When you sell opinions for money, the way Keith and Glenn do, it doesn’t take you long to catch on that the more opinions you have, the more money you make. So, like radish farmers who grow more radishes in order to get rich, Keith and Glenn create dozens of new opinions per night.

But here’s the problem: They’re not very smart opinions. And they’re forcing everyone around them, including you, to also have far too many opinions. We post them on Facebook; we tweet them; we express them in comments on Huffington Post. We’ve become junior-grade cable goons — but paid much less…

It’s hard to find the good guys when one side is self-righteously accusing the other side of lacking civility as if that were any more likely to spark violence than movies or video games, and the response is, weirdly, to defend a lack of civility as if it’s a good thing…

The Internet is a Petri dish of opinion inflation, breeding commentary like bacteria. Because few people do anything interesting or have anything factual to report, they toss off a short opinion. That, in turn, leads to opinion hyperinflation; just look at the comments sections on any blog. Opinions quickly devolve from Big Macs into rat poison. Civility makes only a rare appearance, and facts are no longer facts. Evolution, climate change, gravity — it’s all one point of view against another. Everyone gets a vote, even the people who aren’t particularly sane.