According to our recent poll, people find Twitter and Facebook to be the most annoying among all online resources. I know exactly where they are coming from but reently I have had an opportunity to discover a far nastier online space: Reddit.

According to Wikipedia,

The median U.S. Reddit user is male, 35-44 years of age, has some college education, and is making a middle-range income of $25,000 – $49,000 USD. The analysis also shows that the top audience interests of the site are development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to meet this college-educated, computer-savvy part of the Reddit culture. What I have noticed is that my posts often get quoted by extremely vile sexists on Reddit, which then leads to thousands of sexist freaks descending on my blog. These people are so intellectually challenged that they never even manage to write any posts of their own in response to my articles that seem to offend them. All they do is screech, “Now see what this stupid feminist is saying [link to Clarissa’s Blog.] Isn’t she stupid? And a feminist? Which means she is stupid. A stupid feminist. And her blog is a stupid feminist blog.” Then, they start coming here, trying to leave this type of comments by the dozen.

It now seems to me that all of the Internet-rejects who have no capacity of running their own Facebook page or Twitter account (let alone a blog) have flocked to Reddit to spou venom against those of us who do have something of our own to say.

I needed to watch something on TV because I have to create student attendance sheets and that task is too boring without having a TV on in the background. So I finally settled on a show called “Snapped” that analyzes crimes that have been on the news.

In the episode I’m watching, there is a story of a family where the wife worked while the husband stayed at home with their child. All of the relatives, friends, and neighbors are excoriating the husband as a lazy layabout who exploited the working wife and was too much of a deadbeat to look for a job.

Why is it that in stories about stay-at-home mothers we never see this kind of opprobrium heaped upon women who don’t work? Either living off of somebody is exploitative or it isn’t. Let’s just decide already and stop applying this nasty double-standard that vilifies men for doing the very same things for which women are celebrated.

I haven’t watched the TV at home for so long (almost 4 months) that I forgot how to turn it on. It took me almost 10 minutes of staring at the blank screen to figure it out.

And then I discovered that there is nothing on worth watching, so I needn’t have bothered.

So let’s have ourselves a small poll here:

Feel free to choose several at once.

And after people vote, I’ll share which of the above-mentioned resources has been sending the stupidest commenters and the most annoying trolls to this blog.

From a really great post on the pernicious nature of burqas  and why they should be banned:

Liberals have tried to turn this into a human rights issue, that we should have the right to wear whatever we want. First of all, this is an extremely disingenuous position for liberals to take, since they support a capitalist system which most definitely does not give people the right to wear whatever they want; if they were serious about such a position, they would be advocating a ban on corporate-imposed clothing and uniforms as well. . .

Patriarchy is the real issue under question. Women are told that they must wear these cloth tombstones because men are such beasts that they will rape women who show their face in public. This is merely a fanatical version of gallantry, where men take it upon themselves to “protect” women from non-existing dangers, repressing women’s freedom in the process. . .

Some people dismiss these concerns as “cute.” I am not sure how being outraged against extremist patriarchal hate speech is “cute.” The patriarchy needs to be exterminated. You may argue with my methods, and that’s fine. You may argue that it is not the State’s role to ban such clothing, and I agree with you completely. However, I still think it is better for the State to ban them than for the State to not ban them, in the same way that I’d rather the State ban murder than not ban murder (sadly, they don’t, at least not consistently).

I have to mention that the post’s author has political convictions that are very different from mine in many respects. However, when he’s right, he’s right. Pseudo-liberals who advocate tolerance for one of the greatest symbols of female humiliation and subjection are nothing but woman-haters. They defend burqas because they believe that it’s not a big deal to sacrifice women’s dignity and freedom for a specter of some imaginary multi-culturalist paradise.

And why is he polluting the pages of the Spanish newspaper El Pais with his disgusting sobs about the tragic lives of those poor, poor women who have to work?

El Pais is a great newspaper that is miles ahead of any American news outlet. So why does it suddenly allow some jerk in the throes of a mid-life crisis to tell some ridiculous stories about high-powered female executives who want nothing more than to turn into kept women and dedicate their lives to cleaning the house and doing yoga? Why doesn’t this idiot take his lies to the New York Times? They will be very welcome there.

This Carlin character is so miserable in his personal and professional life that he applauds Gaddafi’s attitude to women. Once again, this would have made him feel at home in the same rag that employs another sexual loser, Ross Douthat. What this idiot, who believes that it’s a good idea to force working women to remain virgins, is doing writing for a progressive European newspaper is a mystery.

Nothing is more annoying that this type of sore loser who tries to hide his own personal issues behind this kind of anti-women rhetoric.

My father is covering the Montreal World Film Festival as a journalist for the newspaper of the Russian-speaking community of Montreal. He has been invited to be part of Catherine Deneuve’s press conference.

“Nah,” he said, “that’s boring.”

Instead, he went to interview a Russian film-maker and actor who can’t even begin to dream of Deneuve’s fame but who has managed to make a movie my father happens to appreciate.