Proffering up NSFW insults in a chat room is part of being on the Internet to many people, including the editors of this publication, but “flame wars” are meant to be online, and that is all. There are few who take the remarks of the n00b on the other end of the t00bs to be anything but harmless text, but they exist.
Our limey brothers from across the pond bring us this story of “web-rage”, wherein Paul Gibbons tracked down an alleged chat room troll, John Jones, who’d been insulting him online.
After finding out the details of where Jones lived, Gibbons travelled 70 miles with an accomplice. Armed with a pickaxe handle, and his partner with a machete (!?), they approached the home of Jones, who had armed himself with a knife, and they violently told him to STFU.
The rest plays out as one would expect when idiots with weapons injure one another, with Gibbons being found guilty of “unlawful wounding.” This leads one to suspect Britain has a thing called lawful wounding on the books, but our intern couldn’t find it in Wikipedia.
The moral of the story, readers, is that arguing on the Internet is futile enough without having to bring it into reality.
Internet User Admits “Web-Rage” [BBC Online, via SciFi]