Expressing disgust or nausea at the culture of Twitter rage-heads out there isn’t the half of it. Roving mobs of howling, hyperventilating scream queens…scolds, fools, goons, brutes, low-lifes. Hair-trigger responses, short-attention-spans, no nuance, saliva missiles, spray pissings.

“A few spotters will shriek at this or that provocateur like Donald Sutherland shrieking at Veronica Cartwright at the end of Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The mob turns and joins in the shrieking and runs over and beats the hell out of the “bad person” for some politically incorrect “error”, and then leaves him or her bleeding on the sidewalk as they move on, looking for the next transgressor. This is the medieval cyber country that we live in.

Bill Maher told Sean Penn last Friday that he’s getting tired of “politically correct assholes” lighting up every time someone says something “wrong” or outside the realm of the usual bromides and sentimental assurances. Penn called it the dark side of social media where people just like to hear the sound of their own voice. Maher suggested that these people have “never done anything good in their life and they want to feel like they’re the good people” by punishing anyone who says anything even mildly provocative. Maher: “They want to turn this country into a place I don’t want to live in.”