Monday, September 14, 2015

Sometimes I have to laugh at stupid people

You folks know I try to keep my nerd blog as apolitical as possible, but sometimes things intersect with my areas of interest (such as gun rights and transgender acceptance) and that makes me go all preachy for a bit.

And then something like this happens, and... well, it's not particularly nice to laugh at someone who is perhaps brain-damaged, but I really can't help myself.

On Friday, Joe Huffman posted a quote of the day from someone who wasn't burdened by an overabundance of schooling:
I think it’s time to put the 2nd Amendment remedy to work to solve the problem of NRA members and enthusiasts and supporters who still live. Time to turn those guns on their owners. When there is not a single gun or bow owner living in the land, then all human and nonhuman 2nd-Amendment victims will be safe. A weapons-free nation will be a safe nation. An NRA-free nation will be achievable by ridding the nation of NRA members and its cohort. The rest of us — and I include our precious nonhuman Earthlings — will breathe easy and get on with it. Leftie pinko tree-hugging vegan — and proud of it.
Now I don't usually get into debates with folks like this because there's no point -- I'm not going to convince them to change their minds, and to be perfectly honest they aren't going to change mine.

What I do happen to enjoy, though, is messing with people, and if I can cause them some cognitive dissonance, so much the better. (Also, I get a bit miffed whenever someone says I deserve death for being part of an organization or owning a piece of equipment.) So I decided to see if I could get the commenter above to play.

You can read the cached conversation here, on Disqus, but in case it gets deleted like so many comments at Raw Story did, here are screenshots:
Yes, I am wincing over the fact that I typed "they guns" instead of "they use guns".

Anyway, this is a favorite tactic of mine: whenever someone says "kill all gun owners" I like to point out they're not only calling for outright murder of private citizens, but also of the military and the police. That usually gets a "but that's not what I meant!" reply. However, this one is special: 
Aha, the "Exact Words" defense, a la Greg Brady. I could already see where this is going, but what the hell, it was a rainy Saturday afternoon and I was bored.
May I just say how shocked I am that she actually knows the word "obfuscate"?  Yes, she uses it improperly, but that's a given considering the rest of her mental acuity.

As a friend of mine said on Facebook: So, she is a believer in "I didn't use those words so you can't pin them on me, even though they are a logical subset of the categorical statement that I did make." This is like someone asking you to pick a number between 1 and 10, and when you say 10 they reply with "Nooo, I said between 1 and 10!"

No...wait. There's actually a semantic argument that can be made regarding "inclusive between" or "exclusive between'. So her reply is actually dumber than that.

But I wasn't interested in making that argument, like I could have made any other number of arguments ("How do you plan to kill all these people?" and "Because no one ever murdered people before guns were invented" are two of my favorites). Instead, I wanted to mess with the life-adoring vegan:
Sadly, she never replied back. And Raw Story has since closed comments (in the name of "reasoned discourse", no doubt), so she never will. Which is too bad, really; I wanted to get the "all life is precious" person to explain why mass murder was good, and war is good, and police shooting people is good, but me defending myself was bad. I was hoping for cognitive dissonance, but another outburst of hilarious idiocy that further discredited her ability to reason would also have been acceptable. 

As another Facebook friend said:
Poor vegan. Protein is required for proper brain function.

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