When Twitter Attacks: D-Grade Celebrities

Robbie Farah is an idiot. He’s apparently a great NRL player, and possibly a likeable guy in person, but when it comes to some things which are admittedly beyond his scope, he’s an idiot.

Robbie Farah was recently insulted. On the internet. Someone said something about his mother (who died in June) and he got upset. The response was something along the lines of “u worthless piece of shit. If u had the balls to say that to my face I would rip your face off”.  His Honour, Justice Farah then went on to propose that the current codified legal doctrine surrounding people being mean on the interweb was “piss weak” and that people should be “accountable for their comments”. I for one was glad to know that the standard defamation and content laws we have are lacking something. At the moment if you make a bunch of hurtful and untrue statements about someone, you can be charged. Similarly if you are deliberately abusive or vulgar.

Farah seems to believe these laws (that completely and practically encompass the specific kind of incident he is talking about) aren’t good enough. I’m guessing he holds this opinion because the culprit hasn’t be brought to justice. So that’s the law’s fault. It has nothing to do with the anonymity of the internet and not being able to find someone to charge with an offence.

I just get the feeling Farah was standing on his chair in front of his computer, screaming at the screen, red in the face, veins bulging in his neck, hands grasping ineffectively as he bellowed “Come out of your devil-box you bastard! I’ll tear your bloody face off! Robbie Smash!” Poor Robbie was faced with a complete inability to deal with an insult the way he usually would; grievous bodily harm.

As a side note, I quite enjoyed noticing that this was all being reported, and Farah was being declared the blameless victim, by news.com.au despite his initial response being that he wanted to murder someone with his bare hands for saying something about his mother. The same news.com.au that has been championing the #heroeswalkaway twitter campaign to encourage people to stop beating each other to death. Sometimes irony is there if you look for it.

Since this mortally wounding slur of 140 characters or less, Farah has taken to the magical twitter machine to declare that the Prime Minister should intervene to stop people saying things about his mum. Or anyone else’s mum. Probably. He feels that The Guvmint (singular, not that state and federal systems are separate) isn’t doing enough to stop people from saying mean things on the internet.

In an interesting note, it’s been uncovered that Farah recently suggested the PM should get “a noose” for her 50th birthday. But as soon as someone says something mean and you can’t punch them for it, suddenly it’s up to Julia Gillard to solve the problem. Nice one Robbie.

This is a man completely unfamiliar with voice chat on Xbox live. That’s probably a good thing.

For those that are blissfully unaware of the seething mass of bile, vitriol and angry hormones that is voice chat in online gaming, the best description I have heard is “I never knew my mum had slept with so many 13 year olds in so many varied ways until I discovered Xbox live chat”.

Other victims of the internet hate machine include Ray Hadley, a radio host no-one has heard of, and Charlotte Dawson, a reality TV show host no one cares about. I’m not sure of the qualifications for either job but I think they include being able to talk, and pause for breath occasionally. Both people are in, and I use the term loosely, the entertainment business, and part of that business is drawing attention to yourself. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see other D-grade celebrities coming out of the woodwork in the future with a “Tell All Interview” about how they struggled against their haters and rose above the vicious words of internet bullies, who are cowards and ugly and not real people and sit in their mum's basement trynig to drag the winners down. Is it getting to easy to hate celebrities? Am I the only one seeing many of them as colossal, self-aggrandising douche bags?

So Dawson was hospitalised in the early hours of a morning after a bunch of people kept tweet-hating her. Apparently these messages were so violent and forceful she was physically injured, or so I’m guessing after seeing a headline “Dawson hospitalised after twitter attack”. Wait, what? Twitter can hurt you now? Like actually hurt you? not just your feelings? Did the Twitter bird get a hold of a knife? And an opposable thumb to hold it? Is Twitter planning some kind of violent uprising so the computers take over the world? No? Oh, so some genius kept logging onto her twitter feed and reading mean messages until mascara rolled down her face and she decided to post “you win x” with a picture of a hand-full of pills (probably multi-vitamins and panadol if we’re staying true to the 14-year-old-girl-cry-for-attention formula). And then she was hospitalised for feminine-hysteria? I’d prefer that headline to read “Dawson hospitalised after attention seeking”.

I just can’t get over the way the media continues to report that it was a “twitter attack” that put Dawson in the hospital, like it was a legitimate assault. Knife attack? Ok. Gang attack? Fine. Midget attack? Sure, why not. Twitter attack? uhhh... really? A bunch of people called her names and this somehow... I don’t even know. Twitter stabbed her? Is that it? Are we to expect YouTube bashings? Facebook brawls? Tactical nuclear Myspace?

