So I got a question. I noticed that most of not all of my critics on Twitter, and I don't know if this is any different than it's ever been, but they are almost 100% going after me personally now. So they don't even... so I'll say something about politics or I'll make some point about something that's happening in the news and no longer do people disagree with the point. They just send tweets and say I'm incredibly stupid. I'm the Dilbert guy and since I'm such a loser because I make a bad cartoon nobody should listen to me. And I think to myself what is the internal process that's going on? Now some of them are just paid trolls and they're just there to cause trouble. But the people who are like real people, they wake up in the morning. And I was looking at one of them, one of the trolls that came after me, and I often look at the profiles of the trolls just to have a sense of who they are and why they're saying what they're saying. And his profile said something like dad, husband, basically he's just like this nice guy. But he gets on Twitter and he becomes a sadist. Like an actual sadist. And by sadist I mean he did something to hurt a stranger for no particular gain that is obvious other than the pleasure of hurting somebody.

And I think to myself that's very revealing. That somebody would wake up and say huh I have a free pass as Twitter is sort of the Wild West. I will go to a stranger and I'll say something deeply insulting in hopes that the stranger reads it. And I think to myself why is there an internal process for that? You know some of them are just political so maybe they're trying to scare people off of listening or whatever. But I don't think most of them. I think most of them actually get pleasure and the sadism of the ability to hurt somebody at a distance without any risk of being hurt back. And I think maybe Twitter needs to add another button. You know so right now you can retweet and you can like things and I guess you can report a troll. But what if somebody is not exactly a troll in the sense that they're not a bot or something. They're just a real person but they're also a sadist. Shouldn't we have a button to mark sadists so that eventually they only can get to see each other? In other words I should be able to mark that guy not as a troll because I'm not asking that he be removed from Twitter at all. His free speech. He said something I don't like. That's not a reason to be kicked off of Twitter. But I'd like to mark him and say oh here's somebody who finds pleasure from hurting strangers. Why can't I make that part of his permanent record? Just say oh this guy says he's like a dad and the softball coach or whatever. Seems like a nice guy but here's a perfect example. It's public. Here's a person who likes hurting people for fun.

Yeah somebody's saying Tom Arnold. Yeah people are complicated. So Tom Arnold might like it for the attention. You know there are other things going on. But I'm talking about the anonymous person who only gets out of it the pleasure of hurting a stranger or the hope that they hurt you because they said something you won't like. There should be some way to mark sadists. Now of course you don't want people illegitimately marked because then everybody would say Scott you're the sadist. I mark you a sadist. So there should be some way you can check for yourself. Something like that. I don't know. Maybe there's no system that would work for that. Well I don't think sadists should be allowed to mingle with non-sadists. It's one thing to disagree but it's another thing to just insult somebody for the fun of insulting. You should be marked as the sadist.

Now some of you know that I quite often insult people online. You've seen it a million times if you follow my Twitter account. But I almost always limit it to these two categories. It's either somebody who's a major politician so that's a different category or somebody who started it. You know if somebody starts it first that's a free slap. I always take a free slap. It's part of the entertainment. I do it for fun. I do it because other people read it. So when I respond to people I'm trying to be clever enough that other people will enjoy reading it. So that's usually what I'm going for. But yeah I don't go to somebody's Twitter feed just to give them an insult if they're a random person.