It’s hard sometimes to understand the people who are perpetually ticked off by … well, let’s be honest … anything that doesn’t fit their worldview and/or might make someone else happy. They can’t stand to see other people enjoy themselves, I’m guessing because they’re so miserable and seeing happy and kind people drives home how unhappy they are. So they atack.
When your entire personality is built around attacking other people, you shouldn’t be surprised when others attack back or completely ignore you because they don’t want to deal with your vitriol.
I mean, if you look at something innocuous (like, say, last week’s column on kindness … sheesh) and you feel compelled to cause trouble because you’re maybe a little bored, perhaps the problem is you, not someone or something else.
Probably every columnist has trolls/persistent critics. Sometimes those critics just fire off endless emails, most of which we can ignore or block (I used to have a guy who would send me wackadoodle far-right-wing videos under an offensive name; fun!). Sometimes, though, they spend the bulk of their time squatting in newspaper comments sections, presumably because they have nothing better to do and think that the privilege of abusing writers is part of the purchase price of their subscription. (Yes, there is indeed a troll who seems to think exactly that, as he’s constantly going on about myself and others calling “paying subscribers” trolls, not appreciating that it’s only the people like him who fit the definition; he’s just a “delight” to deal with.)
I’ll be clear here, as I have been many times before to no avail: An Internet troll is, according to Merriam-Webster and countless other sources, someone who aims to antagonize others online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content. That may be someone cutting and pasting articles from elsewhere in the comments on something that is at best only tangentially related or their own rambling thoughts with obligatory implications of communism, or someone who just alights on the boards to intentionally misinterpret what someone has written, insult anyone with whom they disagree and/or redefine terms to suit their argument because they want to get the best of the “progs” or the “Rethuglicans.” It’s not to advance discussion; it’s to stop it by pointing a laser pointer at the wall.
Or in fur-nephew Charlie’s case, a reflection from my iPad (the phone reflection doesn’t thrill him as much). If you only knew how many times I’ve forgotten that on a particularly sunny day in Sarah’s living room.
Joel Stein wrote in “How trolls are ruining the Internet: Why we’re losing the Internet to the culture of hate,” published in August 2016 in Time magazine: “Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.”
I dunno; “Porky’s” might have been more refined. It’s been a loooong time since I saw that, and I have no intention of seeing it again.
One of the ways they bring the discourse down is to reframe whatever’s been said, claim the moral high ground, and then insult/make up things about everyone who disagrees with them. For people with the actual moral high ground, it’s a very frustrating way to spend time because it’s pointless to everyone but the trolls. What’s their point? Who knows, but I have a suspicion it has something to do with “lulz” and “making libs’ heads explode.” That and making everyone else as miserable as they are (happy, kind people they are not).
Clearly, a lofty and worthy goal for anyone to have. (C’mon, font design people, give me a sarcasm font!!) Makes me want to be petty and start talking exclusively about my fur-kin to the troll who seems to think bestiality is involved.
Trolls feed on attention (so yeah, maybe not a great idea to poke the bear), but also are emboldened by what “psychologists call … the online disinhibition effect,” wrote Stein, “in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.”
Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University and the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture,” told Stein, “These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. You want to say this is the bad guys, but it’s a problem of us.”
Possibly, but none of the resident trolls on the newspaper site have been able to convincingly seem normal (though some of them like to refer to themselves as “normies,” which considering how alarming many of their positions are is terrifying).
And who can forget Milo Yiannopoulos, who was also quoted by Stein in his piece on trolls: “Human nature has a need for mischief. We want to thumb our nose at authority and be individuals,” he says. “Trump might not win this election. I might not turn into the media figure I want to. But the space we’re making for others to be bolder in their speech is some of the most important work being done today. The trolls are the only people telling the truth.”
Truth obviously means something else in their world.
