This reminds me of a news item I saw in 2003 in which a few rich Dubya fans poured out some of their expensive bottles of French wine in order to “protest” France’s refusal to join us in the inevitable boondoggle of Gulf War II.

Again this insistence that I somehow invented a term that everybody else has been using for years. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, but if you want me to go on arguing, you’ll have to pay for another five minutes.

Except ... I’m really not the one who made it up. There’s a whole Wikipedia page for it and everything! I dunno what to tell ya ...

I don’t want to fight about it, but I never saw the term itself as particularly controversial. There are a number of prominent atheist figures all in the public eye now, and so they are getting lumped together under what seems like a fairly neutral umbrella term. At least some of the debate about whether there is…

The story came out after the Trump “grab em by the p***y” controversy, and the accuser claims that Faraci stuck his hand down her pants, penetrated her with his fingers, and then bragged about it to mutual acquaintances. So the accusation is a lot more serious than just a clumsy come-on. He decided not to deny the…

Sure, if you want to. It’s not quite as polished as it might have been, but people seem to like it anyway. I’m not on FB so I won’t see any feedback, which is probably for the best anyway - “Hell hath no fury like a superfan scorned”.

There’s an entire page on TV Tropes called Do Not Do This Cool Thing full of other examples of this phenomenon.

“Morty ... Morty ... we gotta go back into space ... *URRRP* ... more adventures Morty ... Mulan Szechuan dipping sauce ...”

I’m really not that familiar with Roiland. I’m only familiar with Harmon from watching Community and R&M, as I have never listened to the Harmontown podcast.

Yep. “Caring isn’t cool”.

With regard to your first point, I mostly meant that some people reach the Holden Caulfield “everybody (else) is a phony” stage and then just stop. Of course further analysis should show that life and society are much more nuanced than that, and the only way to really become “pure” and untainted by hypocrisy would be…

Yeah, obviously I’m painting with a broad brush.

Yeah, when it comes to philosophy I’m not even a filthy casual myself. I was really thinking of pretentious poseurs who want credit for having read Nietzsche, even though they don’t understand him and think he’s some kind of Social Darwinist or “do what thou will” Anton La Vey type. Think of Otto from A Fish Called…

if you’ve got that all figured out you should really write it up and sell it then

Yep. Never underestimate the fanboi tendency to totally misunderstand their “most favorite thing evar”. My favorite example: anti-PC “freeze peach” crusaders who fail to notice that Blazing Saddles is obviously and emphatically against bigotry of all kinds.

It is indeed the same type of madness. Sports teams, tech brands, anime, comics, political parties and so much more all now attract the same type of rabid fanboi fervor.

And that minority is probably busy lining up interviews on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, not lining up for panel discussions at Comic Con.

Definitely. That seems like the newest, mostly Internet-driven iteration of the phenomenon. I thought about mentioning “the new atheism”, but it doesn’t seem to be driven so exclusively by one particular book, movie, or TV show, and my comment was pretty long already.

See also: South Park, The Matrix, Fight Club, and more examples too numerous to mention.

I think there is a certain personality type of fairly intelligent and perceptive person who goes through a phase in their life lasting maybe a decade, from about age 15 to age 25 or so, in which they realize that many people and many institutions of society are hypocritical and corrupt. But instead of continuing a…