Rants: A Redneck Renaissance?

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The surprising strength of the "Birthers" movement is the most frightening manifestation of the rising fascism in this country that we've seen thus far. Despite the irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama was, indeed, born in Hawaii, rabble-rousing sheepherders like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh continue to stir their listening mobs of credulous rubes into a snowy froth over this blatant fabrication, and--most disturbingly--GOP pols continue not to speak out to squelch it.
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The Birthers are not only nativist (in a land of immigrants), but given the fact that one can't plausibly actually believe Obama to be an illegal alien, the inescapable conclusion is that the actual motivation of the Birther movement is racist at its core.
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In response to the dwindling caucasian majority and concomitantly weaker hold on political and economic power, the GOP is becoming a southern, racist political party--as regional as the fiction of Eudora Welty. The Birthers and their ilk will readily trade their freedoms for the promised security of maintaining the White Power tradition, when it comes to that. They are seriously freaked out by the advent of a Black POTUS who nominates wise Latinas for the SCOTUS and promotes programs which, if successful, would finally level the playing field and make this truly a land of equal opportunity for all.
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The South shall rise again, folks, and again be wrapped in the Stars of Bars and all that it symbolizes for the pickup-with-gun-rack contingent. The racist liars will continue to use the conservative media outlets to infest the national consciousness with the charge that liberalism and progressive politics is about equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity, and the bleating merinos and pinheaded goobers in their growing numbers will continue to suck up the Kool-Aid.

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Reflections: Troll

It is now time to revisit the question with which I ended my post of Sunday, June 1, 2008: “What is a troll?”

In the comments section of that post, Brandon (who has convinced me that he wasn’t a snitch, but merely a bull in the china shop in flagging my illicit presence in the comment boxes of What’s Wrong With the World) reminded me that “troll” is a term originally derived from sport fishing. Having grown up in Michigan, in the midst of many freshwater lakes, I spent a good deal of time in the summers of my youth trolling for bass. An internet troll, then, drags his verbal bait slowly through the weed-choked shallows of the comment boxes of a blog, or dangles his lure in front of the other visitors to a chat room, hoping to catch a controversy and reel in some outraged flamers. His goal is to disrupt, and thus to dominate, the site.

Another meaning of “troll,” with which I became familiar in my New York City days as the consort of a dancer, is any unfortunate jamoke who is considered to be physically unattractive by a male homosexual. Let’s leave that one alone, other than to note that my pocket Webster’s defines “troll” as “a supernatural being [from Scandinavian folklore] as a giant or dwarf, living in a cave”. As I am part Swedish on my mother’s side, that one isn’t completely displeasing to me. But one can see where the queers are coming from: BOO!

A little trolling of Google, hooked this definition from Wikipedia:

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

The use of the word “bait” there seems to confirm the origin of the term in fishing.

Another site provided further insight into the motives of a troll:

A classic [troll] is trying to make us believe that he is a genuine skeptic with no hidden agenda. He is divisive and argumentative with need-to-be-right attitude, "searching for the truth", flaming discussion, and sometimes insulting people or provoking people to insult him. Troll is usually an expert in reusing the same words of its opponents and in turning it against them.

This is interesting, in that it assumes by saying “trying to make us believe that he is a genuine skeptic” that all chronic dissenters (such as was I at What’s Wrong With the World) are insincere and intent only on making malicious mischief. It assumes that they are never motivated by the enjoyment of an honest debate, or disputation in defense of an ideal, but only by a kind of naughty narcissism. It also assumes that the points of view expressed by the authors of the site in question are unassailably Truthful, and that any challenges made to its premises are necessarily acts of patent vandalism. It takes a good bit of egocentrism to see things that way, imo.

