Playing With Trolls: Marketeer's Obsession With Color TVs

Marketeer showed more tenacity than i expected. not that his last comment to me on the thread was any more factually-based than his previous contributions to our exchange. what he lacked in sourced and reasoned support for his position, he made up for in length. the boy sure does know how to fill up a lot of monitor real estate without saying much at all.

right-wing trolls and left-wing trolls who are true believers of the ideologies for which they tirelessly proselytize in web communities unreceptive to their ministrations are consistent in at least one thing. well, two things if you count the insanity that afflicts them all. the other is an unrelenting case of psychological projection:

you have yet to offer an argument refuting anything i said.

Because you have not yet said anything meriting that sort of time and attention. Instead, you have completely mis-stated and mis-interpreted just about everything I have said in order to, I don't know, practice your water-cooler speech or maybe draft a letter to the editor or something. In any event, you are clearly not talking to me, but rather to someone else with whom you are having an imaginary argument inside your own head.

sometimes i ask myself if trolls really believe that statements like this say anything about the person to whom they're directed rather than the person making them. this is coming from the guy whose concept of a sound response to my initial critique was to assume that i had ulterior motives for making the points that i did -- namely that i must be a deadbeat loser who casually charges $2000 electronic goodies with no intention of ever paying.

Marketeer is a multi-faceted troll. not only is he an expert at ad hominem arguments, he is a world class back pedaler:

For example, you take my statements about the cost of a television, which someone asked me out of the blue, not something I initiated on my own. Apparently, the questioner thought it was some kind of super-secret Gotcha moment, because the discussion somehow went from "what does a TV cost?" to "What is the MINIMUM one can possibly pay for a TV?" Whatever.

what was Marketeer was saying about immense misinterpretation and misstatement of an opponent's position, such that the actual opponent addressed is someone who doesn't exist?

Then, you chimed in to further this totally irrelevant and spurious line of discussion to further talk about how cheap TVs are (as a BEST case scenario), and compare that price to the WORST case scenario of a huge hosptal bill, then procede to conclude that the two figures are worlds apart, and then pat yourself on the back thinking you've scored some significant point. Think again.

one of the reasons retailers like walmart, target, circuit city, best buy, kmart, and others make low prices a centerpiece of their advertising strategies is that most consumers can't afford luxury electronics. they buy cheaper, lower quality electronics that use older technology. i also mentioned the used electronics market, revitalized by ebay in recent years, and the dumpster-diving tradition of poor college students simply to explain multiple means by which a person would acquire a television. in other words, the significance of television ownership was more complicated than he wanted to admit.

Marketeer thinks my hypothetical scenario of a medical disaster is unfair. the thread was about the likely outcome of medical disasters while uninsured in america. you either pay, or you die if the condition is serious. the other topics discussed were the cost of insurance itself which is prohibitive for many. the costs are in fact so prohibitive that a solidly middle class family often cannot afford insurance, and they surely cannot afford to pay for major medical procedures out of pocket.

i won't recount every other detail in the discussion thread or the material linked in kevin's original post. the declining availability of good employer-subsidized insurance is hitting the middle class hard. i suppose i was wrong to assume that Marketeer made his remarks with the context of the thread's topic in mind. silly me. trolls don't bother with that because they don't care:

But, anyone with a driving-safe blood-alcohol level could see that the American middle class, as a whole, and in general, is not only not suffering, but is among the most wealthy group of people ever to have walked the planet Earth. The American middle class of today is not only living with material abundance, they are awash in it.

since material abundance does not entail access to good health care in america, this is completely irrelevant. material abundance is available because of the advances of technology and cheap foreign labor. an abundance of affordable access points to health care or health insurance is not available in the US at this moment. Marketeer quickly proceeds to dive right off the deep end:

Any fool could see that the middle class is not "suffering," it was a silly comment, and not at all worth the time and attention it has been given, but is the kind of thing that sets my teeth on edge because it is a form of fear-mongering. It is exactly the kind of thing that every strong-arm statist measure that every government in the sordid history of government has used as a pretext for whatever the hell it planned to do. "THE PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING .. ONLY PROPOSITION X WILL SAVE THEM!!!! GIVE ME MORE POWER!!!!"

Marketeer must keep a set of paper towels nearby to wipe the spittle off his computer screen. i guess he got tired of attacking me because he ends with an attack on Cal Gal, who had ceased to participate in the thread long before this.

I don't think Cal Gal herself is about to go out and start a Socialist Revolution, but I am thoroughly certain that she has had her soft head filled by others with the kind of "THE PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING" garbage that statists of all stripes have always used. She has internalized this intellectual sewage, parrots it without reflection, and falls back on it as her default mode of speaking on just about every political issue, including this one.

Enjoy your hooch. I mean that.

so, that wraps it up -- the only way one can disagree with Marketeer's opinion is to be crazy, deluded, stupid, or a communist. here is my reply. the thread died after that. you may be wondering why i took all this time dealing with a troll. like Atrios, i would like to help fellow liberals take down the oft-repeated argument that widespread ownership of consumer electronics means that there are few if any economic difficulties facing average americans that are even worthy of discussion.

the tactic of bringing up the dire conditions of poverty that afflict billions around the globe sets my teeth on edge. it's about as relevant as the claim that feminism has done enough in america because it's illegal to sell daughters into forced marriage as happens in some other countries. it's an attempt to change the subject. don't allow it. so, i've done my part taking down one troll for trying to cite television ownership in order to derail a discussion about economic difficulties facing normal working people. don't hesitate to take down this argument should you have to confront it. it isn't that hard to do.