The brutal truth of Putin’s war in Europe puts internet whingers on the outer

A real crisis – like that in Europe where Vladimir Putin’s troops are killing people every day – puts things into perspective and, yes, your suffering is trivial.

Kim Kardashian hosts Saturday Night Live.

Have you noticed, in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis, ever such a teeny tiny shortening of tempers when it comes to putting up with professional moaners and high-profile online “victims"? People, for example, such as the bed-wetting British author Laurie Penny, who claimed last week that bad reviews for a her book on sex and gender had triggered her “CPTSD” (complex PTSD).

Usually, she’d probably have got away with this: if someone felt they had CPTSD as a result of book reviews, well, then, CPTSD is what they had. But now we seem less inclined to suck up obvious trash when children are dying and new mothers are being carpet-bombed by Russia.

As JK Rowling told her: if “bad book reviews” cause someone the “equivalent trauma to … witnessing the murder of loved ones”, then perhaps they should stick to a job where “dishing it out, but not being able to take it, is a key requirement”. I haven’t read Penny’s book, but the angry response she received felt wildly refreshing. It made me feel we’re no longer going to put up with this nonsense. In the next few months I hope we might even be heading for a deeper and more satisfying cultural cleanse, possibly of models/influencers/whatevers.

Scan any section of the internet and you will find countless such people saying they are deeply concerned about world events when they really aren’t: like the people who run one of Milan’s biggest universities, who cancelled a course on Dostoevski, a move its tutor, who later resigned, described as “unbelievable”. Why do some people have to tell other people what to think and do so much?

In my view it should always be up to the audience to decide in what way they wish to show their hate for Russian culture. As a friend tells me: “I for one will not be reading Tolstoy until the conflict is over.”

We have become so weighed down by grifters and drifters that even Kim Kardashian, architect of some of the internet’s most naked and trivial content, seemed to have had enough when she said last week she was tired of people taking the piss: “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” Kim was offering advice to “women in business”, dressed, as ever, with two tiny strips of leather over her nipples. But suddenly she seemed overwhelmed by emotion: “I have the best advice for women in business,” she said. “Get up off your f..king ass and work … show up and do the work.”

I have watched the footage of her delivering the line three times and can’t for the life of me understand why such a foolproof bit of honest good sense should have attracted such venom. One woman, a Harvard-educated TV presenter, spitefully said it helped to be “born rich”, as Kardashian was. “Nobody needs to hear your thoughts on success/work ethic,” snarled someone else.

You look at these comments and think: what is the difference between this kind of authoritarian savaging and the stuff you get in Putin’s Russia? Do these people on the net even believe what they are saying, or do they just want to ride, as Penny once put it, in “the clown car of modern politics"?

Kim has always come under fire, for supposedly being lazy and building her career on a sex tape, but this is not the Kim I know. I find her quite reserved and thoughtful – the sort of person to colour coordinate her shampoo.

She is training as a lawyer, and I think she secretly wishes she had always been one, rather than a strange doll covered in yellow “caution” tape, who could barely walk out of the Balenciaga fashion show last week.

Kardashian and a cautionary tale.

I suspect she would prefer to read law books to sitting, boringly, in “glam” 20 hours a day. I love it when she inadvertently shows her Thatcherite tendencies: as her mum, Kris, says: money always matters. The slant of the new Kardashian show is “business” and Kim’s “law school journey”, which the channel that used to run their show refused to take seriously.

People may laugh at her claims that social media is “not easy”, but it isn’t easy if you do it as solemnly as she does.

Some of the content Kim puts out probably takes 10 or 20 people to shoot: millions of people watched an “in-depth” tour of her fridge, conducted in only a bra, revealing she had five milks, six types of water and an entire shelf in her house for “sprinkles”. What’s wrong about saying people need to work hard, anyway? As Kim pointed out, it’s “factual”.

The Sunday Times