‘Great God, Twitter is an awful place!’ I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It’s quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle.
The reason Rod doesn’t do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness.
He’s right, of course, as I’m reminded almost daily by missives like this: ‘Gutted to learn that c**t @jamesdelingpole has kids. So that means even more c**ts in the world.’ (Obviously, it came without the asterisks.) Now we’re supposed to have thick skins, those of us who appear in the public eye. But I defy anyone to read a tweet like that and not feel at least a flutter of discomfiture.
It’s not so much the hurt caused that’s the problem but all the time you waste mulling over the identity of your enemy, and wondering about his sick motivation, and plotting how to strike back. Do you go through the rigmarole of trying to get his account closed down? Do you do a Dom Joly — good on you, Dom! — and report him to the police? Do you craft a reply so acerbic that on reading it he dissolves into a fizzing puddle of self-hatred and mortification? Or do you just press the button marked ‘block’?
What I try to do these days is block. As my young social media guru @nero is forever reminding me, to do anything else is to give these loser malcontents more power than they deserve. It’s true: generally the nastiest, most personal tweets come from people with the smallest Twitter followings (reflecting their smallness in other departments too, no doubt). All you do by acknowledging them is to make them feel wanted; worse, if your reply is public you might even help them recruit followers to their cause.
But surely someone like James Delingpole, someone who writes so contentiously, ought to delight in a bit of Twitter argy-bargy — no? It’s what lots of people assume. But the reason what I write is so provocative is not because I’ve set out to annoy as many people as possible. It’s provocative only because it fails to coincide with what Dr Johnson called ‘the Clamour of the Times’.
Which is to say that, as it says at the top of my Twitter account, I’m right about everything. My problem — shared with almost every other halfway decent libertarian/conservative commentator — is that most people are incapable of appreciating I’m right because their Weltanschauung has been so warped by the post-war, cultural Marxist consensus.
And with people like that there’s really no point arguing. Especially not in 140 characters, as I learned to my cost early on. Some minor comedian, a chap I’d never heard of before but who had accidentally become my Twitter friend, tweeted me to ask what it was that had first led me to doubt man-made global warming. This requires more than a sentence, but I did my best: ‘I guess I’ve always been quite good at sniffing out cant.’
Next thing I knew, what I thought had been a private reply had been incorporated into his stand-up set. It turned out that this comedian was an ardent believer in the AGW religion, as were his audience. So he worked up this routine where he imagined Newton basing his discoveries on his sense of smell. Sniffing, get it? Apparently it has them all in stitches every time.
Last week, I had more local difficulty over some new research from a Berkeley professor purportedly showing that the ‘sceptics’ are wrong and that the evidence for ‘global warming’ is stronger than ever. Actually it showed nothing of the kind. But again, there is not a plausible counterargument you can express in the space of 140 characters. That’s why anyone who goadingly tweeted me in the expectation that there was was rewarded with an instant block.
It’s not that I can’t fight my corner. I can and I very much enjoy doing so — but only on the terrain of my choosing. That terrain is usually an article or a blog where there is proper space to develop an argument, supported with evidence. Try to do the same on Twitter and all you achieve is to sound petulant, defensive, desperate: you can assert all you like but why should anyone believe what you’re saying is true?
This also, I think, goes some way towards explaining Twitter’s pronounced left-wing bias. As Rush Limbaugh and others have noted, the left doesn’t much like to engage in rational, fact-based arguments it knows it’s going to lose. That’s why it’s always so much more comfortable in the realm of the emotive slogan, the glib one-liner, the cheap shot, the ad hominem. Twitter is the ideal medium for all this, in a way that wordier parts of the internet just aren’t. The blog, for example, vastly favours the right because there’s so much more space for all that stuff that liberal-lefties so loathe and fear, such as logic and evidence and cross-references.
I suppose my Twitter following would be a lot bigger if I operated a less ruthless blocking policy. But believe it or not I’m a peace-and-love kind of guy. If you want a fight, go and annoy @toadmeister or @gilescoren. Me, I get quite enough of that on my blogs. Twitter is for my amen corner, only.
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