Between two of us we wound one guy up so much he deleted his blog, but he was calling his blog “Jenjus Khans Atrocity Committing Death Machine” so he deserved it.

heh

Davebones,

That was also an education for me. I try, very hard, not to do that sort of thing anymore.

Although, there is still that wee devil in me.

I try to reserve it for agenda driven lunatics, these days. Is that trolling?

Perhaps it is.

On a very right wing US site, I asked whether the US was essentially, the ’cause of all evil’. I left a conclusion out, though posing the question was enough.

Well, you’d never have seen a more split discussion. The first hundred posts attacked me and the next hundred thought otherwise. I am simplifying.

The point is that attacking a dearly held belief, that, for instance the US is a perfect society worthy of applying it’s model to the world at large is, in fact naive, stupid and downright wrong. This is not a world view that they seemed to share. It will indeed, bring the more rabid nutcases down on you. If you can survive that, then there are more sensible voices within the US community.

I expect I was trolling, when I wrote that post. But it was an interesting exercise..

I’d have thought any direct challenge to a preciously held consensus was trolling? “Knitting is wrong” on “Knitters Weekly”, is trolling, I’d have thought.

Off topic a bit, I agree with you that friendships across geography and politics are likely to be hell of an important. That is glue.

Incidentally, I left that site with more friends than enemies. ‘Cause, you do tend to engage on a personal, as opposed to a political level, after a while.

When I moved on to another blog (Rightwingsparkle) I had very clear alternatives, be rude and get banned or try and engage, and see what happened. I am very glad that I chose the later. I haven’t “got through” or solved anything or even won anyone round to my way of thinking (yet) but I have made some genuine friends on “the other side” and found that we aren’t that different, which didn’t surprise me at all. I think in a time when people are blowing up random strangers for what they believe it is always good to talk, if you can and we can, so we should.

If what we fear about the unsustainability of all this is true, and I fear that it is, these sort of cross boundary friendships could become very important.

I’d say: yes and no, as usual it depends on the type of speech, and the intentions behind it, doesn’t it?

The trolls featured in the article are very complex characters indeed, my immediate thought was ‘Jesus/Socrates crossed with a psychopath.’

I think that Fortuny fella has a definite point. Trolls are (on the whole) immature attention-seekers endowed with IT skills (or just the ability to type), as far as I’m concerned.

And I think it sounds a bit like Disraeli

“I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad”