a good example

So it seems that last night there was a really good example of how difficult it would be to live by Aaron Bady's principle that we can never be sure what constitutes parody. There was a big Twitter fight between Charles Davis and Paul Carr of NSFWCorp and Mark Ames of Exiled Online, which dragged in a lot of other people and publications, including The New Inquiry and The War Nerd. I really can't piece together what the fight was about initially, and just thinking about assembling all the tweets into a Storify gives me a headache. If you look around the timelines of the various people in the fight, you should get an idea of how it went down.

It's interesting to me because it seems to present a perfect case for Bady's point of view on satire. It seems that The War Nerd tweeted out Davis's satirical piece on drones from TNI, mistaking it for sincere, and later deleted those tweets, presumably when he realized the piece was meant to express the direct opposite of what it stated. What's interesting in particular is that Bady writes for TNI, which Ames and Carr and TWN mocked. If I'm reading Bady correctly, doesn't he have to side with TWN for his (erroneous, in my view) straightforward reading of Davis's piece? Despite all the fun that was had at The War Nerd's expense, if we take Bady's position, we can't privilege Davis's take on the nature of that piece over TWN's original take, or that of anybody else. There is no such thing as clear satire, which has a definition that must always remain in play, in this reading. What's more, we have to identify (and condemn) the rhetorical violence committed by Davis in that piece against Muslims and drone opponents, because we cannot assume that this violence was intended as a joke, in Bady's view.

Now, for myself, I'm quite comfortable saying that Davis's piece was purely satirical, that it expressed the opposite of its surface intent, and that this was clear to everyone who made light of The War Nerd's misreading. Why? Because I follow Davis's work, and because I read everything published in The New Inquiry, and reading the piece sincerely simply cuts too hard against my knowledge of his beliefs and the ethos of that publication. (For the record, I also like The War Nerd's columns and NSFWCorp's journalism.) I utilize adult judgement. I am not invoking certainty, and yet I feel quite confident. Human beings derive conclusions without certainty but with considerable confidence all the time. I'm fairly certain that Bady does, too. Either way: I can't see how he can do anything but defend The War Nerd's original reading. I'll let you know when he publishes something to that effect.

Bady's Twitter is here, by the way. He's calling in the troops. (Lot's of rustled jimmies, out there; I have that effect on people.) What else is politics for, but to get connected people to rally to your side?

Update:  Incidentally, I point this out because, as you'll see, Bady in fact participated in the argument I'm referring to.

Meanwhile, lolololol:

There seriously are not enough lulz.

People ask me why I persist in talking about how social commitments distort our political media, and thus our politics, and I always say: because they keep proving the point. For myself, I have no prominent, established political allies to which I can turn to take part in a little hate-off. It's all me.