Salon has an interview with "Pete", the blogger who mistook an Onion humor piece for a real article.
Reached by phone at his Virginia home a week after his initial post about the Onion story, Pete said, "You write some article off the cuff and throw it out there and you never know what's going to happen. The next thing I know there are people calling me from all over the world and telling me what an idiot I am!" It was surely the most public of embarrassments, an example of how the intersection of varied voices and ideologies and sensibilities in the brutal wild West of the new, new blogosphere can go tragically wrong. Or right. Depending on your sense of humor.
It humanizes the poor doofus, which is a good thing…but he still comes off as totally clueless.
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I still think he's an idiot.
Perhaps I would have forgiven him if he hadn't so stubbornly denied his mistake.
Oh, now he says it was a joke.
Right, except that the tone is right in line with everything else he's ever posted on his blog.
So, no. Not a joke. Luckily I have PDF evidence of the original version, without the bloody aborted fetus at the top.
Yeah his claiming it was all a joke is pitiful. Take your licks and move on.
Next stop for him: "I was just trying to make you think."
The word "gullible" was apparently not in his English-German dictionary.
Gullible isn't a real word, so it's not in any dictionary.
Neither is "backpedaling".
The last paragraph of the Salon piece does explain a lot, I think, and makes me feel a bit sorry for him. But I guess I'm not supposed to feel sorry for him because he's anti-choice. I'm supposed to despise him relentlessly.
The guy seems reasonably reflective, and I wish he would really think about what got him into this situation and take away a new awareness of how distorted your thinking can become when you get too deeply immersed in a partisan cause and stop listening to other views.
And for the rest of us, I wish we'd stop and reflect on the extent to which mean-spirited playground mockery has infiltrated our concept of entertainment, and how much our political discourse is increasingly subject to the laws of entertainment. I really don't think this trend is making us happier or taking us anywhere we're going to want to be. For me, it ruins the good, clean fun normally to be had at the expense of such a spectacular blunder.
*sigh* People who don't get satire.
I pity them.
This guy is incredible. To claim that his inability to understand satire is due to his being German... Amusing. To no surprise, he must have missed out on satirical comments, articles and magazines in Germany just like he did on the satire of the Onion article.
Yeah, he does come off as a doofus, for at least two reasons:
First, I hate it when people perpetuate the "Germans don't do humor" stereotype.
Second, he claims he thought the Onion story was real because he meets people like the fictional author of the piece all the time. Which is a lie, because there are no women like the one portrayed in the Onion piece - he's working overtime at trying to deflect attention from his own obtuseness to his favorite strawman representations of the pro-choice movement (i.e., they're inhuman, women who get abortions are unfeeling monsters, etc, etc, etc).
He's a tool. But at least now a lot more people are aware of his tool-hood.
The guy seems reasonably reflective, and I wish he would really think about what got him into this situation and take away a new awareness of how distorted your thinking can become when you get too deeply immersed in a partisan cause and stop listening to other views.
I'd say the fact that he doesn't think about this kind of sugests that maybe he's not quite so reflective after all.
The question I'd like answered is: why does it always seem to be right-leaning folks who believe that The Onion stories are real? I live in an area of the US where most of people (I am not exaggerating) believed the "Harry Potter is Satanic" article and would forward it to each other over and over, long after the article was pulled from the website. Did the "Jesus converts to Islam" article on the same site not lead them to suspect something? Or did the just write a nasty letter to the editor complaining about the factually incorrect story about their lord Jesus while taking everything else at face value!?
It's not that they don't understand the concept of lying, that's for sure. I bet it's that they can't imagine anyone making fun of them.
"It humanizes the poor doofus, which is a good thing...but he still comes off as totally clueless."
Another guy who claims he was a liberal in his youth.
I find this notion that during the heat of some tragic moment which almost all christian conversions can recount, he found christ and invited the holy spirit into his heart.
Ya-ya-ya, whatever.
I've had epiphanies too. But not once did they ever cause me to think that what I thought was up was actually down and what was down was actually up.
