There's an important lesson to be learned from Internet trolls. What trolls do is they carefully, even smartly calculate a forum post or other communication that appears to be stupid or assaultive for the sole purpose of dragging less savvy users into behaving in an undignified manner among their peers. Interestingly, there is no inverse to trolling. Smart people are capable of acting stupid, but stupid people are functionally incapable of acting smart. When they try, they just end up looking both unintelligent and insecure. Youtube is full of these people and they occur in roughly equal numbers on both sides of any debate. For every colossal moron who tries, like a 2-year-old with Rubik's Cube, to use science to explain allegories in the Bible, there is at least one rambling atheist who never quite graduated beyond ad hominem arguments. All those people are fun on their own, but today I'm more concerned with a slightly rarer Youtube creature. My example is the reasonably popular vlogger The Amazing Atheist. He's a clearly intelligent guy who doesn't so much say stupid things as say intelligent things in a poorly-planned fashion. This is a problem on Youtube. I love that there are shreds of well-informed discourse among the idiotic majority, I just wish things were a bit cleaner.

In the above video, The Amazing Atheist spends twelve unnecessary minutes meandering through a few of the most cogent arguments against the ideals of pure free market capitalism. Were his rant transcribed and turned into an academic paper, it'd come out to a rough C not because he doesn't know what he's talking about but because he delivers it in a really messy, scatterbrained way. Now, I get that this video was kind of an on-the-fly production that has more to do with passion than strong rhetoric, but maybe it shouldn't have been. Perhaps the loose community of rational Youtubers ought to set a higher standard for themselves.

I just can't get over how people can record, edit, upload and advertise their videos without demonstrating that they understand they are producing deliberate, labor-intensive content. For all the time TAA spent thinking about, recording and prepping his video, why couldn't he spend another fifteen minutes penning a concise script so he could avoid creating a 12-minute behemoth of twitchy swaying and jumbled arguments?

But then I must return to my mantra, the phrase that has become an all-too-common utterance in my line of work: This is the Internet, so it must be. While watching "Free Market Capitalism FAILS" I found my eye wandering to TAA's wall collage and I couldn't quite figure out why. Now that I've had some time to process it, I realize that it demonstrates both my respect for The Amazing Atheist as well as why I have reservations about guys like him. The collage is a nonsensical collection of pop culture artifacts and secular saints, a way for TAA to identify with a demographic of well-read geeks. Nietzsche hovers over The Amazing Atheist alongside George Carlin, Marylin Manson and an unidentified Star Trek character, an iconic image from the work of Akira Kurosawa rests below a generic anime girl as if the height of Japanese cinema has a nerd-fodder tumor. The Amazing Atheist's wall is what the Internet really looks like. Scraps of high intellect intermingle with vapid entertainments while a man with unnecessary facial hair tries to balance his genuine intelligence with his desire to be liked.