A long time ago, someone told me that to beat a bully, you just ignore the bully. I was a tiny humanoid then, and it made sense to me; if you pretend it isn’t there, it’ll just go away. When I put it into practice, I learned that it was complete bullshit because a bully doesn’t care if you’re ignoring him/her or not. A bully just wants to make you feel shitty, usually because they are psychopathic or because they feel like garbage and want to push someone below them to feel better about their shitty situation. I later learned that a great way that doesn’t involve pile-driving the son of a bitch is or tattling is to be really friendly with them. Since you’re being nice, it throws them off their game since their objective is to make you feel shitty, so if they can’t do that, they’ll either leave you alone because they think you’re weird, or you’ll make a new friend and that bully might turn into a better person because of it.

Later on, I heard a story of how some kid offed herself because people were ‘bullying’ her online. While I felt bad that a potential gem of a person was now dead, I was far more conflicted than most and my stance drew a ton of ire from my peers. Specifically, I thought it was incredibly selfish for her to take her life and that she was a moron for doing so. Once people heard the second part, I would get a face full of ‘How dare you speak ill of the dead and someone you don’t know! She was suffering from being bullied and it was so bad she killed herself! We need to end bullying now!’

On that last point, I fully agree, with a caveat. We need to work to try and end bullying but, as most people who exist don’t understand, if you remove bullying in its current state, then something new is going to take its place and may be worse than what we had, or good behaviors will diminish because we don’t have an example as to why we should not be cunts to people, that example being bullying. These are the worst case scenarios, but in practical design, you always design for the worst case scenario; it just makes sense to apply that here. However, since I never got to explain myself on why I was conflicted at the time, I want to do so now in light of the ‘Take Back the Internet’ lunacy and some large ‘news’ outlets having covered the topic very poorly.

For today, I’m going to be picking on the Daily Dot article written by Derrick Clifton entitled Stop pretending online harassment isn’t real. Prior to jumping in, I need to say that if you’re going to be a writer, learn the rules. Yeah yeah, I bring up shitty writing every post of mine, but the point is to get those of you who are reading my content to understand how to separate yourself out from the drek. I’m sure if you’re under the age of twenty-two you don’t care, but doing simple stuff like capitalizing titles properly is what gets you a job at the New York Times versus working for the Daily Dot or, god forbid, Buzzfeed. The title should read:

Stop Pretending Online Harassment Isn’t Real

For the other rules you may have never been taught, weren’t explained properly to you in junior high or you’ve forgotten, use my titling as a guide because they are all perfect, which is because I am awesome.

Stay cool, calm down, breathe easy for a while, the Internet tells me. But breathing gets harder when you’re wading in death threats, rape threats, or hateful epithets.

Using a comma after ‘while’ makes this sound really like there’s a speed-bump in the middle of the sentence and causes it to be stilted. Always read your work aloud while your writing and proofing because the ultimate goal is to make it sound as if you’re having a conversation, just instead of using vocal chords you’re using paper/a monitor. Also, if you don’t know how to start a sentence with ‘but’, don’t. Use a comma or, if you want something more all-purpose, a semi-colon, to keep from making sentence fragments. Plus, using a semi-colon makes you look super intelligent because nobody remembers the rules on semi-colon usage, which is the fault of English teachers since the punctuation mark doesn’t really have well-defined rules.

More importantly, if you’re having trouble breathing because you’re reading negative comments or thoughts people put on your work or the work of someone you like, you have a mental condition. You also may just be pulling some histrionics because you’re an attention whore who cannot handle being viewed negatively thanks to your planetary go, but I’ll just assume the former since it’s you’ve probably self-diagnosed like a lot of idiots these days do, Derrick.

On any given morning, I start my day by checking Facebook messages, emails, andTwitter mentions—filtering out anything that sounds less than welcoming. A wise author, Dale Carnegie, once wrote that an individual’s name is the most pleasing sound to them in any language. But oftentimes, before I hear “Good morning, Derrick,” an unsuspecting troll writes that I deserve to die.

