Posts filed under Laurelin in the Rain

A special, degenerate subspecies…

A special, degenerate subspecies resulting from the crossing of the Copy/Paste and MRA Talking Points trolls is the Horror File Quote List Troll. This troll is too stupid to even copy and paste an argument related to the discussion at hand; it prefers to paste in endless lists of cherry-picked and wilfully misrepresented quotes allegedly penned by feminist authors. For an example, you can see one in action in three different threads on Feministing: [1], [2], [3]. The basic M.O. is to find some thin reed by which you can connect your favorite list of Evil Feminist Quotes to the current conversation (even the most tangential connection will do), and then you fire up the Cut-‘n’-Paste from a series of lists of dishonestly presented and wildly out-of-context quotes intended to prove the malicious, man-hatin’ intent of the monolithic conspiracy running The Feminist Movement.

The quote lists themselves are a sort of ever-mutating parasite that spreads through the trolls’ activities; they’ve actually been circulating among anti-feminist trolldom since the days of Usenet, and many of them can have their histories traced by the typographical errors, attributions errors, and other mistakes that have been endlessly replicated through their cut-n-paste vectors for over a decade now.