The Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse

Hey all- Jack Wylder here. With Larry hard at work relocating into the new Stronghold of Yard Moose Mountain, he hasn’t had time to blog much lately so I wanted to take this opportunity to share a post of his from the Book of Faces. Enjoy!


It is time once again to explain my Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse.

-X happens.
-Three guys named Cooter get very upset about X and post about it on Twitter. (1 is actually a person, and 2 of them are probably troll accounts)
-30 people actually see the Cooter’s outrage first hand, and write tweets condemning the Cooters for being offended about X.
-300 people immediately share these condemnation posts to signal their virtue.
-3.000 click bait news articles are written about this terrible scourge of hatemongery that is sweeping the internet.
-30,000 trolls (like Cooter69, CooterPowerForever, and DarkCooterAngel) pretend to also really hate X, because it gets a rise out of people.
-300,000 memes are created mocking both sides for being butthurt snowflakes.
– 3,000,000 people claim victim status because they have been so irreparably psychologically damaged by the legions of Cooter. A special federal task force is formed to combat Cooter related hate crimes and the UN General Assembly issues a proclamation blaming it all on Israel.
-30,000,000 Americans who actually have an opinion about X are all like lol wut?

X may be things like “Black Storm Trooper” or “Starbucks Holiday” cups. (we’ve had a new one about every other week for the last four years) but whatever it is, Cooter got very upset, and though he grew up eating lead paint chips, his angry tweet represents you and the half of the country that nominally agrees with you about topic X. His incoherent outrage has been assigned to you, and the half of the country that disagrees with you is going to be sure to post about how you’re all really stupid, so that all their friends will know how virtuous they are.

This week it is because Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez or whatever her name is–I don’t care enough to go look up how its spelled–had a video of her dancing while she was in college posted to the internet.

She put up a tweet about how conservatives are outraged and offended by her dancing (I saw it because the cool Navy SEAL congressman with the eye patch laughed at it). When I went onto Facebook I saw lots and lots of memes about how conservatives are all the dad from Footloose, and want to ban sinful dancing because its from the devil, and we want women to wear burkas.

(seriously, life is way nicer now that I’m trying to limit myself to 30 minutes a day in this cesspool).

Except as I scroll through my feed, which has lots of knuckle dragging, right wingers, clinging to their guns and bibles, the most damning things I could find were people saying stuff like “She’s pretty cute for a deranged socialist” and jokes about the hot/crazy matrix. Most sane and regular people don’t give a shit how she dances, they just don’t want to pay 70% of their income in federal taxes.

And of the many many many threads about this latest super controversial subject, I saw ONE reliable person saying that they witnessed firsthand an actual cranky Cooter (who is a real person and not a troll) outraging about her dancing, and it was on some small town board nobody outside of Somnambulist County Iowa has ever heard of.

We live in a country with a third of a billion people in it. This shit is tiresome and people are gullible. Next week will be some other hot button topic that three Cooters (who magically represent half of the country) get upset about.

Just say no to three guys named Cooter.

EDIT: – this is Larry again. Jack found this post that I wrote a year ago. But if you check current events it is still going on. I think right now the Three Cooters who magically represent half of America are very upset about black mermaids or something. It’ll be something new next week.

Dragon Award Nominations Close Tomorrow.
Tom Stranger audiobook, narrated by Adam Baldwin, FREE on Audible right now

41 thoughts on “The Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse”

  1. Yeah this is painfully painfully true. I only ever usually see the asinine counter-outrage posts. Justifying positions that no one even has. SIGH.

    We don’t have to know about things to have strident opinions on them in the Internet age. Wisdom at its finest.

  2. Hi, Cooter here. I might be upset about the blackwashing of yet another classic tale, if I bothered to give a crap about Whorrywood. They are no longer relevant to any sane individual.

  3. Dancing seriously? that’s what us damned infernal Republicans are supposedly pissed off about now?
    It’s almost impossible to have a civil discussion online with anyone you disagree with. It’s like attacking an idea becomes attacking the person and to me it is one of the most frustrating things ever.

  4. Concur with staying off FB, twitwhatever, and idiotgram, unless you need a laugh. The stoopid is strong out there, and self-sustaining for maybe 24 hours before the next s**tstorm hits… I have better things to do with my time.

  5. But now it appears you don’t even have that one Cooter. The maker of X creates a Cooter to start the ball of troll rolling.

