Waaahhh!!!

"Keep fuckin' that chicken!"- Ernie Anastos, anchor for Fox channel Five WNYW, New York: my vote for the best quote of 2009


So the AV Club has this little thing up about the lineup at Coachella this year, and we're all talking about it. Fella walks into the discussion and says:

Every band you like sucks, because I like a band even more obscure--and which I will abandon as soon as a wider audience discovers it. I can do this because I am anonymous on the internet, and nobody can see what a weak, pathetice, poorly endowed little twat of a man I am in real life.

Thank you. You may now resume acting like anybody gives a shit about what you say.

and I say:

"You also will get one of those, each n' every post. And the person who wrote it is a hundred per cent certain that he's the first one who thought of it."

and this makes him mad, so he says:

Unlike the followup post from the person who thinks he's terribly witty and original in how he points it out.
Yet he's still doing so anonymously on the internet, so nobody really gives a shit what he has to say.

so I say:

"And no one would give a shit if I posted under my actual name, either. So...Other than 'waaahhh!' what's your fucking point? I do this to have fun. What's your excuse?"

In my experience, after this, the whole thing crawls up its own ass, and will go on forever if you let it. This is one of the ways that we have of ruining this thing we got here called Discourse on the 'net.


Curiously, Cracked Magazine -after years of only existing as Mad Magazine's even less interesting stepchild- has a genuinely funny website. I think maybe that's all they are anymore, unlike Mad, which continues its reign of terror against Those Hollywood Phonies and The Kids Today in print. They've been on a roll lately with lists of the ways we all terrorize each other in increasingly pointless ways while discussing -say- how we feel about 'Avatar'.


There's a fine list here of popular internet argument techniques. Curiously, they have a nice way of describing what Janelle Jeffries was doing in her epic December rant ("The Hotel California Guest"). "She keeps checking out...But she never leaves..."


And I'm sure you know all these folks, most obnoxious internet commenters. "The Great Defender" being my fave. Although I sometimes adopt a version of that pose; that of The Great Compromiser: "no, don't you see? You're all assholes..."


There is something creepily straightforward about this piece of "humor" here: a list of personality disorders caused by the internet. The important observation there being, "The guy on the message board who just called you a shitclown for owning a different video game console than him probably would have been perfectly polite had you met in real life."
I've thought that too. Now, if only I felt any sort of need to put that into practice...

(No, I do. It's just that I hold that internet bandinage to be a different form of communication. Hm. I shall have to craft some sort of theory to back up why that's not just basic anonymity psychosis talking.)


Curiously, they ultimately think the law needs to get involved in ways to stop trolls from killing the internet. It includes the observation, "...for a normal person, the memory of getting called a fucktard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-fucktard comments."

Well, again I wonder; would you actually care if a crazy stranger you don't actually know or value the opinion of called you a fucktard on the street? If so, why?

Except I still get as mad as anyone else when trolls troll. The announcement of Howard Zinn's death on the AV Club brought out what few conservatives hang out there. Their points were mostly based on false dichotomies that they then went and built larger spurious arguments on top of.

So I sez:

"The level of anger that comes out whenever someone talks about Zinn or other writers like him comes as no surprise, but it's still disappointing.

Somehow we went from a society that understands that it needs to ask questions in order to preserve what's good and to remedy what's bad all the way over to a society where to ask the questions at all puts you somehow in treasonous country. If you want to point out here that Zinn takes a simplistic view himself, I'd be with you, except to point out that even there, at least it doesn't encourage bullshit behavior.

This is a country where pieces of shit like Jack Welch are listened to, and thought to be wise. Welch isn't being called names by me because he's rich, but that he -like soooo many- forgets that no one gets rich without legions of much lesser-paid people working under them. He acts like there'd be such thing as Management without Labor, and that's just stupid.

Hey; this is the same country that gets all mad when, once in a great long while, someone says that religion ain't all that great, either."

But that's what I always say.