It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial.
Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
> Bonus: I just noticed I'd gotten into a debate with Paul B in that thread. Hah. I was too cocky back then... I should have been listening, not talking!
OT but funny story: back when I was first getting into programming heavily (I had dabbled for about 4 years, but wasn't particularly good), I started learning perl, and got into a flame war on freenode with some random guy I had never seen on before (in the three times I had visited). It was weird - everybody sided with him, so strongly that I was really confused. His username was strange, too - something about "toady".
Yup, I, a perl programmer of 2 weeks, got into a flame war with Larry Wall. Didn't realize it for years, until I saw his IRC nick mentioned somewhere else. Ouch.
Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!