Everybody wants a sense of security. Everybody wants a sense of superiority over their other fellow beings, especially to strangers. The world, as organized as it is, still is a battleground. It’s still the survival of the fittest. The best of the best advance while the others that don’t make the cut are forced to faced condemnation. The online realm of the world is not an exception to that. People log in to the Internet not only to simply meet people, they don’t just go online to log-in to some site somewhere, not only to check mail, download various media and view pornography.

They also try to establish a sense of respect, security and superiority with their online peers and the online strangers. This is true across all of the available networks and communication channels in the online world. Whether it be social networking sites, chat rooms, online forums, online gaming sites or just the personal website, there is this concept that various online users are in a struggle for superiority. They want to be noticed in the online world. They want to get spotted. They demand respect and they demand the people to take their crap. But sometimes, that quest for self-superiority goes awfully wrong.

There are a bunch of who people feel that the Internet is a place where they have to settle a score, that they need to fight off with someone, somewhere online just for them to reassert themselves; just to make themselves feel good. Things go from awfully wrong to awfully bad when the receiving end of the former’s ego and arrogance won’t take their crap and so they retaliate with their own crap. This is where online flame wars start, when two sides trying to assert their online supremacy won’t take crap from each other. Instead, they would opt to beat the crap out of each other in a long standoff that usually ends in a stalemate.

Flame wars don’t only happen in your neighborhood, workspace, or your TV set. Online flame wars start from small things, so you can put in an analogy that the fire starts from a spark. You see, they have a commonality with the flame wars that start in your kanto. These are some of the common “small things” that start online flame wars:

• “Which is the better one” debate. Or sometimes also can be the “who has the better and more accurate belief” flame wars. I remember my professor saying to us that you don’t question a person’s preferences, no matter how weird it is, because it’s the own person’s preference. Online flame wars defy that saying like defying gravity. People who are engaged in these kinds of flame wars basically question their adversary’s preferences. They try to trash and quash it, they try to dismiss it. And they try to make their adversary feel sorry and a loser for choosing something that they deem as inferior to their choice. If you lose, you will feel that your right for choice has been violated and raped. You’ll get stoned for picking something that you think is better but which is not in accordance to the taste of other people. Way to go for these people.
• Grammar wars. Prepare your dictionaries when you engage in grammar-related flame wars. You better have your lexicographical skills on its A-game or you’re going down. Usually, of this kind start when some person makes a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. Sometimes he/she makes a wrong choice of words. And then some person who feels superior will take notice of it. Then he’ll laugh and insult the grammar offender. They go into a long standoff, with the wronged person trying to spot a loophole in the grammar of the other person. And if he does, you should expect that all hell will break loose because the two persons quarreling will be far better than the spell checker of Microsoft Office.
• School wars. In the Philippine setting, the best example of school wars is the La Salle-Ateneo rivalry. Okay, I admit to participating in the online flame wars of “who’s the best school in the country”. You have to be well-prepared to engage in this type of battle. You must have the statistics to back it up, or else you’re going to be bitch-slapped. You have to prepare the statistics of the board exam results of your school, your school’s past and present accolades and endeavors, the campus pictures, the faculty lineup, the list of facilities inside your school and other stuff. In short, you have to have empirical evidences when arguing in a school war online. Google this, Google that, and you’ll find the statistics. The people who argue in school wars are so fucking skeptical that one wrong move that you make will merit bad, sweeping stereotypes that will probably kill your school like what happened to the people who were killed in the Asian Tsunami. The usual protagonists for school wars are people from UP, DLSU, ADMU and UST, whether it be students or alumni. Ironic for a country which has a faltering education system.
• Basketball teams. NBA, PBA, PBL, UAAP, you name it. I’ve learned that stats are a non-factor when debating about basketball, it’s the championships that count. So when San Antonio Spurs fans try to shove up that 4 championships of theirs to our faces, we just bitch slap them with our 14 titles. Or we show them Derek Fisher’s 0.4 game-winner. Every time that someone says that Kobe/the Lakers suck, we just show him the box score of his favorite team being burned by Kobe and the Lakers. You see, I’m a biased Laker die hard and I’m not going to let that feeling of superiority slip in this section of the post. The school wars of course extend in the UAAP. The blue side always cries suspended and cheaters to the green side while the green side retaliates by howling losers and chokers to the blue side. What’s funny is the UAAP discussions between the greenies and the blues always end up to be in the typical “my school is better than yours” battle.
• Sports teams. I have also witnessed a lot of sports flaming online. From soccer, to the WWE, to Formula 1, to baseball, NFL, whatever sport is out there. People exercise their fanaticism over their respective teams and once they meet and mess up each other’s teams, it would surely be an explosion. They’d dig out bad statistics of each other’s hated team or player and they’d slap those statistics to each other. They’d dig one athlete’s worst performance or the weakness in their games game and slap it to the side that they hate. No holds barred. The scandals that the athletes have been involved into will not go unnoticed. Even the personal lives of this unknowing athletes get exposed in the eyes of these flame war participants. Suddenly, all people know the personal lives of these athletes. Maybe another person will post some news that this athlete is a drug user before, or another one posting that another athlete is a sexual offender, or another team is composed of womanizes who love to screw tight pussies because they’re pedophiles. The possibilities are endless. In the end, no one wins and the sports athletes get their life exposed, with those stories being passed on to several forums or chat rooms. Rabid fanaticism at its finest.
• Showbiz personalities. If there’s any showbiz and music flame war that is the one to beat here in the country, it has to be the battle between ABS-CBN and GMA. They have their respective big-time gimmicks (ABS-CBN = Team Kapamilya; GMA = Proud to be Kapuso) and they let it to the public to do the grinding. They smack around each other’s asses, faces, whurever. They talk smack, badmouthing the other network and shoving up to each other’s faces the statistics and the broadcasting awards that the two networks have won. The fight does not end there, as it still goes down to bashing around the other networks’ superstars and their TV shows. If I am a Kapuso fan, I’d bash Kris Aquino like hell right away. Also, the ratings game comes to play in showbiz flame wars so people come up with the necessary statistics to back up their cause in the flame war. Then it all turns into a nightmare. Personal lives will get exposed, even simple night-outs and events of the stars will be a cause of big commotions. These showbiz aficionados and chismosos will, of course, try to make a big deal of every move of the network and stars they hate, even if it’s just as little as a tongue slip.
• Music personalities. Music bashing also comes into play, with they key protagonists being the musical elitists versus the mass clique that they call the jologs. At first, a bunch of people think that they are the best and the finest musical elitists in a certain place online. They pimp out their music library with downloaded, never-heard-on radio stuff from Torrents and Soulseek and they brag it to other online people. And when they start to see famous songs, or songs that do not live up to their taste, they bash the people who they call “music lowlifes”, or the masa. These are the people who the music elitists brandish as the ones who listen to mainstream music, the ones who are like groupies, or the people who dress and listen emo. It’s no wonder that the musical jologs are mostly associated with the emo people, which makes it mean that being a follower of the mainstream radio and music channels makes you emo - even if you listen to mainstream hip-hop music. Being included in the music elitist ranks is easy enough, though. Just [pretend to] claim to listen to five recording artists that your online peers have never heard of in their lives and you are instantly included. And this is still the best music for me.
• Vulgar superiority complex. It’s one thing to feel superiority complex online. It’s another thing to rub your superiority complex all over the other online people. Some people have so much ego in their system that they spill it all over the Internet. And what results after that is a sure online flame war, well because some people will be disgusted with the superiority complex and the big ego, and they will try to teach these people who have nothing to do in their life rather than to spill their ego online and nowhere else. Online flame wars because of conflicting egos are sure one of the best to watch, because it’s a no holds barred, no disqualification match. Families will be involved in generalizations. Genitals will be targeted as a verbal weapon. Even animal waste product will be ammunition for the clash of egos. Sometimes, there will be challenges of a fist fight or a gun fight, but it’s all part of the flame war of egos and superiority complex.

