It’s a good question, OP, why some feel a need to create contention and acrimony, especially when the thread is about a fairly innocuous topic.
The need to react (as @oldhyvvy pointed out) is now leaps and bounds beyond where it was. Everyone needs their squirt of dopamine, and rather than remain silent about a topic about which they’re ignorant, they poke at others. Gotta get that reaction. It seems like they know what they’re doing, but it’s a chemical addiction, under the surface.
Then again, it could be a kind of self-loathing, frustration at not really having something to contribute to a topic, but unable to resist the impulse to get in the mix, anyway. Causing trouble out of boredom and perhaps inner frustration with their own lack of information, insight, intellect? These are the posters who "blurt" things nearly all the time. I imagine them in the stands at a sports game, yelling stuff. Nothing more rattling around their head except the last Big Gulp soda.
(As long as we're quoting famous authors, Nietzsche called the attitude 'ressentiment.')
"A vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have….Ressentiment is more fully defined as the desire to live a pious existence and thereby position oneself to judge others, apportion blame, and determine responsibility."
The need to react (as @oldhyvvy pointed out) is now leaps and bounds beyond where it was. Everyone needs their squirt of dopamine, and rather than remain silent about a topic about which they’re ignorant, they poke at others. Gotta get that reaction. It seems like they know what they’re doing, but it’s a chemical addiction, under the surface.
Then again, it could be a kind of self-loathing, frustration at not really having something to contribute to a topic, but unable to resist the impulse to get in the mix, anyway. Causing trouble out of boredom and perhaps inner frustration with their own lack of information, insight, intellect? These are the posters who "blurt" things nearly all the time. I imagine them in the stands at a sports game, yelling stuff. Nothing more rattling around their head except the last Big Gulp soda.
(As long as we're quoting famous authors, Nietzsche called the attitude 'ressentiment.')
"A vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have….Ressentiment is more fully defined as the desire to live a pious existence and thereby position oneself to judge others, apportion blame, and determine responsibility."