A few weeks ago I made the stupid mistake of getting involved in a long public argument with a man on threads who was dedicated to the idea that Pauline Hanson wasn't a racist. I know, I know, I should spend my time more wisely. I mean it's not like it really took a long time to reply to him every couple of days, but he did live in my head rent free.
I gather it was somewhat the same for him but he didn't let on till the end. I was not interested of course in his hamfisted mantra with a rationale that changed all the time anyway ('Pauline is not racist', 'Australian way of life', 'criminal migrants', 'buying votes' etc) but I did want to try and understand who he was and why he was like that. I did suspect at a certain point he might have been a bot, though he was very annoyed at that suggestion. As a bot might.
One of the things I liked to do was ask how he felt about certain things. He did not directly reply to these kinds of questions, just served up more of the same trash, and then I would say, but you didn't tell me how you felt, and he'd say he had told me already, that X or Y was a good thing.
Look ultimately it was fruitless and stupid, and neither of us was getting anything out of it really. At a certain point it turned. I said I had lived in Australia for more than 60 years and I was white, and that ON should be trying to get me on board because obviously I was the demographic, and he lost it more than usual and said he was 70 and he knew a hell of a lot more than some 60 year old. Which was funny. Then I started thinking that not only was I spending too much time on this bullshit, also, he was too, and he could actually be out enjoying himself productively and positively, rather than fighting this losing battle. I was one step away from saying this (honest) but I just threw in one more question, which was not about race, but about how he felt about the situation with Malcolm Roberts saying that gay people might (he's not sure) deserve less rights than straight people, and that considering James Ashby is gay, well, he's kind of dumping on a colleague in the party and on top of that, Barnaby Joyce recently said that ON was the gayest of the political parties.
I left that question hanging for a while and was going to go back and say look let's give this away as it's going nowhere, but then he deleted his account! I don't know if it was me or something else, obviously, but I had brought up the 'gayest party' thing earlier and he'd ignored it, now maybe he just had nothing to say or nowhere to go on it or he found it painful.
In truth I started going down the path of - he came here just to fight about migration, and defend PH as not a racist, not to fight about gayness. But then I thought fuck it, if he's happy to be an aggressor online then he has to take it as well as he can dish it out. But I also feel sorry for him because he's fighting a losing battle, and for people who don't give a loose root about him.
Can't say I'll miss him. I just hope he doesn't take out his frustrations on the people around him.
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