Stephen Fry on the World Wide Wankers: Quite Intelligent is not the word
Yesterday, I had a go at television. Very short recap: I don’t like what’s on offer very much.
There have always been exceptions, of course. A medium that has given us both Blackadder and QI can’t be all bad.
Of course, what binds both those programmes is the benevolent genius of Stephen Fry. He’s one of those sparse arguments in favour of Western civilisation – or what’s left of it.
Which ain’t all that much.
For every Stephen Fry – or for every great paean for civilisation, like Clive James’ magnificent work Cultural Amnesia – there are a million freaks and trolls who spout and leave their garbage in the public domain of the Internet.
It says enough about our species that for every Michelangelo there are millions and millions of vandals who would spray paint any David they encountered if they felt they could do so safely and anonymously.
As Fry himself acknowledged in a Guardian interview.
Luckily this blog is mostly me talking to myself. An excercise in vanity, no doubt but one almost entirely free of the kind of malevolent nitwits Fry describes here below:
“I don’t know about you but whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining. Their resentment, their desire to be heard at the most vituperative level, at the most unpleasant and malevolent, genuinely ill-willed malevolent, level is terrifying and I am very often simply not able to cope with that.”
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