July 28 2008 Big mouths flapping

There’s a website I used to visit regularly where people discussed Buddhism in a fairly open and sometimes even antagonistic way. It was pretty good for quite a while. Some guys then decided to discuss how their philosophy was so much superior to that of the blogger and every commenter. One couldn’t make a comment without it being totally deconstructed and really rudely bashed. It was like the intimidation of bullys. I engaged with these for a while but it just tired me out. A lot of it was puffed up nonsense and trying to get past that to find the point when there usually wasn’t one other than making themselves feel important was feeling like more and more work. So now I don’t bother to comment there and likely won’t visit it much any more.

Similarly I saw this photo site today which had really good stuff on it and read the blurbs and so forth and left a comment wondering about copyright as all of the photos were from others on Flickr. This person with an incredible haughtiness informed me that of course they checked and got permission to put them on the page etc. By the defensiveness I think that was actually not the case. Its really nothing more than a deluxe scraper blog. And badly designed for someone who has such pretensions of art snobbery. The categories and pages make little sense and the idea of posting all these other people’s photos is just laziness.

Am starting to get unhappy with all these dickheads in cyberspace who think they know everything about everything and haven’t learned to listen in the least to any opinion other than their own. I know I can be opinionated and I do like a good debate but debate takes an opponent and one has to pay attention to their points in order to refute them if that is possible and necessary. But there’s none of that here. Only big mouths flapping and making a big wind.

It will be good to be away from this 24hr. high speed internet when I go back to India. I don’t have the time or opportunity to waste in comments sections and only concentrate on my own work and life there. And I can’t imagine too many Indian people having such bad manners. They may hate you but there’s rarely any time when someone would talk so rudely to someone they did not know. That is true on the Internet as well. I’ve not read deliberately rude comments to stranger on any Indian blogs I’ve seen and I’ve seen quite a few. People tend to be more tolerant and also seem to tend to assume if someone approaches in a rude fashion it is because they are ignorant or not meaning to be that way. People think a lot more about what they do and say in India. Its that Asian question of “saving face” . A few people have explained that to me in the Indian context which is a little different than in East Asia. No doubt I will talk about that at more length in another post.

Now that my passport has arrived and my family visiting is nearly done I only have to get my visa and ticket and I’m outta here thank goodness.