A Theory of Flame Wars

Crossposted from ‘s thread: Dropping My Standards.
Every once in a great while I’ve given into the temptation and let fly with insults online. I’m a writer, and I was a sailor, so I have some fluency in the black arts, but it’s never really been satisfying. Why not?
I think may have hit the nail a glancing blow: there is no shame on the internet. When you call someone out in real life (assuming you’re more in the right than they), you silence them through embarrassment. Other people stare at the object of your ire and think to themselves, Whatever that person did, it must have been a real pisser for to call him a degraded, pus-sucking asswipe. All things being equal, if you have the moral authority on your side, the degraded pus-sucker slinks away. In the entire history of the internet, no one has ever slunk away in shame. Hence the existence of flame wars.
That brings me to the other reason why trading barbs online is unsatisfying. In real life moral outrage sometimes trumps other considerations, but more often the insulted and the insulting are engaged in subtle calculations of size, strength, and willingness to take the argument literally to the mat. Violence, or the credible threat of it, usually settles arguments definitively. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, merely that the world works that way. But people say things online so crude and insulting that they intuitively know they could never utter the remarks in real life, because it would invite immediate physical retribution. Online, of course, everyone is the same size (or at least their mouths are), and there’s no violent punctuation to stop pissing contests from evolving into flame wars.
Boy, I really went on a bit there. Well, the world is full of long-winded, self-important, hyphenated-insult douchebags.