Saturday, October 17, 2015

Resource Spaces of (Bestial) Competition

Wherever there is a resource space, entities capable of reproduction will inhabit it and begin fighting one another. This can be bacteria in a broth, humans fighting over territory, ideas competing with one another for attention in the collective human mind. I have witnessed competition and outright war in a place I would never have expected it, in a resource space that I created. I refer to the comments on my YouTube channel.

Yes, I created a resource space when I started my YouTube channel in 2010. On this channel, I pretend to be Charles Darwin, and I take an often humorous look at bite-sized evolutionary concepts. I try very hard to do outrageous and funny things, often drawing the humor upon myself. You know, things like falling off of a cliff or into a river. Like most channels it got a slow start, but it quickly built up to have over five hundred followers. I have to date had over 34,000 views. Check it out. It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.

Viewers post comments on this as on most other YouTube channels. Sometimes, the comments are pretty insulting to me. Some are insulting to the guests I interview. But this is pretty rare. I more commonly get appreciative comments. What really surprised me recently is that the people have started posting comments about one another, making some pretty brutal statements not against me but against other viewers. In effect, I have created a resource space in which people, hidden in anonymity, can wage war on one another, with few rules of decency.

It is awesome. And awful, too. I marvel at it. For a while, there was a war between someone named Atheist Rex and someone named Raining Fire, who was (or pretended to be; one cannot know) a fundamentalist. They wished death upon one another; Raining Fire fervently desired that God would rain fire down out of heaven on Atheist Rex and kill his or her children. For a while, I began to wonder if I should report this activity to Homeland Security. But, they probably know about it already. Anyway, they might just be playing. No language is off limits, for either the atheists or the Christians.

Usually the arguments are just name-calling and counter-name-calling (you’re-so-stupid-all-you-can-do-is-name-calling etc.) Sometimes the arguments can take an interesting turn. Somehow the topic of abortion came up—a topic I never remember mentioning online. Prepare yourselves for some interesting mind-expanding concepts here. A woman (unless the photo is fake) accused Atheist Rex of supporting the mass genocide of babies in abortion clinics. Atheist Rex responded that God one time commanded the killing of all the babies in the world: at the time of Noah’s Flood. Good point. Then the woman responded that the babies were not really human, because demons had sex with human women and produced satanic spawn who needed to be killed in the Flood. That’s a pretty creative idea—one that, incidentally, is not in the Bible. So far they have not discussed the fact that, according to the book of Joshua, God commanded the killing of entire populations, including the children—and these were humans, not half-satanic creatures. Anyway, it was the first time I ever opened my inbox and found 45 comments only slightly connected with my video. The video was about the dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. A similar flurry of activity has continued since this original flare-up.

I’ll just mention that I refuse to take responsibility for any of this craziness. I am like a man who purchased land and built a school on it, with a playground. The man is not responsible for the bullies fighting one another on the playground.


And I will just sit back and see what happens next. Thank God they cannot track one another down. I hope.

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