In this column, Richard gives his ever offensive opinion on the latest Bieber story to grace the internets: the pregnancy rumour.

There are some things in life I hate (foxes, tuberculosis, vegetarians), often for no good reason other than I just can’t bring myself to like them. A fox once run in front of my car while driving at high speed; it of course died and probably quite painfully, but this pain was inconsequential to what I felt when I received the bill to repair the damage it caused. I don’t actually know anyone who has tuberculosis, but if I did, I’m willing to be they don’t like it very much. And as for vegetarians, well anyone who refuses a hamburger is surely worthy of suspicion. However, lately I’ve found a new hate and unlike my previously listed peeves, this one genuinely makes me sad.

Apparently, Justin Bieber impregnated a woman after an apparent concert and apparently she wants money for this and apparently he’s going to take a DNA test to counter the apparent claim and apparently he’s going to win and he’s then going to take her to an apparent court. This is as much of the situation that I care to describe. There are probably more details but unfortunately my brain has prohibited me from remembering them on the basis that they are so dreadfully boring. I really don’t care what Justin Bieber does (or doesn’t do); I don’t even care what he sings. I can honestly say that I don’t know a single Justin Bieber song. But, some people do care and what’s more, they care too much.

When the news broke, Bieber’s fans – known as “Beliebers” (or as “vajazzled-up rat bags” as I like to call them) – took to Twitter to voice their displeasure about this news and produced a 14million-sized bag of tweetish bile. Now, don’t get me wrong, I routinely take to Twitter (or Hypable) to partake in a healthy slagging of whatever nonsense is irritating me this minute and bile is the best form of it. I think it’s great! But I like to think there is a certain craft in my words that help readers see that I’m not being altogether serious most of the time. I’ve never decided that the Temporal Lobe in my brain should be turned off and to thus render myself capable of only hurling projectile e-Vomit such as “OMFG DIE BITCH” targeted at Bieber’s apparent “bit on the side”. One Belieber was at least able to craft a poetic sentence: “Roses are red, violets are blue, stay away from Bieber or Beliebers will kill you,” to which I can only assume required some stimulus from the brain. Pity it was wasted.

The sad part is, Twitter provides the ideal medium for this concoction of readable wank and it’s hard to inject any form of wit or merit into 140 characters and as a result, we witness what has become a campaign of gross bullying from the sad and pathetic. I genuinely thought we were past lynch-mobs when witch-hunting died out several hundred years ago. Now, I could go on about how this indicates a far deeper problem in modern-day society, and how education is to blame and how parents are to blame and how Justin Bieber’s wonderfully precise hair is to blame but I don’t any of those things are. The internet as a whole has become a brilliant place for the disenfranchised to become interested, for the interested to become fans, for fans to become fanatics and for fanatics to become scarily obsessed. The woman who formed this story is almost certainly making it up and she will be proved wrong and then publicly humiliated in the worst way; she had that coming to her. Why is there this apparent need to threaten her life as well? And when people are so far along the spectrum of obsession, you wonder how far these folk will actually go. Is it all talk (or tweets) or is there a real deeper malice behind the words that could be easily enacted?

Of course, media outlets are no saints either. You will notice in almost every article about this story, Mariah Yeater is pictured in the most unflattering way the journalist could find while they maintain some high and mighty stance. I can’t help but scoff at the irony of this given that such journalists are usually the ones tapping your phones, rummaging through your rubbish bins or paying you to let them wipe your arse if they are allowed to write about it afterwards. It is lowbrow journalism at its finest.

Anyway, I digress. If you want to voice your opinion on something you don’t like, by all means do it. It does, after all, get a little bit lonely being malevolently facetious all the time by oneself. However, please do your upmost to at least inject SOME form of thought into your rantish bile; for my benefit more than yours. And then everyone will be happy. Or miserable. Or both.