Inferiority isn't complex.

Oh woe is me. The end draws ever closer and all around the light fails. One of the dreaded infections of this savage continent has taken hold of me. Each night, as I toss and turn in my delirium, I am circled by visions of weeping eagles, singing doughnuts and shop assistants asking if I found everything I needed today ok (disposable pet nappies, aisle twelve, next to the inflatable cookware). As it seems doubtful that I should ever recover from this mild sore throat, there are some things that I would have you know and images that I would have you see.

No less, and indeed no more, than two people have recently mentioned youtube comments to me. If ever you should delude yourself that the ills of the world are due to corporate fat cats, power-crazed politicians or a manipulative media and that the population are fundamentally blameless, then you need go no further than youtube. Thousands of times a second, beneath videos of cats doing cat stuff, low quality mobile phone footage and dancing girls looking for attention, morons argue the toss with each other on an unprecedented scale, as the human race primally screams in the face of evolution and education. I would say that hope, freedom, sense, punctuation and spelling go there to die, but that would be a staggering falsehood: none of those nouns would ever want to be seen dead there.

It is now apparently vital for websites to let the public post their opinions and 'content'. This is the toxic payload of something called 'Web 2.0', which is bullshit for 'any idiot should be able to effortlessly share their mental faeces', just as I am doing with you right now. Except I'm not doing it on a hugely popular website for all the world to see.

Free speech isn't a luxury afforded to children by their parents, so why put it in the hands of maniacs and let them carry out the equivalent of global thermonuclear war with it? Democracy, the cunning system by which the usually maligned act of the majority suppressing the minority is given a big thumbs up because badges and ballots are involved (and because it isn't the even more maligned act of the minority suppressing the majority), doesn't explicitly require free speech. Actually, most democracies say that quite a few people, like racists and sexists shouldn't really be given the chance to talk bollocks at large. I agree, but suggest that this subset seems a little arbitrary and the natural extension should be to any one whose description falls under -ist. Rapists, harpists, feminists, pacifists, anaesthetists, seventh day adventists, novelists, biologists and physicists should all have their access to communication methods limited, though in the latter case this is often a personality trait anyway.

To be honest the only sane method of selection I can think of is that free speech should be a privilege handed out to people that I like, and probably not then either.