Subclass of Poe's Law?
Aug. 23rd, 2014 10:14 amLet me explain. No, it's too long; let me sum up.
Last year or the year before the Science Fiction Writer's Association (SFWA) took the unusual step of expelling a member. If I recall correctly the member in question was tossed out for misusing the official SFWA Twitter Feed by using it to promote racist sexist material that SFWA understandably didn't want to be associated with. (Imagine a Coke executive using the Coke Twitter feed to link to a post extolling the eating of babies, and giving recipes--you can guess they wouldn't be working for Coke for very much longer.)
This led to many conservative cries of Free Speech--and accusations that SFWA only allowed liberal writers, and at this point I've seen several conservative writers talking about SFWA in terms that sound like a report from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. These rants have become so extreme that they seem, to a liberal eye like mine, to be self-satires.
I just came across (late, I know) a post that indicates the conservative writers themselves are having trouble distinguishing them from deliberate satire.
The satire is here.
I will say Larry took it better than I expected when he found out what he'd done.
So is this simply Poe's Law in action? Or is it some sort of super Poe when the person mistaking the satire for reality is part of the satirized group?
Last year or the year before the Science Fiction Writer's Association (SFWA) took the unusual step of expelling a member. If I recall correctly the member in question was tossed out for misusing the official SFWA Twitter Feed by using it to promote racist sexist material that SFWA understandably didn't want to be associated with. (Imagine a Coke executive using the Coke Twitter feed to link to a post extolling the eating of babies, and giving recipes--you can guess they wouldn't be working for Coke for very much longer.)
This led to many conservative cries of Free Speech--and accusations that SFWA only allowed liberal writers, and at this point I've seen several conservative writers talking about SFWA in terms that sound like a report from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. These rants have become so extreme that they seem, to a liberal eye like mine, to be self-satires.
I just came across (late, I know) a post that indicates the conservative writers themselves are having trouble distinguishing them from deliberate satire.
The satire is here.
I will say Larry took it better than I expected when he found out what he'd done.
So is this simply Poe's Law in action? Or is it some sort of super Poe when the person mistaking the satire for reality is part of the satirized group?