Finger pointing

There seems to be a need among some people to always have an enemy to blame for every little thing. Somewhere down the line we've become a culture of finger pointers, and you can see evidence of it all over the place.

I'm referring, in this instance, to Jira Web 382, which in its original form was quite deliberately worded to be finger-pointing. While I have nothing against backing up a proposal with factual information, finger pointing is always subjective. One persons enemy is another persons friend. To say a group of people you don't like is responsible for something that is somehow sinister and conspiracy-theory isn't a seemly way to conduct yourself in a public forum setting.

Unfortunately the shield the internet provides us all makes that kind of thing much easier. You wouldn't go up to a belligerant drunk who is holding a smashed bottle and shout at him for being wrong about something unless you were prepared for him to take a swing at you, because that's exactly what he'd do - but on the internet it's easy to take vicious swipes at someone just because they disagree with you, and for this reason everyone with even the smallest of grievances can cause an escalation of these grievances to sometimes monumental proportions.

In the case of Jira 382 I've apparently become a hostile tribemember who purely wants to get her own way in everything. I've even been referred to (by inferrence) as a Nazi because I'm taking what I see as a stand for what I see as right. Suddenly there are battle lines being drawn, and I'm taking quite vicious fire from people I don't even know. Aside from reading with some amusement, odd comments on the Linden Blog about how Ann O'Toole keeps commenting a lot, I'd never heard of her, and I've never met her. Yet according to her, I'm a Nazi. According to her and Ciaran Laval I'm part of the "cabal" (Prokofy's term) that is involved with this, despite the fact that I've never actually closed a JIRA issue (other than trying to close this one), which you can see from my JIRA profile.

So we get a situation that's gone from factual to hearsay to bitter contention. People aren't researching before they shout their mouths of. If we were all in the same room, I wonder, would that happen? In my RL job I have had to deal with drunks wielding broken bottles, and let me tell you it isn't a situation you really want to be in. But the confrontation is limited to those who can see what's going on - the whole picture - and still want to risk being hurt if they become involved. Not so these internet confrontations, where anybody can - and does - wade in, often far more viciously than they'd ever dream of doing IRL.

I'm sure they get something out of it. They must do, otherwise they wouldn't do it. But it seems a really sad aspect of the internet, reflected in some ways in Second Life that those who would be sitting quietly at their chairs looking the other way in a confrontation, are at the forefront of finger pointing and shouting from the safety of their keyboards on the internet.