We have a National Bureau of Standards for a reason! It is important to commerce and science to maintain well-defined, common standards of measurement upon which all can agree.
No such pure standard exists for troll diaries. In the interest of scientific precision we must supply this intolerable deficiency! This is a design prospectus for the National Kos Bureau of Standards Troll Diary.
What should the perfect troll diary, the standard upon which all troll diaries will be measured, contain? In the spirit of wasting time and letting your frustrations with the Forces of Evil(TM) out to play, your contributions are welcome.
Since nothing at all important is going on in our country right now to productively engage our attention and energy, we can afford the wasted time and bandwidth to craft this pellucid jewel of offensiveness:
National Kos Bureau of Standards
Draft Design Standards
The Platonic Troll Diary
should contain:
- Obviously, slavish repetition of Republican/Fox News talking points about Obama and his administration
- Gratuitous insults to long-time Kossacks both collectively and by name.
- Retrograde assumptions about women and minorities: racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, any other isms. Extra points for dogwhistle attacks and portmanteau attacks instead of blatant insult.
- Errors or deliberate misrepresentation of easily verifiable fact.
- Defense of persistant myths and falsehoods about recent political history, i.e. Saddam perpetrated 9/11, the surge "worked" and so on.
- Multiple conspiracy theories.
- Must slam puddies.
- Employ as many fallacies of argumentation as possible, preferably in combinations.
- Jingoism, false patriotism, accusing others of treason/unamericanism.
- Horrific speling and Gramor.
- A rigged poll.
- The diary should incorporate all of the above while being as short as possible so as to fall short of legal diary length. What we are looking for is the ideal haiku of offensiveness.
- The diary should suck in as many angry commenters as possible and spawn multiple flame threads on issues, sub-issues and sub-sub issues. An absolutely ideal flame thread would be on whether the other commenters are flaming or not.
So what am I missing? Help out...remember this is for Science. Any favorites? We all have our preferred vintage of whine.
UPDATE: The glittering constellation of talent that is DailyKos has kindly responded in comments with these invaluable additions:
- Troll diary addressed to "you people."
- Excessive punctuation and ALL CAPS. Plenty of exclamation points and no paragraph breaks.
- Express insincere concern (concern troll subgenera)
- Loose inaccurate use of names and terms such as names of departments (National Bureau of Standards vs National Bureau of Standards and Technology, NIST)
- "It should end with a disclaimer . . . of 'I know you're all going to say . . . and I just want you to know that I don't care!' That is then followed by a thin-skinned, whiney update ridiculing people for being mean, indicating that the diarist does, indeed, care."
- Hit and run diary with no tip jar and no comments by diarist.
- Quick violation of Godwin's Law.
- Ugly violations of graceful writing style, especially incoherence and meandering repetition
- Referring to self in third person; talking to self in comments.
- Ad hominem attacks, especially sexual in nature such as "weenie" or "impotent" on the 14-year-old-boy level, or the non-PC category like "bitch" or "retard."
- DELETE MY ACCOUNT!
- Establish troll's credentials, as in: "I'm a lifelong Democrat."
Commenter ticket punch had the great idea of a LEEDS-style point system, where not all items had to be present as long as enough troll points are accumulated. A great suggestion but I still aspire to the Platonic ideal. Short, rancid and all-inclusive.
Congrats to lostmypassport for taking the next bold step...a Troll Diary Template.
Baz
P.S. Perfect irony doesn't break character, but I apologize to any who find this too tart. I love this community and what it has done/is doing for the country. I appreciate you all. I DO have serious diaries to write, but today just wanted to blow off steam.