Trolled

This morning I got a message from a friend saying that I'd managed to tick...well, he used another word...off someone as far away as Idaho. I wondered how that happened as my reach doesn't usually extend that far.

It turns out it came from someone at a right wing "think" tank that among other things denies climate change. I don't think the article had a lot to do with what I wrote (check here). Here goes:

In his recent op-ed, “Our words say education but our actions say something else,” Rick Wilson shows himself ignorant of reality, or else intent on ignoring it.

Wilson argues for West Virginia making college tuition free, or less costly. Mr. Wilson, there’s no such thing as a “free” education. We may make education less costly for students, but what about for the taxpayers?

Giving away free college educations to everyone is a nice sentiment, but it isn’t practical, nor will doing so provide the economic and societal gains purported. Look at our situation now: The government made it so easy to get a federal student loan, it created an artificially inflated marketplace. If students didn’t have such easy access to loans, thousands fewer would be able to attend college, and colleges would be forced to lower their prices — thus reducing the student loan debt that haunts people into old age — or else go out of business.

The ease of acquiring a student loan has also been at the expense of education quality. Because more people are able to attend college, an increasing number feel it is necessary for career success to obtain a college degree, even from a mediocre or low-quality institution. College degrees are a very expensive rite of passage these days that end up meaning very little when everyone is expected to have one. A college degree has become a money-making scheme that institutions use to siphon money from students (and taxpayers), without helping them to obtain increased knowledge, skills or training.

Teresa Mull
Education Research Fellow
The Heartland Institute
Driggs, Idaho

Uhhh gee. I guess I was totally wrong. Higher ed is stupid. I recant. On the other hand, I do have the solace of a good deed since feeding trolls is a form of Christian charity.

So I'm a troll

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Karl Marx, when overcome with an outbreak of carbuncles, found solace in writing obscene Portuguese poetry. That wasn't an option for me during my week + of zombie fever, which I devoutly hope has passed. While the Spousal Unit is fluent in that language, my knowledge of it is limited to one obscenity (anatomical in nature).

Instead, as I have mentioned before, I've found what solace I could in trying to out-troll right wing trolls lurking around the Charleston Gazette website, always a target-rich environment. In one recent article about the Affordable Care Act, a troll wrote that "government should not be in the business of deciding who lives and who dies." I wrote that I totally agreed and that these decisions should be left to corporations and the market like they are now.

Recently, the Gazette ran a thoughtful editorial about how some of our political polarization is based on deep psychological factors. Yeah, well, whatever. Here's what my troll alter-ego had to say about all that:

This is just a clever attempt to take the reader's mind off the eternal struggle between the forces of Coal, which are all good, and the forces of EPA, which are all evil all the time. Remember, in the last days, Coal will triumph over its enemies and make everyone who ever lived bow down before it, the way most WV politicians do now, for the final judgment.

If nothing else, I can rest my fever-ridden body a little easier in the knowledge that I've attempted to keep the web as a refuge of sanity and rationality.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY, about the end of the world, of course.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: THE NEXT NOTCH ABOUT ELEVATED

I could get used to this

I mentioned yesterday that after a long period of being fed up with right wing trolls who lurk around news websites and make toxic comments, I decided to try to out-troll the trolls. That involves saying trying to think of things that are even more Whackadoodle than what the Whackadoodles are saying. It's not that easy these days.

Here's one example. There was an op-ed in the Gazette supporting Senator Rockefeller's brave statement on the need to have an honest conversation about the future of coal. The article got swarmed by trolls. Since part of what drove the controversy was a Republican led effort to oppose measures to limit mercury emissions, I came up with this:

Mercury is awesome. There is nothing in the Bible that says you can't eat it so Rockefeller is against God. Put that in your illegal substance pipe and smoke it, coal haters.

Then my friends at the WV Center on Budget and Policy put up a blog post arguing that regulations weren't to blame for the coal industry's problems. I posted a comment that asked how much they got paid by the Kenyan Secret Service for doing that.

Finally, although I am not feeling well today, I could not resist the chance to comment on an op-ed on the Affordable Care Act by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As you might well imagine, right wing trolls swarmed all over it. I figured I'd have to really strut the troll on this one:

Obamacare is a devil plot dreamed up by the Bavarian Illuminati and the Kenyan Secret Service in the Service of the Antichrist. Read the bill. It's all in there. Here's proof: Barack has six letters. Hussein has seven. Obama has five. Take one from the middle name and add it to the last and you have 666.

