Originally <a href='/showthread.php?p=19075432'>posted</a> on 07/05/2013:
I think that you are absolutely right about that. The reality of an internet forum is, though, that sometimes when you encounter RandomScreenNameSwagX, whom I've never had a conversation with before and who clearly knows very little about UFC and is posting in a gambling thread about how awesome Anderson Silva is or how Weidman is the great white hope, it's difficult to consider this person as an individual, rather than as a part of a greater hivemind of retardation. I'll put it to you this way: I'm sure there's a guy named Jerry who's a good family man, loves his wife, does well by his kids, is really fun to have a beer with, and treats his friends with dignity and respect, but he really hates black people. When I see JerryXSwag on an internet forum, I don't think of him as a person with good and bad traits, I think of him as a perpetuation of a really f-cking stupid idea. That's the reason you can have so many people spending so much time arguing in Youtube comments; they don't really think they're arguing with Brooke, 23, law student, they think they're arguing with LawSwagX, who hates Obama and thinks that he's a war criminal. It's part of the human condition, I think. I'm not calling Craig, 25, mechanical engineer and rabid Silva fanboy, an idiot, I'm calling the idea that he represents in our limited interaction idiotic. Sort of.