Tag: Troll Ban

DISQUALIFY! is not discourse

I’m adding a new reason for insta-spamming, as this shameless and ill-informed attempt to disqualify the military expert and Castalia House author William S. Lind should suffice to demonstrate:

DISQUALIFART: I think I’ll take my advice on military affairs from someone slightly less fucked up in the head.

VD: The more fool you. Lind is highly respected by Marines with extensive combat experience from lieutenants to Commandants.

DISQUALIFART: Spend much time among Marines, do you? Let’s be honest. The chances that a marine knows who this lunatic is, is somewhere next to zero. Tell them what he believes (“We ought to have a king in America and darn it those blacks would be better off as slaves) and you’ll get a really sense of what marines think of such a Cau Cau.

VD: I have spoken to two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the last week alone who are not only personally familiar with Mr. Lind, who was lecturing at Quantico this weekend, but think very well of him. The co-author of one of Mr. Lind’s forthcoming books is an active-duty LtCol in the USMC. You know literally nothing about this subject.

STILICHO: Yep, and I are one too! Lind has been well known and respected in the
Corps for decades. I certainly knew of him in the late 80’s and I
understand he was a regular lecturer/consultant at Quantico well before
that. Al Gray was well known as an admirer of Lind’s theoretical work.

Al Gray, of course, being the former Commandant of the Marine Corps. In addition to being the foremost among the fathers of 4th Generation Warfare, Mr. Lind is also the author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook, which formalizes and explicates John Boyd’s theory that has been incorporated into formal USMC and British Army warfighting doctrine.

But none of that matters to a left-liberal troll who is hellbent on DISQUALIFY despite not only being in complete ignorance of the relevant facts, but continuing to attempt to do so after being warned of his ignorance.

No discourse is possible with people this ignorant and shameless. From now on, any attempt to DISQUALIFY is going to be met with instant spamming. There is absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with attempting to demonstrate why your position is superior to another one.

But DISQUALIFY is the singular tactic of the stupid and the shameless. It is what they reliably resort to because they cannot successfully make a rational case for their own positions or construct a rational critique of the positions presented by others. This is no place for them and I have no intention of suffering such fools in any way at all.

Trolls are not a problem

I found no little amusement in this article in the New York Times about dealing with online trolls. It always surprises me when I learn that other bloggers are genuinely upset by the weird little creatures who occasionally infest their blogs:

ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.

In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain.

The singular goal of the troll is to elicit pain? I don’t think that is entirely correct, but that is certainly one reason why we haven’t seen all that much troll activity here despite the considerable growth of traffic here. With the exceptions of the homosexual Tad and the literary critic Andrew Marston (who doesn’t have a job per se, but volunteers regularly at the New England Wildlife Center if you ever feel like giving him a call and discussing literature with him), most trolls have discovered that they can’t elicit anything more mild annoyance from me and thereby give up. Tad, Marston, Pox, and Obvious are a different variety, they are various forms of what might be described as the crusader-troll.

The crusader-troll attempts to DISQUALIFY DISQUALIFY the blogger by presenting alternate narratives to the blog readers. Hence we have Tad always trying to reframe the narrative with Vox as Pure Evil, Marston going to blogs far and wide to declare that Vox, Larry Correia, and Dan Simmons(?) are Terrible Writers, Pox/Ann openly trying to pick off readers in order to limit the extent of my baleful intellectual influence, and Obvious attempting to portray the mysterious “blogger” or “host” as Hypocritical, while the Scalzi fanboy Phoenician spent over a year attempting to show Vox as Inferior to the Object of Adoration. The fact that their disqualification attempts have obviously failed, as the blog traffic grew from 612,136 pageviews in August 2012 to over 1.5 million in August 2014 doesn’t ever seem to register with them. Perhaps they’re not trolling hard enough?

Of the crusading variety, I tend to find Marston the most amusing because I am aware I cause him far more pain than he causes me. (To say nothing of his fascinating attempts at fantasy fiction which are much more entertaining than all the 2014 Hugo winners combined. I even offered to publish Nocturne; it is guaranteed Hugo-Award winning material.) Every new Twitter follower I get, every additional 100k pageviews of traffic, and every new SF award for which I am nominated causes him pain. In fact, if he hadn’t gone on such an insane literary-snob rampage a while back and annoyed so many people, I very much doubt that Sad Puppies 2 would have been such a big success. Science fiction can thank Luscinia/Marston for the fact that Larry and I, among others, are bona-fide Hugo-nominated authors from now until the end of time. My author’s bio has been burnished thanks to the blog troll.