  6. I saw a tweet telling me that Three Cooters Theory is an outrage, so I am here to tell you what a horrible person you are because it’s the current year and do better and my feelings.

  7. When I complain about things like an entire cast being gender-flipped or a character from a Danish story being recast as Afro-American, it’s not because I hate women or Afro-Americans. It’s because I expect from experience that it’ll be preachy, unfun, and very possibly smug.

    1. I think genderswapping characters in a story (or whole casts) has the potential to be a lot of fun and really interesting. I might try doing it myself sometime. However, lately, you’re right that it does seem to be done for the purpose of preaching/finger-wagging instead of for fun or just doing something different and interesting with the story. As a storyteller and story-lover, this fact kinda makes me angry.

  8. I have trouble reading this without laughing until I cry. Growing up in the South, cooter has a very different meaning.

    That’s why the character on Dukes of Hazard always got a laugh no matter what he said.

    BWAH HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!

      1. This is going to be one of those times when I realize that there is an entire slang that I had no idea even existed, isn’t it? (one extremely brief google search later) No, I pretty much already knew that part.

        I was afraid this was going to be a repeat of that stupid “Dicks out for Harambe” crap that was rattling around the internet a few years back. I had no idea that “dick” was inner-city-ish slang for a sidearm. I heard that and contemplated the irony of who was compensating for what for a full hour with that one.

  9. The funniest bit is that not 48 hours later ScarJo makes comments about how not being able to play X(in her case, a trans character) because she’s not X is bullshit, and somehow the same people up in arms about the supposed army of Cooters angry about a black Ariel are lambasting the hell out of her on Twitter. Their inability to keep from being complete hypocrites would be sad if it weren’t so god damned funny.

    1. Ravenshrike:

      The trans activists forced Johannson to not play the character in the proposed movie not because she isn’t trans but because they didn’t want the movie to be made at all (without her star power it’s doubtful it would get the necessary financial backing otherwise). Dante Tex Gill was a criminal (who crossdressed partly as a disguise), and we can’t have a trans bad guy! It would be bad for the cause!

  10. Welcome to the new normal.

    The US population is over 300 million. No matter what the subject is, there will be someone, usually multiple people, who get all butt-hurt. Really, it doesn’t take anywhere near 300 million for this to happen, so this has been true for a very long time. The big difference now is we have the Internet, so anyone can have a soap-box to air their butt-hurt. Not only just to their friends and family, but to the entire world.

    This is convenient for those like AOC. All she has to do is post something and declare that someone somewhere is mad about it, and sure enough the cooters start coming out of the woodwork.

    I grew up in a religion that forbade dancing (apparently dancing is dangerous because it might lead to drunken naked orgies… or something). However, I don’t know a single person who gave two-hoots about AOC’s dancing video.

  11. We could point out at least some people are miffed because Disney botched Hans Christian Anderson’s story during their first pass on it and recent years have given no confidence that they’ll not botch it again. (See ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, a beloved story so nice that they botched it twice…though the second time they had Brie Larson to scream “-ism!” against anyone who pointed out the second one just wasn’t good.)

  12. This kind of thing is why A) I’m glad I deleted my twitter account a couple years ago, and B) I’ve taken to avoiding using political labels for myself and am now registered to vote with no political party.

    I went to a high school that didn’t have dances because “dancing leads to sex”. Pretty much everyone, including the teachers, treated that like a joke. I mean, we never got proms, so *someone* took it seriously, but most of us knew it was stupid.

  13. I’ve never been on Twitter at all, and have never regretted that decision for a second. (Full disclosure: This is as much due to knowing I probably couldn’t master the mechanics of using it as to any supposed virtue. It took me months to be comfortable posting combox comments and years before I figured out the use of HTML tags.)

    Ultimately, the public will develop adaptation mutes and filters to Twitter outrage. I just wish it would happen faster.

  14. This reminds me of the Nazi Star Wars boycott. I googled it and could not figure out who even posted it. All I found were all the people outraged. So all these imbred nazi assholes had to do was make 1 post somewhere and they get tons of publicity. They get to sit around in a trailer park smoking meth and laughing at this. If they do this again and viewership drops for the 3rd star wars movie (because the second one sucked), the press will blame ‘racists’ for not going to see Star Wars. Cause we all hate Lando Calrissian…. Seeing Lando back is probably the only reason to go see this Star Wars movie.

