OT: On the Nature of Trolls

For the past couple of weeks much has been posted claiming that our new friend [email](Q^20) is some sort of troll, warranting everything from a starvation diet to banishment to the seventh circle of killfile hell. It is the mission of UBI to determine if the said poster is truly troll-like or just another type of usenet anomaly. A couple of quick tests and a stringent grading scale can easily let everyone know if (Q^20) is really a troll or something else entirely.

1) True trolls cast their lines to attempt to land the maximum number of fish. As has been pointed out by one of your sisters, (Q^20) has limited its casting such that its bait doesn't even get wet in the waters of DejaNews. This behavior is actually antitroll-like. Grade for maximum casts: F

2) Your older and more successful trolls always ensure that their return e-mail address, though non-existant, actually reflects an address that may be real. The landed fish doesn't discover the fake address until e-mail is bounced back. (Q^20) uses the e-mail address of [email]. The blatancy of this fake address shows a complete lack of imagination on the part of (Q^20). Grade for camouflaged address: F

(It should be noted here that with failing grades on the first two tests, the best overall grade (Q^20) could receive even if it aces the third test is a D. We will continue with the third test anyway.)

3) The famous and renowned trolls of usenet are quite adept at using language and the convoluted twists of phrasing such that the targeted fish doesn't even know the hook has been set. The greatest trolls can even land fish in moderated newsgroups. It's heartening to see the citizens of a newsgroup identify an attempted troll as quickly as the good people of a.t.d. Grade for use of language while casting (and this is stretching): D-

Overall trollgrade for (Q^20)=(0+0+0.5)/3=0.16= F

So it can be seen that (Q^20) has failed miserably in its attempt at trolldom. We here at UBI feel that rather than starve or killfile (Q^20), pity is much more in order. We recommend that a collection be started such that (Q^20) may attend a correspondence course in Usenet Annoyance Tips for the Clueless, in an attempt, however vain, that it may improve its trollness index. In that way (Q^20) will be able to remove its leperous, spirochete infested, malformed husk of proto- human form from its dank and refuse strewn lair, to finally reside in the abode of its choosing, under a bridge.

The above public service announcement has been brought to you via UnderBridge Investigations, your friendly neighborhood troll spotting organization. All rights reserved.

Jon Armstrong The Space Ranger Graveyard gives one a unique outlook on life. A dark one.

[email] wrote: <bit about trolling snipped>

LMAO! Heh, I needed that, I was up til 3am doing History coursework last night and I'm really tired.... :)

Anyway, the best trolls call themselves Troll and put "~ SUCK IT ~" or "~ LO fucking L ~" at the end of each post and have actually been trolling that newsgroup for so long that everyone on there loves them. The best example of this is of course X PAC of alt.fan.courtney-love, who is actually who I was describing... Oh my, it's much too early for me to be up...

I'm startled; you have a troll-spotting organizion, and yet everybody doesn't hate you? Weird. The one "trolog-hunter" (A trolog being an alt.fan.tolkien troll.(Figure out why and you get a prize!)) I know of is despised for his "troll-patrol" signs.

As far as the troll grade goes. . . no, this guy's worthless. Due to the alt.flame invasion of alt.fan.tolkien, (The trolog-hunter tried to shift a flamewar over to A.F., where it gained the attention of an expert troller named Suzieflame, who then invited all her pals over.) I've gotten pretty good at judging trolls and flamers. M'dear troll, I suggest you get yourself over to alt.flame and learn what a *real* flame looks like.

-Kazul the sky-blue floating dragon, etc. etc. etc. etc. Check out my brainchild, TEUNC, at http://www.egroups.com/list/teunc/info.html and my article and cartoon at http://members.xoom.com/Naskha/ !!!!

UBI is pretty much an underground organization, working in the shadows. We don't kill trolls, just tag with a tracer and release back into the wild to study their lifecycle. Not that trolls are in any way endangered.

I did add that I was stretching that last grade. Gotta be careful with self-esteem issues these days.

It must be Spring, with a.f rising like locust and ravaging the unsuspecting wheatfields of innocent newsgroups. Too bad they aren't on a seven year cycle.

Troll? Moi? Ah, my winged wonder, you wound me to the core. I would be less than honest if I did not claim to crafting special lures and laying my line for unique aqualife, but the Old Goats here at UBI never use nets.

As for a.f, they're a funny once joke. I long ago tired of d*cks*ze wars based on who has the better thesaurus. We here at UBI leave the flamers to our sister organization, the NCSJ (Nomex Clad Smoke Jumpers).

Jon Armstrong The Space Ranger

Troll? Heck! I don't even *own* a bridge!

In article , [email] wrote:

doesn't

alt.fan.tolkien

Ahh! That must be M&M's (Properly Michael Martinez, but everyone refers to him as MM or M&M. That way we don't confuse him with Michael O'Neill (Known to all and sundry as Old Man Quigley.) a troller that the residents of A.F.T. have gotten fond of, (Mostly because he's backed by TEUNC.) and Michael Kew, a serious fella.) problem. He tries to destroy 'em.

