Social Media Warriors

As the lock-down continues and normally passive individuals start to become brittle and argumentative, a new phenomenon has emerged. It goes something like this:

• Person A posts something about dandelions being pretty and posts a picture
• Person B responds with an acclamatory comment about the usefulness of dandelions in making wine, feeding bees, brightening up the countryside etc
• Person C responds negatively about the damage to lawns, posting a picture of their dandelion infested lawn before they treated it with Potassium Hyrdrodeathrate
• Person A points out that some Taraxacum species reproduce asexually by apomixis, so bees aren’t necessary
• Person C likes this comment and adds that they’re worse than the Plague
• Person B cites Wikipedia, saying it’s “well known” that “Raw dandelion greens contain high amounts of vitamins A, C, and K, and are moderate sources of calcium, potassium, iron, and manganese. Raw dandelion greens are 86% water, 9% carbohydrates, 3% protein, and 1% fat. A 100-gram reference amount supplies 45 calories.”
• Person D comments they read on Wikipedia that Korea has a dandelion Taraxacum platycarpum and wondered if “King” Jong Un is actually dead and maybe he would have been better off drinking dandelion tea than having surgery.
• A new argument ensues about whether he is a King, or indeed really dead.

This is an example of missing the point and in so doing causing an argument.

I was stupidly tempted to call it “Msing the point”, or “Msplaining”, because my experience is it’s mostly left-wing women, but then I remembered how irritating and divisive I find the term “Mansplaining”, which originated as a legitimate label for men who can’t help but explain where women are going wrong, but is now applied by some to any male who contradicts a woman, even if they have some relevant knowledge, experience or qualifications. Also, I’ve noticed that missing the point is something men do too and my observation that it is mostly women could be because most of my social media friends are left-wing women who are also quite forceful in their views.

So, I’m going to work on a non-gender-specific label for it. A friend of mine, who has some knowledge in this field, said changing a subject to something tangentially, or tenuously associated with the original topic is a passive-aggressive mechanism called “deflecting”, usually employed because the deflector is uncomfortable with the thrust of the debate. This captures some of the essence of what is going on, but there are other elements.

An example that came my way recently was a polemic by an Australian journalist that compared British, US and Australian death rates in the 2019/2020 pandemic. He concluded the circumstances of the three countries are completely different, inasmuch as Britain is an international hub and found isolation from the rest of the world difficult, the USA has a more dispersed population than the UK, and Australia has a much smaller population than both but is naturally isolated from the world to a greater extent than is possible for the other two countries. Then he went on to say that the comparable points are how far the three countries have strayed from the post-War social consensus, pointing out that in Australia, despite it having a right-wing government, also has a strong social safety net, whereas, in Britain and America, this has been eroded by decades of neo-liberal acceptance. This, he concluded, led to capital being more highly valued than labour in the two northern countries. He cautioned that this led to decisions being made initially in that framework and the consequence of it is a much higher death rate. His primary worry is Australia is headed down that route too and in a few years, they would adopt the same accepted wisdom as the UK and the USA, where “The Markets” dictate the direction of policy.

I thought his analysis was wide of the mark because it is pretty clear in the UK that while market-oriented thinking coloured the initial response, the outcry that followed was sufficient to change the course of the government’s strategy, albeit a little late in the day to stop the huge number of deaths Britain has suffered. The US is different because their policy is not to have a strategy, substituting the erratic whims of the President for any coherent plan. They also have strong competing interests who have long since stopped trying to find consensus and revel in their scorched-earth, all or nothing, national debate. This isn’t restricted to the right, either. The left, in the form of the Berners, are just as bad. Many of them would prefer a right win ignoramus to remain in power than elect a “Corporate Democrat” as they call them.

It was, however, a good polemic and I said so. One of my deflector friends jumped on the thread and said she was sick and tired of people comparing Britain to Australia when their circumstances were different – Australia has an extreme right-wing government etcetera. She completely missed the point of the argument by taking a contrarian stance while presenting the self-same points the polemicist accepted as factors in the different death-rates as evidence of how wrong he was. An argument around that point erupted. Deflection.

Then there are the private conversationalists, who will have a “Hello, how are you?” discussion in a sub-thread, the funny guys who will make a snarky point in an attempt to prove their humorous cajones, and their opposites; the humourless who insist there is nothing funny in the world, the engineers who will blast arcane maths all over the place, the grammar, lexigraphic, and linguistic pedants who have “certified grammar Nazi” memes on their timelines and convert every thread into a discussion about the Oxford comma, predicates, prepositions, and adjectival clauses; the pronoun fiends who are insistent that gender and sex are two different / the same things, the drum beaters who make the same point about the same thing time and time again irrespective of the subject matter, and worst of the lot: the bloggers who write long and boring articles about things no-one is interested in and no-one will read.

As I fall into the last of these categories, I really need to shut-up now.