    Or that nazi protest recently where 10 nazis showed up with 1000s of counter protesters. The idiot media were actually sticking microphones in these nazi assholes faces and putting them on TV. Why give them the free medium? There were like 10 of them of them. They had to save up for 2 years working at the hotdog stand job to afford to do this. The left wing media actually gave the nazi idiots a voice. Why????

  15. I don’t believe in that many Cooter’s, i believe a lot of it, like the AOC dancing thing, is manufactured faux outrage to make conservatives look crazy. The video was “leaked” by a twitter account that had just been created and had no followers at the time but within a couple of hours the news media was all over it? Right. That was planned. Though I suppose there’s someone who gets offended by EVERYTHING.
    PS. I agree she did look pretty hot for a crazy socialist dingbat.

    1. I don’t know about being planned, but at the time I said it was a case of the news making their own news and I stand by that.

      Back in January, I wrote on another site: ” I think it was twitter being twitter? Because all I see is a bunch of news organizations complaining about it circulating. Would it have gone anywhere if they left it in the twitter silo? Dunno.

      edit
      Like, the biggest of the re-uploads has 50k views after a month, which is nothing in youtube land.”

      And then I did a follow up post:
      “This is one of those news media made their own story by amplifying what was a pretty minor affair. In between the posting my quoted post and the edit of said quoted post, I also checked Social Blade, which registered 260,000 views? on the original four minute video in January with nothing before (it wasn’t tracking before that). But because a bunch of news articles had been released already, it’s hard to say how much of those were from the right wing haters and how many were coming in from the critical articles.

      I come back today and it’s reached 2.6 million views. And each news organization is putting out their own take garnering 50-100K views (unless they just put them up). By commenting on a ‘viral’ video… they managed to make the video actually viral. It wasn’t really news until they made it news… now it’s news. Congratulations, I guess. ”

      Still true.

  16. I’m as hard core conservative as you’re likely to find. When I saw the AOC dancing vid, all I thought was: ‘nice tits.’
    Then I went back to throwing darts at a picture of Ilhan Omar that I drew horns and a forked tail on.

  17. It’s sort of like all the Lefties going on as if they are talking directly to Mike Pence and how he hates this and that and whatnot. Yeah, they’re really showing Mike what’s up, I tell ya.

    Social media was a good idea, in theory, but it’s been dead for awhile and could use a burial.

  18. The simple explanation for the current focus on Cooterisms is that it diverts attention from the more objective traits of the people or fictional works in question. For AOC, it’s the fact that her actual policies and propositions have demonstrated both incompetence and obnoxious immaturity in the face of the real-life workings of the political world. Moreover, the focus on her in particular – an otherwise no-name candidate with zero experience or real clout – draws attention away from the dumpster fire that is the overall lineup of the Democrat party, with no strong candidates or attractive economic policies.

    And for fiction, it’s basically a shield against actual criticism, where any unfavorable opinion can be dismissed as racist, sexist and whatnot. Both praising and criticizing Disney for their wokeness is all well and good… as opposed to noticing that the company is in yet another creative meltdown, relying on live-action remakes and assimilating other franchises like the Borg, just to stay relevant. Cinema attendance as a whole has been steadily declining for decades to begin with, so now, even going to a movie gets treated like a political statement rather than a recreational activity, in attempt to attract the virtue-signalling brigades. Actual entertainment? Who needs it…

  19. Honestly, when it comes to Ocrazyo, there’s other things to be really outraged about. Like her continued attempts to deprive America of border laws, for example, and her blatant anti-Americanism. Her fakery that the media upholds as the most awesome virtue signalling ever, I hope she continues, as she is one of those things that will drive people to vote Trump 2020.

    Her dancing never even floated into my radar.

    1. Pretty much. I guess it’s even useful in a way, since she’s begun saying things that are not only monumentally stupid, but even dangerous if they get picked up by someone less scrupulous.

      For instance, recently she started referring to illegals as “legal asylees”. I’m guessing someone failed to tell her that, when thousands if not even millions of people are seeking asylum from their home nation, that’s grounds to regard said nation as a failed state – an ample excuse for any number of repercussions, should anyone try and twist it that way. So yeah, focusing on her dance routine might really be the lesser evil here.

