Connie du Toit wonders:
bloggers are nobodies. They have one vote, just like everyone else. They aren’t elected officials so they have no influence to actually do anything different from anyone else. And it’s FREE. It isn’t like you paid to read it. You can’t get a refund on a subscription where no subscription fee was charged. All the usual methods of voting with your feet and your dollars just don’t work with blogging… so I think that causes people to act out really strangely when they get upset by something a blogger writes. We don’t have a precedent for this sort of thing and I think (at least I hope) that’s why people get sort of weird about the way they treat and react to blogs.
Connie is referring to the way that some people can't just say "Eh!" and move on - they have to create anti-whoever sites, and rant, and so on.
I don't think it's a mystery - it has to do with the fact that it just KILLS them that ordinary people, you and I, can express themselves without leaning on official authority, or indulging in ca-ca pooh-pooh scatological language, or using the H-bomb (Hitler, 'ya know). The rabid ones are FURIOUS that we blogging few, without credentials or permission from the overlords, have decided for ourselves to find out the facts, think about the implications, and, in a reasonably organized way, assemble our thoughts for publication.
Our own thoughts! And, worse, those thoughts aren't simply an echo of the officially approved group-think, nor an easily-knocked-down straw man, but grounded in experience and logic.
Dear G-d, could anything be worse for the overly credentialed, expensively educated, self-appointed intellectuals of the Western world? Imagine it, a world in which the masses' opinions no longer depend on the pearls of wisdom they dangle in front of us!
