Twitter can drag anything, and there will be a guaranteed quorum to go along with the dragging. The unfortunate things about twitter is that it has made joining the screaming masses as easy as pushing a button. There was a big blowup the other day about a dude taking a selfie with a giant machine gun slung over his shoulder. It didn't matter a single whit that the gun was easily identifiable as a prop by the fact that wood grain was visible even at low res. The mob was rabbling and it can only wear itself out like a screaming 2 year old after that.

It's hard to blame Orwell for being a cynic. He was caught between ideals and reality like only a socialist of the Stalin era could have been. Koestler was another of those who turned himself in knots to hate Stalinism while trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Darkness at Noon could have been a really good book if it were written by Orwell instead of Koestler, as it focuses entirely on the concept of the Show Trial in the time of Stalin. I think, despite its boring prose, it's a really good book for our time and place (as is The Joke), because they highlight the extent to which political/ideological extremism is dependent on devouring its own, once it has vanquished external enemies (Kundera was another guy that got dragged on the internet a couple years ago--guess it happens to everyone eventually).

I'm unconvinced after reading this piece, Golding's personality notwithstanding, that this story and Lord of the Flies are mutually exclusive. I think there's a big time math problem that arises quickly when numbers of people get big. Basically we're all playing a game of tit-for-tat, and when there are only 6 players, there may not be many defections, not enough to ruin group trust, anyway. A few bad acts or bad days can be just thought of as a few bad acts or bad days. When the numbers start to get bigger, the chances of having one true piece of shit in the groups become likely, and then when they get to maybe 50 or 100 individuals, it's probably a certainly. It doesn't take a genius game theorist to figure out how badly one bad actor can bend the game entirely to his will, since the whole exercise is entirely dependent on mutual trust. One Golding among the boys is enough to go from harmony to human sacrifice in short order.