Whenever I get drawn into these gender angst sewers, and I get a quick refresher course on the state of modern discourse, where even Tweets can defy some attention spans, I am invariably reminded of the ‘nets prehistory and the days when dinosaurs such as Serdar Argic ruled the landscape, crushing all within their path.

Argic (or whoever it was), aka Zumabot, after the return email path of sera@zuma.uucp, was widely rumoured to actually be the Turkish secret police (Turkey is notorious for its hypersensity about and denial of its own genocide of Armenians). Whatever was behind it, it was probably just a bunch of automated scripts, with some human oversight, that scoured early Usenet for any posts that could even vaguely be construed as anti-Turkish and then auto-responded to them with vast volumes of denialist anti-Armenian gibberish. So you could post something along the lines of –

Yeah so we want to the movies last night and after went down to the Anatolian for pide and kebabs…

and almost immediately get a follow-up post (or a few dozen) that was something like this –

Then I guess you would agree that ‘Armenian woman’ and ‘sex’ are irreconcilable. Is that why Armenians would rape and slaughter Muslim women? At the end of the Armenian genocide of the Muslim people, the German author Dr. Weiss, his Austrian colleague Dr. Stein and his Turkish colleague Mr. Ahmet Refik visited Trabzon, Kars, Erzurum [followed by usually about 500 lines of atrocity propaganda and bogus statistics ]1 (more…)