You want to beat the “trolls” or “haters” on twitter? Stop giving them attention. This isn’t the “ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” speech you got at school. That never worked because you were right there with them every day. This is the vastness of social networks, skip over their comments and go get ice cream. Seriously. Ignore/block the bad man and go get some ice cream, then ride a roller coaster, while eating ice cream. Post a photo if you have to.

How hard is that?

Troll: I HATE YOUR STUPID FACE! I HOPE YOU GET CRABS!

You: I’m on a roller coaster! This is awesome!! Wheeeeeee!!!

Troll: PAY ATTENTION!! I’M HATING YOU HERE!!

You: wheeeeeee!!!

Right?

-Worst Guy Ever

Three Steps to Success

When we’re children we’re taught that a story has three parts; beginning, middle and end. As we grow up and our understanding of the world develops we see this three-part process appear elsewhere in life:

Three parts of a day (morning, afternoon and night)

Three meals of a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner)

The life cycle of beer (brewing, fermentation, drinking)

The three important parts of a ménage a trios (me, your mum, your sister)

Even life itself can be divided into thirds (birth, life, death/Cher)

The important thing about any three-part process is you complete all three steps in order. You can’t just skip a step. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just turn up and the Olympic Games and get given a gold medal. There are two important steps before that, training and competing. You really can’t skip a step in the process. It’s like skipping part of getting dressed in the morning. You might try it once, but when you figure out that you’ve got your dick tucked into a sock and you forgot to put pants on, it quickly becomes a very awkward boardroom presentation.

People often become famous based on the following process:

Develop a skill – achieve remarkable success in your chosen field – become famous for your success

Great actors, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more have achieved fame through these steps. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher, Hugh Laurie, Robin Williams, these are people who have worked hard and succeeded in their chosen fields. Paris Hilton was not included above because I refuse to acknowledge “Born Rich – Sex Tape – Famous” as a three part process.

That’s not to say people haven’t tried to skip a step before. Oh no, there will always be people looking for a shortcut. We’re making TV shows out of it these days (big brother, survivor, . Hell, most of our D grade celebrities are these people. Anyone who is described as a “Reality TV Star” is not actually famous, they’re just noticed. They’ve skipped part of the process and now they’re trying to be famous without actually having achieved anything. Seriously, who the hell are the Kardashians? (Aside from a clan of people that wanted a group discount on monogrammed towels)

We’re seeing more and more the problems associated with skipping step two these days. Rebecca Black wants to be home-schooled now because she gets teased at school.

1.       Harden up you tone-deaf twat, it’s high school, you’re lucky you’re not getting shot.

2.       This is your own fault for skipping step two (develop a skill (singing) – become successful (through being such a good musician that people want to hear more) – fame). Actually, you kind of skipped step one there too... either way it’s your own damn fault for trying to avoid the system and go straight to the fame and riches part. Maybe it would have been an idea to start working as a part-time singer in a small bar before launching yourself onto the internet.

We’re seeing the same sort of thing happen in the London riots at the moment. We have groups of lazy idiots that have seen the process of “Work hard – Succeed in your business – Get rewarded”. They thought the first two parts were a bit much and decided they just wanted to skip to the third part, the money. What they seem to have failed to grasp is the REWARD part. The expensive items you’re dragging out of a shattered shop window are meant to be worked towards. That’s why they’re valuable, not the price tag on the box, but the time and effort spent to afford it.

The reason people look so damn happy driving a Ferrari is because they earned it. They know that they worked hard, succeeded and they finally bought their dream car. People used to see someone with a big house or an exotic car and they would know that this was a person who had put in the hard yards. Now-a-days though we usually see the BMW and assume daddy was loaded and the driver is a wanker. That reminds me; parents, don’t give your children squat! Make the little thieving buggers work for it.

Skipping the middle is like going from being twenty or being forty overnight. Sure, you’ll be forty, but you won’t have the experiences and wisdom gained from your twenties and thirties. So you’ll probably be unable to satisfy a woman, useless at holding your drink and still laugh at fart jokes (ok, maybe that last part won’t change)

Some people might say that a celebrity culture and rampant consumerism are to blame. Some people might say that by talking about these issues we’re only feeding them the attention they so crave. Some people might suggest that deeply ingrained and complex social trends can’t be reduced to a three-part process. Well, some people might like to fuck off.

I’m right and you know it.

-Worst Guy Ever