Screw With the Internet, Have Your Life Ruined

"Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, lose your job."

That title started it all.

The quickest recap possible: Kurt Greenbaum, Director of social media at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (seen above), became so upset with a vulgar commenter that he tracked down the person who left the comment via an IP address.  The commenter, who worked at a school, was confronted and immediately resigned.

Certainly, this episode seems like a pretty severe breach of Internet decorum — never turn anonymous commenting into an IRL interaction.  But what really ticked people off was the article Greenbaum wrote, mentioned above, where he essential brags about how he was able to keep "a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy" out of his blog's comments with the very righteous side effect of helping a man lose his job.

Look, Kurt, I'm sure you fancy yourself some sort of Batman of the world wide web, tracking down evil wherever it lurks, but as a "director of social media" I assume you've been on the Internet before.  You know what kind of crap goes on there?  All sorts of it!  I mean, you've seen 2 Girls 1 Cup right?  By the look in your eyes I'm assuming you've seen it many times.

If getting the "p-word" or the "c-word" (whichever it was) off your blog is that big of a deal to you, you're in the wrong industry.  Heck, your average blog would probably need an entire dedicated staff to keep all the profane and racist stuff off their comments' section that the blogosphere gets attacked with every day.

Additionally, unlike Batman, who had maybe a handful of villains to battle, by turning against the Internet, you have now unleashed a team of millions of arch enemies who will do anything possible to ruin your life.

If one man can track down another man via an IP address and get him fired from his job, I'm sure a million men can track down one man via Google and whatnot and then order at least ten of pizzas to his house!

How the heck you gonna eat ten pizzas?!?!

Do not leave anything offensive in this post's comments or I will come to your front door with a flaming bag of dog poo!  That's how you get revenge, Greenbaum.  I'm old skool!