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In light of the WordPress/Thesis fiasco (cretinous from whichever side you look at it), Matt Mullenweg’s response to a suggestion he should grow up and be less capricious:
If it makes you feel any better, I had to look up capriciousness.
Jesus Christ, is education really that bad in Texas?
From a video I posted on YouTube (my painful review of the film Moon, if you can cast your minds that far back), where I might have described the place I live as being one of the “sickeningly middle-class” areas of Surrey:
What do you mean “sickeningly middle class” you arrogant twit.
Middle class people are the ones who pay the bloody taxes that keeps the layabouts in luxury while they sit on their fat arses doing nothing but being jealous and insulting of anyone with money, who actually work for a living and deserve their little luxuries, unlike the so-called “poor”.
You must a another bloody loony-left student, arrogant and ignorant, god help the UK is all I can say.
(Incidentally, I believe this to be a repeat troll: a similar comment was posted a month or so back, which I deleted because I took it to be a one-off instance of fuckwittery.)
Not only do I find this comment personally offensive, due to the fact that both my parents are in full-time employment and the only reason I’m not is thanks to education and a general job shortage getting in the way; it also demonstrates precisely the hidden subtext of that brief throwaway remark.
Middle-class people—not all middle-class people, mark you, but a large proportion of them—have a tendency to be incredibly smug and arrogant. This might be because this particular subset believes everything the Daily Mail says, and considers all us common people to be benefit-riding dossers. (I’m not denying that such people exist—in fact, I wish death upon them—but the Mail vastly overinflates/conveniently omits figures to sell more papers.)
Perhaps it was a nasty remark to make: of course it was made in jest. Of course, if you were offended, please take this to be my reserved apology – and grow a thicker skin, for Christ’s sake.
Consider this mock-up tabloid front page.
Alarmist headlines, dubious levels of truth, poor citations. So what tabloid is this from?
Answer: it’s not from a tabloid at all. All the headlines above are taken from Slashdot stories from the past few days.
True, Slashdot has never exactly been a bastion of journalistic integrity: in reality, it’s nothing more than a hivemind-operated news aggregator. However, in recent years, it’s been slipping slowly towards a Daily Mail level of sensationalism.
The “Facebook linked to rise in STDs” story was republished straight from The Sun, and the one about Facebook data sharing was clipped from an excerpt of a single TechCrunch article based around a short segment of a statement from Facebook regarding some changes to its privacy policy. Perhaps I’m being unfair to /. here: if anything, its users are to blame for this downward trend.
However, Slashdot is based entirely around user submissions, but the peer review process seems to have broken down lately. Microsoft-bashing headlines (often with poorly-sourced foundations) are becoming ever more frequent, and when Slashdot republishes a Daily Mail story practically verbatim (one which has already been debunked, no less) you know you’re in deep trouble.
I recently removed Slashdot from my RSS subscriptions list, simply because the encroaching stupidity was getting too much for me to be bothered with every day. I’ll still pop on from time to time, and I’ll continue to receive the daily digest e-mail. However, from now on, El Reg and Ars will be my primary tech news sources: I’m not willing to have double standards when it comes to gutter-press journalism.
Tags: daily mail, idiots, Internet, Media, slashdot