There’s a very good chance that the enemy of your enemy may still not be your friend
Every now and again it’s a good idea to turn on your own just to see what it’s like on the other side. It helps to have something to actually disagree with them over. This post goes over my recent days spent arguing with the “liberal” commenterati (obsessive commenters on websites. A google search tells me I didn’t coin this word. Damn) about the protests in Iran. It wasn’t a pretty time, but it was an interesting one. If it’s not a tech. or nerd site I tend to avoid these areas anymore.
In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Common Dreams, a usually progressive left news site. It was a wholly satisfying experiment. I learned a lot about a lot about the nature of comment areas, their addicting qualities and how quickly the conversation sort of descends into self-parody. I learned something about myself: According to these people I must work for the Mossad or CIA.
“If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained?”