A Troll has demanded an explanation.
Just try and keep me out
We all know what trolls are. They generally speaking are attention seeking, manipulative neurotics, sometimes ideologically committed, and presumably found on the Internet.
But they actually existed before the advent of the Internet, and one still runs into them in real as opposed to “virtual” life.
Out in the real world they are usually given labels such as, interfering users, jealous schemers, spiteful meddlers, annoying crackpots, social nuisances, or the like.
On rare occasions, their relentless emotional needs and the drive to satisfy them, lead the Troll into positions of considerable political power or social influence. Once there, their amoral-ism and boundary-less will-to-power-over-others, is likely to wreak more havoc and human damage than they ever could hope to achieve while their noxious influence was confined to some local neighborhood.
Trolls, whether encountered in real life or in a virtual, all share a number of what are by now familiar ploys or gambits which they use in the hope these manipulation techniques will bring them what they want.
This includes the presumption of a right of affiliation, as the context for delivering their casual insults; charges of hypocrisy, or double standards (unfair discrimination) when they are called out; displays of indignation; feigned victim-hood; attempts to intimidate those who resist; and the very common Troll technique of leveraging the moral generosity of the principled man back against him.
Verbally, they engage in equivocation, deceit, constant redirection, and/or any other behavior which will protract and obscure rather than clarify and resolve a specific question.
Clearing the question away, is not their intention.
Their focus is always on maintaining contact with the other as “provider”.
For what they seek is not the freedom to access the material world in order to extract what they want from it, but the social privilege of accessing other persons – made compliant one way or another – in order satisfy their urges.
The difference the Internet makes in their game is that it constitutes an electronic barrier between the Troll Personality and the targets of their attention. Blogs don’t serve liquor, they are private, open to limited participation by invitation – generally by default at first – only, and not subject to government regulation. At least not yet.
Your club is my club
Nonetheless, a view of Internet practices makes clear that the Internet troll and the modern liberal, (read collectivist) in their insatiable hunger for a piece of the lives of others are essentially one and the same. The Internet troll and the Modern Liberal being merely two manifestations of the same general species, observed while operating in different environments.
What individual trolls sometimes achieved in their neighborhoods, and what the Troll Party has now managed in politics through insinuating itself into the administration of our Federal Government, the Troll Horde now wish to complete by ensuring that they may intrude themselves into every human interchange or transaction that piques their interest or excites their avarice: And to do so on their own terms, and in a way that gives them appropriatve control, be the realm virtual or real, social or political.
This is not to say that a Troll might not be telling the truth about its own views. That is to say it, or they, may be accurately describing their own states of mind when they say that it is wrong to cut them out of your intellectual life, because, say for instance the First Amendment to the Constitution of the Federal Government of the United States, prohibits Congress from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”.
They may in fact be so mentally twisted by their needs and their lack of inhibitions in satisfying them, that the techniques I described above have become their unconscious nature. Practice of deceit and manipulation became second nature, second nature became first nature. Eventually nothing is left but a Troll nature where a man’s nature once stood.
Let’s take the specific example of a complaint over the stifling of “free speech”, as our illustrative paradigm.
In a recent accusation over his expulsion from this blog, Mr. Perry Hood has written:
“Regarding free speech, must I remind you that blogs make use of the internet of which you have neither ownership nor control? Thus, what aspect of free speech do you folks not understand. Have anything I’ve written constitute a personal threat made to any of you? Of course not. So I ask again, what is it that you folks fear from me? I would really like to know.And then, again, there is DNW, who by virtue of his hidden identity, forthrightly reveals mine. Don’t lecture me about values, DNW!”
Let’s look at some of the elements above.
Mr. Hood says, “ Regarding free speech … blogs make use of the internet of which you have neither ownership nor control.”
We notice here that:
1. He now entirely sidesteps the Constitutional issue upon which he had been generally hanging his claims. He must abandon it, since there is no issue of Congress making a law abridging his freedom of speech, when someone in the neighborhood kicks him off their front porch.
2. He attempts to redraw his accusation in terms of control of the Internet.
3. But no one is trying to control his access to the Internet.
4. He introduces the idea of ownership, (of the Internet) in order to refute it.
5. But no one has claimed private ownership of the Internet.
6. He attempts to stake a public claim to blogs which are private, by saying that they are found on the Internet which is not privately owned.
7. But by this il-logic he might as well argue that he may ride in your car because you drive it on the highway, or live in your house because it is on a public street, or molest your children because they attend a public school.
Mr Hood then goes on to say, “Thus, what aspect of free speech do you folks not understand.”, speciously implying as I mentioned earlier regarding the Troll mind-set, a “ presumption of a right of affiliation as the context for delivering the casual insult”. In other words, his Constitutional gambit bankrupt, his Internet framing proven irrelevant, he must now “presume” a right of affiliation and access where none is in evidence.
Mr. Hood goes on to ask, “ Have anything I’ve written constitute [sic] a personal threat made to any of you?”; while assuming that the obvious answer is, as he tells it, “ Of course not.”
However, because we have had long experiences with Mr. Hood on the Common Sense Political Thought blog, as well as on the First Street Journal blog, we immediately notice that what he says is not true. Which is why he was on thin ice before he was ever granted an exemption and allowed to make any comments here in the first place.
Mr. Hood has, as we all know, had his privilege of participation on the blogs above mentioned and numerous other blogs repeatedly suspended or banned for just that kind of behavior: personal threats.
What apparently grieves Mr. Hood, is that after calling us traitors, and refusing to intellectually justify the supposed moral claims he lays against others as a pretext for calling them treasonous, he was not afforded the 20 or so warnings and advisories, and “second chances”, which he usually gets.
He was given two. Which was two more than the number to which he was entitled.
But when a man labels you as treasonous for resisting his attempts to appropriate the lives of yourself and your family, and then doubles down when called on it, what point is there in further talk?
The Internet is wide open to Mr. Hood. Let him build himself a cozy fire with the means already given to him by someone else, and attract who he can with the wafting aroma of his roasting cant, envy, and malice.
If any do drop by, he is welcome to their company, and to their intellectual and emotional companionship.
Oh, I almost forgot. The Troll asks, “So I ask again, what is it that you folks fear from me? I would really like to know”
The answer to the question, though revulsion rather than fear is the right idea, involves having any portion of your life repeatedly wasted on a project which you know from long experience is pointless and foolish before you embark upon it: that is to say, the project of repeatedly attempting to reason with an entity which has deconstructed itself into a sometimes wheedling, sometimes demanding, sometimes threatening appetite, but never right-reasoning man.
Does that answer the question?
Perry, you called your own shots. You made yourself into what you now are. You showed us what you are through demonstration, and told us through affirmation.
What is there that is left to say?
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