Everyone’s a critic.  Nothing new there.  But since the development of ‘net culture, everyone gets to publish their critiques for the entire world to read.  After porn and Email, the Internet’s main purpose is as an outlet for people to express their disgust with every facet of their culture, and even other people’s cultures.  And the random grumblings of the man on the street are not just random grumblings anymore — now, they’re a crucial part of crowdsourced ratings information.  Why pay a critic to write reviews when you can get 10,000 people to write reviews for free, then average them into a handful of metrics?

Yes, the ability to bitch to the world about all the things you hate is not just possible now — it’s practically your duty.  And yet so many people seem so, well, terrible at it.  With that in mind, I’ve thrown together this handy tutorial that will guide all Internet bitchers towards writing the kind of compelling, useful bitch-rants of which the world needs more.

Of course, in keeping with the true spirit of bitching, I will not be offering positive suggestions.  Instead, I will meta-bitch about the common snares bitchers fall into when bitching, that you may learn from their mistakes — or should I say “bitchstakes?” — with real-life examples provided.  Think of it as the Seven Deadly Sins of Bitching, only they’re not deadly, and there’s only five of them.  Feel free to bitch about that in the comments below.

Unoriginality. Even the most insightful, hilarious or informative criticism loses some of its lustre after the hundredth encounter.  Some ideas are just so worn out, we don’t need to hear them again!  Ask yourself: have I read this thought somewhere else more than twice?  Have I read this thought somewhere else more than thrice?  If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” consider that territory covered, and move on.

Unless otherwise noted, all the examples of ridiculous bitching cited here are from a (pretty good, worth reading) salon.com story on Glenn Beck’s rise to fame.  I could have chosen anything; you don’t have to look too hard to find examples of all the following.  Salon is supposed to bring in a slightly more literate and educated crowd, so just imagine if I stuck to comments from Yahoo questions!  On second thought, don’t.

But anyway.  Salon is a left-leaning publication.  So of course everyone but the trolls knows Glenn Beck’s an awful, awful person.  And we’ve just finished reading 12 pages about him.  Do we really gain any new insight from comments like this, seen here in its entirety?:

Beck

He sucks the big one! Period

Well … at least it’s concise.

Impertinence. And I mean this in the most traditional sense of the word: not as “irreverence” or “insouciance” — which is what you should exhibit when you’re tearing down idols and pissing on other people’s livelihoods — I mean this in the sense of not being pertinent to the subject at hand.  I distinguish this from irrelevance because something may be very relevant — just not relevant to what’s being discussed.

We all have our bugbears, bêtes noires, and pet issues.  But forums and comment threads are started to discuss a certain specific topic.  Please don’t keep bringing up the horrors of female circumcision when we’re trying to decide which High School Musical movie is best.  Please.  You know who you are.

In the comments on the Glenn Beck article,  à propos of nothing:

… Norway is the one country who has escaped the recession with an unemployment of 3% and a thriving marked:

And we have health care for all our citizens.

And consider this, which is just a single paragraph from a longer post, all of it on NASA’s climate change research:

NASA astrological engineer Phil Chapman wrote just last year, “All four agencies that track the earth’s temperature – the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy Group at the University of Alabama, and the Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California – report that it cooled about .7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and puts us back to where we were in 1930; this after a previous year’s drop. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that ‘global warming’ is over.”

I mean, that’s great and all, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?  Or Glenn Beck, for that matter?

Solipsism. I don’t like reggae.  I would never mention this except to illustrate a point: I have never for a moment confused my dislike of reggae with the actual quality of reggae.  If other people like it, far be it from me to tell them they’re wrong.  Moreover, I never for a moment believed that anyone else would ever care what I like or not, in that my opinions, in and of themselves, as points of conversation, are in no way interesting to anyone but me.

Opinions are like assholes: they’re all over the Internet.  They really break down into two kinds — opinions can be useful if they’re informed and informative, but the rest are just subjective.  “I thought that movie suffered from a loss of momentum in the second act” is a subjective opinion that nonetheless tells us something about the film.  “I thought that movie sucked, because I hate all Westerns” tells us nothing — assuming we already knew it was a Western.