That, my friends, is what you call backfire. Well done, Andrew. But he will never learn because he is too neuro-atypical to grasp normal human psychology. He will continue to poke the bears because he has deemed the bears to be Evil, never understanding the wisdom implicit in the notion of letting sleeping grizzlies lie.

(That being said, it’s also amusing to me that my shadow troll, Ann Morgan aka Pox Vay, gets more traffic and comments than many blogs, and even has her own meta-troll, Obviously. This comment by her was downright funny too: “I also confess to being immature in some ways, mainly I lack confidence,
patience, and sometimes have poor control over my temper.” You don’t say.)

There will always be trolls. There are too many immature, attention-seeking, emotionally unstable individuals sans audiences for there not to be. But they are no reason for concern. Quite to the contrary, they are a material testament to the fact that you matter, that you are making a difference. I wouldn’t worry about trolls if I were the average blogger. I would worry more about having such a small audience, or so little of import to say, that the trolls feel no temptation to show up.

A house blithely divided

It would hard to have provided a better example of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness than we saw in the comments yesterday. And further proving that leftists will say literally anything in order to salve their feelings without concern for their past or future arguments, consider this gem from Snowflake in which he attempts to justify the Left’s primary tactic of disqualification:

the fact that one thing (a round earth) which is true, but for which at one time there was no evidence of, does not mean that anything or everything else for which there is no evidence is also true. Nor can you properly claim anything, be it a round earth, a flat earth, or a pink unicorn to be true, until you provide evidence of it. Disqualification is valid, in that until you provide evidence, the disqualification holds, and you can’t claim that your particular unproven theories are true, simply because there is no other alternate proven theory at the time.

Now, the first statement is partially true, although we know the earth is not actually round, but rather an oblate ellipsoid. It’s rather fitting that an erroneous example should be cited here, but regardless, one can hardly argue with the statement that one cannot assume the correctness of all naked assertions on the basis of one correct naked assertion.

So far so good.

On the other hand, it is absolutely false to assert that one cannot claim anything to be true until evidence for the claim is provided. This exhibits a fundamental confusion between two different concepts, a “claim” and a “proof”. One can claim anything to be true without providing one iota of evidence. Others can freely choose to accept the claim or reject it, but they cannot credibly argue that the claim is intrinsically “disqualified” on the basis of no evidence being provided.

If that were the case, then no one could ever make any statement of fact without simultaneously providing the evidence supporting it. This is an intrinsically anti-scientific perspective, as it would necessarily disqualify all hypotheses, which are claims made in the known absence of evidence. Moreover, it is an inherently self-negating statement, as Snowflake has provided no evidence to support his claim that disqualification of a statement sans evidence is valid.

Moreover, Mr. Wright’s discussion of his theory was not presented as a proof. It was, rather, an explanation of behavior that has been observed on many occasions by many observers in the past. It was a hypothesis, in other words, and one for which considerable evidence was gathered by the feverish attempts to disqualify it.

But why is the Left so eager to disqualify claims and hypotheses? Why does it make a fetish of evidence here while simultaneously denying literal millennia of evidence collected with regards to matters such as human intelligence, genetics, and even the law of supply and demand? (Recall that Wright specifically noted this very behavior in his essay, which none of the critics appear to have actually read before leaping to attack it.) Because the entire aim is to shut down the discussion, silence the perpetrator, and to divert the train of thought before the logical incoherency of the Leftist and the obvious errors of his positions are exposed.

(This is why I crack down so hard on the fools who leap in to engage the trolls on the trolls’ terms. And I use the term “fools” advisedly; one is snapping at the troll’s bait and doing PRECISELY what the troll hopes someone will do by permitting him to shift the matter being discussed away from the one that the troll finds threatening. For example, note how every single discussion of the flaws in TENS is immediately met by multiple attempts to change the subject to Young Earth Creationism. Don’t fall for it.)

