Ellem posted a David Frum essay the other day - a response to recent criticism of Bush.

I am really looking for anything like an honest defense of Bush on this one. I haven't seen one yet. Not one. What I am seeing are a lot of rapid-fire, ugly, dishonest defenses of him, which makes it look like everyone on the right feels he's guilty but is sticking up for him anyway. But, for me to make a comment like that is exactly the kind of useless, generalizing, straw-man anecdote that this essay starts off with. Except that, in addition to the straw-man fallacy, this essay adds a fresh collection of ugly, dishonest defenses. I'm shocked people are callous enough to associate their names with this, let alone expect anyone to be suckered now.

As neoconservatism runs its course, people will gradually find the writers of essays like these to be worse than what they slyly try to apologize for. Copy-pasting it and leaving the links to citations out of it does it a great service, ellem.

The facts are painfully clear. (NBC news)

New Orleans was well known to be a time bomb, and they weren't given the funds they needed to prepare for big storms. The government clearly had the money; the notorious $200 million Alaskan bridge underscores the point all too well. Would it definitely have saved the city? Some people are desperate to tell you no. They are lying. The truth is simple. We'll never know.

Bush put a fool of a crony with no experience in charge of FEMA, and the agency apparently suffered further under the numerous (and no doubt, expensive) reorganizations that took place under the aegis of his new Department of Homeland Security. Ostensibly it was all meant to better prepare us for terrorism, which we can now see was also a failure. The only difference between a hurricane breaking the levee and a terrorist blowing it up is that, with a hurricane, you always have some warning in advance.

What does this article give us?

• A link indicating that one levee break was in a recently upgraded section - a horrifyingly dishonest defense of the people who stopped the levee fortification projects. Obviously maintenance on them continued. But with their funding cut by Bush and the Republicans, they weren't able to do the level of work that they needed. And not just on the levees, but on pumps, on emergency equipment, on planning and preparedness, you name it.
• Then it gives us a link discussing relative National Guard troop strength and deployments. My first instinct is to fact check it, from too-long experience with blogs like this, but... Oh my. It's a trick. It doesn't matter if their fact checks or not. Here we all are, watching TV together, watching Fox News reporters crying into the camera and begging for refugees to be allowed to walk out of the city, because there are no troops, no police, no food, and no water, days and days after the disaster... no troops and police, that is, except the ones guarding the bridge, keeping the refugees in.

  We already know what happened. And this weasel is using this stupid trick to try to rewrite history. He's writing about troop strength. Look, it's very simple: it doesn't matter what the number was. What these people reported from their own city speaks for itself. The point is not up for debate - because it will be answered with clips from newscasts, and you will finally meet the point where your ability to talk utterly fails to change reality. The evidence is all over the TV. It was a failure of planning, and/or a failure of leadership. You decide which is worse. The fact that redstate.org says 8,000 reservists were available to help them was not a great comfort to the tens of thousands of people that were left alone for six days in the disaster area. It would sound pretty hollow to the people who starved, who dehydrated, who were raped or shot to death. They were begging for help on television. We heard it over and over. "Where are the troops? There are no troops!" If you guys really fall for this memory hole shit, that's what is shocking, and that's what is sickening.

  This is what it comes down to. Redstate.org can't say "the troops were there helping, the liberal media just didn't show them." They can't say "They were there, but they couldn't help." They're reduced to saying "well, 8,000 troops were available in theory..."

• A link discussing how some police joined in looting. OK... irrelevant.
• A link that apparently implies New Orleans owes its fate to the exposure of a Republican congressperson's sexual practices during the Clinton scandal. You see? "You'd better mind your own business with regards to Republican House Speakers' marital infidelity, otherwise... you might find disaster preparedness funding drying up, and only yourself to blame." No, seriously. You just can't make this stuff up.

If this all weren't so miserable, I would actually be laughing. This essay smells more and more, not just of corpses, but of desperation... of strained loyalty and fear, of someone who'se been asked to explain something truly unexplainable, and knows they are failing, but must press on... and of fanatically unquestioning, inexplicable, indeed, unamerican level of loyalty to Bush, that would drive people to grasp at it, repeat it, post it, without knowing (or perhaps even caring?) how awful it is.

