It's not my intellectual superiority so much as it is the complete lack of understanding of what Anonymous is or the complete lack of thought behind the OP's sentiments.mirror said:Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on your obvious intellectual superiority. Brevity is the soul of wit, but I prefer inflammatory assertions to have actual reasoning behind them.Jaime_Wolf said:Yet another topic from someone who doesn't understand what Anonymous is or what it does.
I suppose I can write out a more full response so I can save it and paste it in when another one of these topics gets made two weeks from now.
You can't disband an organisation that doesn't exist. The whole point of Anonymous is that treating it as a group is part of the joke. The only way in which it's a group is that it involves more than one person and they go under the same name. There is no charter they agree to, there is no system of beliefs they uniformly adhere to. There are general trends, but that's more to do with the demographics of the sort of people who'd be interested in this stuff than it is with a concerted effort to band together in the name of some set of ideals.
It's not that anyone can claim to be part of Anonymous or that they "might as well" be part of Anonymous, it's that anyone can be part of Anonymous. That's the entire point. You don't sign up for it. You don't have to know other members. If you go off and do something and claim credit for Anonymous, it isn't that you're misrepresenting Anonymous, that's exactly what Anonymous is. It is definitionally impossible to misrepresent Anonymous.
Trying to answer "who Anonymous is" is a futile endeavour - that's the entire point of the joke. It isn't an entity. It doesn't have real membership in the conventional sense. As for it being hard to trust claims made "by Anonymous", that's the entire point. Anyone can speak for Anonymous, which means that no one actually speaks for Anonymous. If you think it's hard to trust people representing Anonymous, you're right. In fact, you shouldn't trust them at all because there is no actual organisation to represent, just a bunch of individuals going under the same name. Again, it's definitionally impossible to actually speak for the group.
There are no "pretenders" or "rebels" falsely acting in the name of Anonymous because acting in the name of Anonymous makes you part of Anonymous. It is not possible to claim to be part of Anonymous and not actually be a part of it since the only prerequisite for membership is to claim membership.
The sentiment that you can somehow cause the concept to stop existing is ridiculous. There is no part of the concept that requires them to keep their name out of the mud or to hold to any sort of organisation. It might be sensible to suggest that if we just ignored everything they did, they'd eventually get tired of it and stop, but suggesting that by no longer recognising them as a group they magically stop being one makes no sense. Not only does that make no sense for the vast majority of social groups in general, but it also makes especially little sense when there isn't an actual organisation in the first place. Even if everyone got tired and moved on, all it would really take for Anonymous to continue to exist is one person claiming to be part of it.