I missed the arrival of derp-iness. Clearly one of the losses from having given away the TV years ago. I love South Park, where it arose, but not enough to actually have a TV in the house. So I hadn’t heard the term derp until a few weeks ago when Samantha used it while on the phone. Since then, I’ve heard it non-stop, everywhere and all the time!
Here’s a definition I found by googling: One who, in an argument, takes a position, and when that position is destroyed by evidence and well-reasoned argument, acts as if the reasoned argument never happened, instead sticking to his original position while resorting to logical fallacies such as bad math, unwarranted assumptions, appeals to emotion, wishful thinking, false and deliberately misleading data and analysis, or ad-hominem attacks on his opponents. One who argues in bad faith.
Most derps I know are not evil. They have just shut their brains down, and if the info doesn’t match what they ‘know’, then it’s obviously not true. Some, of course, are evil. All of them are tedious.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist who writes for the New York Times, with several categories of derpitude. And since he is an excellent writer, he’s had a lot of fun with it.
Problem is, of course, that right now derps are doing a lot of damage to our economy, unemployed folks and our country’s physical infrastructure, by insisting that the deficit is the problem – and we must starve the poor, deny health care to children, and pay no attention to those millions of unemployed. The sequester is a good thing in Derpland. Since a few of them have noticed the deficit going down, now they want us to be frightened of inflation, of which there is almost no sign. And the main sign is the Fed’s talk of tapering – which came about to solve the derp problem of fear of interest rates rising, and which caused interest rates to rise.
All of which pretty much cancels out the humor of derpiness.