Most ridiculous of all, Republicans, as the bodies pile up, still unable to answer the charges against Bush, are inventing charges they can answer.

• I am starting to hear people making this a climate change issue. OK, let's be clear, wherever you stand on climate change, it doesn't matter. This is not about climate change. We knew the levees needed work and Bush didn't do it. If terrorists sabotaged a levee, would it take 6 days to respond to people stuck at the convention center?
• I'm hearing that the accusations "contradict each other." No one is exactly pointing out what the contradictions are, or worse, like this essay does, their "contradictions" are the series of mistakes that Bush has made. They literally close their eyes, recite the list, and pretend it sounds like they contradict each other, rather than that Bush simply made a series of mistakes. I imagine this theme has room to run; perhaps later they'll find two different liberals who'se ideas actually do conflict, and that will somehow hopefully provide a further lure to the fish.
• "Good God, what is wrong with these people? Will they ever learn to see somebody else's misfortune as something more than their political opportunity? This, from the most ruthless exploiters of 9/11 in the country.

This article has the appalling gall to ask, "is there not something indecent about the haste with which the American left avidly tries to turn this terrible disaster to political account?"

This begs the question: What crime cannot be explained away by this foolproof answer? What couldn't Bush do wrong, that wouldn't be OK after all, as long as "the Left's" hastened indecently to prosecute him? If Bush shot a child on national television, would we hear this same universal, generic refrain: "Look, we'll have a study, we'll convene a Congressional investigation... perhaps the facts will come in and we will indeed discover Bush is a child-murderer. But in the meantime, isn't there something indecent about the Left's rush to use this for political gain?"

It is not a problem for people to criticize Bush for fucking up. He and his people fucked up really bad, and there are now thousands of bodies floating in the ruined husk of a major American city. Most of them were not killed by the hurricane. They died afterwards, waiting for help. Some waited in their homes, in buildings, in hospitals... Some went or were taken to places where help should have been... and they died there, after waiting without food and water, wondering why after almost a week of unimaginable horror, the only thing the few visible troops were doing was keeping them trapped in the city. And we had to sit in front of our televisions and watch it.

"Why can't we act first, investigate afterward, and let blame and credit be apportioned as they are due, when they are due?" BECAUSE SIX DAYS AFTER THE DISASTER, THERE WERE PEOPLE DOWN THERE BEGGING FOR THEIR LIVES, DESPERATELY WONDERING WHY THERE WAS NO HELP. As much as I'm sure a professional Bush apologist would love for everyone to, you know, just calm down and not be so angry about it all, we watched on television as people starved and drowned, all while desperately wondering where their help was... for... six... days... straight... We watched while a shockingly idiotic Michael Brown (A Bush crony appointed to head FEMA, despite having no experience to do so) embarrassed himself in television interviews. We watched while stories came back of outrageous confusion and ineptitude... Bush survives because propaganda buys your anger with words. But, as the blubbering Geraldo Rivera and the furious, shell-shocked Shephard Smith showed us last week, there are some things you cannot paper over with words, and some things even professional propagandists cannot be paid to say.

There aren't really strong enough words for being forced to wait in a drowning building without food or water for six days, surrounded by the growing number of floating dead. Not being allowed to leave. Being menaced by the troops meant to protect you, if you dare to try to cross a bridge, or run after them as they drive away, begging them for water. Not when we have a better way. Not when the reason for it is only the callous incompetence of politicians.

If you are calm about this, you are not a human being. And this is exactly what I would call David Frum's ugly, ugly essay, and all those who would repeat it without noticing or being able to tell if any of it is honest. This kind of propaganda, fiddling while Rome is burning, is inhuman.

--

Ready for more? Here's a quick run through the Ben Stein special:

"George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans." A rather audacious lie, considering how widely documented it is that he cut funding for protecting the city.

"George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell." Actually, if he had funded preparations, and if he had competent professionals instead of zero-experience, idiot cronies running organized disaster relief, many of these things could have been lessened or prevented.

Perhaps the federal government could save money in future disasters by declaring in advance that since a destroyed city will have some lawless elements, we can therefore refuse to help everyone in the city, since it is all their collective fault.

