Shank

Geddit? It sounds a bit rude, doesn't it?

As a vegetarian it's a little hard to think of anything meanigful to relate about shank. It makes me think more of:

The Shawshank Redemption
Longshanks, Strider's nickname in the Lord of the Rings.

Given Strider is already a nickname, the fact that he in turn had a nickname is silly. But you can't really say that it was Aragorn's nickname. Multiple identities can give you a massive headache.

Speaking of which, I was both entertained and appalled by the news that US agents are adopting multiple online personalities in order to promote American interests on facebook, Twitter and, for all I know, the Doctor Who Fan Forum. Not appalled because it's so wrong - it's especially revealing in moral terms that they aren't allowed to do this in English for fear of US lawsuits - but because I've done it myself.

Many years ago I was engaged in an online argument. I was losing. Not on rational grounds, I believed, but simply because there were more people with the opposite view on the site than agreed with me.

So I cheated. I created, basically, a sock puppet who sided with me. To make it more convincing, my sock puppet didn't entirely agree with me, but backed up the core arguments. At one point I was even arguing with myself. Eventually, with two people onside, the tide of debate turned. It became more acceptable for other voices to agree with me. I won.

This victory was so massively important to me that I cannot now remember what the fuck it was about.

So I can hardly blame the US military for stooping to this tactic when I once used it myself. In the end, the second online persona became so dominant over my original online identify that it took over completely and eventually got its own website. I scare myself sometimes.

S

PS: Apparently the sock puppets are specifically not targeting Facebook and twitter. Don't panic.