Steve Clemons, who writes “The Washington Note” has closed comments on his blog and remarks –

The comments on my blog have grown increasingly vile — and are not in any way constructive, civil, fair-minded, or policy-oriented. I am turning them off …

… I’m off to Havana Cuba for a research trip for a few days and have no interest or time in playing hall monitor for folks who need to grow up …

… I have emphasized over and over again that I am too busy to blog, do my New America Foundation work, and be a nanny for those who are not mature enough to be able to manage a civil discussion here …

… Eventually, I will review the last few weeks of comments and remove every one of them that went over the line with extremely crass and demeaning language …

… If you folks grow up, we can turn this on — but it takes shared commitment and responsibility. I won’t tolerate those who can’t be civil — on all sides of these debates …

Clemons is one of the more lucid and level-headed observers of American politics and foreign policy in particular. I’ve never commented on his blog as I’ve never felt the need, and I’m way out of my depth when it comes to the finer points of U.S. foreign policy anyway. I’d rather just read what he has to say from time to time, hopefully learn something and give my brain some exercise.

Former Fairfax blogger Jack Marx once mused on a “thought”. That thought was, maybe if Israel relocated to Tasmania, things in the Middle East might settle down a bit.

People took him seriously.

265 comments later, he closed the forum. Check out some of those comments and you’ll understand why. He also received threats to his person and to his family (which do not appear on the site). Marx was later sacked by Fairfax for suggesting that Kevin Rudd may have got a hard-on in a strip-joint. He migrated to a blog at News Ltd, took some time off late last year to write a book, and has not returned to blogging.

I suspect he’s had a gutful of it all.

What is the solution to the Israel/Palestine conundrum? I haven’t got a fucking clue, but it would be nice if both sides could grow the fuck up and stop punching bullets through each other’s heads in this seemingly endless cycle of medieval revenge and learn to share their fucking toys.

Yet, take an issue like this, take any hot-button issue of the day, whether it be climate change or the so-called “Muslim menace” or refugees or abortion or gay marriage, try to write about these topics calmly and rationally on a mainstream or popular blog, and you can bet London to a brick that before too long, the rabid and the rancid, the defiantly, willfully ignorant and deranged, the thumping hordes of footsoldiers from the legions of the stupid will clusterfuck that blog in a manner that will soon have it looking and sounding like a spastic convention on a carousel in a tornado.

Of course there are some creative typists out there masquerading as journalists, writing blogs specifically for an audience of the stupid, because whipping up the stupid into spittle-lipped, frothing hysteria is so goshdarn easy.

The stupid? Why, they don’t think much on thinkin’ about a thing, but by golly they gots ‘emselves an opinion on it all, and they’s a’ gonna let the world know what that o-pin-yun is, yessirree.

And they’re very well served by the vast number of “opinion” writers in mainstream media who are, apparently, expert in all the things they have an “opinion” on, even though they’ve never studied on the thing they’re “expert” on beyond reading a whole bunch of “opinions” from a whole bunch of other “opinion” writers who are expert in a whole bunch of other things they’ve never studied on neither.

Y’ follow?

B’doi.

A friend of mine emailed me some thoughts on “opinion” …

“People have become obsessed with opinion. All those op-ed pieces now dominate in the old and new media. From Bolt to blogs. People gravitate to the ‘like-minded’ believing that traditional journalism, where you interview perhaps a newsmaker and two or three opposing sources in an attempt to reach some sort of fair representation of an issue, is now considered with abject mistrust. Balanced journalism is somehow thought to be biased or simply lies (see how the ABC gets pounded), yet opinion is ‘telling it like it is’ or ‘striking out for the little guy”.

Barack Obama once remarked in an interview that he liked to give some thought, study and measured consideration to an issue before shooting his mouth off about it. It’s certainly a novel concept after the last eight years to have a man who thinks of himself as the President of the United States first and not an action hero figurine.

Yet, if you’re brave enough and prepared to lose a few brain cells on the way, try reading some of the comments on American mainstream media blogs that deal with Obama’s proposed health-care plan. Obama thinks it might be a nifty idea to allow 47 million Americans to afford to see a doctor when they’re sick or spend some in hospital when they need to.

What a fuckin’ Nazi.

This audacious scheme, according to the legions of the stupid who comment on such blogs, will transform the United States into a genocidal slaughterhouse where old folk will be frog-marched into death camps and their bodies ground up for cattle-feed and aborted and bloody foetus’s will clog the waterways of the nation, having been untimely ripped from the tender wombs of their loving mama’s on, and by the order of, the newly unelected President for Life of the Multiverse who also just happens to be a Muslim terrorist and a goddamn nigger who weren’t even born in this country, he was born in that country over there, the one you can see from my house if you stand on your tippy-toes on the edge of the bathtub and look up and to the left a bit.

What we need, say the legions of the stupid, what we need is to bring ol’ serial-killin’ George back to sort things out, talk about a culture of life and blow some shit up.

What we need, say the legions of the stupid, is someone just like us.

Good grief.

Even a few conservatives have had a gutful of this crap.

I won’t read Andrew Bolt’s hysterically stupid dog-whistling bullshit anymore, Miranda Devine’s too daffy to contemplate wasting time with, Gerard Henderson’s dreary, deathless prose has me nodding off after a paragraph. I’ve never bothered with Piers Akerman or that other Daily Telegraph guy and I never will.

Nor do I comment on mainstream media blogs. I read a few, but I won’t read the comments anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that many of my fellow men and women throughout the world are clinically insane.

Fuck ‘em.

And why am I saying this?

Because it’s my opinion on the matter.

And anyone who dare disagree is a fist-fuckin’, dog-ball suckin’, baby-rapin’, Nazi-lovin’, greenie fuckin’ lefty faggot.

So there. Nyah, nyah.