Hit space before you hit Enter/Return, you dolt. That’s shit they teach you in grade school typing class; there’s zero excuse for you to let that happen. Refer to above regarding starting a sentence with ‘but’, and to tack this on, don’t reuse the same sentence openers. It’s a great way to bore a reader and come across as uneducated.

Dale Carnegie is only important because he wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People, which unfortunately was the first snowflake on what is now a massive avalanche of self-help books and authors. I say this because Carnegie’s book is stupid, not because it doesn’t work, but because the whole point of the book is for the reader to toss himself or herself aside and do his or her best to stroke the ego of their peers. Seriously, what kind of tip is:

Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.

In other words, if your friend is thinking of jumping off a bridge with the intent to flap his or her arms so hard that self-propelled human flight would be achieved, you are supposed to be supportive of this notion. How fucking dumb is that? No self-respecting and decent person would do that or let their friend make such a stupid move. I can only assume that back then, people might’ve had more common sense so it works for the late nineteenth century, but it doesn’t work now because the middle ground for the average person is relatively unintelligent. If you have high praise of someone who actively tells you to avoid confrontation should it happen, which is only a good move when your life is on the line and you lizard brain asks you to do this, you are an idiot who is very impressionable and should rectify being an idiot instead of buying a genre of book that is well known as fucking garbage.

On the point, you just said you filter out shitty comments, Derrick. Why is it that they send you into an emotional black hole? Could it be that you have a problem you aren’t addressing or getting help for because you can’t not think of yourself as perfect or, just perhaps, could it be because you’re framing everything so the audience views you as innocent and the people who disagree with you are ‘the big bad trolls who we should hate’? Proof-read your shit when you finish writing with it so you don’t have direct contradictions to what you say within mere seconds of each other, you twit.

As a professional, I’m expected to simply shake it off or understand that it comes with the territory of living in public. After all, it’s just the Internet, right? It shouldn’t be taken so seriously. But it’s that very attitude—one that’s internalized from friends, employers, social media platforms, and even law enforcement—which sustains a culture that ignores the harrowing specter of online harassment.

Again with the fucking ‘but’. Not that I was a fan of the Daily Dot ever, but the fact that you’ve proven you don’t know very simple linguistic and grammatical rules tells me that the rest of the writing staff probably doesn’t either and hires people based on how many articles they can churn out plus how much controversy they can create with their writing, and that means I don’t ever want to be a fan of your work or the work of the website.

I love how Derrick uses the phrase ‘harrowing specter’ to give us the chills, as if he’s going to take us into a dense and unlit forest in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm. It’s a shame that he’s using great imagery for an imaginary problem that only a ninny would complain about. Yes, Derrick, you are supposed to ignore degenerates and children who say shit like ‘Go jump in traffic’ because they’re doing it to get a rise out of you and, judging by this entire article’s existence and your first statement, they’ve won. Congratulations on being a first-class retard; I’d give you a medal but you’d likely think it was chocolate and try to eat it.

The very people who should claim responsibility for fixing the problem tend to act as though they don’t see it, but those who have been the victims of harassment can’t pretend messages like these don’t exist:

Holy fucking crap, you have to have Parkinson’s because that is the worst erasing job I’ve ever seen someone do. I’m going to assume you have an Apple computer because if you were on a Windows operating system past Vista, you would’ve just used the Snipping tool and highlighted the part of the picture you wanted. You could also just use Microsoft Word or some basic painting application to create solid square boxes that are white in color and drawn them over the information you’re trying to keep private. Good lord, not only are you a shitty writer but you’re awful at basic computing tasks; how on Earth do you have a job?

As for the comment itself, that’s the least threatening comment I’ve read in my entire life. This person isn’t even specific about what harm they want to wish on you or if they even want to wish harm on you; how the fuck is that threatening at all? This person has atrocious spelling and grammar, which is a tell-tale sign that you can just ignore what they have to say since it’s really uneducated. Even if it wasn’t so awful, you should still ignore it since the point of being anything in this world short people tied to the STEM fields is to handle criticism, whether positive or negative. Taking criticism and pushing through is what makes people great, but it seems we’ve lost that in society since you and plenty of others curl up in the fetal position when someone tells you you’re a ‘wanna-be journalist’, which is the only intelligent and correct thing this person said considering how you felt so shitty you wrote an article looking for sympathy. Quit being a man-baby, you putz.

