Sad and Furious

There are times when you see something on the web and think, 'there but the grace of god...'.  My latest such moment came when I watched a video on You Tube of some middle aged guy ranting about the 'injustices' he had suffered at the hands of other members of a forum he used to be a member of.  Amongst other things.  It just went on, and on.  I had to stop a short way in, it was all too painful.  Now, I'm not saying he didn't have a point.  I'm familiar with the forum in question, it's supposedly a discussion group about comedy, and it is indeed populated by a bunch of pretentious knob ends who are in imminent danger of disappearing up their own arseholes.  Like all such 'communities', if someone disagrees with the consensus or has the audacity to offer a different opinion, mob mentality sets in and they all descend on the 'offender' like a pack of rabid dogs, bullying them off of the forum.  Which is, sort of, what had happened to this guy.

However, I'm also familiar with this guy's blog, where, unfortunately, he has a tendency to come over as an embittered old reactionary with a big, big chip on his shoulder over the way that his life hasn't turned out the way he clearly feels it should have.  He seems to blame middle class pillocks of the kind that ran him off of the forum for this.  Unfortunately, his definition of 'middle class' seems to encompass anybody who went to university and earned a degree.  Apparently we working class people don't do that sort of thing.  I also believe that this guy was also involved with that now defunct forum which hit the headlines for its abusive and misogynistic posts about female public figures.  All of which makes it difficult to feel that sympathetic toward him.  Moreover, his response to his brush with bullying, public rants on You Tube and on his blog, throwing abuse around, is just so undignified.  I've always found it easier to walk away from such situations and ignore the perpetrators - if they're that big a bunch of wankers, why would I want to be part of their 'community'?  Anyway, the long and the short of it is, whilst I do a lot of ranting here, I just hope that I don't come over as sad and embittered as this guy does.