Alex Massie Alex Massie

Damn those ugly sociopathic nerds and their squalid ejaculations!

Imagine that, until now, the only books you’d been able to read were those that had been carefully selected by your parents and that, not surprisingly, these were books of a type that your parents approved of, written by authors who, for want of a better word, they considered sound. These books weren’t necessarily bad, you understand, but the more you read the more you began to wonder if this was the only type of book there was and these the only perspectives ever committed to paper.

Imagine how you might feel, then, if you were suddenly freed from this prescribed reading diet and handed a pass to the British Library. You might be amazed at the variety on offer and bewildered by the sheer range of subjects waiting to be discovered. Having been brought up on a high-fibre reading diet, you might very well binge yourself silly on sweet and fatty sensations of questionable literary or intellectual merit. But if your parents were then to warn you, in grave and disappointed tones, that this was only to be expected since everyone – and your parents most especially – knows that libraries are dominated by crude and unrewarding books that are likely to corrupt the weak-willed and the credulous, you might say “but isn’t a library fun?” And, for that matter, anyone familiar with a library would tell your parents that they’re the kind of buffoons who should never be charged with nourishing a child’s intellectual curiosity.

Forgive me the laboured analogy. But the McBride-Draper affair has, as I feared it would, produced a fair measure of tedious hand-wringing from newspaper pundits who seem incapable of grasping that the web is just a library without significant entry costs and that, like a library, it contains all of human life. That necessarily means it has plenty of nonsense and absurdity and depravity but only a fool would presume that this is all it contains.

Iain MacWhirter’s column

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