Is there a clinical diagnosis out there somewhere? A study made of the conversions which indicates what the person was going through when their conversion occured? Personally I would love to see a study that would prove that the people who have these conversions were in essence responding to some bowel movement of the mind which caused some chemicals to go to the wrong places and trigger the wrong emotions resulting in some misplaced conception that they were spoken to by god or his virgin-born son.
It's nice to know the guy didn't respond to the incident the way the real wingnuts would, lawsuits and intimidations meant to shut the Onion down for daring to insult a conservative.
MYOB'
.
The Onion is satire? You mean all those things they say about Bush are jokes? Hell, they can forget about me renewing my subscription and now I'm gonna vote a straight GOP ticket since I now know that those guys aren't really the idiots I thought they were.
"Gullible isn't a real word, so it's not in any dictionary."
Really? It's in my Collins Paperback Dictionary and also the Marriam-Webster online dictionary.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/gullible
I was thinking that he may have been covering his ass because he had hundreds of people who were almost literally yelling at him about how stupid he is. Granted he is but I wonder what would have happened if it everyone said "I disagree with you dude but The Onion is satire". Who am I trying to kid, a guy who takes this as an opportunity to put graphic abortion images up is an utter loser. People with sites dealing with abused and unwanted children should track back IMO. By the way, I didn't feel like registering for a site that I'm only going to visit once, is this guy in Germany or is he a German living in the US? If he's German how does he rationalize that he isn't a constituent of anyone?
Captain Al,
Gotcha!
And for the rest of us, I wish we'd stop and reflect on the extent to which mean-spirited playground mockery has infiltrated our concept of entertainment, and how much our political discourse is increasingly subject to the laws of entertainment.
Maybe, but what response besides playground mockery is appropriate for this guy? He makes it clear that his opposition to abortion brooks no compromise. It's clearly not an issue of him choosing not to have an abortion himself - he won't rest until it's impossible for any woman in America to have an abortion.
What dialogue is possible with that guy? He's made it clear that he believes any woman who would have an abortion to be sub-human, and any person who would support choice aids and abets a murderer.
And he doesn't even have the perspective or intelligence to recognize satire. Is this a person with whom constructive debate is going to be possible? Or isn't the proper response of a rational community to marginalize this guy by whatever means possible, the same as we'd do with any other madman with a microphone?
Captain Al,
You don't happen to have a brother named Pete, do you?
;-)
Showing perhaps his true nature, Pete has modified the article that was getting so much traffic. He added an image of a very late term aborted fetus, blood and all, and a passage that says "here.. this is what you are trying to do..." as if all the rest of us want to do late term abortions for fun. It really says something about the man and his mission.
Handing out onions to right-to-life protesters must become an accepted response in favour of women's right of choice.
(signed) marc
I wish we'd stop and reflect on the extent to which mean-spirited playground mockery has infiltrated our concept of entertainment, and how much our political discourse is increasingly subject to the laws of entertainment.
You certainly may be right about this being undesirable, but I think it requires a somewhat selective view of history to think that it's a NEW phenomenon.
I wonder what would have happened if it everyone said "I disagree with you dude but The Onion is satire".
I read waaay too many of the comments to that guy's post when it was up and, in between the admittedly overwhelming number of "Get a brain, Moran!" posts, there were any number of people saying what you suggest, almost verbatim. So, what would have happened is pretty much... this.
"Captain Al,
You don't happen to have a brother named Pete, do you?"
Hey, how was I supposed to know that comment was satire? I was just joking though. Honest!
That's from his more recent post on stem cell research. One would think that with the surge of hits to his blog (and intense scrutiny) that he would use spellcheck. Or at least spell his favorite president's name correctly.
I went and checked back on his blog... there is no way to post or read comments. All criticism is removed.
I think that says lots about him.
And it is not good.
I think that says lots about him.
And it is not good.
To be fair, it may just say that he's had more than enough people call him an idiot recently.
Marc Buhler wrote:
The problem with Argumentum ad Ewwww is that it works equally well against knee surgery and cesarean sections.