Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
The Internet is a bastion of negativity, and we get to sit there and voice our cute, little, important opinions.
I don't know that anybody has walked up to me in the street or in a store or in the grocery and said to me, 'I hope you bomb Assad.' Certainly plenty have said, 'No; thumbs down, thumbs down, thumbs down.'
It's very much the currency of discourse on social media where political disagreements very quickly become very personalised.
The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
Social media is natural to me, and it's a very immediate way of saying something. It's the way politics are done these days. In modern politics, you can't ignore that even if you wanted to. I can't imagine doing politics without it.
Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words.
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences.
In the end, the whole Internet thing kills me, because you can use it as a positive thing or you can read into all the negativity. And I think you've gotta put out positive energy, put out cool viral stuff, and then just stay out of people's opinions.
The only danger about websites, you know, is people who remember something you did or said thirty or forty years ago, and bring it up against you, so you're going for a job and you don't get it.