The other images he posts call him a ‘nigger’, tell Derrick that he and his family should die and call him ‘sassy nigger faggot’. I gotta be honest, as someone who has been called a sand monkey, wetback, gringo, border-jumper, spic, nigger, towel-head, jungle bunny, gay, faggot, gay faggot, and door-rider, you got off pretty light. Racism exists and while it’s something we should work to minimize, I find most of it hilarious. I’ve never met a smart person who was racist, some of the terms are fucking funny (I particularly like door-rider and jungle bunny) and they’re all just words at the end of the day. The only reason racial epithets have power is because the people who use them want to hurt other people’s feelings with them. If you don’t let them bother you, then they won’t bother you, unlike real bullying. Even better, just start peppering them into your every-day language with friends. Then your friends will use them around you since you’ll be fine with it since you know they aren’t trying to be hurtful and over time, these words will just go back to being words. Once that happens, other terms will become hurtful and the cycle will repeat; help speed it up, not slow it down.

If anyone in real life ever told me that I need to be killed, followed by a racial epithet, the police might take it seriously. Should that sentiment have arrived in the form of snail mail, perhaps the people in charge would share concern. But most online users on the receiving end of harassment and death threats are left to their own devices, and wait at the mercy of social media platforms that may never read their abuse report or police officers who laugh them out of the station.

Stop linking to tags. If you want to prove the point you’re making, which is that the police will take such threats seriously and will act on them, get stories and articles that show the police doing just that. However, that’ll be hard to do, since most police officers aren’t that fucking dumb and understand the fundamental difference between real bullying and harassment and online ‘bullying and harassment’. As for the ‘snail mail’ cop out, the reason the police would take that more seriously is that nobody uses the postal service for anything these days that doesn’t involve delivering large packages; I guess you could send a person a card or something, but that’s super rare thanks to email, Facebook and smart phones.

If someone is sending you a hand-written hate letter, that implies that the person behind the letter is so angry that they pulled out a pen and paper and got to writing. Then they got an envelope, stuffed their diatribe in the envelope, licked the envelope and closed it and slammed a stamp on it, which costs money. Plus, you can’t put a deadly substance in an email, but you can in a real letter, and that’s the main reason why the police would take a real letter more seriously; it indicates that someone’s hatred is far more vitriolic and lasting since it cost them actual money, plus all the time to do this which is far longer than tweeting mean shit, to do this leading to the idea that the person might be mentally unstable and capable of doing something more dangerous. Use some fucking logic, you mongoloid.

That sad reality informs how many online victims devise their own coping mechanisms, defense strategies, or proactive measures to combat online harassment—because too few community members and people with institutional power treat it as though it’s not a real-life issue.

That hyphen is completely unnecessary, which is sad since you had been using them correctly before now; built me up just to knock me down, eh Derrick? Also, there currently does exist a means to combat online harassment, which I’ll detail towards the end of this piece. It’s something you probably know but aren’t enacting since you’re job is not to do the logical thing, it’s to be a victim. I can’t wait until the profitability of being a victim ends or until all of you professional butt-hurt ass-hats go off the deep end fishing for sympathy, thus resulting in the ironic death of gaining said sympathy since people will finally see you as insane instead of a martyr.

The next part I’m not including is some video title Stop the trolls: Women fight online harassment. I’d advise against watching it because Anita Sarkeesian is in it, plus it’s utter tripe since it’s basically advocating for censorship and cutting down on free speech to protect women who don’t have the emotional strength to handle being criticized, seriously or hyperbolically. Katie Couric also hosts it, and this is another reason not to watch the video since Couric is a proven idiot who left the best job she ever had on the Today show to do the nightly news, which promptly sent her into obscurity and nobody except die-hard Couric fans even know she exists. Perhaps she wanted to leave to do ‘real news’ and it’s obviously her prerogative to go do other shit with her life, but I still think it’s still dumb to walk away from one of the most watched and objectively most entertaining news programs to ever exist just because you think the nightly news is ‘more serious’ or ‘more fulfilling’. Going from cute haircuts to really ugly, short ones that make you look more bitchy doesn’t help, either.

