This is the penultimate Out to Lunch column (I know that at least three of you are going to have to look that word up) and I thought I would try and futher enrage some of my readers by pointing out the obvious. The gallimaufry (you'll have to look that one up as well) of comments last week contained the usual quota of those who, when offered a stick, persist in grabbing the wrong end of it as well as the barmy army who genuinely believe that South Africa has nothing to learn from the rest of the world.
That's a view shared by people like Jimmy Manyi who also believes that the country is not suffering from a skills shortage and that the new head of BUSA is not male enough or black enough. If he were in the UK Manyi would just have just lost his deposit as a candidate for the Monster Raving Loony Party. But he isn't. He's here, he's real, he means what he says and he has the ear of people who are dumb enough to think he is talking sense.
I frequently pour myself a large Lagavulin of a Thursday evening, light a Hoyo robusto, banish the servants to their chilly rooms and try and console myself that the more extreme comments under the Out to Lunch column are the work of people with very sad and lonely lives. After all, most of them are protected by pseudonyms.
That means sex, skin colour, ethnic background, religion and age can be disguised. Who knows on the internet if Chloe is a tantalizingly pneumatic Cape Town blonde of around 30 or the nom de guerre of a resentful black office worker dying to throw in a few racist comments to discredit all the Cape Town Chloe's.
And maybe Africais4Africans isn't what we all assume him/her to be. Maybe Ais4A is a white commentator keen to damage the reputation of South African blacks by presenting an offensive stereotype of the sort of person we all love to hate every week. If that's the case then he's doing a grand job of whipping up racial hatred. By I could be deluding myself. There is always the possibility that Africais4Africans really is as he appears; a genuine offensive stereotype and those threats against whites are for real.
The point is we just don't know and that means it's a little premature to be hoarding tins of baked beans and making sure we have enough ammunition for the inevitable civil war.
Anonymity allows people to say things they would never dream of saying to someone's face which is a tremendous thrill because it permits one to be opinionated without any of the downside of accountability. Those of us who write columns for a living are obliged to put our names on our work and to occasionally pay the ultimate price for expressing an opinion.
Defenders of freedom of speech at all costs believe that there is little wrong with allowing people to comment on the internet under a cloak of anonymity and I have also previously held the view that this is freedom of expression at its rawest. But my view is changing. Does rawness necessarily equal intelligent and helpful debate? I'm not sure it does.
What it evidently does do (judging from the Moneyweb comment pages) is to enrage readers and fire the starting pistol for a race to see who can be most offensive in a series of ever worsening personal insults. Which would be fine if we really knew who we were insulting but is utterly meaningless if, for example, Africais4Africans turns out to be a chortling whitey getting his kicks from getting a reaction with no risk of having his head punched in.
That way our many decent readers suffer collateral damage from the crossfire of racial insults and form a completely erroneous opinion of how they are viewed by other race groups. I don't know about you but I have never experienced in real life the hostility we experience every week on the internet.
With the print media gagging opinion makers of all hues we urgently need intelligent debate in this country and, for that reason, I frequently write things I hope people will disagree with just for the hell of it. But I really can't be bothered to respond to personal insults from people who are too timid to identify themselves.
Actually, that's not strictly true. I did once track down somebody who regularly posted insulting comments on a website and he turned out to be a scrofulous nerd who obviously didn't have many friends and spent his late evenings and early mornings playing with his computer.
The viciousness and banality of internet site comment is not a uniquely South African problem but that doesn't mean we should allow it to poison the thinking of the growing number of new internet users in this country. Something needs to be done because the hostile anonymous commentator on a website is no different to the masked terrorist who leaves a bomb in a shopping centre.
Both are afraid to put their views legitimately and both are reluctant to be identified. Which means they are either ashamed of what they are doing, don't really believe in it or are fully aware that what they are doing is something illegal and repulsive. The solution is simple.
There's nothing wrong with posting comments under a pseudonym but before doing that commentators should be registered and passed as acceptable by the owners of a website. That way the racist loonies would be weeded out, the element of fun would remain and the quality of debate would improve.
David Bullard can be followed on Twitter here.
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