Welcome to the pages of Mind Child’s Guide to Online Health and Fine Unscriptural Dining.
Anyone who has been hanging around Simon’s world of Apasta-fiesta knows that there are a lot of strange things growing in this large garden. Of all these interesting species the trolls deserve some attention as to how to best be used, avoided, or manipulated for your own pleasure. So today we will talk about the online world of trolls and how best to identify them and use them or avoid them.
The Beer flavored trolls—These are trolls who typically have either just left the Borg or have one foot in the door and are so miserable that they get themselves drunk to run away from their problems. They walk like a drunk, talk like a drunk, and act like a drunk. If you enjoy drunks then you will enjoy interacting with these trolls. Quite often they make complete assholes out of themselves in efforts to get attention and if they don’t get attention, they berate, ridicule and defile others.
Control: We need an ignore button to get rid of the drunks in chat. However pending that, you can’t use a lot of logic in dealing with someone who is drunk. In fact, the next morning they are not going to even remember what they told you. You can shame them though as emotions are still accessible to the drunk or you can manipulate them and let them make even greater fools of themselves, record it and post it for all to see.
Dangers: Drunks are just obnoxious and often use vile language. Interact at your own risk.
The Chocolate flavored trolls—These trolls look delicious on the outside but when you take a bite you find out that they have no sugar inside them at all. Typical examples are people who make promises that they have exciting or important information and never deliver. They make offers of friendship and help but next time you see them in chat or on the board they have no idea who you are.
Control: Most of the time these trolls are newbies who have little or no social skills and have such low self esteem that they need to imagine themselves as being important and see themselves as rescuing people somehow. Use the old caution: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ask questions, demand some evidence, and observe reactions. If they have anything to give, they will ante up.
Dangers: Disappointment is a common symptom. Personal embarrassment from passing on their news to your friends is another negative.
The Popcorn flavored trolls—These are trolls who are sometimes funny because of their own stupidity and don’t have much weight in terms of damaging others or contributing anything of value. They mostly crash posts and tell you to go back to meetings or some other form of dub nonsense.
Control: Don’t feed this troll too much as they thrive on attention. The mellow trolls can be told to be a good kitty and go back to playing with their toys.
Dangers: Occasional insults, crashed threads.
The Quince flavored trolls—These trolls look deliciously beautiful on the outside and are a pleasure to hold and anticipate biting into but when you do, you find the taste is absolutely disgusting and spit it out as quickly as you can. These are the type of people who love to pull hoaxes on us, to get our hopes up that something good is going to happen and that the Borg will suffer but alas it is all lies. These professional liars got to great lengths to make themselves look believable and are ruthlessly convincing. Their typical strategy is to use things that have a very strong emotional appeal but have limited logical appeal.
Some examples to note: Most recently we had the Danni affair in which someone was supposedly doing something about the sexual abuse problem in the congregations. This individual managed to fool a lot of people and created a mob mentality that was more like a lynch mob than anything else. If you went against the grain of this majority opinion you got defamed as working on the side of the Witnesses. Another example prior to this was the infamous Governing Body Hoax on H20 where supposedly a rogue member of the GB was making secret communications with H20 in the hopes of understanding apostates and to make changes in the organization to bring them back. It was all shit, nothing real.
Control: Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice shame on me. We should learn from our lessons. If we got taken in by Danni or the GB hoax the next time around we should be more skeptical and even remind others of how they too have been duped in the past. Let the evidence be shown. If there is no evidence that can back up any claims, (there seldom is) then point this out and piss on this troll. Alternatively, we can sucker them in the next time and get enough information to really fuck them over good. They may think they are smart enough to get away with it, but as millions of people who have been to prisons realize, they aren’t that smart.
Dangers: This troll can make you miserable by dashing your hopes and make a fool out of you. They cause flame wars and turn people against one another.
The Shit flavored trolls—These are trolls that love to start fights not only with themselves but to get others to fight each other. Shit flavored trolls that have been around for awhile, are masters at pushing emotional buttons of other people and keeping the flame wars going. This type of individual needs to be distinguished from ordinary mortals who sometimes get into flame wars of their own and press emotional buttons in the heat of arguments. The Shit flavored troll is a professional at doing this though and offers little besides this activity. This individual may hate themselves and others and harbor long grudges and ill intent towards others. Misery loves company is their favorite theme and if they can make you miserable, their job is done.
Control: Calling out the actions of this individual in a separate thread and exposing their actions is probably the most effective strategy. Trying to stop a flame war in a thread is like getting in-between fighting dogs to break them up. You either let them wind it down until they are emotionally exhausted or throw buckets of ice-cold water on top of them.
Dangers: This type of troll makes the whole board smells bad. You can see the negative emotional effect it has on others who manage to get sucked into the flame wars this troll starts. It takes time to heal the wounds and some may never heal.
The Sour flavored trolls—There are two tart versions of trolls in this category. One is the fundamentalist troll who is trying to “save” the lost sheep in our discussion board and complains bitterly about all the wolves, atheists, apostates, mean people, smart people, evolutionists, etc. etc. that are making their job harder than it should be. This troll tastes a bit like sour grapes. The other sour troll is the type of people who loathes themselves so much that they need to strike out at others to rescue some bit of their humanity. They are apostate-phobic and hateful. They look for every opportunity to belittle someone, often making outrageously rude remarks about their appearance, weight, posting style, or anything else they can think of. Their self-esteem is so low that they may even try to justify their insults, telling others that they were trying to “help” this individual they attacked. Interestingly, such trolls may be suffering themselves from their own inability to deal with similar problems themselves and are just acting out their personal hostility towards themselves against others.
Control: Sour grapes fundy type trolls don’t understand logic and have limited reasoning abilities. You can just continue your job in making their life miserable by being yourself.
The loathing troll needs to have a mirror to look at to see what they really look like. You can be that mirror and remind them they have lots of unfinished emotional business to take care of.
Dangers: Fundies will typically bore you with their endless quotations of scriptures that they use in inappropriate ways. Loathing trolls offer little more than vile insults.
The Spam flavored trolls—These trolls are relatively easy to spot and have a distinctive flavor. You can identify them quickly by their simple minded tactics that try to get you to praise Jehovah, Jehovah do this, Jehovah do that, Jehovah will clean your clock suckka. The answer is always Jehovah, no matter what. These are the dubs who were indoctrinated so heavily that they always carry a Watchtower with them and always change underwear several times a day so they will never be caught in an accident without them. They are much too salty for my taste and I’m trying to give up all that Jehovah fat (really bad for your health) so I rarely bother with them unless they get to be a huge pest.
Control: Best hints for cropping this species is direct vindictive attacks against the Jehovah virus and mocking the Spammer (pun intended) as per Elijah and the profits of Baal. They can’t handle their chief idol being mocked and will run off and hide after putting up a futile but brief fight. Liberal use of sexual indecency in describing their idol really gets them foaming at the mouth.
Dangers: Typical responses are nasty email letters and insults along with threats that Jehovah will string your guts along the fence posts unless you repent your evil ways.
Well now that you have the basics down? Have you spotted any of these characters on the board? Feel free to add any descriptions of trolls you find appropriate.
Skipper