"George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been" I doubt this, but regardless, I don't think this is about racism either. If anything, it's just about callous indifference to poor people. This is laissez faire capitalism in a nutshell: poor people can't afford a car to escape, and a hotel room or out of town relatives to escape to? They deserve what they get for being poor.

"There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency." Not so. (Dated august 1st.)

"If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God..." Right... I knew this was coming. I figured the Right would get around to claiming the left was "blaiming the hurricane on Bush." It's the final insult... of their own readers.

"Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day." By now we've been led down the garden path to where not taking our medicine won't help us if we're not really sick. Nicely done.

"The entire episode is a dramatic lesson in the breathtaking callousness of government officials at the ground level. And I knew this was coming too. At some point, all outspoken critics of Bush have to be vilified.

Heap it on, Ben Stein. They have nothing to lose now, anyway.

"Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing..." Hmm... How about hundreds of mentions an hour across all the major TV networks, for days on end? Don't worry, I'm sure the criticism will intensify if they pretend their shooting was justified.

"What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government" Skipped civics class, apparently.

"If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?" Ah yes... the mandatory evacuation that provided no transportation for those without means to travel. Ah well, if they can't leave on their own power, let 'em drown. We have to weed out the weak, is that it, Ben Stein?

"When the city government simply ignores its own sick and hospitalized and elderly people in its evacuation order, is Mr. Bush to blame for that?" If Malibu was destroyed, I'm sure Mr. Stein would like his federal taxes to cooperate with his state and city taxes in boating him away from the wreckage... instead of bungling for nearly a week while penning him inside it.

"Is there any problem in the world that is not Mr. Bush's fault..." Oh that poor, downtrodden Bush. All these terrible problems aren't his fault. He's just the President. It's not like he takes any responsibility for his budget, or his policy, or his appointments to federal agencies, or... or... He's just misunderstood.

All in all, a stunningly cynical, manipulative, cold-hearted evil collection of words. If you believe in God, you definitely go to hell for things like this.

So, who is AtariAmarok? Who is this guy who calls himself "Concern is a faggot"? And what's with all these weird anonymous posts?

Since this is my first stalker, and the story is a pretty good one, I thought I would provide some background so that everyone can appreciate it.

Our story starts some time ago in a Slashdot article posted by CmdrTaco, called Mathematics of the Social Security "Crisis".

Reflecting on the fact that a lot of really brazen misinformation about Social Security is passed off as news, I posted a short rant about the problems with accuracy and balance in the media, ending: "The heart of the matter is that when Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity lie about something, no one is yet able to mod them down."

That clearly struck a nerve. It went on the moderation roller coaster, I suspect because I hadn't signaled my "balance" by including Dan Rather in my list of examples. In retrospect, maybe I would have, if only he had lied about Social Security...

I got some responses, too: hundreds. Some were sophisticated and some not-so-sophisticated. I was immediately branded a Liberal, and all the usual suspects arrived in the tired parade of Conservative outrage over my temerity in criticizing their salaried propagandists (in a story about Conservative propaganda). As is often the case here on Slashdot, plenty of people shot back, and they wrote some excellent, solid responses.

So, can we talk honestly about an issue on the Conservative agenda? Or can a cheerleading team using a few notorious methods drown out and confuse everyone, altering their perception of the truth?

One of the less inspiring responses came from a gentleman named AtariAmarok.

His opening protests went along these lines:

• O'Reilly and Hannity are "commentators, and not journalists". (This is funnier in retrospect. The "Fair and Balanced" network's "No Spin Zone" shouldn't be criticized for lying because it's "commentary")
• "neither are 'paid to lie' by anyone". (They don't do it for free, honey)
• This was followed by the amusing admission: "They are paid to be themselves. If they lie, that is part of their beliefs."
• He ended with one of the weakest defenses of Fox-style bias that I know of: all journalists are (the devious implication is, equally) biased.
• I should mention he prefaced this with the idea that "journalism ... has nothing to do with 'democracy'...".

Because it was so easy, I answered him, along with a number of other posts, and this began an exchange that very quickly grew in scale and scope. Two things contributed to this prodigious thread.

