Kicking Against The Pricks: Thoughts On That Vox Day Troll Fiasco

"Come, my armies of light! Sally forth and attack Pidgin's Landing. With my unbridled genius, my athleticism and that mouse I designed that didn't sell very well because it had too many buttons, we shall soon overrun that most loathsome blog!"

"Oh..."

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'It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.'

-Acts 26: 14 (KJV)


Well, not really. These troll-surges aren't half as bad as people make out. You hear about some bloggers shutting down comment rolls, terminating their blog or even losing their minds. I feel for those people, truly, but I don't get 'em (Though I'd hazard it's the repetition that ultimately snaps them. Trolls are a one note bunch. Or the racism and misogyny, of course:  I'm lucky there). For me it's fun. A breeze. A piece of piss as we say in Limeyland.

Which is phrase that links well to Vox Day. For some reason that previous post where I questioned the very existence of his wife stuck in his craw. He sharted about it on his 'Alpha Game' website (An 'alpha-male' development project that's best understood as a kind of penis cult inside an echo chamber). Therein he defined me as a 'gamma male', which is funny, because I swiftly became Chuck Heston in The Omega Man as his gormless followers descended on Spool Pidgin.

I'd like to tell you it was a tough, valiant battle but it was more a pull-the-trigger-with-left-hand-smoke-with-the-right Somme-type affair.

The first wave had no comprehension of irony or satire and were thus tragically cut down in their knicker-sniffing prime. Second wave realized  they should at least pretend to understand irony and satire and still got cut down. The third wave was more of a trickle by then, one that had no option but to criticize my weight and writing ability. This, readers take note, is the troll equivalent of boys and old men being sent out into the breach with rifles made in 1892. The last push. Not pretty.

Not that any of this should surprise us. Men who wish to become alpha males by taking instruction from another male aren't exactly brimming with self-awareness or wit. But all trolls, in my experience, are irony-vacuums, whatever their political stripe (If you ever find yourself in an Antarctic base with six other people, one of whom you suspect is a troll, just stick that episode of Brass Eye in the DVD player and see what happens). Your righteous fury can only ever feed trolls. Absurdity castrates them.

Oh, come on. I'm allowed to be a little smug...


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One troll explained that Vox Day resides in Italy these days. I nearly spat my cornflakes out with laughter. Daily, the Great Leader spouts about the Hispanic onslaught on America or the liberal junta crushing it from above and his readers swallow it whole. But he's not even there. He ran away. Much like Oswald Moseley (Britain's would-be fascist dictator whom Day oddly mirrors in character and appearance, sans 'tache) who scarpered to Paris, Day would probably counter this humdinger with 'You can't clean a dunghill while under it'. And, like Moseley, we can all sit back and giggle at the man's hypocrisy, which is only exceeded by his megalomania.

"So you wanna be an alpha male, huh? First you gotta get y'rself a rad black shirt. Then you gotta pose like someone out of Color Me Bad. Hey, no laughing at the back! The nineties ruled, scumbags!"

But I ask you; what happened to this man's galaxy-sized intellect he insists on telling us about? He thought, and still thinks, that I actually believe his wife doesn't exist. I guess his unquestioning belief in his own abilities sent him arse-over-tits with that one. It rendered the last paragraph of my post--where I reveal my conspiracy theory uses the same spurious, cherry-picking, confirmation-biased methodology as his daily dribblings--totally invisible.

(There was that photo of me breaking into 'his house' too. Didn't that set something off on his radar?)

But I shouldn't be all that gobsmacked. Most people, after all, know him as that dupe who thought John Scalzi was actually admitting to being a serial rapist.*


(*Then he added an extra two paragraphs to cover his ass, hoping no one would notice. See here.)


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Let's give the shit his due. Vox Day is highly capable at debating, as he repeatedly tell us. In his anti-atheist polemic, for instance, he's savvy enough to quickly dispense with the old 'atheists don't get theology' argument like the polystyrene fort it is. In all honesty I'd put money on him instead of me in a face-to-face debate.

Yet his tactical nous is scuppered by his being strategically flawed. His very worldview hamstrings him. You could be a modern day Demosthenes, but if you're seriously refuting a century and a half of evolutionary evidence you may as well be Stan Laurel.

Put simply, his beliefs constrain his understanding. With evolution this becomes painfully clear, even to a dunce like me. For instance, Day is under the impression some species are 'more' evolved than others (a misapprehension rooted in his racism, perhaps), and that the Coelacanth has somehow ceased evolving merely because its physical appearance hasn't changed. Any Cnut (No, not a spelling error, I promise) wishing to turn back science's tides surely has to be better informed than that.
 
Another example is his belief the Enlightenment was satanically informed. Well, in that case, good for Old Nick: the weight of evidence suggests a marked downturn in human violence from the Enlightenment onwards. Of course, that we should place any value in the words of a man who believes a supernatural being taints the affairs of humanity in defiance of the will of an omnipotent god is itself a good question. 

Whenever I read a Vox Day post I think of a fly trapped in an upturned cup, the cup being the self-oppressing nature of his own ridiculous and outdated worldview. The fly spins around and around at incredible speeds, often pulling some dazzling aeronautics, but never gaining enough momentum to smash its way out.

Or, to put it another way, he may call us to his potty to show us a turd that resembles Michelangelo's David, but it IS still a turd.


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I have regrets, serious doubts actually, about dragging his wife into it. She is, ultimately, a real life human being who never did me any wrong (That said, I hope against hope that she is a product of his mania; Vox Day refuses to believe in marital rape, and so one has to logically assume he has no moral qualms with sexual assault as long as the paperwork's kosher). 

Mostly, though, I shouldn't have brought her good looks--or otherwise, were that the case--into it. Two bickering heterosexual male bloggers always seem to end up doing that.  I could argue 'Well HE started it', but that's no reason to copy the dick is it? Besides, you're a blog reader, not me and Vox's dinnerlady. So apologies for that ugly bout of objectification. High time I got on board the good ship 21st century.

Vox Day would probably tell you that last paragraph is quintessential 'gamma man'. He always says that sort of thing after the fact, of course. I don't know why he doesn't just write out a comprehensive list of all Gamma man's attributes and thus save himself a lot of bother. 

This is how Vox Day dresses when he blogs. Note terrified eyes as he searches the horizon for N.K. Jemisin piloting a Blitzspear. (Sorry; one for the 2000 AD fans)

So, yes:  I doubt. And Vox Day never does. Neither do all his cronies who left steaming lumps of brainwrong in my comment lounge. White, male and well-off (Day's dad was a millionaire CEO; how else do you think Day can lounge about in Italy or fritter cash on a gaming mouse no one wants?) they are unaccustomed to it. They all found a slipshod and superficial philosophy that fits them comfortably and saw no reason to explore beyond it because that would require actual work. They don't even see any of that as a weakness.

Still, we can all take heart in this thought:  Once, centuries past, men like Vox Day and his followers ruled the world unquestioned. Nowadays they are reduced to barking--uselessly--at nobodies like me.