AsIProvedEarlier™

I’ve seen this one in the wild at least a couple of times. Here’s the latest one, from Jerkface. (It’s in the comments, obv.)

Seasoned veterans of Loonacy will recognise several different levels of Loonin’Trolls. From lowest upwards, they run roughly like this:

(0) “Emo Kid”: I really like this girl, but she won’t let me … Actually, I don’t understand this one at all, but I presume it’s a polite version of
(1) “Nigger Free Code,” which is an attempt to blanket the discussion with pointless offensiveness, even though neither the sender nor the recipient gives a fuknicker. Sometimes accompanied by a bitly link to a porn site, which leads us to
(2) “Adam King,” who has nothing to say but can’t stop saying it. Usually in intelligible English, which leads us to
(3) “oiaohm,” who admits to being borderline insane. At least I think that’s what he admits to. It’s difficult to understand anything he says.

That pretty much covers it (I’ve actually missed out CopyPastaGuy), and these people are sad and easy to ignore. The absolute peak of Loonin’Trolling comes with “AsIProvedEarlier™.”

As with all trolls, there are no actual arguments and no citations. This species is far more clever, though. It starts with a reply to some random point, let us take the Jerkface example of “piracy is destroying the PC gaming market.”

You or I would consider this case on its merits. AsIProvedEarlier™ goes one better. He completely ignores it and decides to talk about patents. Patents Are Evil!

This is not sufficient, however. Any Loon can quote this little nostrum. A genius Loon will turn it around and claim that patents hurt Microsoft (and Apple and maybe Oracle and don’t for God’s sake mention IBM because they have patents coming out of their ears). This is clearly a ludicrous position, but it’s only intended as a stop-gap to attract attention. And it naturally attracts attention. Success! Next up:

Patents force software engineers, all software engineers, to be outlaws! It’s actually quite a reasonable argument, if you accept the premise. Which is where the real magic of this variety of trolling comes in:

That being said, I think I made my point clear.

(OK, I goofed a bit. It’s not quite “as I proved earlier,” but it’s along the same lines.)

Basically it’s a pyramid of nonsense and shifting targets which can be varied according to whim or to individual refutations.

It takes guts and a certain amount of intelligence and definitely persistence to maintain this posture, which is why you don’t see Loons doing it very often. It’s worth following when they do, however, because they inevitably get just as confused by their own gibberish as the readers do, and eventually come out with something like (and suddenly it’s either badly-spelled or punctuated or ungrammatical — curse that cut’n'paste):

Lawyers love patents. That should scare you enough.

You guys support injustice. Your insane anti-Linux bias will push you to be against ANYTHING that the ebil “freetards” fight for. F_ck, it could be anything freedom of speech, human rights, if those “freetards” support it, it must be something to oppose. It’s disgusting really.

Sooner or later, normal people stop pushing back. And that’s where the real insanity starts peeping through.

It’s worth waiting for.