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An opinion piece on a controversial subject.

iainmentiainment
in Fun, Jokes & Captions
http://junkee.com/an-opinion-piece-on-a-controversial-topic/23161

:-)

No doubt you will have noticed that Issue has been in the news lately, due to the scandalous behaviour of Public Figure, and the controversial comments of Publicity-Hungry Commentator. The editor of this site and I were discussing the Issue just the other day, and we agreed that making a glib reference to that discussion at the start of this piece would add a sense of authority to my authorial voice, as well as suggesting that the site upon which this piece is being published shares my opinionated stance on this Issue.

I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said “oversimplification that makes me feel smart”. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part, due to the Issue’s sudden prominence in the news cycle. I haven’t exaggerated my position in the interests of raising my public profile, and here I am casually dropping in a reference to a long-ago instance that proves I have cared about the Issue for longer than you.

The Establishment Of Authority

I am an important person. You know this because I subtly mentioned, during the casual reference to a long-ago instance, that I was chair of an obscure sub-committee of some sort. You haven’t heard of the sub-committee in question, but I’m going to mention an esteemed public figure here in such a way as to imply that they too were involved with said sub-committee, though in fact they were not.

In case you think that I have taken a knee-jerk stance without giving the Issue due consideration, I used The Google to do some research while I was writing this Opinion Piece. I’m sure you’ll agree that a single reference to the findings of Ideologically-Driven, Ethically-Dubious Lobby Group With Questionable Funding Practices is very interesting, and adds a veneer of rigour to this whole piece. Furthermore, when you take those findings and draw wild conclusions, you will understand why I’m shoehorning in a reference to a bitter media spat from quite a while ago that I’m quite clearly still upset about.

I also have a deeply personal and sad experience, which I will bring up here to invalidate your objections — even though it doesn’t inform my argument or actually have anything much to do with the Issue at all. This deeply personal and sad experience of mine means that you are a horrible person if you raise any objections. If you too have a deeply personal and sad experience pertaining to the Issue, I will adopt a tone of sympathy. If you disagree with me, I will affect sympathy while implying that you are feeble-minded for allowing your feelings to cloud your judgement.

I have now established my authority.

Surprising Digression

I didn’t really plan this piece out in advance, so this is a rather large digression into another area of discussion altogether that I seem to have conflated with Issue. Am I so obsessed with this unrelated issue that I see it everywhere? Am I struggling to reach the word limit? Are these rhetorical questions actually an effective means of furthering my argument? Or is it obvious that I am using rhetorical questions to introduce points that I know are weak, playing the plausible-deniability card of ‘just putting it out there’?

Perhaps I really believe that these two issues are related. Due to my opaque reasoning, it’s quite hard to tell.

Pre-emptive Attack On Anyone Who Might Disagree With Me

If you disagree with me on the relationship between this issue and the one at hand, here’s a false equivalence comparing the Issue to slavery, or Nazism, or some other horrific historical example that is tremendously irresponsible of me to bring up in a poorly-researched opinion piece. Since your head is spinning at the flights of logic I’ve been taking, here’s an extended simile that will drive my point home like a flock of seagulls devouring the remnants of a box of fish ‘n’ chips, left on the beach by a careless citizen: I am the flock of seagulls; this publication is the sky; the Issue is the newspaper on which the fish ‘n’ chips are spread; Australia is the sand; Alan Jones is the battered flake; and you are the chips.

People that disagree with me on this Issue have said “selective quotation” and “quote taken out of context”. Though it’s tempting, I won’t take the moral high ground by pretending not to make sordid implications about the personal lives of these people while doing just that. Instead, I will construct a straw-man, and assume that the handful of people that I have misquoted above speak for everybody that disagrees with me on the Issue, even those with moderate views who hold valid concerns about my unhinged-and-seemingly-rooted-in-personal-interest zealotry regarding the Issue.

You might have noticed that I have spent more time attacking the hypothetical positions of my opponents than actually clarifying my own position on this Issue. I will grant you that tiny concession, hypothetical-reader-with-whom-I’m-carrying-on-a-conversation, but you have failed to take into account that, prior to submitting this article, I also found some statistics. It’s basically checkmate.

You must be feeling pretty silly for disagreeing with me.

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Author byline with impressive achievements, a plug for a recent publication, and a lot of loaded buzzwords.

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