Comments like these also beg the question, why, if you don’t like the subject matter, are you watching / reading / listening to the material in the first place?

There’s also a grander, more sweeping solipsism, in which facts are made subordinate to personal experience.  Sure, medical statistics show that smoking causes cancer, but “my grandfather smoked twelve packs a day since he was six years old, and he lived to be a hundred and twenty!”  That’s not just the solipsism of thinking that if you don’t like something, it’s not worth liking; it’s the solipsism of thinking that your singular, personal experience actually trumps the experiences of the entire rest of the world put together.  Admirable, almost, in its depth of conceit.

Some examples:

Boooorinnnnnng!!!!!

I have to say that it has been a real chore to wade through the minutia of such a minute life.  Before anyone assumes that success is synonymous with real talent, remember that Three Dog Night sold a lot of albums — too many albums.

Another:

What is the point of this series?

And perhaps my favourite:

Glenn Beck and Salon.com

This is really just getting pathetic. How many more Glenn Beck articles do you plan on putting out salon.com? Just ignore the guy if you don’t like him.

No — you just ignore the article if you don’t like it!  Sheesh.  It’s so — well, you know.  I don’t need to spell it out.

Pedantry. Imagine you spend hours making painfully detailed notes, setting up interviews, doing research, missing pilot season and your friends’ parties, and ignoring your children so you can create a timeless work of art that speaks to fundamental issues of existence, and then, after finally releasing your precious creation, tentatively, to the blogosphere, with dreams that the life-altering ideas contained therein may reach people, provoking thought and discussion and changing the way they see the world — ultimately changing the world itself — you sit in front of your computer, hitting the “refresh” button over and over with bated breath, until finally the first comment is posted.  Your heart races as you scan the page — will this person agree with your analysis?  Have you won a heart and / or a mind?  Has your insight just rocked this person’s world and shaken his or her beliefs to their very foundation?  And there it is — “You should really put the period inside the quotation marks.”

And that, my friends, is what we call “missing the big picture.”  Pedantry has its virtues.  I myself have been guilty of it on occasion (seventeen occasions, to be exact).  Bertrand Russell said, “A pedant is just someone who prefers his opinions to be correct.”  And we should, I think, all strive to be correct.  But this emphasis on tiny details misses — ironically — two tiny details: first, that one shouldn’t miss the bigger ideas of a bit of writing by becoming hung up on trifling (and ultimately insignificant) details, and second, there’s a time and a place for correcting other people.  Sometimes, it’s enough to be content in the knowledge that one is always correct without informing everyone around him as well.

To wit: if after twelve pages of personal history, all you can come up with is a nagging doubt about a detail provided merely to include a little atmosphere, you may be so focussed on the tree in front of you that the forest will eat you alive.  These posts all came in rapid succession from the same poster, within minutes of the original article’s publication.

At 7:22 am:

Love Isn’t Always On Time by FOREIGNER????

> Beck returns from the break with Foreigner’s “Love Isn’t

> Always On Time.”

It’s Toto. “Hold the Line”.

Sorry, but I guess it’s a common mistake:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f-cEM1l7Ks

Unless you can find a Foreigner song by the name “Love Isn’t Always On Time”

In which case I stand corrected.

If not, what was your source for this?

As if it matters under the ascendant light that is Glenn Beck

But I was correct. Foreigner never had such a song. It was Toto.

The Internets do lie sometimes. Carry on.

So … thanks for that.  Really helps put the entire life of Glenn Beck in perspective.

Oh, and by the way, you spelled “dear” and “shall” wrong.

General Incoherence. This charming catch-all category covers everything else, from the posts that go beyond impertinence to head-scratching leaps of logic, from the rambling to the offensive, and from the bizarre to the truly incomprehensible.

