People keep telling me of new places where it has been appropriated and asking me if I want to do something, and the only possible answer is that I cannot bother myself with it, anymore. It is a tsunami that long ago spread beyond my control. I cannot devote every hour of the day to wrangling it.
That said, what I find interesting today is the life it has found on right-wing blogs and news aggregators, where it is presented for their entertainment as the work of a "stupid liberal" deserving of their scorn.
I keep getting pointed at these at Google alerts and I notice two related phenomena:
First, there are a number of places that call me a liar and say that they're about to take me apart point by point. On those cases where I bother to take a look and see what they do, their rebuttals largely consist of interspersing between my paragraphs various epithets for "stupid" and "liar." Like that story about Trump complaining about the Mar-A-Lago guest whose injury from a fall, and subsequent profusely bleeding head, ruined his whole day; the "rebuttal" or that one is, "Where does he get this nonsense?" -- and sometimes various insults directed at me; the answer of course is Trump himself, our sole source for the story, the guy who thought it was an amusing anecdote that would make him look good. Trump related the story on Howard Stern's show. If I'm a liar, then he's a liar.
Other stories they "rebut" by slamming my absent self with abuse is Trump running a fraudulent University, which is "more nonsense!" even though he had to shut it down and pay court-mandated fines; much like the fraudulent charity he ran, that was a petty cash fund for his own enterprises.
To date, none of the "rebuttals" I have read actually document that I got anything wrong. They just call me names and say I'm lying, which is, to be fair, the same way their role model rebuts unpleasant facts on Twitter. Oh, and sometimes they resort to "Whataboutism," or just yelling; to wit, the paragraph referencing Trump's lies about personally witnessing a crowd of thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheering 9/11? That was one bloody dangerous lie, and they do not try to pretend he didn't do that; they just yell about the Terrorists and Jihadis.
So there's that going on. Lots of Google mentions. Lots. A new one every few weeks. No actual rebuttals, even if that's how they characterize what they're doing. They think the way to win a debate is by being louder, and they are not wrong; as I've said, I can make you weep with a turn of phrase, but I can lose an argument to a barking dog.
Something else, though.
On these pages are ALSO long, abusive threads talking about how evil and stupid I am.
I do not go looking for them, but I sometimes encounter them by accident, and then I stop reading.
And there we get to something I learned during the Sad Puppy mess, that I most assuredly do NOT want to bring up again, but that nevertheless resonates, given that back then I occasionally encountered posts by fans and some of the more toxic SF authors, about how I was part of a cabal, and how I was the stupidest writer in science fiction, and how they would never ever read one of my books, even on a bet: that kind of thing. These discussions went on at ridiculous length, some of them, and again, when I encountered them, I steered away and paid no further attention.
To wit:
What skin is it off my rather sizeable proboscis if this cartoon version of me takes up space in the heads of a bunch of addlepated dickheads? If they're working themselves up into a spit-flecked lather, raging about me?
Need I be scared? Potentially, I guess.
Do you think it hasn't occurred to me that someday I might be at a convention and be confronted by some alt-right a**hole who read that thing and thinks that the best response is violence?
Or that someone even crazier might pack his second-amendment phalluses and get in his car for a cross-country visit that ends at my front door?
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