“Dealing with Online Criticism and Self-Congratulatory Television Culture on Pentecost Sunday”

On a beautiful Pentecost day…

You know, it’s really unpleasant to have to read nagging tweets, angry emails and hate comments about yourself or your work all the time. Most of the time it’s all thoughtless, stupid and biased you tots. Sometimes they get under your skin. Sometimes it comes very close. Some days you are more susceptible to it than others. And regardless of the person, no one is immune when moody people see your expressions or behavior as a reason for a bit of verbal aggression. But on a free and open internet in a ditto country, this is part of it, inevitable and insurmountable. So that you have to learn to deal with it, learn to let it slide from you or, where possible, close yourself off from it. Actual threats aside, that is not impossible. Not even very difficult. But it seems that many politicians and press people cannot accept or want to understand this. Something about power, ego, position, or maybe privilege. So you see them complaining more and more often, louder and more sentimentally or even flirting with (online) intimidation and threats. That arouses little sympathy, especially with people who think they are right to lash out at you. You reward them by whining. You also challenge new callers, shouters and any threats to drop a nice penny in the (digital) barrel organ. Don’t feed the trolls, that’s why we always said. But yeah. That was in the past, and they don’t learn that Kaag’s diplomatic class or at College Tour. Here at 8:30 pm, but there is no (online) attendance requirement. For the emperors without clothes (Sommer) are now all too often behind the curtain of your vinexpas booth (Fresh).

Television, the barrel organ of self-congratulation

Social

“I keep repeating it: Mediahuis, Roularta and DPG Media, owned by three wealthy Flemish families, have a monopoly on almost all newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands and Belgium. The noses are all pointing in the same direction. Whether it’s about the blessings of wokeness, transgender madness, the European Union, Ukraine, vaccinations, migration, the blessings of Islam, the climate or ‘extreme right’: nowhere in the mainstream media do you read a dissident sound, and certainly not among the columnists and opinion formers of the dailies.”

Sunday night. Nice game of Risk