Walks outside, sees a bunch of people on my front lawn.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a dog turd on your lawn.”
“Well, that happens from time to time. Just ignore it and it’ll be gone in a day or two.”
“Don’t you want to come over and see what it smells like? It really stinks”
“No. Leave it alone and in a day or two it won’t stink anymore, and in another day the sun will dry it up and it’ll crumble into the soil.”
“We can’t have that. What will we have to smell after that happens?”
“And what will we have to poke with a stick?”
“Or with my finger. It’s not so bad - The side that faces the sun is dry and hard. It’s the other side that is squishy, see? Oh, yuck.”
"Just leave it alone. Tomorrow you will say, Hey! There’s that turd. The day after you’ll say “That turd is getting old. A week later it’ll be ‘Didn’t something used to be on that lawn? I can’t remember’”
“Sorry, but we can’t do that. One of us went home to get a stalk of rhubarb. We are going to poke the turd with it and bake it into a pie to memorialize out great battle with the dog turd. Don’t people around here make rhubarb/dog turd pies around Thanksgiving?”
“No. Now go away.”
(I can’t believe that I have to do this, but tradition calls for links.)
Because it is the nastiest of the food-plants and because of it, I have not had a good coffeecake in years because everyone else insists on adulterating it with horrible chunks of plant matter.
Also, the leaves are poisonous! That’s nature-code for leave me the fuck alone! Are we gods, that we think we can meddle in the affairs of poisonous plants?
I like to think I’m a fairly good reader of parody and subtext, but I must admit I don’t get it. What do rhubarb pie, Benghazi, and global warming have to do with each other, and which one is the turd?
If I had to guess, I think Magiver is a turd, but his excrement seems limited to the Benghazi and Iran threads right now.
I dispute this. The SDMB isn’t your front lawn; it’s more like the park down the street where you have to go to specific locations to see, smell and poke the dog turds.
Also, the examples you posted seem pretty small beer. Where the hell were you when this abomination was racking up the posts?
So, not feeding a troll is leaving a dog turd to dry up in the sun? Who the fuck deals with dog turds in their yard by leaving them alone for a few days? No, you pick that shit up and throw it away, like a grown-up, not some agoraphobic nutjob who’d rather have a yard full of dried crap. The analogy just doesn’t make sense.
It’s like if I were to post a thread urging people to wipe boogers on their shirt and leave them there to dry out, and also say that one should never wash their booger-stained clothes, but in fact wear them with pride at the office… and then claiming that booger-stained clothes is actually an allegory that teaches us to keep household poisons out of the reach of children. That’s just a terrible analogy.
We have a secular faith, reason. We believe that if you present the facts and a plausible explanation for those facts, even the most rigorously stubborn rightard will finally see the light. We witness for that faith even when the task is impossible, we go on, we try.
Also, I can’t unleash my inner snark against my sane and reasonable friends, they become cold and distant. If I must have a dark side to my humor, and it seems I must, I should at least have the decency to use it on the deserving.
No, reasoning with it is a much better strategy. Using logic and questioning will make it go away. Or poking it with your finger. Which one is working best for you?
The problem I’m pointing out is that your analogy attempts to make leaving turds in one’s front yard as the preferred course of action, when I don’t think anyone in the real world wants turds to sit around in their front yard, waiting for them to decompose. The problem isn’t that you are anti-troll, the problem is that your analogy is inapt. INAPT, I say!
And I’m actually having a rather fun time explaining all the ways in which Magiver is full of shit. It’s a hobby I have. If I didn’t like to argue with people I disagree with, there would be no point of me posting here.
Only mods can scoop up turds and throw them away. The rest of us can poke them, step in them, read The Bible to them…they all eventually go away regardless.
I like the general spirit of the OP. I found the actual presentation amusing as well, although the examples were not the best to pound the point home.
