“The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.”

Whoever said that first was really onto something. A prominent journalist has just been assassinated in the most sadistic and barbaric way possible - burnt to death in the charred remains of her car - and Facebook is full of cackling and feculent morons making fun of the people protesting this gruesome event.

Facebook truly is cancer and hell truly is other people. Social media brings out the worst in us because it offers freedom, not of expression or thoughtfulness but of spite, hatred and ingratitude. Online forums are like the rat temples in India where the common folk offer blood sacrifices to parasites and other assorted vermin.

The needless vulgarity, the astounding bigotry, the sheer virulence and mindless hatred of the mob are fashioned out of the most unhinged and subhuman language to further bloat the distended carcass of whatever remains of our ‘freedom of speech’.

It really is a hideous sight to behold. Sound arguments, tempered by reason, logic and humanity are immediately and systematically shot down by the savage and invincible ignorance of the great unwashed, barely literate in their attempts to undermine and spin the political assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia into ‘business as usual’ for a ‘beleaguered government’ who, of course, had ‘nothing to do’ with this ‘regrettable event’.

Diversionary tactics, clutching at straws, nit-picking, going off on a tangent and a thousand other rhetorical fallacies are employed to make a mockery of the events surrounding Caruana Galizia’s death, ironically highlighting and reinforcing most of her prophecies and premonitions.

Driven insane and incoherent by animal devotion to one party or another, this country is seriously flirting with a return to the dark ages of the 1980s and a shutdown of all and any political dialogue.

May God have mercy on us all.