I feel that. There’s a lot of smug superiority online in general, where people seem to think that someone being incorrect about something is an invitation to insult them, and where the harder you insult them, the better. It’s sad. I blame television to some extent. TV shows and movies love to portray tough conversations ending with some sort of hard but true emotional jab that snaps the other person into understanding. Total bullshit, that rarely works in real life.

I’ve taken to politely calling them out and questioning the rationale behind their behavior. That’s what someone did to me about twenty years back and it helped me get my ass in line. I’m hoping it’ll do the same for a few of them. As the least, I know who to block if their response is just as nasty. My block list is long but my time here is much more peaceful!

Let’s talk this out. Not the biochemistry aspect, but the smuggery.

Was their post smug? Yes. Factually incorrect? Also yes - I’m a microbiologist, I took my share of biochem courses.

Your response was equally smug as well as condescending. Their comment was wrong but innocent in its intent. Yours, conversely, intended to disparage their comment and them as a person.

What do you intend to gain here? Not with the correction - that is valid, but it’s entirely possible to correct without being smug, condescending, and denigrating. What do you think that adds to the conversation that a simple, polite correction would lack?

I vote for buried alive in a peat bog. That way, people in the distant future can discover their preserved corpses and put them on display in museums. At least they’ll finally give back to society.

Can we do something other than burn them? I don’t think the planet can handle much more CO2 output.

“… He is no longer the man he once was.”

Pretty sure that’s not true. I can’t imagine any ethical, sane person waking up one morning and thinking to themselves “you know, I think I will try a little raping today!”

No worries! From your comments, you seem to be a bit of an audiophile. Just watch out, because audiophile forums are FULL of authoritative sounding BS.

Just want to chime in and mention those tiny hairs aren’t protective. They’re hair cells, named because they have tufts of stereocilia, and are what your ear actually uses to hear. When they die, you lose hearing. There are two types, inner and outer, and while the outer can influence the amount of sound detected by the inner hair cells, they can only amplify, not reduce.

The ear protects itself against loud sounds by contracting the tensor tympani and stapedius muscles, dampening the eardrum and tensing and shifting back the ossicles, the small hearing bones of the ear. This all serves to reduce the amount of force transmitted to the inner ear but takes time to occur, so it can’t protect against sudden loud noises, like a gunshot.