The Leftist doesn’t care that his own argument would destroy his own positions; apply this standard to human equality or evolution by natural selection and both fall apart immediately. But because he has no objective standards and no attachment to the truth, the Leftist will blithely apply one subjective standard to his opponents and another to himself without even necessarily realizing it.

The irony is that in attacking Mr. Wright’s Unified Field Theory yesterday, his critics provided the very evidence that they irrelevantly claimed was lacking. If you wish to destroy the credibility of a Leftist’s arguments, you have only to go through it step by step, until you reach the change of definition, ambiguity, logical inconsistency, or outright lie that will INEVITABLY be there. A little patience and precision is all that is required.

The iceberg’s tip

I find it both amusing and absurd to observe how certain trolls simply cannot manage to control themselves. Despite my supposedly controversial style, in my entire history of Internet use, I have only been asked twice to refrain from commenting on an Internet site. In both cases, I not only refrained from commenting there, but ceased regular reading there as well. I even declined an invitation to return to one of the sites when contacted and encouraged to do so.

Contrast with that the behavior of Ann Morgan, who is not only one of the trolls who continues to read this blog and attempts to post easily identifiable comments here, but apparently can’t even manage to keep her troll-dentities straight:

Rose colored glasses March 22, 2014 7:13 PM

**It celebrates the Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, Indus to downplay Christian Civilization without ever once considering the barbarity of those civs.**

So… on the planet you came from, Christians never burned women alive for nonsensical reasons, held slaves, or spent 400 years trying to wipe out the Cherokee and Souix…

Ann Morgan March 22, 2014 7:16 PM 

This comment has been removed by the author.

Don March 22, 2014 8:08 PM

Ann did you forget which sock puppet you were using? What is that, three on this thread alone. I would be honestly interested in hearing why you think you cannot stay away even when you have been told. Worse you simply cannot follow the rules so we always know it’s you. You fool no one but yourself. Go do something quit hating Christians and blaming others for how you respond to your problems. It’s spring go for a walk. Throw rocks at the beach, go to Church tomorrow, I promise though it might hurt giving up sin and pride is painful at first, you’ll be happier in the end.

While I normally delete the trolls’ comments, I leave those I consider to be educationally illustrative. This example of a troll attempting to resurrect itself should help explain to some of the relative newcomers why I occasionally nuke what superficially appear to be innocuous comments, but are actually the tip of an incipient and entirely familiar iceberg.

For some reason, the trolls never seem to grasp that virtually no one, in the entire history of the Internet, shows up for the first time on an established blog and promptly vomits forth a massive series of comments indicating familiarity with both the blog and its regular commenters. It should be obvious that changing one’s identity will never fool anyone so long as one insists on saying the exact same things that resulted in one’s identification as a troll in the first place. But then, logic does not appear to be a strong point with these creatures.

Speaking of one’s critics, I thought it was amusing to see that someone is attempting to imitate my cruel tactic of directly quoting Mr. Scalzi’s words. While I have no doubt he’ll be able to dig up a few careless infelicities, people tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. This means that I have always been aware that my words will be mined and carefully sifted for the purpose of attacking me. That is why quotes cited for use against me are usually modified or grammatically incomplete.

Otherwise, they tend to say more about the critic’s particular ideological bent than anything else. I mean, does anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes seriously think I am even slightly embarrassed with people seeing observations like these being publicly attributed to me? I mean, what is the implied argument here, women DO have a Magic Vagina Power with a range of 30+ yards?

On Doctor-Assisted Suicide
I suspect euthanasia advocates would feel differently if it was legalized, but the doctor was required to use an axe.

On Male Intuition
Men can, as it happens, tell when a woman doesn’t have any idea what
she’s doing. As hard as it may be to believe this, a woman’s Magic
Vagina Power does not actually ensorcel every male within a 30-yard
radius and cause them to believe that a woman is automatically
superlative at every form of human endeavor.

On Public Education
“Is sending your kids to American public schools parental malpractice?” Yes.

Portrait of a Breakdown

The famous stalker of Asian women and rescuer of woodland animals appears to be going off the deep end. In addition to revealing his latest identity, “Nikola” of the copious comments on the Greatest SF Writer poll, he posted this on his blog:

Nina asked if anyone’s ever gotten pissy about being drawn and I suggested people who do probably don’t notice they’re being drawn and just assume they’re being stared at and I blamed people like the regulars on Vox Popoli and Alpha Game Plan for basically trying to sexually harass their way into de facto sex segregation. I should have explained the context better, in which Vox Day has been stalking and harassing people who write unfavorable reviews of his novels.

