Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Oh Blather

. Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Today an anonymous commenter writes in response to an old post,

Chavez and Morales are sooooooooo crazy, huh, professor. And the IMF and UN have been helping Haiti all this time using values we, as Americans, stringently hold; subjugating any aspect of the earth until we can target it with mega machinery and the vultures who prey on the carcass of the third world. Earthquake machine? What else would you call the Bush administration? Your complicity with the Heritage Foundation is showing.
I pull this comment from obscurity because it nicely illustrates why my fellow citizens are incapable of engaging in reasoned discourse about anything important. The reaction is incoherent ethos; logos makes no appearance. What exactly is this person trying to say? Is it that Chavez isn't crazy because the commenter believes that the US actually has an earthquake machine? Or is the commenter being metaphorical, as in the Bush administration was an earthquake machine. In this case I don't understand how that applies to Haiti's earthquake, which occurred long after President Obama's inauguration. And so asserting that the Bush administration wreaked havoc doesn't make Chavez any less crazy for asserting that the US has an earthquake machine. Finally, whether I am complicit with the Heritage Foundation is irrelevant to my belief that the assertion that the US has an earthquake machine is just plain nutty. No matter how I parse it, therefore, the only thing the comment demonstrates is that the commenter is too lazy to develop a logically coherent point. But, such laziness doesn't prevent the commenter from vomiting all over our blog. Next time you disagree with something we write, please take as much time as you need to be logically coherent.

Thanks, the Professor

3 comments:

Alex Parets said...

"Thanks, the Professor" should be your signature to all emails from now on. That was fantastic. I'm still laughing.

Greg Weeks said...

As I can attest after 4 years of blogging, incoherent comment vomiting never goes away.

Reed M. Kurtz said...

Didn't you see the sign?

DONT FEED THE TROLLS!

Oh Blather
 

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