Bah! Self-esteem, schself-esteem. Who cares about troll-s.e.?

No, it was over the winter. I think A.F. is attacking some music group now.

yourself

I wasn't refering to *you*!!! I meant that "Q something or another" thing!

Or maybe you could hire the A.F.T. Fire Department?

-Kazul the sky-blue floating dragon, etc. etc. etc. etc. Check out my brainchild, TEUNC, at http://www.egroups.com/list/teunc/info.html and my article and cartoon at http://members.xoom.com/Naskha/ !!!!

his

Saw M&M and thought of Milo Minderbinder(sp?) and M&M Enterprizes, where everbody owns a share.

Want to buy some egyptian cotton?

Gotta be careful here in Lotus Land. Anyone can sue for anything.

Whew! Thank Goodness! The other goats were looking at me funny-like.

The A.F.T Fire Department? They aren't the ones with the motto "Fight fire with fire" and load up their trucks with napalm, are they? Or are they the ones with the sign "Only dragons need apply"?

Jon Armstrong The Space Ranger Graveyard gives one a unique outlook on life. A dark one.

A.F.T.

Nah, I invest in Ho-Ho's.

Yeah, but Trolls don't win court cases. . .

shift a

troller

"I'm tellin' ya, he's a troll in sheep suit!" "I dunno, Fred, Jon looks pretty goatish to me. . . "

It's the former. Although there *are* three dragons in it. . .

-Kazul the sky-blue floating dragon, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Kazul wrote: <Beware of falling snippage>

thing!

Sheep suit! No way! You don't know some of the guys I work with.

Besides, the salesdroid said it's what all the foxes are wearing now.

Jon Armstrong The Space Ranger Graveyard gives one a unique outlook on life. A dark one.

Does it have chocolate on it? DJ

Jane: "Dammit! I left my exacto knives in Pediatrics!"

Think that will make it edible?

I do believe that any reference, no matter how obscure, will get pounced on in this group. Not that that's a bad thing... ;)

ObLearnFromYourElders: The night before shipping off to army boot camp I took a couple of my best buds and a couple of friends to the drive-in movies. Watched 'Catch-22' and 'M*A*S*H'. Talk about starting a new life with an improper attitude. Kids, don't try this.

Jon Armstrong The Space Ranger Graveyard gives one a unique outlook on life. A dark one.

In article , [email] wrote:

Hey! An ObX! Cool!

ObWhine: My cotton has vanilla beans in it! -Mindy Note: my sig is now a note from my school counselor that was sent home, regarding the class I have with him. Read on, on the off chance you care. "I have some concerns about Mindy in my class. She overtly shuns interaction with the other students in my class. She has several times commented that she finds the class a waste of her time - despite my attempts to explain the value of the skills we talk about and practice in class. In her defense, she does put up with a lot of mocking by some of the other students in class, and so I can see here she would have a low level of trust when it comes to participating in class activities (which she occasionally does not). I think much of this she brings upon herself as a ay of distancing or shielding herself from others. It tends to have an infectious effect on the group dynamics. "Since Mindy is such a brilliant student" (ROFL) "it comes as no surprise that when we are defining concepts in class she is always at the forefront. She will usually make the attempt to participate if she is in the proper frame of mind. My hope is that she will take the class more seriously in the future."

Mindy wrote in message ...

Wonderful! Mr O'Neill works at your school!

That note painted a wonderful picture of your counsellor's classes. Some notes tell us more about the person who wrote them than about the person they're about....

Now all you need is for your mum to react like Helen. <g>

One of the things that bugs me seriously is when people are placed in a position where, without their consent, they are expected to share personal stuff with others, some of whom may not be full of respect (full of something, perhaps), and are pressed to participate and reveal stuff they'd choose to keep to themselves. That's a counselling situation, and it should be voluntary, and the client has the absolute right to choose how much or how little to participate. It's dangerous for some individuals, and it betrays a lack of respect on the part of the organiser. More: it implies that people have no right of privacy, and implies that reticence shows there's something wrong with you - wow, what good modelling of social interaction. ;:-) I've taken exception to some retreat programmes for young people (including as an attendee myself - I was once a young person <g>) and ended up asking organisers to clarify something for me: so you're saying that teenagers have no right to privacy, and that respecting privacy is a practice you feel you should be trying to discourage?

I'm not here talking about compulsory therapy undertaken by mental health professionals, who may at times choose to press people. Nor about law enforcement situations when young people may need very strong encouragement to tell what's been done to them by parents or others they feel loyalty towards - though I would not expect this evidence gathering to occur in a group situation. *Sometimes*, very rarely, in some circumstances, privacy has to give way to other values: but a non-voluntary class in Junior High is not one of those circumstances, IMHO.

Okay, rant over. 8-)

Martin.

Martin Sylvester said:

I agree. A school counselor has no automatic right to learn the intimate details of the lives of the students; he has the right to *ask*, to be sure, but they also have the right to *refuse*. And a lot of school counselors (who remember don't need much formal training for the job) can dispense the most horrendously bad and destructive advice.

