The people who make crass stupidity into an art form...
A Swift way to deal with trolls
THERE is a darkly ironic website called The Darwin Awards, where notional gongs are handed out to those whose sudden demise is entirely down to their own stupidity.
There’s the man on a mobility scooter who reaches the doors of a seventh-floor lift just a second too late as they slide shut and in a fury batters them repeatedly with his vehicle until they open again. He triumphantly rolls through. Unfortunately, the lift has gone…
Or the skier who fancies doing a bit of tobogganing for a change. He doesn’t actually have a sledge, so he tears away the OUR good friend John Bowe, who plays Lawrence White in ITV’s Emmerdale series, has recent experience of art imitating life.
His character has a complex back story. In the days when it was a criminal offence to be a “practising homosexual” (oh, the nuanced contempt in those two words) White was arrested and subjected to so-called “aversion therapy”.
Until homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, the bizarre and cruel practice was only too real. As an alternative to prison (or sometimes an I’M NOT on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any other social media site. I’m no masochist; these virtual worlds are the repository of routine personal abuse.
Richard gets his fair share – you should have seen the death threats from so-called cybernats when he chaired a perfectly reasonable TV panel discussion before the Scottish referendum – but he’s got the hide of a rhino and couldn’t give a stuff.
He doesn’t bother to block trolls and even says he feels a bit sorry for them. “Imagine having the kind of life where the highlight of your day is to anonymously insult or threaten someone? Beyond sad.” But he’s an old journo, my husband, and had the corners knocked off him a long time protective matting from a steel safety barrier at the foot of a ski run and climbs to the top with it.
Down he goes – the makeshift toboggan works surprisingly well; so well that he’s still travelling at speed when he slams into a safety barrier. The one that he removed the matting from.
The well of human reckless stupidity is indeed bottomless. This week a security video from China went viral on the internet. It shows a car pulling up in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary, home to Siberian tigers (the largest of the species). Despite a forest of signs warning visitors not, under any circumstances, to accompaniment to it), the procedure required gay men to suffer electric shocks while being simultaneously exposed to sexually explicit photographs of naked men. This was supposed to “cure” them. Other techniques included what was known as “chemical castration” – libidosuppressing drugs that usually had catastrophic side-effects on mental health. Bowe is now fronting a public petition to have men imprisoned for homosexuality pre-1967 to be granted full pardons. In some cases, these ago. This week Taylor Swift, left, was criticised after she was given a tool to permanently block trolls from her Instagram feed.
“She’s rich and famous enough to take it. What about freedom of speech? Shame on her,” summarised the more printable posts.
What nonsense. Swift may be a superstar but she is not much more than a kid. Does being successful rob her of the right to have feelings? Or consider herself threatened?
If someone came up to Swift on the street and said the kind of things we’re talking about here, they’d be arrested and jailed. But this “tool” should be made available to everyone. If it is, the age of the troll may at last be coming to an end. Four cheers for that. leave their vehicle, we see the passenger door open and a young woman steps out. It seems some sort of marital argument was under way, and she walks round to the driver’s side to speak with her husband.
After a few seconds a tiger materialises out of the bushes behind her, pounces, and drags her off. (You’ll need strong nerves to watch this video). Her husband and mother leap out to try to drive the tiger off, with the result that the daughter escaped with her life, but the mother forfeited hers.
I know we can all make stupid mistakes, but getting out of your car in a tiger sanctuary? will have to be posthumous, as in the case of the late Alan Turing. Turing was the genius who cracked the Nazi’s “unbreakable” secret codes and shortened the Second World War by years as a result.
His reward was to be aggressively prosecuted for his homosexuality in 1952. He agreed to chemical castration as an alternative to jail and the poor man died soon after from cyanide poisoning. After a 2009 internet campaign the Queen granted Turing an absolute posthumous pardon.
Bowe says men convicted on charges similar to Turing’s should be offered the same. I completely agree. If you do too, join the petition at Change.org RICHARD writes, left, about the default setting in some wives that may allow them to quietly conspire in their husband’s natural demise – allowing him to choke to death; not offering CPR after a coronary; delaying a 999 call, etc.
Hmm. I hope this doesn’t mean he’s started to suspect something.
eat heR woRds!
MIRIAM Gonzalez Durantez, Nick Clegg’s wife, writes that she was “disappointed” to be served Hellman’s mayonnaise at a No 10 lunch. What a grotesquely snobbish thing to say. Quite apart from anything else, Hellman’s mayo is delicious (and no, I’m not on a retainer). I’ve never met Ms Durantez, but one thing is for certain: if I ever do, I won’t be inviting her round ours for lunch.