Right Wing Douche Bags

Sometimes I have this overwhelming urge to shout 'Shut the fuck up' at certain people.  Often these are people on social media.  Actually, these days it is always people on social media who provoke this reaction in me.  Time was that it was the TV which provided me with a seemingly endless parade of people to send my blood pressure soaring with their idiocies and pretensions.  In fact, there was a time when I quite enjoyed arguing with people on TV.  For a while it was a real Thursday night 'thing' for me to come home from the pub and argue with the pundits on BBC2's Late Review - especially Germaine Greer. Obviously, she never responded or argued back - such is the beauty of arguing with the TV: it is strictly a one way process.  You always win and nobody actually gets offended.  The trouble with social media is that people can do and say things which reveal them to be a prize arsehole and you do have the opportunity to actually hurl abuse at them, abuse which they will probably read.  Just lately I've had to refrain from hurling such abuse at a particular pillock on Twitter.

Increasingly, what I've been wanting to say is 'If you want to be a right-wing douche bag, just be a right-wing douche bag and stop trying to blame other people supposedly on the left for 'bullying' you into being one'.  Or words to that effect.  To elaborate on this scenario, the owner of another satire site, whom I followed on Twitter and who liked to come on as some kind of left/liberal progressive, over the past few months started denouncing other left/liberals who he identified as 'Social Justice Warriors', (middle class 'liberals' who latch on to causes because they are 'trendy').  Apparently they were worse than fascists with their moralising and suppression of differing view points.  Not surprisingly, he then started taking all sorts of flak from them in return.  His response? To pull his site offline and, after yet more vitriol directed at the 'Social Justice Warriors' and the left in general, interspersed with supporting right-wingers who had been 'oppressed' by Twitter, he pulled his Twitter feed too.  Except that every so often he briefly reactivates it to Tweet some new claim that he is being oppressed by the liberal fascists.  (Sadly, I've not been able to move fast enough to unfollow him when he does this - it's a peculiarity of Twitter that even when you deactivate an account, your list of followers remains intact).

It's not that I disagree with him about the trendy, 'right on' types who attach themselves to various left/liberal causes and affect outrage at anyone who disagrees with them or questions any aspect of their cause.  My problem is the way in which he has reacted, in particular his apparent eagerness to denounce the whole of the left for the antics of this minority, not to mention his cosying up to right-wingers who have also 'suffered' at the hands of the 'Social Justice Warriors'.  What did he think would happen when he spent so much time shooting his mouth off about them on Twitter?  Of course there was going to be an adverse reaction.  But to blame these idiots for taking his site offline and claiming that they 'forced' him off of social media is just pathetic.  Those were his decisions and his alone.  Look, if you aren't prepared to fight the ;Social Justice Warriors' then don't start a scrap with them. Personally, I just ignore them.  They thrive on any kind of publicity, so I deny it to them.  If I want to criticise them, I make sure I do it on my own platforms where I can control any attempts by them to respond.  I don't try and start slanging matches on social media where you can't control the conversation.  Moreover, I'm not going to abandon my political principles and use these clowns as an excuse to give succour to right wingers and become a douche bag myself.  These middle class amateur progressives aren't the left - they have no idea of the ideology or principles of the left.  They're just wankers.  Yet increasingly, I see various professional media 'left wingers' using them as an excuse to turn away from the left and become right-wing douche bags instead.  (I say 'become', but I'd question that they were ever truly left-wing).

Finally, on the issue of right-wingers who claim that 'liberal' social media like Twitter are suppressing them - tough shit.  The right have had it their own way with regard to the media for far too long, ensuring that their vile views take prominence.  If some of them are now getting a taste of their own medicine by finding that some social media outlets won't tolerate their more extreme bullshit, I have no sympathy.  It isn't 'political correctness gone mad', it is simply a matter of taste and decency.  They really need to learn to 'shut the fuck up'...