For "Jellybean", Read "Umbricius"

Josh writes:

Poor Jellybean -- in many ways he's still an innocent. Or at least not guilty on a technicality.

His earliest Internet experiences soiled by years of contact with teen angst whinging and petty interpersonal entanglements, he recently made a brief foray outside the world of Livejournal and goth message boards to check out the grown-up world of political blogging.

I can't fully claim to know what might have been going through his head at the time. Perhaps he was expecting to find people -- adults! -- typing one-handed online from the comfort of their fire-side armchairs (one-handed, not for the usual reason, but because they were holding a cigar in the other, or possibly swilling a fine Cognac). Perhaps he was expecting to find erudition, intelligent discourse, and learned respect for ideas not necessarily agreed with (not to mention the right of others to hold such ideas). Perhaps he was even expecting an understanding of the fundamentals of argumentation and reason, those cornerstones of civilization and progess.

But what did he get? You cunts.

Right wingers insisting that every night Helen Clark gargles with the blood of infants to get the taste of Kofi Annan's cock out of her mouth, before going to sleep on a rustling mountain of taxpayers' money; left wingers insisting that every night Don Brash gargles with the blood of beneficiaries to get the taste of Dubya's cock out of his mouth, before running off to kick pregnant teens in the stomach and masturbate over photos of mushroom clouds. (It seems to me that there are more of the former than the latter, but as a bit of a socialist hippy myself I'm willing to concede the possibility of bias in my attentions.)

I said I didn't care about matters political before -- that was a bit of a lie. It's not so much apathy as, shall we say, burning contempt and disgust at the dismal quality of political discourse on New Zealand weblogs (worse even than the dismal quality of politics in New Zealand).

On sites where the two camps get together to "debate" (as opposed to the various echo chambers/circle jerks that comprise most politically-oriented sites) all you see is straw man arguments for Africa, or that delightful style of "argument" that involves ignoring everything your opponent says except for the one minor point you can confidently disagree with, instantly sending the debate spiralling off in a different direction.

And above it all, that glorious hypocrisy where pundits will villify their opponents for doing exactly the same thing they were doing two seconds ago. My personal favourite: "You left/right-wingers are all morons! You're going to ruin the country! Helen Clark/Don Brash deserves to be dragged into the street and shot! And another thing about left/right-wingers -- you're all so fucking hateful!" Ah, the hilarity.

And by "hilarity", I mean "shut the fuck up".