The Prospect Of Nuclear War : Paul Craig Roberts

Most Americans live in their myths, and these myths are immune to facts. Some Americans become angry when confronted with information inconsistent with their preconceptions. I began learning this back in the newsprint era from letters, and the lesson has continued from emails and comment sections on websites.

Postal letters and emails are outlets that permit a reader to let off steam by lambasting a writer, but comment sections permit readers to share their outrage with all the website’s readers in addition to the writer and to gang up on and slander a writer.

Websites, such as OpEdNews and Information Clearing House, that I permit to repost my columns return the favor by having comment sections in which government trolls, assorted kooks, Reagan haters, and uninformed individuals can slander me, assault my reputation, misrepresent what I write, and do their worst to counteract the information that I supply to readers. Trolls and their ilk do the same thing to any number of writers who try to compensate for the absence of an honest Western media. Look at who is under attack. It is not the presstitutes at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News; it is Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, for example. One is said to be a rapist, and the other an accessory to the theft of documents.

I have never understood the point of comment sections. Invariably comments either praise or slander writers or consist of disputes between readers in which they come to verbal blows over subjects about which they are poorly informed.

I have heard the claim that sites have comment sections in order to attract readers and to increase visits or “hits” that raise the site’s salability to advertisers. However, Information Clearing House, for example, does not take ads, and the comments on articles posted on OpEdNews are a tiny percentage, a small fraction of one percent, of the readers who visit the article. Therefore, I conclude that these reasons for having comment sections are irrational.

Some say that comment sections are like letters to the editor of newspapers that let readers have their say. But newsprint editors reviewed the letters and only printed those few that had some merit. This is not the case in website comment sections where every fool and troll has access to the writer’s audience.

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Reposted with permission