That would have been an amusing conversation to witness. It’s certainly ironic to see “Andrew Marston”, one of the most notorious trolls on the Internet, accusing anyone else of stalking and harassing people. But this is what they call “psychological projection”, I suppose. It is eminently clear that the guy is mentally unhinged. Consider:

Why I Want To Punch Matthew Bellamy.

This is why: Vox Day likes Muse. I once said I knew a few nice Muse fans. Here’s the thing, Vox Day is such a racist, misogynist pompous stuck-up giant twerp blogger scumbag fuckface dickhead asshole that it negates the few cool Muse fans out there.

That’s my superpower, actually. He has unmasked me: I am Divide by Zero, capable of negation at will. I find the experience of watching Marston to be fascinating; it’s rather like watching one of Maupassant’s protagonists as he disintegrates. It won’t surprise me if this guy eventually attacks one of the Asian women with whom he is even more obsessed than he is with me and “the Popoli”.

The more I see, the more I think the blogosphere has gotten gradually worse. Listen, Vox wrote a post defending (not quite advocating, I don’t think the blogosphere has sunk that low yet) sex trafficking. And one of the Popoli said some things but they’re more full of shit than Gene Belcher on Super Bowel Sunday. For one, Serena isn’t about me, it’s about some guy named Paul Trowe. The other thing she said was just an indecipherable, incoherent mess. Get over yourself, you’re not that important. 

(Nod, smile, back away slowly, one hand on the concealed .357 Ruger….)

Trolls are psychos

I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to anyone here to discover that scientists at the University of Manitoba have discovered that trolls really are horrible people. In fact, they are psychopathic and spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet:

5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed “trolling.” By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were “non-commenters,” meaning they didn’t like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

The researchers conducted multiple studies, using samples from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk but also of college students, to try to understand why the act of trolling seems to attract this type of personality. They even constructed their own survey instrument, which they dubbed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or GAIT, containing the following items:

I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.

I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.

I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.

The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.

Yes, some people actually say they agree with such statements. And again, doing so was correlated with sadism in its various forms, with psychopathy, and with Machiavellianism. Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!

Anyhow, one need have no sympathy for psychos like Andrew Marston, Hunt Stoddard, Greg Tingey, and Tad in his various identities. They are seeking attention and pleasure in the distress of others, which is why it is always a mistake to engage with them. That’s why I no longer bother to engage with them and simply ban them the moment it is obvious they have popped up again.

This also may explain why I am not inclined towards trolling. I test lower than the average on psychopathy, despite having other Dark Triad traits. And obviously I am not sadistic, since the only individual I take any pleasure in tormenting has repeatedly assured us that he actually enjoys the attention on the rare occasions that he notices it at all. It’s a real win-win situation.

The troll’s new target

It seems that Mr. Marston, aka Yama, Clampps, Arachnothera, Will le Fey, and a plethora of other pseudonyms, has now taken to vandalizing the Quantum Mortis Wikia in his copious spare time.

18:49, December 25, 2013

Welcome to the Quantum Mortis Wiki

Nobody’s ever going to read this piece of shit.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I’m accustomed to everyone in my private life knowing what I do online. The trolls, however, are not, and I’ve learned they really don’t like the people in their daily lives learning about their online activities. So, as promised, I’m gradually going to bring every banned troll’s online activity into his real life. Each time a troll shows his head after being banned, I will disclose one more piece of personal information about them.

As you can see from his IP address, 72.93.116.138, Andrew Marston lives in Marshfield, Massachusetts. He works at a wildlife center, which is why he uses bird names for so many of his trolling identities.

Troll Ban: Mark Gainer

Mark Gainer is a socially autistic atheist who erroneously thought he could ignore the rules of the blog. He quickly discovered otherwise. It’s pretty simple. Either you abide by the rules of the blog which were posted years ago, or you do not comment here.

If you don’t like the rules, I don’t care. They are not going to change. And the last ten years indicates that everyone here will survive very well without your continued contributions to the discussions.

