you think he is playing the "i dont really care so my opinion matters more than everyone elses to those who have limited knowledge of how shit really works and what the F is going on..." ?
It's not so much that as a will to inflict on others.
He's been at this for a few years, at least; it's a steeper decline than the pop-conservative two-bitting he was on about before, but we can say the same thing about popular conservatism. Regardless of what he actually thinks he's accomplishing, what he is doing was once actually SEO; the object was to create noise as a baseline for normalization. I saw one, recently, while looking up whether or not the kitten could eat this or that, and I can't even remember the precise word, now, but the Google return led with a handful of blogs using an obscure word, like a rarely-invoked definition of "predicate", to describe cats as requisite carnivores, and the other thing that stands out about these pages is that they really didn't seem to know about cats. I did eventually find the right terms for a useful return, and understanding why the cat should not have hummus, which is elevated risk of feline gout, among other problems, which in turn makes perfect sense given the acidity. Still, though, if cats didn't eat vegetable matter that wasn't psychoactive, I wouldn't be checking on hummus and fried potatoes. And, no, the latter does not require butter; fry a potato with vegetable or peanut oil, he'll still eat it. Still, though, there was a cluster of blogs and familiar managed-content pages that managed to seed and keyword and crosslink its way to the top of the Google result for a not entirely obscure question.
And if you ever wondered, a couple years back, about YouTube pushing a striking amount of alt-right material, perhaps there was some old-school, manual-slogging SEO involved, but it turned out the site was actively pushing the stuff. The whole point is to normalize the extraordinary.
Consider the Sciforums experience, by comparison or contrast, as such: Every once in a while, people might refer to LaPlace, or any number of variations on the statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Squeaky-wheel normalization is a long superstition; if they make enough noise, then they can have their way regardless of the merits. In the wake of the Jackson wardrobe episode, it emerged that the impetus for FCC action against CBS turned out to be an efficient phone tree and letter-writing campaign, such that something like ninety-five percent of FCC actions against broadcasters over an impressive period came from this cluster of activists perpetually complaining.
This sort of effort is not necessarily without its effects. We can look at low-key grift like our neighbor pushes and wonder if he is a mark or thinks himself in on the swindle. In any case, the persistence of certain behaviors ought to raise a question akin to Poe's Law, with the question of parody being invested at least partially in being unable to distinguish between a bot, reduced human competence, or some weird pretense of extraordinarily slothful ignorance. Still, in the context of, say, topline pub chatter, you can find among the plastic-capsule politics of being center-left, mostly liberal on social issues but sometimes more fiscally conservative, a certain strange sympathy; we might call it inexplicable if we leave that term to whether or not any given individual can actually explain their sympathies, as such, but it does have behavioral significance reflecting, at the very least, particular priorities. These generally orbit "me and mine" arguments, in which the idyll reflects an individual's desires, and often in lieu of one's interests.
Shortly after the 2016 election, for instance, I encountered two strangely related Poe-range provocateurisms. One was a known misogynist trying to convince people he was progressive while arguing against ending disparity in order to prescribe a broader populist idea that would, at the very least, as he perceives it, help him. The other was a straight-up argument coinciding strangely with that one argument's underlying pretense, that people normalize the extraordinary by refusing to normalize the extraordinary. And if the argument becomes, as it did in that particular case, that a failure to give sufficient sympathy to supremacism is to blame for Donald Trump's election, well, now my generally centrist, allegedly slightly left of center associate who is socially liberal and a little more conservative fiscally, is arguing on behalf of supremacism.
And the connection between these overlapping jokers, to the one, and the Poe/SEO behavior, to the other, is how much of what the jokers want us to believe is the same sort of pretentiously uninformed drivel spewed by bots, lulzies, content farm hands, and basket cases.
It's true, though, if you look back far enough in the archives, you can find our neighbor at least putting up a pretense of argument. In recent years, though, his habit is lazy propagation of right-wing tropes, and generally according to the pretense of being an incompetent ignoramus. Pretending ignorance while just accidentally propagating right-wing tropes, such as he does in the
topic post↑, is a condensed, easier version of a
earlier routine↗, which is to ask a question according to a pretense that he is somehow unable to find any actual source material, and thus must rely on metacommentary from oppositional populists. It doesn't actually matter what people responding in good faith tell him, if it's not what he wants to hear. Actually, that's a pretty good hook, right there: In confessing ignorance, he lands on absurd, unsustainable, rightist tropes; we ought not be surprised.
Of course, it is also true that along the way, during those years, he and his side lost a political argument they were really dedicated to, but if that's the sort of thing that unhinges a person, or is a threshold for dropping out, then the problem is worse than I am describing. Y'know, like the difference between, "Oh, for phuckall sake", and, "Oh. Holy shit."
†
There was a time when someone was pushing the word, "bitch", in such a manner as to make the point about what is wrong with using it like that; it occurred to ask what men thought the masculine equivalent was. For instance, I'm sure we can find times when the use of the word "honky" went with immediate danger, but, generally speaking, hearing white people complain about the word only reinforces the point of those advocates' supremacism. I recall someone else went so far as to try the word, "jerk", but couldn't explain why, which, in turn, was about as much as we might expect of such a suggestion. But nobody said, "dick", as I recall, and maybe we all knew it was ridiculous; indeed, I would have gone with "dick" before "jerk", but, right, the day ends in -y. And the problem with words like, "cocksucker", or "faggot", is that they have an inherent misogyny about them, or else, like men calling one another, "pussy", they transform something they allegedly want into an insult. I never, even in passing, asked a woman if I could kiss her insult. As receiving fellatio and performing the penetrating role in anal copulation are traditionally considered desirable, the problem with being a cocksucker, according to the insult, is not actually in performing oral sex on a man, but, rather, not being a woman while doing so.
But, yeah, when the dude said, "jerk", it was a phucakll moment.
†
The Hispanic, from a conservative town in a conservative state, who was a local Republican hand, and thought of Mexican migrant labor as an invading army might well disdain being viewed as pandering to white supremacism; indeed, he might resent the lack of diversity demonstrated by the failure of liberal bigotry to correctly recognize brown on brown ethnic prejudice, because apparently if liberals could only just see that, they would understand just how right he is.
I honestly do have that experience. Nor should that be hard to believe.
†
It sounds like an easy refrain to say you're overcomplicating things. Part of the problem is that it's one thing to have a sincere commitment to something facing the kind of blowback certain behavior has encountered, but few among that contingent are sincere about anything but their insincerity. This isn't so much mattering more than others, as, "I don't really care, so my opinion matters more than everyone else's", might, in its neurotic autoconstriction manage to suggest, and in the moment we can simply note the hint toward neurotic conflict is in expressing a lack of interest, like not caring, right before making the point that they do; that part of the projection isn't inaccurate.
The latter part, regardless of the self-superior part of the expression—the part about how shit really works and what the phuck is going on is kind of important. Something has fallen out of their pretense of moral authority. In the movie, some haughty asshole finally has the comeuppance of recognizing he really was a racist, or some such; cheaper plots simply face up to the point that the reckless rival really is the better pilot. People do not, in living reality, adjust so well as the asshole characters in literature for whom we seek redemption at the end.
This is more like, "If I can't have it, then nobody can."
The behavior is antisocial, seeks satisfaction, is slothful about even that, and finds itself even more alienated every time it stakes anything of significance to itself and is wrong; in such circumstances deeper entrenchment is likely the result of least effort.
