Joel Stein makes no secret of his at least slightly left-of-center political views. But that doesn’t stop him from occasionally throwing a playful jab at like-minded thinkers in his “Awesome Column” for TIME magazine. His latest offering, which questions the value of Internet comment boards, includes the following observation:
After all, nearly all the comments I’ve ever read immediately devolve into arguments among extremists who’ve read only the headline and want to write about something unrelated, which is always whether the President is a horrible communist or a terrific communist.
Stein teases fellow lefties again a little later in the piece:
Besides, we’re merely giving a voice to a few obnoxious cranks. The Guardian found that fewer than 1% of readers post comments and that more than 20% of comments come from 0.0037% of readers. These people are such bad writers, they are the same 0.0037% of the population who don’t have a column in the Huffington Post.
Ouch.
