If ignorance and stupidity were capital crimes the hangman would never get a day off, and since I oppose the death penalty instituting it for these crimes may be a ever so slightly excessive, not quite what you would call commensurate response. Nevertheless they are terrible things and somebody has to say it.
- Misusing "The cake is a lie": just about every time somebody uses this meme they are applying it to … you know, cake. Which makes absolutely no sense at all if you know what it means. The phrase "the cake is a lie" has it's origins in background grafiti painted on the scenery of the game "Portal" – a message left for the protagonist regarding the evil GLADOS's promises of cake at the end of the "test". So in any sensible world this would be a meme about conspiracies, abuses of power, dishonest politicians or businessmen, corruption, deceipt, exploitation… in fact practically ANYTHING except for the one thing it's invariably used for: baked goods.
- Miley Cirus memes: on a roughly 5-year rotational cycle holywood finds a young girl, gets her to sing terrible songs and show a great deal of skin – then when she inevitably crashes and burns forgets about her: and everytime it happens we have the exact same debate. We have the sexist conservatives complaining that she's a bad influence, we have the liberals complaining that she's being exploited and we have the individuals trying to find a way to say that her behavior is empowering. It's a trend and debate as old as Madonna's career and it never changes. The only way it may ever change is if we stop playing the game – it's not even the sex that sells here – it's the controversy about the sex that sells… so stop the controversy, walk away – just shut the hell up. If the girl is truly empowered and doing it because she enjoys the attention then she'll keep doing it without you defending her, if she's a terrible influence on your children then the best way to reduce that influence is to ignore her and not keep drawing their attention to the fact that she shocked you. The only people who have anything to gain from the debate are the record companies – the one group whom neither side of the debate considers to be doing the right thing. They are doing what makes them money – and this world being what it is – the only way to end it is to stop letting them make money out of it. It's a curious game professor, the only way to win is not to play.
- Viral Advertising: you know something – I hate viral advertising. Not the ads themselves – the people who share them. Laugh at the ad if you think it's funny but stop being some rich corporation's free marketing agent. Especially if you then go and rant about some of the things those corporations do. Excercise your free will and don't just follow a trend because everybody else does it – especially when somebody else is hoping to get rich out of your lack of thinking for yourself. Don't be a pawn in somebody else's game. Of course I would never suggest that sharing it shouldn't be allowed – but I do hold on to the right to think it's stupid. I have seen too many facebook walls with, on the same day even, a post about the horrors of animal-testing and a shared ad for a company that tests on animals.
- Group-prejudice memes: man these annoy me. Racist jokes may be out of vogue but sexist jokes, nerd-jokes, gamer-jokes, people-from-some-country-jokes … the world of internet humor has now devolved into a state where prejudiced assumptions about people based on an arbitrary characteristic makes up practically all of it. This is beyond stupid: this is harmful, this is hurting people – and hurting people is not okay.
- Rants about the stupidities of internet memes: rants like this blog post you are reading right now, they are futile, they are ultimately meaningless and to put the icing on a terrible christmas fruit cake they tend to devolve into what may just be the lowest form of humor ever invented: self-refferentialism.