This inquiry, it must be remembered, has been instigated by my having been labelled a troll by Zippy Catholic, and twice banned as such at the site, What’s Wrong With the World. I plead innocent to being a maker of malicious mischief for its own sake. My attitude toward blogging is expressed quite well in the following excerpts that I came across in a book review of a biography of John Milton by Jonathan Rosen in the June 2, 2008 edition of The New Yorker:

For Milton, the great trial of life was to discover truth through error, but without falling off the path of good. His oratical vigor balances divine purpose and individual autonomy, and he displays an optimism that, in its mixture of manliness and statecraft, sounds like a speech by Teddy Roosevelt:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. …That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Bloggers who feel threatened by any and all dissent on their sites would do well to keep Milton’s words in mind if they want their intellectual integrity to be respected, even where their premises are seen to be in error.

WWWtW-Watch #15: Mole

Dedicated to the proposition that it can happen here.


It can now be disclosed – since I have been banned for a second time – that, over the course of several days, I had again been posting comments on threads at What’s Wrong with the World. As I am no geek, I was without technical knowledge of how such a ban is effected. What I discovered, almost by accident, is that one can apparently only be banned on one computer network at a time. (Or something like that.) Anyway, I found that I could post to WWWtW from home, and so I did.

I was not without some moral misgivings about entering a “place of business” from which I had been 86’d. But, as the saying goes, I decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Taking those misgivings into account, however, I entered without disguise, using my real name, and providing the address of an email account that I have been using for nearly a decade. I expected to be discovered and shown the door immediately. As it went down, I was able to comment there over the course of several days. If I was a mole, I was a mole who was hiding in plain sight.

I was spotted almost immediately by a guy named Brandon. Brandon had previously known me as “Rob,” primarily at Disputations. There is a Brandon in every grade-school classroom and on every cell block in the slammer. He’s the guy who runs up to tell Teacher (or the turn-key) about whatever it is that his classmates (or fellow inmates) are trying to get away with. The most polite word for Brandon’s type is probably “snitch.” Unless they are very large guys, the Brandons of this world usually pay for their compulsive police work on the playground (or on the exercise yard). I just ignored Brandon. For whatever reason, his I.D.ing of me was without result.

I next aroused the suspicions of the redoubtable Lydia McGrew (and isn’t that a perfect name for the female heavy in this drama?) who thought that she recognized the rhetorical stylings of “Rodak” in the commentary of “Rob.” It is nice to know that one has developed a distinctive voice. Again – since she did not directly ask if “Rob” was, in fact, “Rodak” – I simply ignored Ms. McGrew’s musings on the subject.

What I believe to have been the terminal Rodak-spotting was effected by an intellectual pug named William Luse. This is an individual who is in the habit of taking any counter-argument to one of his unimaginative pronouncements as a personal insult. If that ESPN announcer who delights in giving nicknames to sports figures turned his talents to the WWWtW regulars, he might dub this jamoke as William “Fast and” Luse – because that’s how Bill plays with the words of his interlocutors. Billy was the easiest to ignore sans twinges of guilt.

I have to believe that WWWtW staffer, Zippy Catholic, who had known me well as “Rob” – first at Disputations and then on his own site – was immediately aware of my reemergence at WWWtW and decided, for whatever reason, to let me slide for awhile. It was Zippy who originally aroused my ire by suggesting that I had been operating as a “troll” in my exchanges at WWWtW. (see comment section here).

As I said, I am no geek. I knew, obviously, that “troll” was a pejorative term. But I had only a vague idea as to the specific shortcomings included in its usage. Now that I had been commenting at WWWtW illicitly, it occurred to me that maybe Zippy had been correct. Nonetheless, I did not really worry myself too much concerning this transgression of cyber-etiquette, since, for all their intellectual pretensions, the WWWtW cabal are absolutely vulgar and déclassé in their response to any comments that are other than adulatory affirmations of their narrowly orthodox dicta. They disrespect honest dissent. So be it, then. To put it in the vernacular – what goes around comes around.

But the question remains: what is a troll? This will be considered in a subsequent post.