First, AtariAmarok, whatever his shortcomings, likes to post a lot. A quick browse through his extraordinary posting history indicates that if he does have a job, it is almost certainly as a professional Slashdot poster. He often writes dozens of posts a day, frequently starting early in the morning and churning out one after another into the evening. And he likes to answer within hours or even minutes of getting a response.

Second, as others bowed out of the argument, AtariAmarok would step in for them, sometimes responding to a single post with as many as four responses.

Unfortunately, what he had in quantity, he lacked in quality. For instance, among his additional assertions:

• Nazi propaganda didn't kill Jews. Men with guns killed jews. ("bad Nazi information killed not one single Jew or anyone else.")
• However, the allies could not have won the war without "anti-Nazi political expression ('propaganda')."
• Dan Rather should be allowed to report fake Bush Memos as news. Quotes: "I am not afraid of what Fox News ... or Dan Rather have to say." "I defend CBS news..."
• "A television station is totally incapable of censoring through the act of airing anything."
• The Fairness Doctrine is the same as Chinese-style censorship.
• The government has no place micro-managing media content.
• Porn should be legal on TV.
• ...unless, of course, it's not properly "labeled." Presumably the government manages this.
• Needless to say, the Bush administration strongly disagrees with this view. However, "liberals especially love to censor the media."
• FAIR is a "left-wing pressure group", that advocates racism
• It is unnecessary to do any work to prove this, because AtariAmarok is able to simply dictate facts. Arguments over his facts are a "diversion," and "pointless."
• Of course, he only believes what he says is a fact, "when it is factual." ("If it is mere opinion, or sarcasm, of course I don't believe it 'true' [sic].")
• By the way, this is not slander.
• CNN and the four major networks produce liberal propaganda. (i.e. he's a vast left-wing conspiracy believer)
• It's OK to actually substitute "[expression of information]" or "[advocacy of causes]" for the word "propaganda." (It's basically the same thing?)
• In fact, propaganda on TV is not only OK, "I come right out and say it is great."

His whole method of arguing is interesting. It fits a pattern that I've seen on Slashdot and elsewhere. It's worth looking at it in some detail.

• "Creative misinterpretation."
         
  • In defending Fox News's biased reporting, he pointed out they were "the first to report who was behind" 9/11. Yes, I know, it has nothing to do with bias.
           
  • I pointed this out. To try and get back on topic, I gave him a FAIR report about Fox News' biased 9/11 coverage. He responded: "Read what I said: they were lucky to first name who was behind it. Nothing to do with 9/11 commission report, which came out long after." Not only does he think it matters whether they said "Osama" first, but he apparently thinks I'm actually trying to argue that.
           
  • A few days later, he asked: "Do you have any specifics of altered TV broadcast content?" (altered, meaning, unfair or biased content.) Hmm. Like the 9/11 report I just mentioned?
           
  • I made the point that paying big salaries to read propaganda means you are "paying liars." He doesn't agree, because, "like any movement," conservatism provides "true believers" who ...would do it for free. I jokingly reply, "why pay them then?" Atari answers: "I don't give them one cent." Uh... right. Glad we cleared that up.
           
  • I say, "it's understandable to want to ban [propagandists] from the airwaves." Of course, I'm actually making the point that, instead of banning them (like the Chinese would), I just want to make sure all views get equal time on the air. AtariAmarok, of course, immediately concludes I want to ban things anyway. ("fascist.")
           
  • Creative misinterpretations are even better when combined with each other. Number one: He "misinterprets" the Fairness Doctrine as partisan political censorship. Number two: I observe that a war may have been started under false pretenses (this is the cost of propaganda). He responds, this is only a matter of "opinion." Uh, you mean Iraq, or that it could hypothetically happen at all? Finally, he fuses the two into a perfect "double-misinterpretation": "...your use of your opinion about the Iraq war as support for the idea of censoring Fox News." Bravo.
           
  • Here's a post where I point out some additional examples...
           
• "Laziness."
         
