Amost Paradise

Anonymity on the internet is generally found in its darker corners. It's reserved for individuals who wish to publish statements or media content, but do not wish to be held accountable. It's usually limited to comments on articles, and user-submitted content websites like Reddit or 4Chan. Occasionally, an entire site is run by an anonymous author - this rings alarm bells in the minds of most savvy readers. 

This is the case for the new anti-wind website, 'Stop these things'. The key advantage in publishing content online anonymously is the capacity to denigrate individuals, without risking legal culpability for defamation. It's shaky ground, but they choose to stand nervously on it. I featured recently on their page, on a list of individuals who 'do not get it'. 

I share this honour with Greens leader Christine Milne, Professor of public health at Sydney University Simon Chapman and Prime Minister Julia Gillard. 

There's a curious and revealing theme of social-media-phobia in their post. The faceless author writes:

Old Greenies, and there are a few in our group, used to be in the front line, in the trenches.“We were members of the Greens when it meant something,” they say.Now we have a new breed of keyboard cowards.

A gigantic cinder-block of irony contacts violently with our faces, when reading those words, penned by an anonymous author, on an anonymous blog. 

A frequent tweeter, Infigen’s Ketan Joshi has 120 followers.  In our opinion that’s akin to social media masturbation. You’re practically doing it on your own, mate.

I just need 13 more followers, and then we can both be keyboard cowards!

This statement is a relatively unbridled attempt to provoke a reaction, through the use of a graphic insult. (It's probably also worth pointing out that they have 51 followers on Twitter). They adopt a similar ethos in this post, accusing an entire acoustics organisation of being comparable to rapists. 

One can actually determine the frequency with which a particular user tweets. Using SnapBird (A Twitter history tool), we can see that it has been 22 days since @stopthesethings tweeted their first tweet, and they have tweeted 103 times (including re-tweets and replies). It has been 242 days since my first tweet, and I have tweeted 436 times. 

@stopthesethings have a tweet frequency of 4.7 Tweets per day. I have a tweet frequency of 1.8 Tweets per day. Anonymous, you seem to well and truly surpass me, in terms of online masturbatory fury. 

In a departure from form, they then attempt to reference actual content I've written:

Joshi said Sarah Laurie stated that Wind Turbine Syndrome can be perceived “out to distances as great as 30 km and sometimes more”.  Laurie never said that.
It’s an old scam. Ignore the facts. Put words into the opposition’s mouth so you can refute them.

I made that statement in this article. In the article, I included a reference to a comment Laurie made, which reads as follows: 

Andreas, unfortunately I have heard your situation all too often. There does appear to be a group of people who have been badly sensitised, who find it very difficult to escape from the ubiquitous low frequency noise, and who then report perceiving it out to distances as great as 30 km and sometimes more.

Sorry, Anonymous. They follow with another direct insult:

In short, Joshi writes so much fiction we’d amost (sic) recommend him for the Miles Franklin. But his prose is lousy.

Say what you will of my prose, Anonymous. 

My spelling is amost perfect.

Update - 19:38 AESDT 19/01/2013:

Anonymous updated the post to remove the reference to Laurie, with no acknowledgment of error on the page. Anonymous did choose to leave in the typo, and I congratulate them on their steadfast refusal to give up their ground, with regards to basic spelling anarchy.