garbled opinions that are often misinformed and implicated in extreme ideologies (usually some form of fascism). Most commonly, the 'comments' state something as an obvious truth but upon a micro-second of reflection are actually completely off-base (e.g. 'just fire all the workers').Probably just as common is the coping strategy of so-called 'ironic' detachment.
I think the conundrum is that we want to maintain democracy and yet counter this type of democracy-in-action (i.e. idiocy) we all see in various 'comment sections' of on-line newspapers. I don't know how this could be done, but I fear if we don't we will end up with one of two things: either the idiotic commenters will take over, or we will lose democracy to the 'experts' who 'know better.' This is an ancient problem (see Plato's Republic) so I don't imagine there will be any quick solutions. If anyone is interested in a contemporary and fairly easy-to-read theorization of this problem, I highly recommend Ranciere's book Hatred of Democracy.
Though I don't expect everybody to be masters of the language arts, the one thing that I am constantly reminded of when reading comments on the internet is how we graduate people from highschool, college, and university who are only semi-literate in their written native language.
I propose that every school in Ontario have a sign, placed as Catholic schools do with religious figures, at the front of every classroom that reads:
YOUR = BELONGING TO YOU
YOU'RE = YOU ARE
Forget it, Marc. You're asking for too much. We must carry the grammar torch alone in our solitary paths.
While that annoys and saddens me to no end, I'm really curious as to why so many people in the last few years have started adding apostrophes to plurals, effectively turning them into possessives.
Sometimes I meet people whose heads (and faith in humanity) are on the verge of explosion because of reading comments. I, Internet veteran and survivor, lay soft hand on heaving shoulder and tell them sagely, stop reading the comments. No, no, don't interrupt and tell me weakly that they're funny "in a depressing way" - they're making you crazy. Don't insist that engaging those monkey swine is actually "entertainment" - it's not. Don't dive into the fray, crying for sanity, reason, and logic - when you emerge on the losing end (and you will) you'll find yourself succumbing to the base instincts of a troll, lost souls who witnessed the final frontier of commenter stupidity, who saw too much to return, who subsequently make their homes in the dung of the Internet. By all means, read the original post. Take it in like a lakeside view. Share your impressions with your chosen patio people, feline, and/or member of the customer service industry. But resist the impulse to wade into that blank text field. Ignore her siren song demanding that you submit, submit! And tear your eyes from the mad ramblings of past casualties. The only winning move is not to play.
And yet, here we all are.
Not all comment sections are created equal. We might be small, non-constructively critical, and a little over-preoccupied with basic grammar and spelling, but there's real love among us. Sure, online, sometimes we don't agree, but offline we're all sleeping with each other, and that's what counts.
The day this comments section becomes a minefield of stupid like the Toronto Star's is the day I hang up my hat and resign from my post as your second-most devoted commenter. Or maybe I'll start trolling. I'll name myself swirling_and_toppling and post long missives about communism, Islam, and the Third Reich.
mantauk,
you are the reason why torontoist's comment section will always be echelons higher than thestar's
(your comment here made me Ch.O.L.)
I'm not gonna lie, I had to google "Ch.o.l" and Wikipedia says it means "an indigenous Maya people, from the Chiapas highlands of Mexico". Which is high praise indeed!! I make 'em laugh, I make 'em cry, I make 'em indigenous. It's all par for the course in a Montauk workday!
Old Angry White Guys are breeding amongst themselves and creating fully formed offspring who vote.
Rob Ford for Mayor!
The original name of Kenora was Rat Portage so that guy may be in for an unpleasant surprise.
When the cost of entry is so low we cannot be surprised at what we see. The sad part is that is the ignorant that are often the most likely to vote or protest; George Bush's "Base".
Kenora is arguably one of the most beautiful places in all of Canada.
Only cause you mentioned ignorance ;)
You guys should probably be using PNG for screenshots of mostly text. It delivers similar or better compression without the artifacts.
Agreed—we usually use GIFs for text and solid line art, which are even smaller than PNGs, and which will likely be the format for an article like this in the future.
ugh media coverage was not even-handed and was indeed insane;
i think i can recall at least 30 reports by ctv news celebrating the apocalyptic killer rats, the super-toxic garbage mounds all over the city....
in fact i think the media fantasticized this whole issue
Speak for yourself. My son played in one of those parks and came home with a small third leg protruding from his tailbone that kept tapping the tune of "Popcorn" against the back of his chair. It was almost a mercy when the rats ate him.
Lost it at "I Would Totally Handle Bags of Shit" and the e.e. cummings bit. I love these!
I guess, in a broad sense, this stuff is mid-way between the ad-hominem hysterics of question period in Ottawa and the anonymized, utter chaos of 4chan and similar.
So suppose there's an "us" composed of ironic and occasionally snarky but generally well-educated, rational and well informed people, and a "them", composed of angry conservative uninformed illiterates who feel disenfranchised most of the time.
Do you think "us" should listen to "them," and vice-versa, or should we both just entrench, and use each other as examples of what's wrong with democracy?
Its a book called "True Enough".
http://www.amazon.ca/True-Enough-Learning-Post-Fact-Society/dp/0470050101/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248819544&sr=1-1
I think we should declare war on "them", drive them from their homes, dash their babies against rocks, and seize their property by force. Like in the good old days.
Hurray! You should do these more often. To preserve my faith in humanity I stay far away from the comments on newspaper articles, but sometimes it's nice to see these people getting the mockery they deserve.
The one-liners tearing down the comments, while clever, are incredibly smug and patronizing.
People are rightly upset. I say let them vent in the comments. I enjoy reading them all.
I respect these anonymous comment for what it is - honest opinion unfettered by fear of social reprisal or political correctness. If you don't like it, don't read it. But don't call in the 'I'm shocked and appalled at my fellow man' thought police. The comments demonstrate a genuine emotion which is otherwise lacking in civic discourse.
Torontonians are pissed off. Yet somehow the Torontoist is above it all? Puleeze.
^ The 'I'm Shocked And Appalled At My Fellow Man' Thought Police Are On Strike, Anyway
^ I Am Of Course Speaking to You, Internet President
^ What Our Civic Discourse Needs Is Less Civility, You Whore
Now that IS funny
No way. Blind blithering rage untempered by any concern for facts or rationality is not mere political incorrectness, which I'd be fine with (it's even laudable much of the time).
No, the comments under discussion here are revelling in stupidity. And when all the stupidity accumulates in one place, it becomes a stupidity tsunami, each uninformed opinion feeding into the next. Civic discourse SHOULD make room for emotion, but these are more like temper tantrums.
And who is it that decides what is an 'unacceptable' amount of blind blithering rage? Apparently, you do. And that's what I'm afraid of, more than any blind blithering rage. If you think someone is stupid, tell them. If they don't listen, well ... that's to be expected. But you can't stop them from being stupid.
Naw, but I can point out that they're stupid, and lament that facts seems to have no place in some people's civic discourse. Anger is fine. It's irrationality that's the problem.