Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I've never understood that tack, in a forum/list debate. If you repeat someone's assertions back to them, displaying the flaws/illogic, etc., you're "slandering" someone or "lying about" them. Hunh?
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I've seen the like.
My current shake-my-head-in-bemused-wonder example comes from a chap who calls himself Vox Day. (His real name is known, so he's not hiding behind a shield of anonymity.)
Vox under his real name is a published SF writer. He and his followers believe publishing has been essentially taken over by Lesbian feminists, making it increasingly difficult for them to get published. (I know the editors at an assortment of trade houses, and while they are mostly female and on the opposite side of the political fence from Vox, they also check their politics at the office door, and purchase decisions are "Is this a good book my house can sell?" matters.)
He previously gave fits to the folks who administer the annual Hugo Awards via ballot box stuffing and block voting for stuff his faction liked. (At least one Hugo nominee who Vox's followers liked and nominated asked that his work be removed from consideration, because he didn't want to provide any support to Vox and company.) The Hugo
voters responded by voting No Award in categories dominated by those tactics.
His current effort is a search engine intended to compete with Google. It learns your beliefs, and concentrates on finding and displaying links that support them. This is magical thinking at its worst: if you believe it, it
must be
true, and here's an Internet link
proving it!
Whatever it is, no matter how outrageous, you can find someone who believes it, and has a website about it. There's a chap in Bangkok, Thailand that really believes the Earth is in fact flat, and has been spamming various LinkedIn forums with links to a video and a couple of books he's written about it. Precisely how you can manage to
believe that in our current day and age is a mystery to me, but he manages to do it.
I would ROTFL if the underlying motivations and trends this behavior illustrates weren't sources of despair.
______
Dennis