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So let me get this straight: people are now so desperate to be outraged by something — anything — that we have to go mining for it. If someone hasn’t offended us today, surely there’s something in their past worthy of a bout of pearl clutching and umbrage.

What I find objectionable about Noah’s lines are their lameness as comedy, but I think I lack the outrage gene.

What is so addictive about outrage that we have to seek it out? A Peterborough, Ontario woman noted on Facebook recently that her son “did really good today at his circumcision.” Aside from the somewhat oddball notion that an eight-day-old baby might excel at having the tip of his penis cut off there didn’t seem to be much worthy of note. At least until the group Mutilation Watch got at her. Christine (last name withheld) was inundated with snarling messages about her being a child abuser. By the end of day someone was threatening to burn her house down.

Everyone is outraged about everything. People who aren’t even listening to my radio show tweet objections to it. It’s not just that people are touchy; they seem to need to be touchy. Outrage gives us purpose.

But of course none of these dust devil outbursts would be genuinely worthy of note if they weren’t curated and trumpeted by conventional media. Terrified of slipping into irrelevancy, mainstream media outlets amplify every Internet tremor as if it were an earthquake. It’s a particularly noxious form of journalism to bundle allegedly objectionable content with piqued tweets from @IluvTurles and @maggie64 and then ask “What do you think?”

But such is our new media universe. Every voice matters no matter how barking mad or intellectually blighted the source.

And if there were any question about the trend, I look forward to the comments that will follow this column.

National Post

John Moore is host of Moore in the Morning on NewswTalk 1010 Radio Toronto.