On this general topic, remember Ru-Paul's hilarious portrayal of a school counselor in the two *Brady Bunch* movies?

COUNSELOR: And Jan? JAN: Yes? COUNSELOR: Come back here when you're pregnant, ok?

Exactly. We seem to have gotten the idea that revealing everything about ourselves, even to complete strangers, is a *good* idea. There's a big difference between "honesty" and "exhibitionism".

Sincerely Yours, Jordan

JBassior wrote in message ...

sure,

(who

That's frightening. 8-(

A colleague of mine had to deal with a girl who was being pressed by college counsellors to abort her baby for the sake of her studies. Again, I'm not opening a debate on that topic, the point is this: such a step was so profoundly at odds with that student's own value system that if they had succeeded they would have scarred her for life.

[...]

I'll watch out for those movies; never seen them.

Well put.

Martin.

Martin Sylvester said:

Well, they're supposed to have a degree in psychology, but as someone who once helped someone get such a degree, I can tell you that getting a bachlors' in psychology isn't really very hard. Anyone who can read and write English and compose simple paragraphs can do it. Common sense not a requirement!

That's out and out horrifying.

Were the counselors aware of her beliefs? Or were they so fanatically in favor of seeing her exercise her "right to choose" that the possible effects on the girl herself just didn't even occur to them.

Ru-Paul's role is small in both movies, but he / she is hilarious in it.

On honesty vs. exhibitionism ... Daria is honest, but she's not an exhibitionist (in fact she's rather shy), to illustrate the difference. Quinn's a bit of an exhibitionist, but she isn't very honest.

Sincerely Yours, Jordan

JBassior of AOL http://www.aol.com writes:

you know I don't think Psychology in the States can be the same subject as Psychology in the UK. I've done Psychology courses and I very much doubt a UK undergrad would be able to even pass their first year unless they had a better grasp of subjects such as Statistics than most science students do. In Psychology we had to perform T-tests to establish the significance of our experimental results and also study scientific method / the philosophy of science to understand the nature of the endeavour. Apart from in medicine, few sciences ever bother to test whether their experimental data has value, instead they tend to simply discard data that doesn't fit as "erroneous". And the ignorance amongst most scientists as to the nature of science is quite appalling, most still cling to 1930's ideas as to how scientific theories are made and validated. In my experience Psychology students are expected to be more scholarly, perhaps because (as with Sociology) people have tended to diss it in the past for not having progressed very far, or for studying everyday phenomena. It's like, people tend to decry mathematicians who bother to prove 2+2=4, but you're leaving yourself in a very exposed position as regards proposing more advanced and useful theories if you haven't first proven the basics rigorously.

Nowadays it seems to be axiomatic that scientific theories tend to run counter to common sense. Certainly that is the stance being taken by people involved in improving science education in the UK (who are educational psychologists, dare I say).

-Shez.

Shez said:

You're probably right, about the difference in difficulty. The psych classes my client was taking involved no math harder than very basic statistics, and anyone who goes through college either knows or can quickly brush up on how to do that. Advanced statistics didn't enter into it.

Sincerely Yours, Jordan

Shez wrote:

Of course, the major problem with many psyc studies done in the US is the fact that they use college students as test subjects... so all the test prove is how college students react to certain situations...

One of my psyc profs in college thoroughly debunked the Zimbardo prison study, as well as the... oh, shoot, what was his name... the 1950s study where subjects were told to administer shocks... you know the one I'm talking about... anyway, in the case of Zimbardo, the students acted like prisoners in prison movies because that's how they were conditioned to believe prisoners behaved through watching TV and bad movies. Real prisoners behave much differently, actually (my psyc prof ought to have known, he spent his leisure time studying and counselling prison inmates). As for the other study, well, the subjects were paid-- they were the sort of subject who was willing to do pretty much anything for $20. (Which was a lot of money in the 50s...) Alright, I'll admit that I don't remember the whole debunking of that particular experiment, but whenever I hear that psyc studies at a University have made startling discoveries, my suspicion lights go off, especially if all of the subjects were college students, or were the sort of people who responded to classified ads offering money for participating in psyc experiments. <g>

If you really want me to, I'll try to dig up my notes from 10 years ago... but I'd rather not.

That said, there have been a lot of good, solid psyc studies done with realistic sample sizes and good controls. I just can't think of any offhand. ;-) (We always seem to remember the bad examples, n'est-ce pas?)

As for my friends who have psyc degrees, the ones who took it seriously had to put up with a lot of hard work-- lots of time in the lab as well as time at facilities studying abnormal psyc. One of my friends has been dealing with behaviorally and emotionally handicapped kids now for about 7 years--- it's a miracle that he can still do it--- the kids are really hard to deal with, especially in a classroom setting-- since they have just about -0- boundaries. *shudder*

rich.

Jane: Usually when I have this dream I'm wearing pink taffeta.