      1. Ah, but they CAN’T call Venezuela, and other similar nations failed states, because these idiots are all espousing Socialism as (again, somehow, automagically) the Final Solution to ALL THE WORLD’S ILLS (and really, they push for hardline Communism, while crying it’s never ‘really been tried’). There’s been a rather large rise of tankies showing up and being very public in their hatred of free markets, and well, freedom that’s not controlled by them. There was one recently cheering on and making fun of the deaths of the Kyoto Animation staff, and when called out on it, tried to backtrack and say it was a joke.

        They’re filth.

        1. You are so right. Communism has enjoyed a hundred years of uninterrupted failure, yet the leftists still Believe. “Oh, no, we don’t mean that kind of communism! Just put us in charge and we’ll do it right!” Just like every single communist group has claimed before its descent into oppression, poverty and brutality.

          I have enjoyed many of the works produced by Kyoto Animation, such as A Silent Voice, Full Metal Panic!, Amagi Brilliant Park, Beyond The Boundary, The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzimiya, and Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions. I would hope the people could be remembered for their accomplishments, rather than for this atrocity.

          I had hoped nobody would try to use this tragedy to make political statements, but I suppose it was as inevitable as the flocks of leftist vultures that exploit every shooting to tear down the Second Amendment. Every time something horrible happens, ‘activists’ try to claim it as proof that our entire civilization is all wrong, and we need them to ‘fix’ it.

          The fugghead that murdered those 34 innocent people deserves to die.

          1. After learning that the name was available, my next thought was to look up voter registration. I don’t know if Japanese registration records party affiliation, how to get those records if they are available, or Japan’s politics past LDP without Wikipedia.

            I also checked what KyoAni has made in case some were properties I felt like trolling over.

            All I can conclude is that I am a horrible person.

  20. Larry is perhaps insufficiently cynical. Allow me humbly to suggest there is no Cooter, and never was.

    Cooter is as unreal as the MAGA-country-loving attackers of Jussie Smollet, and created out of make-believe moon-twinkles for the same reason: the demand for oppression and bigotry has outrun the supply, so more must be manufactured cheaply and quickly.

    1. Mr. Wright:

      Asimov said it best: ‘A fire-eater must eat fire, even if he must kindle it himself’.

      So much of the continual outrage churn is planned, even if it doesn’t always turn out like they planned. And the big overall plan is to get everybody but the true believers so weary that they switch off and not vote. Which will mean they win, for the last time.

    2. I don’t know about that. In a country with a third of a billion people you can find some small population who believes in quite literally any crazy thing.

      1. But the fact pattern around Cortez, possibly also the other three, pretty clearly suggests systemic astroturf false flagging rather than any natural process involving actual Cooters.

        ATM, the Omar bigamy thing looks plausible to me, but I haven’t investigated, and may be quite gullible. Aside from seemingly credible charges against the four future Presidents, everything else around them looks like fecklessness and premeditated messaging.

        We could probably find someone to do some fake autistic screeching about how Misha Burnett proves the Misha -American community, and thus Ori is racist against immigrants. MHN, MGC, ATH, etc. have had some astounding trolls over the years. However, given the obvious degree of dishonesty and outside motivations in trolls seen locally, the scenario of a naturally occurring Cooter keying onto that argument is extremely implausible.

  21. Starlord who listens to the cool music mixtape wore a Gadsen Flag T-Shirt, so Cooter cubed is outraged he’s a white sheet wearin’, hang dem blackies racist.

    1. According to some reports, the T-shirt was promoting a charity that helps injured war veterans. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, it makes the YAHOO smear piece even worse than it was before.

  22. Yes, except Cooter is actually called “Misha” or “Chang”, and his job description is “foment hatred among our hated rivals whose evil policies prevent us from taking our rightful place and ruling the lesser nations around us”.

  23. While I agree overall I think this breaks down at the 30,000 trolls part. When ever these things pop up all the articles being written or people referencing it, it always seems to fall back to the exact same three tweets as proof. If there were so many trolls out there about these things, why aren’t there ever more examples of “all the out rage” ever shown (it’s not like the people that love to paint their opponents as sexists, racists, homophobic, etc… have any issue pretending obvious trolls are legitimate) I honestly think it goes straight from the 3000 click bait articles, to the 3,000,000+ treating it as truth and passing it around and 30,000,000+ listening to it and willing to accept it as true since it makes them feel better. Of course 30,000,000+ on the other side are going WTF are you talking about

  24. Thirty minutes a day is ok. Zero is probably better. I guess its part o your job though. My sympathy.

Leave a Reply to Brenden Shouse Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *