LJ is not here to help.

It serves to support almost any notion, regardless of how much it sucks. A negative or dissenting comment here is amplified a thousandfold by the reader, so polite disagreement is most commonly expressed (I'm guessing) with silence, which usually conveys no information.

Friends are loath to speak freely, even in person. It's so easy to ditch people you see electronically more often than in the flesh. When was the last time a friend pissed you off -- I mean, really, REALLY pissed you off, and you eventually worked it out, instead of just un-friending* them? People used to do that. I did, in the days before LJ and Blackberries and MySpace. Now we don't even say "I disagree. I think you're being unreasonable because..." We just make new icons, re-market ourselves, and junk the products people that don't share our every opinion. We are not just free to explore our own ideas: We're prone to dysfunction and neurosis, because we throw out the beneficial effects of collective good judgement.

Diaper-fetish baby boomers tell each other that everyone else has it wrong. A community doesn't make it okay. Sometimes people need therapy, or a good yelling at, or a punch in the nose -- not reinforcement. I'm not excluding myself from "people."

Do you feel like that, or maybe a slightly less dark version of that, once in a while?


* I hate that word.