November 27, 2013 4:27 PM

    It’s faith based on BAD evidence. Very Very bad evidence.

November 27, 2013 7:30 PM

   VD: “Oh, is it now? And what is the standard by which you assert the evidence is “very very bad”?”

    I presume you refer to the bible when you talk this religion crap. Most idiots do. The bible is high derivative. The bible was written years after the fact. The bible is a propaganda too. The bible was revised by later generations.

    Do your self a favor and get out of that cult. If you don’t, you’ll live a life as a lie. No one should do that. On the other hand, if you are so feeble minded that you need an ancient fairy tale to tell you how to live your life, then maybe that derivative lie is what you need.

November 27, 2013 7:33 PM

    If you can’t state a question properly or make sense of words, don’t bother.

 November 27, 2013 7:48 PM

    Rules of the blog? That cute. The answer is it would depend. I’d need to see the sticks, the type of connections between them, and the nature of the surface?  Just make your fucking case instead of trying to ask idiotic rhetorical questions.

 November 27, 2013 7:54 PM

   Very cute….”Rules of the blog”. What’s number 6? “Idiots may apply?”

  VD: Since you clearly refuse to abide by the rules of the blog, you cannot comment here.

November 27, 2013 8:30 PM

   Under those conditions, then, no.

Troll Ban: Anonagain

Apparently excess exposure to the Left has caused Anonagain another allergic reaction or something.

Vox has decided he’s going to be a complete asshole and delete my responses to the yappy little anklebiters on his blog,
and even those comments that are on topic but don’t express the correct
attitude, so I’ve decided to simply respond to the frothing little
yappers from my own blog.


Hey Vox, you really can go fuck yourself. I don’t mind getting deleted,
and I don’t give a flying fuck what your personal opinion is of me, but I
am not going to hang around your blog to be treated unfairly and
disrespected by you or anyone else. When you leave their BS OT comments
up and delete only mine, you’re being an asshole. But I am going to
respond – no balding little Napoleon is going to prevent me from
finishing what those fuckers started. It’s not the first time you’ve
done this. The fact that you can’t keep your bitter betas from going
into a feeding frenzy is not my problem, it’s yours – you attract
pathetic losers looking for their testosterone fix from you….

I had to mass-delete her comments a year or two ago when she descended into a shrewish slough of vulgarity, but let it go when she came back and behaved herself. Unfortunately, the emotionally incontinent usually end up losing control sooner or later.  Perhaps she and Real American can one day find happiness together on another blog, cursing virulently at each other 24-7.

She can write whatever she wants on her own blog. She simply won’t be participating in the discussions here. The thing is, I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you happen to be on: if you insist on attacking people in a vulgar manner then you’re not going to be doing it here for long. The chief hallmark of the troll is his insistence on going where he is neither invited nor wanted. But secondary characteristics are vulgarity, a predilection for attacking others, and an extreme sensitivity to being disrespected, which usually concerns the comment-deletion.

I’m not the only one who has noticed that the civility of the discourse has improved considerably with just six troll bans: Andrew Marston, Kilo Papa, Phoenician, Golf Pro, Ann Morgan, and Real American. I very much hope five more won’t be necessary, but to be honest, I’m too busy with various projects to waste any time policing the comments of those who can’t control themselves. So, understand that by the time I am deleting your comments, my finger is already on the trigger and I am the world’s most perfect equalitarian when it comes to pulling it.

It’s nothing personal. It doesn’t really matter to me or the thousands of other people who pass by here from time to time if there are seven trolls who happen to be banned or eight. But it is perhaps worth noting that at least two of those trolls have been repeatedly banned from a number of other sites.

But this conclusion really says it all about the troll’s narcissistic mindset:

I’ve had enough of the backbiting little fuckers and being deleted by Vox whenever I try to defend myself against detractors, or being scolded like a child. He can run his blog however he likes, that’s his business – and he can also delete all my comments and shove them up his ass for all I care. If nobody in the universe reads any of these posts here, that’s fine by me. Comments are not welcome, except by invitation. I don’t give a fuck what most people think.
– Posted by Taylor at 12:54 AM

No comments:

New comments are not allowed. 

The troll doesn’t care, and in fact doesn’t even want to hear what anyone else thinks… but is obsessed with everyone else hearing what it has to say.