There are, we know, many stupid people on the earth. Some are so stupid that they are quaintly hilarious. A large number of them congregate on internet messageboards. My friends over at Portal of Evil have provided me, however, with a motherload of amazing idiocy. I won’t link to it directly, but if you ever feel like the Straight Dope is too uncivil or too lowbrow, you can always check out the Yahoo news forums.
Here are some of the best highlights first picked out and commented on by POE:
The skeptics:
The right wing journalism critics:
The above statement: pure poetry? Or just too good to be true?
Apos, why do you do that to yourself?, it´s masochism to hang around places like that looking for anything remotely resembling the Standards of the Dope.
Those snippets felt like being stoned (biblical variety) by idiocy to death.
We used to play a little something we called The Yahoo News Ignoramous-Free Discussion Hunt. It’s go a little something like this:
Click on any Yahoo news story.
Click on the “Discuss” link at the end.
Verify that there are a minimum of 20 comments posted.
See if there are no posts in the thread that would get a poster warned/banned if they were to spew their shit on the SDMB.
The game is next to impossible to play, however. It winds up being too damn depressing. If you ever find yourself feeling good about humanity, just spend a few minutes there. It’s an eye-opening reminder of what kind of pathetic scumbags are out there happily tossing out their hate-filled ideas.
You know, don’t you, that if the Dope were a physical place and the Yahoos ever decided to take over, we’d be so outnumbered (and, no doubt, outgunned) that they’d be drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon out of our skulls inside of three hours.
As opposed to the wittier satire we often read about the current administration here.
Let’s hope the Motor City Madman hasn’t acquired a taste for dog meat
I didn’t know Yahoo even had a news forum and won’t dispute the PALATRbility of its members. Finding the lowest common denominator on the internet would probably take an entire staff of researchers a number of decades to uncover. Drawing comparisons with the SDMB to lesser quantities is counter-productive. After reading (and posting some of) the hundreds of turds dropped here on a weekly basis, the last thing in the world anyone should want to do is give dopers a ‘superiority complex’. Is the SDMB one of the quality internet forums out there? I guess so. Could it be better? I assume so. Will it improve if we use those POE highlights as a barometer? I don’t think so.
Well, yes, but the exibition in the OP came from a single thread, that´s a large ratio of stupidity per thread that I don´t think could be easily found on the SDMB. In my experience the SDMB is much better for resoned discurse that any other forum I´ve seen, where usually ignorance runs rampant (“I don´t know anything about the subject but I have an unshakable opinion on the matter”).
The anti-environmentalist side: You know, if “species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate”, and we now add these new species to the total, that should get the tree-huggers off our backs for a few years.
