Why you shouldn't feed the trolls.

Back here, we have the most exciting SWC-related brouhaha going, in which increasingly-annoying commenter Olaf seems to think everyone else is obligated to do his work for him. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Olaf's argument is this single line of his:

Since the funding cuts for the SWC program have been announced, it would therefore, logically, be upto you (or others who oppose the spending cuts, which you haven't explicitly stated) to argue how such cuts will be detrimental to the goal of women's equality, and how, were the funding to be reinstated, women's equality would receive tangible benefits.

See how that works? Apparently, in Olaf's opinion, the CPoC need only announce and implement cuts utterly arbitrarily with no justification whatsoever, whereupon it will be up to critics to do all of the legwork to defend a "reinstatement" of the aforementioned funding.

How convenient for the CPoC and its Kool-Aid swilling followers -- a "guilty until you prove yourself innocent" attitude -- sort of like tossing people in jail arbitrarily and making them prove that they're not terrorists, or invading Iraq because Saddam Hussein couldn't prove he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, or ... well, you get the idea.

The CPoC never justified even minimally why the SWC deserved to have its funding cut. All we heard were horrified gasps of "advocacy" or "radical feminism," and the funding got chopped, whereupon those who want the funding restored are now expected to produce detailed justification for why the funding should be reinstated -- justification that, as I'm sure you're aware, will be invariably dismissed for one reason or another. Or simply ignored.

What a great gig. Although, in its defense, it really is the only way to be governed by the intellectually bereft. It's not like those folks have a lot of other options.