  • FAIR does a good job of documenting Fox News' bias. Clearly, to a conservative fanboy, they have to be "dealt with." I suppose many earnest partisans would have put their noses the grindstone and dug up something questionable or distracting about them, to try to bog me down in details. But AtariAmarok is a braver soul. He simply accuses them of things, and then claims all debate on the subject is moot, and we must take him at his word. When invited to give any specific examples of them doing something wrong, he first tries to avoid the question, then just claims the "facts" are "obvious," then throws in some more vague accusations, and then claims I am "setting up a straw man." (By asking if he could point to any specific thing FAIR had ever gotten wrong? Sigh...) To give you a flavor for this, here is choice quote: "You were arguing with me about the FAIR Fox 9/11 report before I ever read it. Then I read it, and found no complaints with it. You are STILL fighting.... I know plenty else [sic] about FAIR however, and can accurately describe them (fact) and to dislike their pro-censorship attitude [sic] and racism (opinion)."
           
  • Finally he goes for the gold star. AtariAmarok reveals that he does not understand the concept of backing up an argument with a source. His first attempt (on the theme that FAIR is a racist group): "Do a Google search on fair.org and race and media. Take care to look only at the links inside fair.org." Of course, google reveals no such thing.
           
  • One of the funnier moments came when AtariAmarok tried to claim that a FAIR paper about Rush Limbaugh was about 2/3rds made up. Which paper? He won't link to it. Which 2/3rds? He won't say. Yes, I know this is already funny, but it gets better. Someone actually found the paper for him, and started asking him specific questions. AtariAmarok couldn't respond. He slunk away from that thread without finishing, completely humiliated. Go, look: it's his shortest thread in the whole discussion!
           
  • More impressively, the same guy also ran down the source of his even more vague "racism" claim, and thoroughly destroyed it as well. Once again, AtariAmarok, defender of fairness, slunk off without answering.
           
• "Brazen refusal to cite sources."
         
  • "I named and described a rather famous report from a while ago. You are too lazy to look it up, but not too lazy to whine 'gimme a link'." (See above - this is the Limbaugh report someone else schooled him for lying about.)
           
  • If you don't search for his references for him, you are worse than a lazy 3rd grader.
           
  • My fourth or fifth request for sources was actually quoted by him as "[list of technicalities to change the subject]"
           
  • When I take a humorous shot at doing this same trick on him, in order to illustrate how silly the "facts are whatever I say they are" policy is, it's "off-topic and insulting ... babble." He really seems to have no idea at this point that he's been tricked into talking about himself.
           
  • Finally, after whining, crying, avoiding, pretending not to need to, intentionally (or unintentionally?) missing points and changing the subject for nearly two entire weeks of debate, spanning dozens of threads, he finally provided a single URL. This is it. Go read it. His single real "source" to back up all his anti-FAIR comments is a long, rambling, goofy amateur essay. Here's one quote, pure and unadulterated, to give you a flavor for it. "I figure I'm the least biased person I know, but still I'll have biases &, this being a 'non-scientific' survey, I'll grant myself a 10% margin of error- which seems fair." Really? Why not 9% or 11%? I dealt with it more thoroughly here.
           
  • Perhaps emboldened, he goes on to cite a url (this one, on FAIR's own website) where FAIR says "As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information." He then demands that we recognize this is proof he has been right all along, and that this sentence is in fact an admission that FAIR is a "left-wing pressure group."
           
• "Fearless Disregard for Logic."
         
  • Fundamentally, he can't grasp a world where his political team isn't in control. Despite all his conspiracy theories, he can't actually imagine what it would be like to watch his "enemies" buying up television news networks and using them for propaganda (yes, very ironic). So, to him, a rule like the Fairness Doctrine must be bad. So no matter how obvious, how extraordinarily plain it is that there is absolutely nothing partisan in that rule, he finds it biased. No matter that it is a rule squarely aimed at stopping the views of Americans from being silenced or treated unfairly, he finds it to be censorship. And no matter that a long list of Republicans created and supported the idea over generations, he finds it to be liberal. Chanting these errors over and over again, in post after post, with unshakeable conviction, was essentially AtariAmarok's entire thesis. It is my impression that if the evidence were a vast, stormy ocean and he were literally drowning in it, he would claim he was dry with his dying breath.
           