I wish I could continue to use Salon’s comments on the Glenn Beck story, but unfortunately they removed the most insane (and antisemitic) comments before I had a chance to copy them.  Instead I turn to YouTube, which has perhaps the most reliably disturbed group of commentators ever.  I will link to the videos just to provide context for the complete craziness.  All the following are posted in their entirety.

For the sake of organisation, I will divide these comments into subcategories, such as:

Sheer Stupidity

TheLordJanus

I can make that same effect with my editing software!

One of my favourite things to do on YouTube is look at videos of “ghosts” caught on tape, and see how many people feel the need to point out that the video is faked.  It’s not, in fact, a real ghost.  You can tell because the camera shakes at 2:14.  Not, you know, because ghosts aren’t real.  Thank God we have the expertise of these keen-eyed truth-hunters to separate the real ghost videos from the fakes.  The Lord Janus will not be fooled!

Even worse are the people who don’t feel the need to point out that the video is fake:

Ger2May

Has anyone tried ripping the closet apart? Maybe, the ghost is of a person that died and was buried behind there.

Just … just kill me now.

Random Racist Ramblings

KILLKIKESANDNIGGERS

Why don’t those black ass niggers just fucking quit already.  I swear there are plenty of fields to sing mammy in

This could also be filed under “Sheer Stupidity” or “Impertinence” or “Unoriginality” as well, but there’s just so much idiotic racist ramblings in Internet commentary that it deserves its own category, for no other reason than the sheer quantity of it.

Depressingly, this literally took me all of two seconds to find.  I just went to the first video I could think of starring a black person, and it was the third comment down.  If that’s not justification for misanthropy, I don’t know what is.

Now let’s see how long it takes me to find the word “faggot,” just for kicks:

CrySomeMore31

LOL at 3:14, when justin says “oh” he looks like a faggot…

I actually had to go to the second page of comments (it was #12) — but then, it was the first video I tried.  And he’s not even gay.   Sigh.

After further investigation, I have developed a theory that given enough comments — say, over 10,000 —  every single video on YouTube will eventually get a comment that contains the word “fag,” “faggot” or “gay” (used as an epithet) — even videos that have nothing to do with faggotry.  Try proving me wrong!

Inarticulateness

jilliansnell

But remeber when they say thrie was fued going on between miley,selena and demi well think what could happen now that all three are single. And have you noticed that miley might turn into another brtiney spears but i mean i like britney’s music but everything she did after the divirce thing is kinda extreme and who dances on a pole at and award show.

That is almost intelligible.  This, on the other hand, is not:

gonetoosoon100

usa sucks they fail in life

chicago bid for the 2016 summer olympics epic fail

soccer fail

miley jonas bro fred fail

mj for ever

who cares what these rednecks say

To say nothing of this:

wassim68200

gtibuituikgboibguiçhug_tuh_ruh u_rrrrrrrrrrhtghbtgjrtgihjtigj tihgjitghjitiutou_uuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuujjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

But then … that may just be the rickrage talking.

Vulgarity

seannn111

You go Elizabeth I support you!!!Rosie is just a fat pig liberal cunt who she be shot between the eyes and I would love to do it!!!!!!!!!

In the words of Hedwig Schmidt, “There’s no need.  There’s none.”

Inanity

founkytown123

*True Twilight fan* Copy and paste if
you are a true twilight fan*

*True Twilight fan* Copy and paste if
you are a true twilight fan*

*True Twilight fan* Copy and paste if
you are a true twilight fan*

*True Twilight fan* Copy and paste if
you are a true twilight fan*

It gets better every time.

And one more for Solipsism that’s so charming I just can’t pass it up:

vanzyInicole555

I really enjoyed the Harry Potter Series…Read the first book when in 2001. My uncle Ambrey bought it for me.

I could go on … Partisanship, Banality, Long-Windedness, Spelling, Syntax and Grammar Errors, Failures of Logic, OVER-RELIANCE ON ALL CAPS … but I think you get the point.   Avoid these pitfalls and you’ll have the “bitchin’est” bitches in town.  You’re welcome.