Peggy Archer, writer of the blog Totally Unauthorized, has done us all a favour by providing direct links to the comment threads of the four idiotic blogposts made by Peter Shinn mentioned in my earlier post.
People, reading through the comments is the funniest thing I have read for a long time. Truly priceless stuff. Here's the timeline:
- Pete writes his first blogpost about The Onion article.(The Onion is a well-known satirical newspaper, famous for its dead-pan humour and made-up news stories)
- People comment.
- Pete writes a second blogpost, still treating The Onion article as legitimate, among several other astounding lapses in metaphor detection, understanding of satire, and just plain logic.
- People comment.
- Pete writes a third blogpost, in which he says that knowing The Onion is a satirical newspaper is proof that "our children are brainwashed in the public school system".
- A lot of people comment, and this is where Pete adds his own comment: " I moved! And you can't comment! Maybe some of you should have been aborted."
- Pete writes a follow-up which, among other things, declares that oral contraceptives are a form of abortion.
- More people comment
- Pete finally turns off the links to his comment threads, but you can still access them (and yes, you can still add comments) using the links (2,4,6,8) above.
- Pete complains about his personal contact information being leaked to the Internet, when the idiot HAD ALREADY POSTED ALL OF IT HIMSELF on several websites. Do a Google search for Pete and marchtogether and see how easy it is to pull up all that information.
As I said earlier: you simply couldn't make this story up if you tried, I am going to wrap this up by the excellent comment left by Peggy Archer left on a mirrorpage of Pete's blog:
It's a shame you can't see the comment threads on the original site anymore. Out of almost 2,000 comments (I think - Haloscan's counter stopped so there may be more), absolutely none read like your examples.
Admittedly, there were a few nasty comments obviously left by folks just wanting in on the internet's hottest party, but the VAST majority of the comments were written by well-educated, intelligent, articulate folks (MANY of whom mentioned being 'pro-life', BTW) who just could not believe what they were reading.
Peter came off as not passionate and driven by his zeal to serve his cause, but as a clueless and sanctimonious jerk who continued to make the same silly error even after having it repeatedly pointed out to him by hundreds of people.
On second thought, though, what Peter did really was amazing - for one brief, shining moment, people on both sides of an incredibly divisive issue came together in their disbelief of such stupidity and their relentless mockery of a man who desperately deserved it.
Yeah. And I had people thinking THIS was for real, too (I'm assuming you've read Herbert Kornfeld before): http://schmaltz.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/suckage_now_i_b.html
How you been, boyo? I STILL get mega-hits from people following the Plain Layne demise, as if it was still current news. Funny--my wife and I were in Woodbury, MN just the other day. I told her all about Plain Layne. She thought that was about the strangest thing she'd ever heard, and I had to agree with her...
Posted by: Pete (Alois) | August 02, 2006 at 07:19 PM