On last night’s episode of Glee, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character Holly Holiday took a break from singing Adele to go “deal with the haters,” three high-school kids heckling the glee club. Despite the fact that the students weren’t doing this razzing anonymously, the conversation quickly turned to Internet commenting. “Anonymous technology has allowed us to be brutally cruel without suffering any consequences,” one of the kids says. How did Holly explain to them the error of their ways? By having a meta conversation with them about how people who hate Gwyneth Paltrow on the Internet are making society nastier, of course! Here’s Holly/Gwyneth’s speech on the subject: “I get it. We live in a culture of insults. I mean, we’re constantly bombarded with these images of people who are richer than us, and happier than us, and are having more interesting sex than us [Editor’s note: No one thinks Chris Martin is having interesting sex, right?], and it makes us feel terrible. You know, we tear them down to feel better about ourselves, but we don’t just stop with the people who are on TV and magazines, we do it to everyone, and we think because it’s done anonymously there are no ramifications. But there are ramifications, guys, because it makes you comfortable with insensitivity.” Next week, tune in to Glee for a lecture from JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon about how criticism of Wall Street is making the world a worse place!
