I may have contributed to a new term for a rhetorical ploy we see more and more. Here’s how it happened – I’m rather proud of this coinage, but wonder whether we may be reinventing the fallacious wheel. Is there an already apt term in rhetorical jargon?
When you get to my age seeing the pearl-clutchers swoon angrily over dictionaries having the temerity to change something gets old, especially when it’s yet another round of people just showing that they don’t understand what lexicographers actually do.
Torey Maguire reckons feminists should just ignore Alan Jones, since he’s just a formulaic shock-jock troll, but I don’t agree. “Don’t feed the Trolls” is bad science, and we should feed the trolls if we need to. Creative mockery to underline the point that we are not “offended”, we are contemptous: that’s cathartic as well.
Game design consultant Ernest W. Adams at Butterflies and Wheels: It’s time for us to force the permanent nine-year-olds to grow up or get out of our games and forums.
Another comment nugget of awesome found in YATOD, this one in the Penny Arcade forums, on a thread discussing sexism/misogyny in the wake of the hatefest directed against Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter on Tropes vs Women in gaming.
Every time women on the internet point out how routine it is for a woman’s mere presence on the internet to provoke squadrons of flying he-man-she-hater monkeys to post floods of vile abuse, someone reckons that it’s not really that bad and women should just get thicker skins/lighten up/stop whining etc.
Kate Harding: if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live”, you are so fucking awful, I can’t even.
Mumbrella: Sandilands threatens to hunt down ‘piece of shit’ News Limited journalist for reporting negative viewer reaction to show
Months later, the woman who spoke these four words is still dealing with cyber-harassment including rape and death threats
Ironically, no one hates high pressure sales tactics more than skeptics. We can’t stand it when a sales associate gets in our face and uses cheap psychological tricks to try to make us buy stuff we don’t want. We take it as an insult to our intelligence. We resent it.
Hoyden About Town 