{"id":499,"date":"2006-07-16T11:04:33","date_gmt":"2006-07-16T16:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=499"},"modified":"2006-07-16T11:04:33","modified_gmt":"2006-07-16T16:04:33","slug":"unintentional-self-parody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":"Unintentional Self-parody"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing about politics is usually miserable, pointless, and time-consuming. It would be just as productive for me to sit by the road, giving the finger to people with the wrong bumperstickers. So I don’t do politics here. However, while doing some vanity searching a while ago I found something amusing.<\/p>\n

The thing is, years ago I had a political satire site<\/a>. One of my bits was a news story wherein it said that:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the wake of the attack earlier this week that left Uday and Qusay Hussein dead, many in America’s academic community came forward to encourage the remaining supporters of Saddam Hussein to “look past their anger” and try to discover the “root causes” of the American attack. Said Middle East correspondent and professional idiotarian Robert Fisk, “While it might be tempting for Saddam’s supporters to lash out at the west, they would be better served by trying to understand why they are so hated throughout the world, including in their own country.”\n<\/div>\n

The point was to take the “why do they hate us” attitude of the far left and reflect it back at them through a funhouse mirror. The “why do they hate us” mentality de-humanizes people by reducing them to actors who can’t rationalize and who should be expected to lash out violently when wronged. Inverting the argument showed how silly it was. Like a lot of the stuff I wrote, it was better in concept than in execution. It wasn’t really funny. It needed a punchline. <\/p>\n

Now it has one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On this forum there are a bunch of people who took this very obvious parody, missed the joke, and tried to argue with it as if it was in earnest. These aren’t well-reasoned arguments about how the article is wrong or senseless, this is AMERIKA SUKS! <\/p>\n

This is like putting up a goofy George Bush\/Bill Clinton scarecrow in the yard with a dunce cap on it, then coming out the next moring and finding someone having a heated argument with the thing. It wasn’t very funny before, but now it’s hilarious<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing about politics is usually miserable, pointless, and time-consuming. It would be just as productive for me to sit by the road, giving the finger to people with the wrong bumperstickers. So I don’t do politics here. However, while doing some vanity searching a while ago I found something amusing. The thing is, years ago […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}