Social media is a funny place. It’s an alternate reality where people happily shout things at others that they’d likely never say if they ever came face-to-face.
I, generally, love it. But it also gets tiresome as the ‘persistently angry’ and ‘professionally offended’ seem to take up an increasing proportion of my Twitter feed.
Thankfully, I’ve rediscovered the block and mute features. One stops somebody from even trying to contact you or look at what you’ve written (I tend to avoid using that, with one or two select exceptions) and the other simply removes them from your feed. So, while they think they’re shouting at you with their anger at offence, you never get to hear it. It’s the social media equivalent of good double-glazing.
I only mention it because there was a moment last week when I’d just tweeted out my pleasure at hearing that payday-lending parasites Wonga had gone into administration. Prior to being forced by regulators to cut their interest rates from exorbitant to merely eye-watering, those who could least afford it, but were so desperate they turned to the company, were loaned money with repayments that could bankroll a small country. That the firm has been forced to pay back some of that interest in belated compensation lays behind its collapse.
So far so good.
But, no. A former Guernsey politician then highlighted my tweet and accused me of virtue-signalling. This lazy catch-all phrase is used by people who claim others are only saying something to make themselves look good. The irony is that these virtue-signal accusers are themselves, er, virtue-signalling.
Anyway. I pressed the mute button.
Elsewhere, I spotted a tweet summarising a column printed in this newspaper. It said: ‘[His] take on the Catholic abuse story in the JEP today argues that it’s mostly teenagers and not kids being abused, families are worse for abusing, and it’s mostly a problem with homosexuals who need to be purged from the church. Some moral authority.’
It gave me cause to read that day’s paper, expecting and hoping for the summary to be wrong. After all, nobody would write such a thing, would they? My heart sank as, sentence by sentence, the summary proved wholly accurate.
There’s a general agreement that columnists don’t comment on each other’s work through these pages, so I shall try to avoid doing that.
But I will say for anybody to defend child abuse in the church by saying it’s worse in the wider world (so that’s okay, then) or that homosexuality is the primary cause of child abuse in the church, needs to stop, take a step back, and question their own belief system, Christian or otherwise.
And finally, it’s Channel Islands Pride this week. Our annual chance to enjoy messages from people asking ‘why don’t we have a straight Pride’ and ‘why do they feel the need to flaunt it?’
They always make me smile.
The same small band will post their comments on the JEP website (possibly under the online version of this column, and usually with some intentional innuendo that they always find hilarious: ‘they just can’t help shoving it in our faces…’ etc, etc) and almost certainly on Facebook forums where they get to feed off each others’ hate and intolerance.
Well, while homosexuality is still a crime in nearly 100 countries around the world, while rates of gay-hate crimes are increasing, and while some use dog-whistle words to imply gays are paedophiles, I’ll continue to back it.
And for those who want a straight Pride… go organise one. You’ll love it.
