James Delingpole distinguishes between being controversial because you have insight and truth on your side and being obnoxious because you’re more willing to call people foul names:

“But surely someone like James Delingpole, someone who writes so contentiously, ought to delight in a bit of Twitter argy-­bargy — no? It’s what lots of people assume. But the reason what I write is so provocative is not because I’ve set out to annoy as many people as possible. It’s provocative only because it fails to coincide with what Dr Johnson called ‘the Clamour of the Times’.

Which is to say that, as it says at the top of my Twitter account, I’m right about everything. My problem — shared with almost every other halfway decent libertarian/conservative commentator — is that most people are incapable of appreciating I’m right because their Weltanschauung has been so warped by the post-war, cultural Marxist consensus.

And with people like that there’s really no point arguing. Especially not in 140 characters, as I learned to my cost early on. Some minor comedian, a chap I’d never heard of before but who had accidentally become my Twitter friend, tweeted me to ask what it was that had first led me to doubt man-made global warming. This requires more than a sentence, but I did my best: ‘I guess I’ve always been quite good at sniffing out cant.’

Next thing I knew, what I thought had been a private reply had been incorporated into his stand-up set. It turned out that this comedian was an ardent believer in the AGW religion, as were his audience. So he worked up this routine where he imagined Newton basing his discoveries on his sense of smell. Sniffing, get it? Apparently it has them all in stitches every time.

Last week, I had more local difficulty over some new research from a Berkeley professor purportedly showing that the ‘sceptics’ are wrong and that the evidence for ‘global warming’ is stronger than ever. Actually it showed nothing of the kind. But again, there is not a plausible counterargument you can express in the space of 140 characters. That’s why anyone who goadingly tweeted me in the expectation that there was was rewarded with an instant block.

It’s not that I can’t fight my corner. I can and I very much enjoy doing so — but only on the terrain of my choosing. That terrain is usually an article or a blog where there is proper space to develop an argument, supported with evidence. Try to do the same on Twitter and all you achieve is to sound petulant, defensive, desperate: you can assert all you like but why should anyone believe what you’re saying is true?

This also, I think, goes some way towards explaining Twitter’s pronounced left-wing bias. As Rush Limbaugh and others have noted, the left doesn’t much like to engage in rational, fact-based arguments it knows it’s going to lose. That’s why it’s always so much more comfortable in the realm of the emotive slogan, the glib one-liner, the cheap shot, the ad hominem. Twitter is the ideal medium for all this, in a way that wordier parts of the internet just aren’t. The blog, for example, vastly favours the right because there’s so much more space for all that stuff that ­liberal-lefties so loathe and fear, such as logic and evidence and cross-references.”