18 lines
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Plaintext
18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
kook
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Term used to describe a regular poster who continually posts messages with
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no apparent grounding in reality. Different from a troll , which implies a
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sort of sly wink on the part of a poster who knows better, kooks really
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believe what they write, to the extent that they believe anything. The kook
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trademark is paranoia and grandiosity. Kooks will often build up elaborate
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imaginary support structures, fake corporations and the like, and continue
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to act as if those things are real even after their falsity has been
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documented in public. While they may appear harmless, and are usually
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filtered out by the other regular participants in a newsgroup of mailing
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list, they can still cause problems because the necessity for these measures
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is not immediately apparent to newcomers; there are several instances on
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record, for example, of journalists writing stories with quotes from kooks
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who caught them unaware. An entertaining web page chronicling the activities
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of many notable kooks can be found at http://www.crank.net/usenet.html.
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