ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three of the most prevalent of these pathologies: over-the-top parody, comparison to Nazism, and comment-thread trolling. It focuses on argument between persons in face-to-face settings. The Internet is a unique domain for argumentative interaction. In fact, there are a number of argumentative phenomena that are peculiar to the kind of communication made possible by the Internet. Given that online political communication is now pervasive, it is no surprise that there has emerged a rough-and-ready conceptual vocabulary for identifying and discussing various kinds of pathologies that are specific to online argumentation. Hal Colebatch seems to think that the opposition's counter-argument is entirely in the chanting. Or maybe in the claim that those invoking the Nazi comparison have thereby lost the argument. Trolling not only ruins the prospects for argument following a post, but it actually skews readers' perceptions of the content of the original posting.
