Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.

This is a long article but it’s really good, it’s worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there’s room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.

And that’s Monk.

Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like “we have X amount of members in Maine”.

Please.

Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.

Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they’ve accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn’t their goal.

Even now there’s an undercurrent of “I don’t think I even disagree with them”. Well, how could you? They haven’t said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.

It’s a sophisticated form of trolling and it’s recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.

You don’t need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they’re around, everyone is angry. When they aren’t, people get along better.

Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn’t, because they will attempt to say what’s on their mind. It might be the worst take you’ve ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.