My colleague Gwen Faulkenberry, who has had similar issues with trolls, had some wise words in her column Sunday about someone redefining terms to loop in legitimate criticism under the banner of “name-calling,” which she said is “somewhat problematic in that it means different things to different people. I take it literally. My parents taught me never to call people names. They were public school teachers, and ‘no name-calling’ is a basic school rule since for teachers’ kids, school and home are the places you live, physically and intellectually; it all runs together.”
That was the same way I was raised. Calling someone a name, disparaging them rather than their argument, meant you didn’t really have an argument (still does, by the way). None of us are perfect, though.
“Humans mess up even when we try to live according to our ideals,” Gwen wrote. “But to us, disagreement with an idea, even disparagement of it, is not name-calling. Labeling teachers ‘indoctrinators’ and ‘groomers’ is name-calling. Putting people into a ‘basket of deplorables’ is name-calling. So is saying a candidate is a ‘baby-killer,’ ‘demon-rat,’ ‘pawn of Satan,’ or ‘libtard.’…
“What is not name-calling, at least by my definition, is to say with much sadness that MAGA Republicans have fallen down a rabbit hole, and we may never get them back. It is likewise not name-calling to say that the national Democratic Party leans too far left for most Arkansans.”
It shouldn’t need to be said that calling out bad behavior (like being a troll who’s ruining comment boards for everyone), regardless of party, is not name-calling; what is name-calling, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the use of offensive names especially to win an argument or to induce rejection or condemnation (as of a person or project) without objective consideration of the facts.” Calling someone a pedophile or groomer simply because you don’t agree with them is name-calling; it’s also a redefinition of the terms, but that’s another column. If you call someone that, they damn sure better have been convicted of sex crimes against children.
About Arkansas issues, specifically the LEARNS Act and the recent attempt to gut the state’s Freedom of Information Act, considered one of the best in the nation, Gwen wrote: “Also not name-calling is to say that the LEARNS Act is part of a national hoax perpetrated by corporate billionaires to destroy public education, and that those elected officials who pushed it through our Legislature did a terrible disservice to the people of this state.
“There are aspects of LEARNS that aren’t terrible. But instituting a universal voucher system is extreme. Just like proposing sweeping changes to FOIA is extreme. It is also extreme to deem tax breaks for the richest Arkansans an emergency. That’s like calling an ambulance for a hangnail.
“All this stuff is extreme. And extreme is not truly conservative. These measures, and the behavior that has accompanied them as lawmakers bullied their own constituents for speaking out in opposition, are the reverse of reasonable. A deviation from dignity. A complete withdrawal from wisdom. We know better, and we should demand better for ourselves and our children.”
Sadly, I’m starting to give up on the idea that as a people we know better. If more of us did, I don’t think the people Rex Nelson calls the Know Nothings would be in the Legislature today enabling so many things antithetical to the values of thinking, loving people. I hope that I’m wrong and that we can rise above the pettiness and hate we see now, epitomized by childish name-calling, not only among our people but the officials elected to represent us to the world.
As Gwen wrote Sunday, “I do not believe name-calling makes Arkansas or anywhere else a kinder, gentler place, but if we hope ever to forge a kinder, gentler state, we must recognize abnormal conduct and designate it as such. We cannot lump in extremist behavior with reasonable differences of opinion. It is a lazy way of thinking which makes us vulnerable to manipulation. That’s what extremists want. We must not give it to them. We must hold the line.”
I couldn’t say it any better than that.
🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐
Doug Szenher of Little Rock thankfully is not one of the chronically unhappy people of whom I speak. When I ran a guest column of his last week, I included in the tagline at the end that he was director of public affairs when he retired from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
Not quite. I had grabbed that job title off the Internet (I thought from an official source, but apparently not; my fault), but it was a description that he said made him “sound a lot more puffed-up and important” than he really was at the agency, where he started as an information officer in 1977. His job title and description changed many times over the years, but he’s pretty sure “director” was not among them.
He didn’t want a formal correction, but I thought it important to clarify the matter. And thank you, Doug, for your kindness in bringing it to my attention.
Serenity is a fuzzy belly 