Take, for instance, Mia Matsumiya, a vocalist who blogged for a span of roughly seven years about music while living in New York. During and after her blogging days, which ended in 2010, she received so many creepy, abusive, and dangerous messages from strangers that she began screenshotting and archiving anything that she felt elicited an emotional response.

I like how you again just do a circle-jerk link and don’t actually post a link about this story about Mia, which leads me to believe you made this all up. I also like how often people like you use the words ‘creepy’ and ‘dangerous’ as if it makes your argument stronger. It doesn’t, and that’s because you and people like you overuse these words because you have awful vocabularies and are consistently using top-shelf words that have very clear definitions for everyday events. The comment you posted that she posted isn’t creepy or dangerous, it’s hilarious and pathetic. Hell, you could even call it complimentary since the commenter is saying that this Mia girl is attractive to him (or her, whatever) to the point that he would smash her brains out. I wish I got messages like that because if I did, I would laugh it off and respond saying that I agree I am hot and that I’d fuck me, too, partially because that kind of response is funny and because I am hot and I’d fuck me, too, if I was into dudes.

Matsumiya’s approach is one way of confronting online harassment head-on, and has been utilized by many other women with similar experiences. During last year’s Gamergate controversy, for instance, games reviewer Alanah Pearce found herself on the receiving end of online abuse and rape threats. However, she devised a novel way of holding the men (and boys) accountable: by finding and emailing their moms about it.

Stop circle-tagging you goddamn mold-brain. Also, while I don’t agree with Alanah Pearce’s views about GamerGate, which is still going on since games journalism and journalism on the whole is still fucking unbelievably corrupt even after being viciously outed for being so, that’s a funny way of handling the situation; props to her.

“It was just a way to try to reach a resolution, to productively teach young boys it’s not OK to be sexist to women, even if they’re on the Internet,” Pearce told the Guardian, “that they are real people and that there should be actual consequences for that.” In at least one case, the mother wrote back assuring Pearce that she’d talk to her son about the harm he caused, apologizing on his behalf.

It’s perfectly okay to be sexist, male or female. I like how she assumed it was young boys when it’s been proven so far that women are far more sexist than men on Twitter. Not that Twitter is a catch-all kind of barometer, but since it’s so widely used, I feel comfortable enough saying that women are probably a large part of email and Facebook-related sexism and sexist comments. As for actual consequences, the consequences are that people won’t like you and won’t want to hang out with you; being bigoted automatically comes with the territory of being a loony loner, which I think is more than adequate enough. More importantly, if it’s not okay to be sexist to women as a man, then it’s not okay to be sexist to men as a woman. I’m seriously baffled how these feminists don’t see that cutting the legs off one side doesn’t solve the problem. Everyone should work to be cool and good-natured towards each other, regardless of their sex.

Far too often, in the wild wild west of the World Wide Web, the victims and survivors of online harassment have no choice but to take justice into their own hands, because they have no other recourse. Instead, those who endure the abuse live with the expectation that they’ll handle it on their own, engage in self-care, and operate by the “sticks and stones” mantra.

But in reality, online harassment doesn’t only hurt mentally or emotionally, it could also lead to physical harm should it escalate—something Matsumiya reportedly feared before her Internet stalker was arrested in public, for a different case.

I didn’t think I could hate you even more Derrick, but congratulations. There are no fucking survivors and victims of online harassment. Just because it happens to you and just because you didn’t let it kill you doesn’t make you a survivor or a victim, it makes you a person. The ‘sticks and stones’ mantra works because, as I’ve already said, online harassment is not equal to real harassment. It only hurts you if you are a weak-willed, thin-skinned pussy, and you and people who think like you are clearly not strong enough to withstand criticism. If you can’t stand heat, get the fuck out of the oven; you are not meant to be a creator.