  • Quote: "Pointing out the facts about FAIR is not slander. Whether it is name calling or insults depends on your own opinion." At that point, he was refusing to make even a single specific complaint, or give even one, single, specific URL.
           
  • Quote: "It was specifically 'fascist' for you to declare expression of political opinion as illegal." Hmm. I did? I guess he can just refuse to cite the source for this, too.
           
  • Quote: "You have only used the term 'propaganda' to involve political expression you do not like." (My response: "I advocate restoring the Fairness Doctrine. This is precisely the opposite of what you are saying." Sadly, this attempt didn't penetrate either.)
           
  • Quote (on the unimportance of propaganda): "However, the fact remains that bad Nazi information killed not one single Jew or anyone else. Bad guys with guns did the deed."
           
  • One minute, the Fairness Doctrine is a powerful menace that censors political speech. Yet this doesn't stop him from (accidentally) claiming that while it was being enforced, the liberal media were practicing their bias anyway.
           
• "Hypocrisy, as elevated to a lifestyle."
         
  • Like many green young conservatives, he's a wild-eyed free-speech radical when it comes to the television news. "We shall make no law that regulates my sacred right to say anything, even on television," they thunder. "Refer to the Constitution again," he smugly intones. But then they get kind of uncomfortable about abandoning slander or false advertising laws. Ask him whether any "indecency" on television should be regulated, and you can practically smell the smoke shooting out of his ears. He changes the subject faster than you can say "Nipple Ring." You are flying off the handle, he whines. It's "entirely off topic, and is a diversionary tactic."
           
  • His hilariously ironic way of describing the "liberal bias" of the major television networks: "NBC, ABC, CBS were then (as now) not the conservative's friend." I guess no one had yet told them that was their job. LOL.
           
  • One of my personal favorites: He claims there's no real difference between Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh. I dare him to find as many documented lies, or even close, by Franken as I can about Rush Limbaugh. He responds by saying, "There are right-wing sites that bash Franken just as there are left-wing sites that bash Limbaugh." OK, sure, but can he show us right-wing sites that do it by telling the truth? This is not a detail he has a good grasp on. Of course, he claims he can:
            "They are both the same in manner, demeanor, and overall accuracy." [emphasis added] He even lays it on thicker. "Only a real wing-nut would think that one is so much different from the other."
            But when pressed, he actually can't. He never actually gave a link to the FAIR article on Limbaugh he claimed was only "one third" true, let alone listed his complaints. Someone else actually found it for him, and he ran away scared before finding even a single thing wrong with it.
            Now, he produces a one-off right-wing hitpiece on Al Franken. Unfortunately, much like Limbaugh himself, it's full of lies. I proceed to demolish it, point by point.
            His answer to all this? "Thanks for your point-by-point deflation of Frankenlies. I knew they were wing-nuts anyway. The same is true of FAIR's war with Limbaugh... Yes, FAIR scores many good points against Limbaugh, but the whole thing between them is a battle of equals." (Sigh)
           
  • Would it be rubbing it in to observe, at the end of it all, that he conducted an entire debate over bias in the media in an staggeringly biased, dishonest fashion?
           

Despite all this, as the weeks went by, I really tried to reach him. He was clearly trying so hard, and at times it seemed as if his mental mountain of lies, inconsistencies, and paradoxes would crash down around him at any moment. But, finally, I began to realize something fairly interesting: the person I was arguing with obviously wrong, and he probably knew it, but he absolutely refused to give up. The more he was caught out, the more insistent he became. There was no apparent conscience or guilt to put on the breaks.

I couldn't resist. Probably to his astonishment, I answered almost every single thing he posted, no matter how childish, shocking or repetitive. And believe me, after two weeks of this, it was a mountain of all three. There are some really excellent "Movement Conservative" debaters - truly scary bent intellectuals who could do such a skillful, Johnny Cochrane-esque job that some readers might actually be confused into believing their argument. AtariAmarok struggled painfully to measure up.

Here I have to confess to something of a weakness. I actually enjoy these kinds of people.