There are multiple ways to try to stop on-going flame wars, or at least try to prevent it from happening. The most famous (and most sinister) of them is posting this picture on various online forums, or repeating the slogan text from this picture in several forums, chat rooms and networking sites:

Poor kid. I feel for him.

What bad has he done for him to deserve being plastered centerfold in one of the most unconvincing online posters that man has ever made? People are using his disease to try to stop flame wars. I say that people who try to stop flame wars by posting this picture are low-lifes who deserve to be with this kid in the mental health center. Or who deserve to be shot dead. This is an uncreative and an offensive way to stop trolling in the internet.

Aside from that ugly picture, online flame war stoppage might come from the online members themselves. One might decide to stop because he’s had enough or a mediator will come to try to stop them. But what’s sure is that both sides of the battle will readily think that they badly owned their opponents. Maybe one person will be proud to think that he has won the argument because the adversary quit due to his imaginary reasons of the adversary chickening out or not having enough arguments to their side. And the other side will think of that as well.

Another way is to throw ad hominems and fallacies to the flame war adversary, in desperate hopes of settling for a tie or turning the tide. This is the best resort to those people who entered a flame war, but knowing that they will be losing and will be getting owned big-time.

Fallacies are the way for people who are tired of thinking of their next move in an online argument, or who are dead in the water because they have run out of arguments to bring to the table.

Sometimes, it boils down to online moderators and administrators. When the fighting doesn’t stop and it gets worse and worse by response, sometimes, they have to intervene. Maybe delete some posts there, lock some threads and moderate stuff here, or ban continuous offenders and send them elsewhere. This is considered as a last-case scenario, when the flame from the online war is enough to burn down the whole forum or chat room or whatever.

I guess got to go back now and re-engage with the online flame wars that I am involved in. I still have a bunch of stupid people to smack around virtually.