Trolls

Vox Day gets trolls, as does (probably) every sane blogger. Vox has tracked his worst troll to a specific identity, and has notified police.

Trolling stopped here the very moment that I contacted the FBI regarding the cyber-stalking being done against this blog and against certain commenters here. Trolls are merely psychopathic cowards who think that they can attack from the safety of their anonymity; however, they are not actually anonymous. But they are cowards. They cannot be satisfied with just being stupid in the comment block. They have to escalate into cyber-stalking in order to puff their damaged egos up into a semblance of the stature of those who they attack.

Trolls will be back; but they will not be tolerated, and any illegality will, WILL, be forwarded to the FBI.

Stalking By Hugo/Liberal Viewer

I've been stalked before. It takes severe mental illness to stalk someone.

This time it is Hugo/Liberal Viewer. I'll post this one email and no more:

"SOOOO how is the weather in Missouri?
ANDDD why do you hide your real name XXXXX?"
[name redacted to protect whoever it is]

So s/he is looking up how to find me. He thinks he has a thread, now. What a loser. The previous stalker at least got the name right. I've already revealed my approximate location a number of times; that's not news. He's definitely not too good at this. But, if he does manage to show up at the door, or more likely a window on the ground floor, he needs to know that we are all armed here, with plenty of detection devices employed. On the surface I'm not convinced that he has the intelligence to find us, yet the world is bizarre since the advent of the Leftist trolls to power in the government.

So, to Hugo/Liberal Viewer - bring it on. There are plenty of woods in this part of the state for private burials.

The Troll Issue

Folks, there is more than one Hugo, but only one of them is a troll. I will publish other Hugos as they arrive and comment - please welcome them, they are NOT all trolls. I'll try to keep the original troll at bay, but as you know he sock-puppets in order to create disruption by inserting irrationality. There will always be trolls, and they won't get caught right away. So I must engage them, at least briefly, until their real intentions are clarified. When that happens, they become icons of the mindset which must be fought in the culture/morality war which they have chosen to wage. So I don't mind dealing with them, but only up to a point beyond which there is no remaining value to their existence on this site, and their disruption needs to cease.

At any rate, please welcome any other Hugos which comment here.

Thanks,
Stan

To the Troll

You might as well give up. I read no further than your identity, and immediately delete you - with a smile.

That is the beauty of the blogger set up. I get to nuke you without reading a word.

Keep wasting time if that's your intent, but now it's just your time and not mine or anyone else's that you are wasting.

Ha Ha! Ha HAAAAA! You're done here.

Trolls and Trolling

It is likely that any public information outlet which allows commenting will be trolled. By trolling, I mean the type of comments which are merely mean-spirited, destructive and without any actual content. In other words, vandalizing the source which allows the comments. I make this distinction because other sites have defined trolls somewhat differently, such as was done at the popular science site, which shut down comments altogether, with this comment:

"A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

In other words, dissent to the "established scientific undeniable Truths" is considered trolling at popsci.

And there is this, from Slate regarding a study (behind a paywall) on the Dark Tetrads to which trolls belong (Looks more like "pentads" to me):

"...what a new psychology paper has to say about the personalities of trolls themselves. The research, conducted by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterized by personality traits that fall in the so-called Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

It is hard to underplay the results: The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.

In the study, trolls were identified in a variety of ways. One was by simply asking survey participants what they “enjoyed doing most” when on online comment sites, offering five options: “debating issues that are important to you,” “chatting with others,” “making new friends,” “trolling others,” and “other.” Here’s how different responses about these Internet commenting preferences matched up with responses to questions designed to identify Dark Tetrad traits:
[emphasis added]

I encourage dissent here, if it is principled and disciplined, up to the point where it becomes obtuse and/or obstructionist. But the purposefully destructive trolls must be eliminated; they are psychologically damaged and demented. Now there is evidence to that effect.