Most of them know when to quit, either out of guilt or embarrassment or a pragmatic sense that they may as well move on to easier marks. Most fundamentally, it's about knowing when the argument makes you (or your cause) look bad. But when you get someone, like AtariAmarok, who will endure almost any humiliation without giving up, this is a recipe for enormous fun.

As you might be able to imagine, someone who is forced to take positions based on emotional impulses and team spirit, and who simultaneously never admits they are wrong, can be led down a chain of their mistakes until they are literally insisting that the sky is not blue. So I took AtariAmarok all the way around that bend a few times and back again.

This clearly enraged him, and of course, it drove him to greater and greater absurdity as he steadfastly refused to give up. (Heh, heh)

Only, it's not true that he never gave up. He did fail eventually. Finally, weeks later, the story was archived. I can only imagine his seething, insensate rage as he discovered, through the coincidence of some Perl cron job somewhere inside the Slashdot server, that the last round of responses entered into our discussion were mine. It was not exactly clear what kind of internal beliefs Atari was operating on at this point, but it seems sure getting the last word in was a very important one.

Sure enough, he followed me off-topic into another thread, crashing into a discussion about independent video game developers to continue his argument on Social Security. I am not ashamed to say I indulged him further, and we had a few more rounds, this time at a practically leisurely pace. But, finally, after a few more days of this, he disappeared.

It was only later, when he was marked as a foe by the political troll user, that he developed new determination and dispensed with the formalities. I was threatening his worldview, and I had to be stopped. The emotional worlds of online forums and politics had collided. He had been frightened to the extent that a "jihad" was required.

After reading all this, you can see why I thought political troll optout was such a neat idea, and though I was not the first to join up, I was one of the first. How could I resist. I can't suppress my satisfaction at finding, guess who, AtariAmarok, with his familiar words, immortalized in that journal.

It was hardly a surprise that someone noticed him: the sheer stunning size of our creation weighed down the page like a 200 pound tumor. It was impossible to use your scroll bar and miss this thing. It is huge. His last-worder tit-for-tat, and my obvious appreciation for it, was by now dozens of layers deep across a seemingly endless series of threads. He made such a spectacle of himself that anyone who read that article couldn't help but see it. At that point, being made the foe of a user named "PoliticalTrollOptout" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.

It certainly didn't shock AtariAmarok. It was as if being called a political troll in someone's journal had freed him from having to pretend he was not, unleashing a frenzy of previously repressed impulses. "Concern is a faggot" was born.

Although I was very pleased with all this, after I had a read through that political troll user's long manifesto, I was... also a bit concerned... myself. I realized that I was not the model of the perfect discussion partner. AtariAmarok's behavior was off the map, and while it's difficult to decide how to react to people like this, my way was not the best way. Who knew whether these were calculated, politically-motivated maneuvers, or the truly involuntary ravings of someone who genuinely needed help? I made my guess, and responded with plenty of healthy scorn. And there it was in black and white: whether or not he deserved it, it wasn't right. I had been indulging myself and having fun, but this was serious. I should have been more respectful. The worse he was, the more he needed it. If he was doing all this on purpose, I wasn't going to convince him of anything. And if he really was genuinely capable of the subhuman intelligence displayed in his posts, he needed my help, not my spite.

I made a new sig, and at the same time I resolved to improve. Questions, not judgments, and so forth.

It surprised me that AtariAmarok became convinced that I was the opt out user. I suppose it shouldn't have - we often imagine everyone has the same vices we do. As I looked through different threads of his trolling other users, I found out that it wasn't even the only person he'd accused of being me. Aside from being flattering, it's very funny. Maybe it makes him feel better, somehow.

As a stubborn child arguing over politics, I really enjoyed him, but as a bigoted stalker, I figured it was time to give AA his walking papers. I filtered him. What a nicer place this seemed the second I did it. He's someone else's problem now, though the good news is, he's an optional one. As for the "Social Security" story, if you look, you can see that Slashdot "got it;" the Conservative campaign to shape the story failed here, even if it succeeded on television, which was the moral of my post. Speaking of my post, it finally settled at a score of "3" (after a few suspiciously late moderations), but my responses did better, and I graduated to "excellent" Karma by the end of the whole project.

What do you know, a happy ending. :)