As an art critic and a columnist, discussing things he knows about is Jones' only job. Deliberately picking something he doesn't know about would be like shitting on his keyboard instead of typing. Which is almost exactly what he did in the Pratchett column. He vented his internal waste instead of thinking, elevating the "You Had One Job To Do" meme to the international stage by dropping his pants to moon the idea of criticism. He mentioned once flicking through a Pratchett novel in an airport bookshop then spent the rest of the column bragging about reading Jane Austen and Bukowski, because he's apparently so smart he can extrapolate modern comedy from 18th-century misery and a rape apologist.

Comstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Images
"I also predict Stephen Hawking's next book won't be as smart as me."

Not knowing things used to be shameful. Now an army of idiots is trying to turn it into a badge of pride, an anti-llectual attempt to claim expertise because they know something sucks so hard they've carefully never learned anything about it. They claim crass ignorance as proof of intellectual purity. Columns like this only support this psychological septic tank higher over everyone's heads, all the better to overflow in every direction. This appeals to these people because they're reversing evolution to become stupider. Their reverse-biology already has them emitting shit from their mouths.

Big Cheese Photo/Big Cheese Photo/Getty Images
They also reverse "global informational network" back to "LOUDER SHOUTING."

This is why every online discussion suffers a tide of opinions so ill-informed they could be used as WebMD for stupidity. Here, Jones is obviously doing it for clickbait, but he's also warned far more people that he's an idiot. Our hope is that this little bit of pus he's squirted into the face of the reading world -- a world he has separated himself from on purpose -- will act to inoculate them from ever reading him again, much as cowpox protected people from smallpox.

LittleBee80/iStock/Getty Images
Columnist rage bait is like the common cold: constantly changing and shared by co-workers.

The most elementary attention-getting is doing exactly what you're asked not to. That's literally elementary, as in school, but it's become a full-time adult occupation. The Spectator's Brendan O'Neill has escalated this assholishness to absurd new heights, the stinking endpoint of human processes, by applying this childish contrariness to anyone saying, "Please don't be such a sexist or racist jerk."

The Spectator
Poe's Law just filed a restraining order.

When barrister Charlotte Proudman told a creep that she didn't join LinkedIn for sexist come-ons, O'Neill reacted like she'd mandated a woman's workplace uniform of blood-washable gloves and a sausage slicer. She's gotten death threats over her reaction, but O'Neill still treated her like a hysterical fainter and squirted out every sexist-defense cliche in existence: It's just a compliment; there was no harm meant. He utterly unironically says that the accusations of sexism are inaccurate because she's not even that good-looking. I think he's trying to build a defense entirely out of the sighs of a sad penis.

He acts like feminists want to eliminate all emotions around women, possibly because horny unwanted advances and rage at their rejection of his depressing dick may be the only feelings he has around women. The replies to her original tweet were a Commenter Sutra, proving the sexism problem from every possible angle. You can't be stupid enough not to see it. You have to consciously decide not to. And columns like O'Neill's deliberately work to normalize everything wrong with the world. They brace the assholes against progress by reassuring them they're not alone.

Carlos Santa Maria/iStock/Getty Images
"What do women know about being women anyway? Am I right, guys?"

In a column where he tells women to just put up with whatever men want, whenever men want to make a situation sexual, he says, "Far better to have the occasional rough encounter," and there's no way he doesn't see the overtones. He wondered, "Hmm, should I really be putting rape implications on this post?" Then he thought, "Definitely" -- except that's a lie, because he didn't wonder or even think for a second. He presumably sniggered over his sexual-assault sniping while high-fiving his own ass with the article, because for him wiping and writing are synonymous.

The strangest example of this was when PR professional Ed Zitron wrote a column about things that suck in the thrilling world of public relations. He criticized cold-calling reporters and the self-referential circle jerk of everyone in PR praising everything in PR. And then a company called Everything PR lost their minds.

Everything PR
They cut "stupid doo-doo head" for brevity.

Zitron's column didn't mention Everything PR at all, but they reacted like a Sonic The Hedgehog fan on a Mario forum. You'd swear Everything PR was a literal name and the embodied concept of the industry was reacting to a personal attack. They took up their blade to defend their noble trade, and the result looked like someone hacking at a keyboard with a broadsword. Like all the worst commenters out there, Everything PR mistook anger for an argument. Every idiot thinks their rage is a headline all by itself, but outside their own skull nobody cares, and inside that skull there's nobody there.

This company's only job is presenting a good image online, and nobody has professionally fucked their job so hard outside of robot pornography. It reads like Borat and Dril climbed into a telepod and hit their head on the way out. If Mad Men had hired Fez from That '70s Show and he internalized their bullying for seven seasons, this is how he'd complain. Running it through Google Translate into another language, then another language, then back to English would probably improve the clarity, but it may be too stupid for even the algorithm to bother.

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On the upside, it would convince GoogleNet we aren't worth conquering.

She's the human avatar of Internet comment sections. Websites have a dividing line between the article and the comments so that people know when to stop reading, and Hopkins is what happens when a commenter leaps over this line like toilet water splashing over the rim when someone unleashes enough shit. Which is her only function. She's a septic feedback loop, regurgitating the worst possible combination of words to generate an ever-larger column of waste, then using the heightened platform to increase the range of her inky splatters.

The Sun
If you told her "WEEOOOO" was a slur you could use her as an ambulance siren.

She incarnates how "outspoken" now means "asshole." Her hateful rants have triggered a response from the United Nations, which really shouldn't happen outside of Bond movies. She's been threatened with libel actions because she confused other writers with each other. It's possible she doesn't even know what a writer is and just wandered into The Sun offices one day during her daily "screaming at strangers" practice and was accidentally transcribed. She reportedly suggested the idea of gassing the House Of Lords, which is the point where even the UKIP publicly proclaims they don't know you. And UKIP's sole shitty operating principle is "not quite wearing brown shorts in public."

Concerned with ethics in game journalism?

Breitbart

Nope, can't move on, still convinced that child was far too non-Caucasian to build a clock outside of quotation marks?

Breitbart

They appear to think a dotcom makes them a respected news source in the same way some of their columnists think wearing a suit makes them professional. It doesn't matter how nice your jacket is if you're standing screaming on a street corner. Their only function is polarizing issues until they electrocute everyone's higher functions. It's the Etsy of hatred: It'll serve whatever bullshit you want as long as it's legal, and if it isn't, or if it's broken, it'll issue a tiny apology which in no way compensates for all the hassle and wasted time. Instead of finding news for an audience, it provides custom-crafted headlines to shovel into any echo chamber and stoke the fires.

Michael Blann/DigitalVision/Getty Images
Artist's conception of Breitbart fanbase.

Echo chambers amplify assholes, incubating ever more extreme viewpoints by letting people remove any contrary opinions from their worldview. And the headlines must become more and more offensive to keep up and score those sweet shares. They end up as Zeno's assholes, established hatemongers becoming ever more toxic for ever fewer niche nutballs, and hopefully they'll continue this ass-ymptotic trend until they disappear up their own rectums to create a perfectly singular echo chamber. But until that glorious moment, they'll hang around to poison any attempt at informed discussion.

Enjoy more online idiocy with The 5 Maddest Men In Manvertising and The Worst 'Metal Gear' Story Ever Told

Comment on commenters with 6 Reasons The Comments On This Article Will Be Useless and The 8 Most Obnoxious Internet Commenters.

Luke has an Internet Commenter Hero, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.

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