A Quick Word About A Professional Troll
It is weirdly offensive that a professional troll like [NAME REDACTED] operates under the veneer of pretending to know things when the entirety of his shtick rests on being able to use google and loosely following the Steven Pinker pop culture model of ‘being a public intellectual means making broad statements.’ Knowledge exists in the same way that the physical layers of a painting exist, and we can choose to either work towards being increasingly aware of the figurative river flow of the tints and shades of epistemes that exist in the world, or we can declare that — in direct response to the well-publicized massacre of children, an event that only consistently happens in the United States — that life in the United States is Pretty Good, Actually.
This isn’t the first time that [NAME REDACTED] has looked at death and come to a different conclusion. In 2013, in response to the death of 87 workers at a factory in Bangladesh, he wrote that it was okay that the world was this way, because — and I quote, perhaps unfairly — “money is also good.”
Argue with his post-massacre tweet on its supposed merits and [NAME REDACTED] might point you towards Steven Pinker’s The Angels Of Our Nature, which argued that humans are less violent now than they were in the past, but Pinker’s book looks for for its intellectual foundation in the Enlightenment when it could have been looking at questions of proportionality.
[NAME REDACTED] also seems strikingly unrepentant about immediately telling us all life is actually good immediately after schoolchildren were murdered. In one reply to Wesley Lowery, he tersely and dismissively replies that — yes — “it is a very sad event.” In another reply to Dave Karf, he sarcastically asks if the response he was receiving was for his “failure to read the room.” In response to a deliberate joke which accurately characterized his sentiment, he notes that it is ‘very interesting’ that the joke used fictitious language and didn’t immediately respond to what he said.
None of this matters. None of what [NAME REDACTED] says matters. It’s another example of someone successfully exploiting the attention economy for a moment — creating a response like this one — when a very real reality exists on the ground in Uvalde, Texas.
And how does this post look three days after it happened, three days after what we wrote above? What’s currently emerging regarding the police force in Uvalde looks horrific — you can see reports from the Wall Street Journal here, the Associated Press here, and a wrenching clip from CNN here.
You can also find information for the Robb School Memorial Fund here.
