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

An Idiot's Rug

I have a problem. It may sound like a common ailment. You may indeed have suffered from this at some point. The Australian Bureau of Statistics hasn’t put an exact figure on it but my sciencing suggests that 1 in 3 people will, at some point in their lives be the victim of an idiot (if you haven't and you can see two people nearby looking annoyed... bad news).

This may not come as a surprise to many of you. You’ve read those “Letters to the Editor” sections of the newspaper, you’ve listened to talk back radio, you’ve seen that some undeniably cruel bastard digging up the scarecrow-like corpse of Gretel Killeen and using it to summon the eldritch spirit of Big Brother for another horrifying season (where’s that bloody 2012 apocalypse when you need it). Idiots are all around us, they make life that little bit harder for us every day. The people who stop in the middle of a shopping centre and block the entire walkway to have a conversation. The taxi driver who has decided that “hazard lights” translates to “I’m about to do a something stupid, inconsiderate, annoying or all three at once lights". The bouncer who thinks you look like someone who got kicked out of the club a couple of weeks ago, by someone else, while he wasn’t working, but he heard the guy was wearing a white shirt, like the one you’re wearing now. Yeah, the peoplle you meet when you don't have a gun...

Sometimes this stupidity pays off and you get given back the change for a $50 when you gave the guy a $20 or bartender forgets to ring up a round of drinks. This doesn’t happen as often as I feel it should. Maybe we should start a national campaign to support idiots getting into jobs that benefit the people and keep them out of government jobs...

Then there’s the judgement calls; those times where you’re not sure if you’re winning or not. I’ve had one of those recently. Like a prematurely ejaculating birthday present, it came as a surprise. I have a fully carpeted kitchen now.

Yeah, that’s right. Plush red carpet from wall to wall all through my apartment, including the kitchen (luckily the bathroom was spared). I’m now stuck without a real idea of whether i should enjoy this or flat out hate it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad having a nice thick rug under foot when I’m cooking (ok microwaving, it still counts as food though) and while it’s new it remains nice. I’m looking at this like the US economy, or Julia Gillard though, I don’t see it lasting.

There’s a reason most kitchen aren’t carpeted. Kitchens are messy. That’s why you don’t see serial killers chopping up corpses in a bedroom or a lounge, too hard to get stains out. Serial killers know what they’re doing, that’s why they’re SERIAL killers, if they got caught after the first one they’d just be normal killers. A serial killer will go for a bathtub or a nice kitchen bench (proper granite, none of that Ikea crap) because it’s easier to clean up afterwards. I’m now denied this since I have a carpeted kitchen, on the bright side a whole bunch of people get to live a little bit longer... no connection... honest...

I didn’t ask for the carpet, it was just there one day (perils of living in a hotel, sometimes you come home and someone decorated). But honestly, I’m not too worried about cleaning it, that’s what housekeeping is for (perks of living in a hotel, I come home to a clean apartment every day).

So I’m not going to care too much about being a neat and tidy cook, and everything else can get sorted out between the rug and the maid.

Now to try some recipes that call for a lot of red wine and fire.

-Worst Guy Ever

Shameless advert; Like this crap on Facebook.