As for the Matsumiya bit, it was a problem because it escalated and that was likely because this fan of hers was probably crazy enough to stalk her, his or her attempts at terrible seduction aside. The objective vast majority of people do not suffer from mental issues that would bring about stalking; stop using singular cases to paint situations with a broad brush because you think it will help your argument. It won’t, and people with a quarter of a working brain cell will sniff through your bullshit.

There’s something to be said about approaching new technologies in a way that’s more authentically human and discerning. It’s indeed possible to engage the Internet in ways that welcome new ways of staying connected, without allowing the mediums to erase our real-life sensibilities; without forgetting that we should treat others as we’d want to be treated. But when laptops and smartphones power down, online mistreatment simply doesn’t just go away. Those on the receiving end must still find a way to manage somehow.

Holy fucking crap, A+ in victimhood studies. I read a lot of stories, articles, pieces and posts nobodies like you put up complaining about their ‘trials and tribulations’ but this is honestly one of the best articles I’ve come across in regards to the author playing the victim card. You’ll fucking manage because this shit isn’t important and I know you know that, you cunt. Good god, you had some awful parents.

But until law enforcement and tech companies create systems and standards for holding online abusers accountable, a cultural shift matters all the same. The actual or perceived sense of safety and security of people in online communities should take precedent over any impulse to minimize online harassment.

So you’re perfectly okay if you ‘feel’ like you’re protected even if you’re not? You totally won’t later move the goal posts when your tiny mind figures out your being duped even though it’s what you directly asked for? Idiot. Love how you’ve spent your entire article building up how we need to start policing the internet and yet here you say ‘safety is more important than minimizing harassment’. If nothing sold you readers that Derrick Clifton is a flaming retard, this should.

Here’s the last quote because I can feel myself developing high blood pressure just reading this:

Those who deal with online harassment on a routine basis should not be shamed, nor should they be scrutinized for how they cope or fight back. The Internet should affirm and support them instead.

Yeah, let’s just stroke their ego! It totally doesn’t matter if they’re going out of their way to dox people like Chelsea Van Valkenburg did, or how Randi Harper constantly does when shit doesn’t go her way; as long as we just tell them we’re with them and to support them in what they’re doing, everything is okay! I mean, it’s not like what they’re doing is completely illegal, and it’s not like what you and others are suggesting are barely short of straight-up violating the first fucking amendment. No, everyone who suffers ‘online harassment’ must be made to feel happy and special because mean comments are super hard to handle and just make me all frowny and stuff! Fuck you.

I mentioned earlier why ‘online harassment’ is a crock of shit, and we’re about two-thousand words deep and I need to wrap this shit up, so here’s why ‘online harassment’ is a bunch of bull. You can only ‘harass’ someone online if you have some sort of computing device, which means both parties need electronic devices. Electronic devices have two working states: on or off. If you are getting ‘harassed’ online, here’s how to stop it:

I know it’s a TV remote, fuck off, you get the point.

This is why online harassment is bullshit and real-life harassment is not; because you can’t turn off real-life harassment. You can’t simply disengage with someone at your convenience in real-life or surround yourself with an echo chamber so that you can block out thoughts or ideas or anything you don’t like because real life forces you to interact with people you may hate on a regular basis.

Online harassment will never be treated like real-life harassment because the worst thing you can have happen to you short of your personal information being stolen or leaked, which is a crime and you can call the police over, is get your feelings hurt. Don’t want your precious fee-fees to be hurt? Then go dark, set your profiles to private/friends only or just get the fuck off of your computer/smart phone/tablet and go outside. The vast majority of people online are saying the shit they say to get a rise out of you; stop being a gold-medal idiot and ignore these people because it actually works online.

However, we all know you know this already, since you admitted that you filter out shitty comments and negative criticism, so this is just wasted finger energy on my part. Enjoy it while it lasts because once everyone gets over this victimhood fad, you and the rest of the people like you are well fucked, mate. Also, eat a dick.