24 hours a day, 365 days a year, someone, somewhere, is being wrong on the internet. If you spend much time thinking about the ways in which they are wrong, or, worse yet, trying to do something about it, you’ll never get anything else done.
The problem is that the quotes you have offered don’t dwell on that. They lean more towards the energy cost of having a child and that effect on the world in terms of carbon footprints.
Europe and America are just about retaining the amount of people in the country whereas other areas of the world are having population explosions. There is a cost to this, even if it isn’t about how we are going to feed them.
To be honest, I can get behind some of the quotes, especially the last one. I’m sorry if that upsets your Christian mind, but as someone else has already said in this thread:
It’s just basically unfiltered thinking. Your neighbor may smile and nod politely when you tell him your opinion on something, but you will see what he’s really thinking in the comments section of the local TV station or newspaper.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing in this time of political correctness and recreational outrage and “won’t someone please think of the children!”
What gets me lately is how politically partisan many of the comments are on various sites, like for a CNN story for example. If both sides aren’t outright bashing each other, a right winger is bringing up Obama as a negative example even if the story has nothing to do with politics (or a left winger is bashing some part of the Republican Party). It’s very disheartening.
Speaking as a non-American, that happens here. All. The. Time.
Do you mean in your country or on the Straight Dope?
If the latter, I expect it here because people are debating, but you wouldn’t expect the ordinary person to get so partisan on some dopey news story on some media website.
On the Dope.
Here it doesn’t feel like debating. In fact, I would say that very little political debating gets done here. Nothing can ever get “discussed”, it ALWAYS, without fail, turns into a Republicans vs Democrats thing. No one defends their views or policies, they instead just attack the “other side”.
And just so everyone is clear, I am saying that this happens on both sides.
I swear Bob Rae, the interim leader of the Liberal party of Canada, has hired a thousand people who do nothing but post idiotic and ill-informed comments about the current Conservative government on the Globe and Mail website.
Considering it’s supposed to be a national paper, and considering the Conservatives hold a majority of seats, it’s amazing how few comments are from Conservative supporters.
IME, and I always thought this was weird, you get a lot of angry left wingers posting on the NP and Sun comments pages, and then a much more right wing sampling on the CBC’s website. Riddle me that one!
And yes, I’m pretty sure only idiots post on news comment pages. But then, considering some of the pissy, angry debates I’ve witnessed on here, it sort of seems like the pot calling the kettle black. 
Here’s a browser plug-in that translates all YouTube comments into “herp derp”.
Which, as stated, renders YouTube a lot less offensive. You could pretty much do the same for much of the internet without losing anything of value.
So which ones are which, then?
Care to guess?
The real ones are the first and last one. The middle two are fake. Don’t think you could have sussed it by the poster names, however; the HYS pages were full of real people with chosen usernames like that.
I don’t know. There are always stupid comments on such sites, but there’s the occasional well-written one. The Daily Show and Colbert Report often have good ones, despite the stupidity of not allowing paragraphs.
I also know certain YouTube channels that have intelligent comments. It just depends on the audience:
I’ve never seen intelligent comments on Yahoo!. I have on HuffPo.
And I’d argue that political stuff is one of the only things we really do debate here, as there are actually two sides in some cases.
Should I read an article in an online news source that strikes such a chord with me that I need to respond.
I would take it to a board where I value the opinion of people who’s opinions I value. (The opinions I mean not necessarily the people)
Comments sections are purely forums for recreational outrage or other such wankfests where you can declare your devotion to a soundbite
There is simply wrong or naive and then there is crackpot rainbows & unicorns fantasyland insanity. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/us/armys-plans-to-relocate-gear-offer-roadmap-to-future-roles.html#comments:
Damn–not bad. I got one and missed one, which is as good as a monkey could’ve done.
QSH, if this was some backhanded call for unrestricted breeding, I regret that you will not get any support for such a position here. Least of all from me. (And having now worked for several years in a public housing project where children are the source, directly or indirectly, of about 95% of the problems we deal with, I doubt anything you say will cause me to do a miraculous turnaround.)
The thing you gotta remember about comments sections is that they’re not like message boards. Message boards have a staff of moderators who have a direct stake in making sure they do not get filled with filth. There was a time when you could find anarchic boards with spam and flame wars, but nearly all of them have long since wised up. Now if someone is being a total jerk or spamming, the moderators can just throw the bum out, and there’s nothing the bum can do about it. (Sock puppets used to be a problem, but there are ways of fighting them as well. It’s like viruses; there will always be more, but the countermeasures will keep right up.)
A comments section is open to anyone who reads the article. Sure, most places require a registration, but that’s no more complicated than punching in a few lines of text. There will be rampant stupidity, which will not be culled because no one in charge of the site gives a damn about culling it. I actually don’t mind the truly awful ones, like the ever-annoying right wing echo chambers on the websites Sadly, No brings up. I take one glance and write it off, no harm, no foul. What’s really annoying are places like Cracked, which have some interesting and insightful comments (some even bringing up issues the article writer missed), but you have to slog through tons of garbage to get to it. There isn’t even all that much flaming, mostly banal declarations like “I’d hit that.” or the usual cliche meme crap about over ninethousaaaaand and Chuck Norris. Not to mention rampant spamming, which even YouTube doesn’t allow anymore.
Speaking of which, YouTube gets a lousy rep mainly because it’s the big dog. But as I mentioned on my last MPSIMS post, nearly all the really nasty stuff is by the worthless jerks for the worthless jerks; the rest of us have the good sense to keep out. The real problem is that it’s so huge that there’s no way to regulate it, so we have to police ourselves. Really stupid or offensive posts get downvoted into oblivion, spamming gets shot down pretty quickly (there’s even a button just for that purpose), and the eternally moronic “meme” posts (“Don’t read this! Oh no, you read this, now you have to spam this post or die!”) have died out. It’s far from perfect, but it has caused a drastic reduction in the truly disgusting stuff. And yes, there are good, smart replies if you bother to look. (I’m “hawaiidkw1” there in case you’re interested, and hey, I never know. 
) In large part, I would classify YouTube as “banal”. You get lots of dumb one-word or one-sentence replies, narcissism (“I’d hit that! I’m getting a boner! Now I am recommending this video to a friend! Now I am getting a message that the connection has been cut off! Now I no longer have a boner!”), convoluted emoticons, boring observations (“Man, they sure gyrate a lot!”), and other various meaningless drivel. No point, but at least no harm, which sometimes is the best you can hope for.
But there are people spouting both on the internet, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you spend too much time worrying about it, you will get nothing done.
It’s also useful to remember that you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.
the online version of our local paper has a comments section. They regularly push the cars vs cyclist debate and people always respond with homicidal comments - which pass through the moderators.
The exercise is largely pointless - if you’re not commenting soon after it’s published you don’t get published or your comment is buried deep within those which should have been edited - people repeating the same rubbish. Does anybody really go back through the comments sections trying to mind them for pearls of wisdom… no, theyre just rants.
They don’t even know how babby is formed.
In general, the more broad-ranging the site content, and the less-moderated the input, the more blindingly stupid the comments.