There's a frequent commenter on this site, a not unintelligent fellow who has a legitimate point of view but chooses to express it in very bitter tones. We've all had those days when the only thing we can do is put the worst possible interpretation on everything. He has that day every day. 

Here he is commenting on a post by a teacher who encourages her students to write:

What makes a writer? Self-delusion. Most of the people here write with two grand hallucinations in mind: that their own lives are worthy of committing to words (for most OS posts are self-obsessed accounts) and that writing is financially remunerative.

Both dead wrong, of course. Your own navel lint is undoubtedly fascinating to you, but believing that someone else wants to bend down and stare at it, or like it, is a grand conceit. And of course, no writer is ever paid anything for writing any more. Magazines are dying and print books are rotting zombies, just waiting for the next breeze from the Internet to knock them over. Why should a publishing house pay more than car fare to anyone? Keep flipping those burgers, writers.

The only possible response to that is: Geez! Lighten up! The nice lady was talking about elementary school students, not the publishing industry.

On the other side are all the people who say You Are Wonderful and give all kinds of sentimental praise which sometimes goes beyond even what an individual post really justifies. They're a lot easier to take, but sometimes they seem as far off the mark as the commenter above (whose handle is tomreedtoon).

Back when Sirenita Lake and I had our own zine, I would never publish the letters that were purely "You're great, I love your magazine." I would only publish the ones that actually added something to the discussion, even if -- in fact, especially -- if they were critical. Nowadays, when we're dealing with the infinite bandwidth of the internet, such a decision looks elitist.  If a dozen or a hundred people want to tell me how great a blog post of mine is, there's plenty of space. If the same number want to tell me how wrong I am, there's an equal amount of space. But I still relish the comments that add something to the discussion, even when they are bitter (ad hominem attacks excepted; to his credit, no matter how bitter he gets I've never seen tomreedtoon indulge in an ad hominem argument).

This has something to do with the issue of dignity and decorum in our society. Last night a congressman shouted "baby-killer" at a fellow congressman during a floor debate. Last September another congressman shouted "You lie" at the President in the same chamber. Both outbursts are appalling breaches of decorum, and both were applauded by the same activists whose take-no-prisoners tactics dragged down the health care debate last summer at "Town Hall" meetings. 

I think they do these things because those  so-called Town Hall protests were the only really energizing thing to happen to the conservative movement in 2009; those protests spawned the Tea Party movement and gave new life to the Republican Party. So it's no wonder that Republican politicians are adopting the tactics. It's just a wonder they do it on the floor of Congress. The number of things that distinguish the U.S. from a third-world country where such things happen as a matter of course -- Taiwan, where legislators regularly engage in donnybrooks on the floor of their congress, comes to mind --  seems to be growing less all the time. 

My response to the "baby killer" shout? As soon as the perpetrator admitted responsibility, I looked up his opponent in this year's election, Andy Wilson, and I made a donation.