Your Freepiphany

[kiki]

When was the moment that you discovered how jaw-droppingly, forehead-slappingly ignorant and bigoted right-wingers on the internet are, for the first time?

I have two. The first was when, discussing Fox News with an erstwhile young Republican on the internets, I jokingly quoted Homer Simpson: "They're the only news station to tell it like it really is - that everything is just fine!" He, of course, didn't get the joke and thought I'd come over to his point of view.

The other was talking about evolution with a guy who could only respond to scientific points with Bible scripture. I said, again jokingly, "...unless you're one of those wacky people that thinks that all dinosaur bones were planted by liberal homosexual college professors."
Again, not a trace of irony for my discussion partner... he was indeed "one of those wacky people", and obviously rabidly proud of it too.

Since then I've learned never to try and use sarcasm with right-wingers - they don't get it, and they probably hold the exact views you're trying to satirise. And I've learned never to be shocked at how dumb they are.

[KyndCulture]

1. When I mistakenly ventured into a Yahoo poltical chat room

I was dumbfounded, literally.

[Deep13]

2. Discovered it on television, not the internet.

In the 1980s when I was in college, I saw Maureen Reagan on television. She was shilling for the right-to-lifers. The interviewer asked if she though women who had invitro fertilization should be forced to be impregnated with each blastocyte created and bring them to term. Reagan giggled, nodded and said yes. I realized then that the so-called Christian right were Nazis.

[meegbear]

3. Mine wasn' t the internet ...

it was on a bus ride home from work in the mid-90s.

Someone left a New York Post on a seat and I started reading it. There was a column called "Times Watch" and it was supposed to be an Ombusman on the New York Times. The writeup was about on page 5 of the New York Times Review of Books, there was an article on a book covering the history of communism in America. The columnist was ranting about how this should have been on the front page and "what are trying to hide"?

I thought it was funny, then I started to think that somewhere out there, someone was going "Yeah! What ARE they hiding?" and people are eating this up.

From there on, with the repug rhetoric on Clinton in full-force, it all came home.

[kiki]

4. I should clarify...

...that I'm in the UK and I've never been to the US, so mine may well have happened more recently than most (when I discovered the wonderful/retarded world of the net).

The examples I provided are about four years old, and looking at them they do seem pretty tame by today's standards - but remember these are simply the first, and not the worst! The opinions expressed in my examples have pretty much become part of the mainstream "discourse" by now...

[zbdent]

5. Invasion of the smearers (prelude to freepers) in unrelated Usenet

newsgroups . . . turned anything into "Bill Clinton having sex with fill-in-the-blank"

Mid-90s . . .