Unintentional Self-parody

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 16, 2006

Filed under: Rants 7 comments

Writing about politics is usually miserable, pointless, and time-consuming. It would be just as productive for me to sit by the road, giving the finger to people with the wrong bumperstickers. So I don’t do politics here. However, while doing some vanity searching a while ago I found something amusing.

The thing is, years ago I had a political satire site. One of my bits was a news story wherein it said that:

In the wake of the attack earlier this week that left Uday and Qusay Hussein dead, many in America’s academic community came forward to encourage the remaining supporters of Saddam Hussein to “look past their anger” and try to discover the “root causes” of the American attack. Said Middle East correspondent and professional idiotarian Robert Fisk, “While it might be tempting for Saddam’s supporters to lash out at the west, they would be better served by trying to understand why they are so hated throughout the world, including in their own country.”

The point was to take the “why do they hate us” attitude of the far left and reflect it back at them through a funhouse mirror. The “why do they hate us” mentality de-humanizes people by reducing them to actors who can’t rationalize and who should be expected to lash out violently when wronged. Inverting the argument showed how silly it was. Like a lot of the stuff I wrote, it was better in concept than in execution. It wasn’t really funny. It needed a punchline.

Now it has one.

On this forum there are a bunch of people who took this very obvious parody, missed the joke, and tried to argue with it as if it was in earnest. These aren’t well-reasoned arguments about how the article is wrong or senseless, this is AMERIKA SUKS!

This is like putting up a goofy George Bush/Bill Clinton scarecrow in the yard with a dunce cap on it, then coming out the next moring and finding someone having a heated argument with the thing. It wasn’t very funny before, but now it’s hilarious.

 


From The Archives:
 

7 thoughts on “Unintentional Self-parody

  1. foobario says:

    I have a simple test for whether an idea is sane or not: reverse it, and see if it still makes sense. Not all of my beliefs pass this test, but at least when they don’t I am aware of it, and figure out why.

    I’m not a ‘liberal’, but this practice of trying to develop some perspective makes people think I am. Which says something about the whole politcal dichotomy thing.

  2. Cineris says:

    Two days ago I saw on Reddit.com, which is a social aggregator news site, a story claiming that Roger Ailes is Thetan Level VIII in the Scientology organization. Their source? A story on the SomethingAwful.com forums.

  3. Pixy Misa says:

    The Lemon was you? Huh.

  4. Shamus says:

    Yeah, that was me. You read it at the time? Not many people remember it now.

    The site was a flash in the pan thing. It was really hot for a very short time, but I’m not dedicated or talented enough to keep something like that going. I let it slide, then let the domain expire. Now it’s a spam portal.

    Sigh.

  5. Shamus says:

    […]A story on the SomethingAwful.com forums.

    Not just a story on SomethingAwful, but a story in the SomethingAwful forums.

    Wow. Also: Wow again.

  6. Pixy Misa says:

    I wasn’t a regular, but I did stop by a few times. Never made the connection until now. :)

  7. KelThuzad says:

    I must be thick, daft, a dunce, or otherwise, but I don’t really understand–
    Oh. I get it now. Heh.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.