Yahoo! Answers is one of the dumbest fucking things in existence. Even by the low, low standards of both The Internet and Yahoo in general, the Answers section is exactly where rational thought and discourse goes to die. Slowly, painfully and alone.
Somewhere here, in between teenagers who want you to do their homework for them, religious zealots and bigots of every kind, one may find me occasionally killing time. It works; it puts me in a place where I can practice my rhetorical skills. It's like standing on a downtown street corner in a large city, and every five minutes (sometimes less) someone walks up to you and makes the worst straw-man argument in the world. For no discernible reason.
It's a complete stranger. A nobody. Crazy, probably. Sad or mad, usually. People whose outsized sense of outrage has a manufactured feel about it -yes- but one can't help but pause and wonder how it feels to live your life that way.
Then you remember: it's my duty. I need to ridicule the ridiculous, and I'm under no contract to take seriously the rantings of the stupid. You need to do them the favor of letting them know How and Why they're wrong.
Many examples follow. At first, I used to hang around the Gender and Women's Studies board (and occasionally, 'Royalty', but that one doesn't get much traffic), but mostly settled on Religion and Spirituality. If you really want to see a community of people get sucked down a long, long Stupid Tube while badly debating an inherently unanswerable set of questions, that's where you wanna go.
Off we go, then.
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