The right to an opinion........

UPDATED:
I am still very much a firm believer in the right to have an opinion and the freedom of speech in society providing it is not deliberately used to incite violence or any form of racism or religious discrimination. This includes all the other freedoms we have won over many centuries however, I do not like the trend towards the rights of minorities taking precedent over these hard won freedoms of ours and I maintain the right to challenge issues that I feel are wrong.

Here's an example, for many years now I have been the member of an on-line forum where many controversial issues are openly discussed and often very robustly. In fact so robustly at times that the Moderators of the site need to be quick to intervene and either delete the postings or bring cool sanity to an otherwise overheated debate.

However Of late though a growing admittedly minority group of, shall we say, an "older" generation of contributors who are clearly not as erudite, educated, literate or dare I say intelligent enough to be able to counter an argument with cogent well thought through responses resort to abusing the writer personally. Their mode of "attack" is to resort to small, personal slights, not outright ranting attacks, but small irritating snide attacks that are in many ways very painful, even to a crusty old debater such as I. Let me give you an example, suggesting that in my case, my contributions were "pontificating" or "arrogant" or some other unfair negative description. My views were opposite and critical of theirs, nothing less. Of course this is only their view of me, but I have to say that I always like to be forthright and yes, I have strong views which I may express strongly but in clear and cogent terms without personalising or naming anyone in particular.

One type of response I have grown to dislike intensely is the follow up one of my posts with a retort simply says something like "what"? or "meaning"? Rather than typing a full sentence. In these cases I can't bring myself to respond nor to some of the more detailed responses that are riddled with the most terrible spelling errors or complete lack of understanding of basic grammar or punctuation. I am no scholar or academic but I have pride in my use of language and am careful how I present it.

I hate to see poor spelling where little or no effort is made to check BEFORE posting the response. I used to surreptitiously correct spelling and punctuation until it became all too tedious and I became even more despairing of the sheer laziness of the writers.

So, why bother I thought. Why put up with the sniping and innuendo, why correct the spelling, why punctuate the posts and the answer? A was a resounding blank!

I don't want to suffer the stress of it all from these ageing dinosaurs from a past age, these old crusty class warriors who make me cringe at my own working class background, these silly sexist dolts with little or no understanding of the way to deal with disagreement in an intelligent manner. My detractors seek to spread the blame by implying that I am attacking every member of the forum, I am not. But I am attacking those who seem unable to contribute properly.

So I walk away and leave them to it and sadly I am not the first to do so and I am sure I wont be the last. What is more worrying about this and what prompted me to write my thoughts was that this trend seems to be more and more prevalent in society in general. Any scan of Facebook, Youtube or some other social networking sites and you will see these rantings and poorly written posts.

It's back to my brighter side from now on as the burden of the "old world" is behind me now and I don't intend to go back.