Censorship, Opinions

I admire Malcolm Gladwell. His books (The Tipping Point, Blink) are great and his articles in the New Yorker are generally pretty stimulating as well. So about a year ago I started reading his blog. Now of course Malcolm Gladwell has thousands of people reading his blog and therefore there are scores of comments to every post. Recently however, one blogger has been leaving a plethora of comments on his blog -- most of which are critical, ad hominem, mean-spirited and generally rude. So Gladwell, earlier this week, asked the readers of his blog if this person whould be banned from his blogs. Well, this set off a firestorm, and then this guy -- on his blog -- encouraged his readers to inundate Gladwell's site with "votes." So Gladwell then went to his blog to leave a comment and found out that this guy -- who was so offended that he might be "banned" from gladwell.com doesn't even allow comments on his blog. So, what's the point? Well, maybe there's a couple of lessons to learn:

• I wish that people like Gladwell would choose to stay out of the mud once in a while. Whenever you try to defend yourself to people that are unfair and unspirited, you immediately lower yourself to their level. I think that people are smart enough to figure out who's right and who's wrong. You don't always have to defend yourself.
• Why is it that the people with the strongest, loudest opinions are often the people that have the lowest tolerance for criticism, feedback, etc.?
• Proverbs 20:3 "Avoiding a fight is a mark of honor; only fools insist on quarreling" and Proverbs 18:6 "Fools’ words get them into constant quarrels;they are asking for a beating," seem appropriate here. There are some people that just aren't worth quarreling with.