When Trolls Get Trolled

Poe's Law: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

Pouring over the graphic videos coming out of Japan over the last several days, showing the devastation and sheer human toll the Japanese are still enduring, I also was drawn to the usual places to gauge reactions from others.

There were the expected "it's a message from god" jabs from the likes of Glenn Beck. Gilbert Gottfried got fired from his gig as the voice of the duck in the AFLAC commercials.  And then I found this young lady:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUbY_M3HURQ

For those who didn't click the video, it stars a girl named Pamela who goes into a monologue extolling how her god answered prayers during the Lent season to open the eyes of atheists by striking at Japan, a country with a large non-Christian population.  It's part of a series of videos she had on her YouTube channel, which is now closed.  The other videos were similar monologues of her expounding on various topics in the news or in her alleged personal life, and from the viewpoint of someone clearly a fundamentalist, extremist Christian.

The folks over at 4chan fell for it, as did a lot of other people.  They didn't spot the obvious patterns of her subject matter or her mannerisms which gave away her schtick.  She was trolling the religionists and, as it happened, the atheists too.  Richard Dawkins even featured the video on his website, though without comment.  It made the rounds of Facebook and other social media and obviously on the boards at 4chan.  The result?  The children inhabiting those forums poked into her personal life, revealed her personal information, and then proceeded to harass her by having pizzas delivered to her house.
They couldn't have been more Bart Simpson-childish if they had simply lit a bag of dog poop on fire on her steps and ran away after ringing the bell.
And all because they couldn't spot what amounts to one of their own giving them a lesson in just how indistinguishable parody can be from the thing being parodied if it's extreme enough.

Wherever and whoever Pamela is, I hope she finds another outlet for what is a clearly brilliant mind for satire.  The following is a letter I sent her on YouTube just before she closed her account:

Oscar worthy performances

I have now perused through several of your videos and I think I have a pretty good bead on precisely what you are doing.

To that, I say BRAVO.

Yours is quite possibly the best example of Poe's Law I have ever encountered. I realize you can't (and probably shouldn't) respond to me, given that it might blow your cover. But I felt compelled to write after watching what I consider a parody of even myself (from many years ago).

I grew up a fundamentalist Christian. My summer bible camps? Yeah, we all sounded just like you do in your videos, even without hitting all the political talking point. In retrospect, it was quite strange that we were otherwise bright and growing young people so willingly turning our brains off.

I got over that and found myself "coming out" as an atheist some years later in my late teens. I have never looked back, though I often find myself turning around to combat the rather insidious spread of fundamentalist thinking wherever I find it.

To close, I wish to once again tell you I found your performances Academy Award winning and if you are not an aspiring actress, I certainly hope you are writing all of this down. It's gold!

 Pamela signed off her account with this, rather sad video, coming clean about her previous trolling and basically begging off from the infantile reaction by 4chan and its adherents:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBZMCtIXjIA