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Tuesday 5 August 2008

If we just "get over" evil, evil will stop?

The recent actions of that imbecilic assistant professor with his anti-Catholic, anti-Civilization desecration, (yes, I'm obsessing over it a bit,) seem to me to be a near relative of trolling. And sometimes when I see, (or more often read the words of,) Bill Donohue of the Catholic Defense League or whatever it's called, I think, dude, you're right but STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS.
But I am wrong -- you don't ignore evil and it goes away.
Yes, sometimes when you pay attention to the man behind the curtain he's just part of the Forces of Dimness; but sometimes the Forces of Dimness are the Useful Idiots of the Forces of Darkness.
The NYTimes Magazine has
an article on the ugliness at the heart of trolling, because of the ugliness at the heart of trolls.
[A troll] proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.
“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”
“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”
“What do you mean? What did I do?”
“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

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