We’ve all run into the vicious nastiness which pervades the Internet. If you make public posts, there’s a good chance you’ve been its target, if only from occasional potshots. Sometimes it’s seriously painful. Anyone who’s had a loved one die of COVID needs to think carefully before mentioning the fact publicly.

An Atlantic article by Kaitlin Tiffany, “How Telling People to Die Became Normal”, looks at the kind of people who try to increase other people’s pain. Referring to a Facebook group dedicated to this kind of malice, she writes:

Members of this group have spent their time visiting pages for the deceased and writing things like “Another one bites the dust!” and “nAtUrAl ImMuNiTy,” or posting a bunch of laughing emoji or a meme of Yoda saying “Around, he fucked. Find out, he did.” One guy replies to old comments from friends and family members of the deceased and says, “You did not pray hard enough. He’s dead. Why didn’t you pray harder?” or “You sent only three pairs of praying hands. Jesus counts them on Facebook. other people sent four pairs.”

Others mock people whose loved ones died after getting vaccinated, and therefore must have been killed by the vaccine (though by the same logic they were killed by what they had for breakfast and by the last TV show they watched).

“It isn’t cruel to state the obvious,” one wrote. “What’s cruel is to continue to promote a jab that has killed so many knowing that your own child died from it.”

These sound like the kind of people who would adopt kittens just to torture them, but of course they’re convinced they’re on the side of Right and Good. One person, talking about an “award” given posthumously to mock people who have died of COVID, said, “For a lot of us, the Herman Cain Awards are very therapeutic.” He went on to describe his stereotyped image of his targets: “They are almost universally white, Republican. The men have goatees and are hunters and/or motorcycle drivers.” In a later interview, though, he admitted, “A better therapy is to just not be on social media at all.”

The article cites this person by name. Please don’t treat him the way he treated others. As the last quote shows, there’s a chance he’s improving, and perpetuating a cycle of malice won’t help anything.

I’ve come across many articles that regard cancel culture as a good thing, punishing people for expressing wrong thoughts. (There are also articles that deny that it happens at all, but I won’t get into that today.) They don’t seem to care that the response is often disproportionate to the offense or that sometimes the “offense” is merely disagreeing with the cancelers or being in a target group (e.g., people who look like Tony Stark).

I don’t know what else to say, beyond reminding people of Wil Wheaton’s advice: “Don’t be a dick.”