Saturday, May 16, 2009

The Finding of the Snark

The internet is awesome. While there are vast hordes of single-minded, ideologically-driven morons out there, there are those who take great delight in sniping at them. Since everybody knows that arguing online is futile, your only option is to highlight idiocy, hypocrisy, and just plain annoying-as-shit behavior with the spotlight of sarcasm. It's even better if you can work in a pop culture reference or two. This is so much faster than trying to present well-reasoned arguments, list copious links, or just automatically gainsaying whatever the other person posts.

Like most internet junkies, I've been taken in by trolls. I've even been a troll once or twice (but the novelty of that soon wears off). I've learned to hold off on hitting the "Reply" button until I've seen several posts by the same person carrying their ideas further. Then I look for the weak or inconsistent spot and retrieve one of my carefully-horded LOLcats or mocking pics and let it do all the work.
I've been known to bemoan the fact that the Left in general is better at rapidly coming up with mocking or demeaning nicknames that undercut an opponent's position or gravitas. I guess when that's your only style of argument you tend to get good at it. (Ha!) However, I did see this humorous post today from someone on the Right, addressing the "torture" at Gitmo:

You can't argue with Blazing Saddles. You just can't.

1 comment:

Elle said...

I trolled a time or two. I found it to be somewhat satisfying, albeit fleeting satisfaction as one tends to get barred from posting by forum admins. It becomes a tiring pastime trying to come up with unique user names and completely innocent-sounding yet alarmingly disarming screen names. Don't even get me started on the stable of avatars AND unique email accounts required to pull off a successful troll attack. It's exhausting.

;)