Just in case you have been confused by recent buzz about TamTamPamela and the resulting YouTube flamewars, I thought I would summarize the events here.  For the past year, a girl calling herself TamTamPamela has been posting videos to YouTube which echo some extremely fundamentalist Christian views.  Several atheists had been adding harsh comments to her channel, but she seemed rather unfazed and continued to upload videos of the same format.

            After the March 11^th earthquake in Japan, TamTamPamela posted a video in which she rather charismatically thanked god for grabbing the atheist nation of Japan by the shoulders and giving them a good shake to show them the error of their heathen ways.  Her glassy eyed joy at the Japanese tragedy sparked greater outrage than her previous videos, grabbing the attention of an atheist YouTube vlogger who goes by the moniker Thunderf00t.

            Thunderf00t posted a video that contrasted science based reasoning with fundamentalist Christian unreasoning and compared TamTamPamela’s condemnation of Japan with that of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s rants about other natural disasters being directed upon the sinful by a vengeful god.  Thunderf00t's subscriber base is in the six digits, and this led to TamTamPamela’s video going viral.

            The comments began to stream down TamTamPamela’s page, hurling voracious threats of every kind.  The search for the real TamTamPamela began and quickly yielded all of her personal contact information.  Some people went as far as to credit the revelation of these details to Anonymous.  Regardless of who first dug up her personal information, it rapidly spread and the threats against TamTamPamela began to include her home address and phone number.  These actual details will NOT be revealed in this article because such inclusion would only increase the potential of violence against her.

            By midnight on March 14^th, several dozen pizzas had been ordered for delivery to TamTamPamela’s home address to ensure she would know that her address had been compromised - just in case she wasn’t keeping up with the rapidly scrolling comments on her YouTube channel.  Shortly after midnight, in the wee morning hours of March 15^th, TamTamPamela posted her final video, ‘coming clean’, which now only exists as a mirror.  In it, she said that her fundamentalist Christian videos had been nothing more than a ruse.  She admitted to being a troll, indicated she was tired of pizza, and acknowledged that things had gone a bit further than she had anticipated.

            The streaming hatred shifted from her video condemning Japanese heathens to her ‘coming clean’ video.  The death threats escalated, and within a few hours TamTamPamela terminated her YouTube account.  Regardless of the credibility of her recantation, the anger over TamTamPamela now continues on message boards all over the internet.

            There are those who hate her for her glassy eyed praise of god bringing death and destruction to the Japanese.  There are those who hate her more for being a troll.  There are Christians who hate her for satirizing their beliefs and, finally, there are atheists who hate her for the potential backlash her actions could create if it turns out she was motivated by some sort of misguided atheist agenda.

            Whether she really was a troll or just made that claim in an attempt to cool the flames, TamTampamela is definitely the best illustration to date of Poe’s Law; "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."

            Who is TamTamPamela?  In my opinion she is what is known, in forum parlance, as a 'Poe'.