Arguing With Idiots on the Internet

It happens every so often. If you watched this video you might want to follow some of the comments. I made a simple one. (Click to embiggen the images).

On the face of it, this seemed to be a fairly uncontroversial comment. After all, Farage is stating an unpalatable truth that usual suspects are wetting their knickers over. I got a response. Read what follows and weep.

It’s difficult to know where to start with such a stupid statement. After all, Orwell’s socialist thinking has nothing to do with the relevance of his comment. It applies perfectly in this context. Also, despite being a socialist, Orwell was railing against the kind of totalitarian thought that Farage is doing today. Despite their political differences, they have this much in common. But, again, none of this is relevant. The quote fitted the situation. So I replied (you just had to, didn’t you? – Ed)

I felt that this was all that could be said. After all, Mr Hughes had not addressed the topic in hand and I have a low tolerance for stupidity. (Really? I would never have guessed – Ed).

So, we got a response.

Now I’ve come across a great deal of stupidity in my time, but this is right up there with the best of them. He did not write to warn against people like Farage, he wrote to warn against totalitarianism – regardless of where it came from. Farage is not a totalitarian as anyone who has followed his career will recognise. I concede that Johnson and his government are and fit squarely into that warning (and I didn’t see it coming). That he does not understand why his comment was childish is to be expected. It was nothing more than a stupid non sequitur, like much of the following response and is typical of the tribal mentality of the hard of thinking.

And, as is usual with someone who lacks reasoning skills they assume that a critical response is caused by a touched nerve, not because they have just made a fool of themselves.

And, yes, I have read Orwell. I studied Animal Farm at O Level and his collected essays at A Level. I subsequently read 1984 in my own time. The assumption that I haven’t read Orwell is false. Also the assumption that Orwell would have taken a specific approach is some hubris – unless Hughes is capable of communing with the dead. I’m not sure that Orwell would have approved of aiding and abetting criminal gangs, but that’s just an assumption too.

So I reminded him here that he has failed to address the issue being discussed. Again, though, he sidesteps the question – because he has no answer beyond boilerplate “right wing bad.”

Yes, I know he was a socialist, but it seems that this idiot has been communing with the dead. How could he possibly know that Orwell would have hated Farage? I have read enough of his writing to understand that he had a nationalist streak that ran alongside his left wing politics. But again, we get the fallacious claim that because Orwell was a socialist, his comments cannot be applied to this context. He is also stupid enough to think that because he is being tribal, so am I. Nope. I subscribe to no specific political tribe and nothing I have said so far indicates that I do. Note also his definition of truth. He then goes on to insult my own grasp of English. (You can’t educate pork – Ed). It’s also worth pointing out here that his fact was irrelevant to the point. It was a non sequitur, so a logical fallacy. His own grasp of comprehension is poor because if you read the original response I made, it was me asking the rhetorical question.

Anyway, as I was waiting in the vet’s car park and my cat was going to be brought out fairly soon, I’d run out of patience with this moron.

To be fair, if I wasn’t typing on a small screen, I’d have probably been a bit more specific in my comment here and pointed out more accurately that it was the soviet regime he was warning about rather than communism specifically, but the two go hand in hand anyway.

Animal Farm is a thinly disguised satire on the Bolshevik revolution – so not Stalin specifically but the whole lot of them. 1984  is a warning about totalitarianism without being specific about the regime and could be applied to any totalitarian regime. But, meh on that point. However his final comment really sums up the stupidity. I recall similar claims made back in the days of forums when someone felt themselves being challenged. They cried that their freedom of speech was being taken from them. It takes a particular type of idiocy to think that someone deciding to no longer engage is a restriction on their freedom of speech – or that I hate freedom of speech. Indeed, no one has cancelled him and why would I? After all, I’m more than happy for his foolishness to remain on display as typical of a certain type of SJW (All SJWs – Ed).

He has assumed that I am right wing when I am neither of the right nor the left, preferring to take a stance on a case by case basis. Idiots such as this are unable to comprehend such nuance. Just as he uses terms like “objective truth” while being completely unable to grasp what that might be. At no point did he engage with the discussion preferring instead to use a series of logical fallacies and puerile insults (tautology – Ed).

It would seem that my initial assessment of this halfwit was spot on. And doubtless he gets to vote…