I knew when our greatest living president took the ALS ice bucket challenge some know-nothing-know-it-all would be like "zomg, waterboarding!" And, indeed, many KNKIAs were all "zomg, waterboarding!" But the stupidest "zomg, waterboarding" tweet has to be this one, from a George R. R. Martin fan fiction* writer by the name of Saladin Ahmed:
How irony dies: Bush, who tortured hundreds of innocents with waterboarding, takes the ice bucket challenge. ht @AOL pic.twitter.com/b8E4cXkb9I
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) August 21, 2014
Let's count the dumb, shall we?
- He misuses the word "irony."**
- "Hundreds" is actually "three."
- "Innocents" is actually "three senior al Qaeda terrorists who committed crimes against humanity and held crucial intel."
Not bad for a sub-140 character missive!
Of course, little things like "accuracy" and "facts" don't really matter to the KNKIAs such as Mr. Ahmed. Because Twitter, for them, isn't about disseminating news or improving the world's wealth of knowledge. No. It's about signaling how super serial they are. It's about demonstrating to their readers that they are good people who believe the right things. It's about saying "The Other is bad but I am good and therefore we should be friends."
Twitter, as we know, is for moral positioning. And no one is positioning harder than Mr. Ahmed this fine August morning.
*To be fair, I don't think he's technically a GRRM fanfic writer. He just writes books that look like cheap GRRM knockoffs, judging by their covers.
**Also: The word "torture."