On reflection, however, I think I'd better stop doing this. There are probably Whackadoodles out there who really believe all that.

So I'm going to swear it off. Cold turkey. No more trolling for me. Unless it seems like the right thing to do at the time.

NO LINKS TODAY. I have a fever.

On becoming a troll

People who view news stories online have no doubt come across the right wing comments that are written by  anonymous people who lurk around these sites the way carp hang out at lakeside bait shops. Such people are called trolls in the parlance of our times.

Sometimes reading troll writing can be infuriating. There have been times when I dreamed of challenging this or that one to a no-rules cage match, although I realize such a move would likely do little to advance my status as someone working in a Quaker organization. Sometimes troll lit is just kind of funny in a sad way.


But lately, as I've noted when the occasion arises, some people have joined the fun by parodying trollish comments on the web. I finally decided it you can't beat join em and plan on out-trolling the trolls whenever the opportunity arises.


My first effort appeared in an online editorial about climate change, a subject always ready to enrage coal-groveling Whackadoodles. Here's what I came up with:

Yeah, anyone who believes in climate change hates America and freedom and probably Jesus too. Science is stupid. So is the environment. I mean, if animals eat each other and go to the bathroom in nature, why should we care about it.

I'm kinda proud of that one. It's a little over the top but comes closer than you would probably like to believe to real things people say on line. As the late great Don Marsh, longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette, sometimes said, "Vox populi, vox wuffo!"

SPEAKING OF TROLLS, they'd really go off on this.

BLACK LUNG. Here's the next installment in NPR's series and more from the Gazette.

HE THINKS TOO MUCH. Such men are dangerous.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Feeding the trolls, again

Over Memorial Day weekend, some women shaved their heads in protest of mountaintop removal mining. I admire their dedication, although I obviously wasn't consulted on tactics. Maybe this is just the martial artist in me talking, but I prefer strategies that inconvenience one's opponent/s rather than oneself or one's allies.

Unfortunately for the protesters, it didn't seem to get a lot of press other than a picture and brief paragraph in the Gazette.

That was enough, however, to bring out the trolls, i.e. all the right wingers who lurk around media websites so they can spew their views. So far, over 60 comments have been made on the article. I highly recommend checking them out.

Hats off to one commentator, ProudRight, who I believe to be a great satirist. He comes so close to saying the things that real people say in forums like this so it's kind of hard to tell what is jest and what is not. Here are two gems ProudRight added to this discussion:

Either you're a friend of coal or an enemy of coal. Almost all the people here like MTR and want to keep mining the coal. By getting rid of the mountains we make WV better. If they don't like the way we mine coal, why don't they do us all a favor and leave? The people against coal are using big words and talking it up because they think they are better than the rest of us. How smart is it to shave your head, like we're not going to mine coal because you shave your head? The truth is these protesters can't stop us doing our job. They're just a wasting their time away. Coal is WV. Everybody likes coal just like they like the Mountaineers. How you tree huggers going to watch ball if your sitting there in the dark? I'm sick of looking at ugly green mountains when we could have more factories. Coal is the future they can't stop.

and

The know it alls just use the fancy facts and numbers to lie about coal. We mine the coal because WV is coal. Without coal there will be no WV. You don't see us going around shaving our heads. In November we're going to vote Obama out and vote the tree huggers to jail where they belong. I'll be watchin the Mountaineers win football games and riding my 4 wheeler while you tree huggers will be sitting in the dark. EPA out of WV, Obama prison.

I think the only thing that distinguishes ProudRight's satire from the sincere venting of those he/she imitates is the fact that the author manages to insert a reference to Mountaineer games in every comment.

Rock on, ProudRight. And wake up, America!

Feeding the trolls

I understand that it is the custom in Zen Buddhist monasteries to collect any remaining grains of rice after a meal and offer them to the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in the Buddhist conception of the wheel of life and death are those beings who were greedy in previous lives.

In that unpleasant state or realm, one has a huge and empty belly that is always hungry but a tiny throat that can't swallow much. Feeding them is a meritorious act of generosity.

I've come to think of writing op-eds, like this one of mine, as a similar act since putting one in the paper feeds the trolls, which in this case refers to right wingers who lurk around the web in order to attach their remarks to pieces they disagree with like lampreys latching on to fish.

I devoutly hope that this act of providing nourishment will serve me well in my next rebirth.

THE DEATH PENALTY. E.J. Dionne argues that only conservatives can end it.

CLASS WARFARE, revisited.

CHIMPANZEES are just not that into cooperation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED