When sarcasm backfires

[yendi]

Over at Twitter this morning, I wrote, "Ah, okay Hank Williams. Your racism and antisemitism were to "make a point." That's okay then. Oh, wait. It's NOT. http://bit.ly/pyqG4Q"

I was lucky enough to attract the attention of a troll by the name of Gene McVay who wrote, "Right, is ESPN trying to be like Nazi Germany where they also did not have freedom of speech?"

Clearly an intelligent guy here, given both his inability to comprehend the concept of "free speech," his ability to make a worse analogy than Williams, and his shifting the topic from the racism of Williams to the suspension of him (presumably because he agrees with the former).

So I, assuming a good faith effort here, asked, "Do you actually understand what freedom of speech is?"

Gene's response was, "Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. It is banned by ESPN & was banned by the Nazi Party."

At this point, I felt obligated to point out, "Sorry, you just showed you also don't know what censorship is."

To which he replied, "Right you are, I'm a moron."

I'm going to go ahead and take him at his word here. He doesn't know much, but that last tweet showed a nice amount of self-awareness. In fairness, I'd been assuming he was simply plum ignorant, as I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but who am I to waste any more time arguing with him?

(Warning: If you visit this guy's main Twitter page, it's full of unmitigated nastiness, including Birther claims and posts with six exclamation points in a row. And yes, if I'd visited there first and seen that he was spamming his complaints at anyone who mentioned Williams, I wouldn't have engaged him at all.)

Comments

[jeff-morris.livejournal.com]

I'm utterly dumbfounded by the number of people on stltoday.com that cheered ol' Hank on for putting that colored Muslim socialist foreigner who thinks he's president in his place. But they aren't racist, of course. And what about all those liberals who said terrible things about the great GWB and nothing ever happened to them because of this liberal socialist media?

And then I remember that these are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know. Morons.

Edit: just visited his twitter. He certainly puts the "twit" in it.

[yendi]

Heh (to the edit).

[nishar.livejournal.com]

I am willing to bet he thinks a media company that doesn't put on some one who angers viewers/sponsors is Fascism. Plato argued people should question what they believe in. I think this guy should start by questioning his ideas about words. Once he understands what he is actually talking about, then maybe he can examine his deepest held ideas. Ideas like "The family tree should resemble a telephone pole." :P