Troll Eruptions

Last night, something strange happened at Progressive Eruptions. Suddenly, Shaw Kenawe had morphed into Shaw Kenawe, The Wicked Witch of the Blogosphere! Either someone hacked into Shaw’s profile, or Shaw is participating in a hoax. Whether trolling or masquerading as a troll, pranks – no matter how seemingly harmless - are neither amusing nor funny. How often have we read accounts of online harassment, character assassination, threats of violence, or stories of teenage suicides due to bullying in Cyberspace!

Adrenaline is an addictive drug that promotes socially communicable aggression, and trolls are notorious adrenaline junkies. Let’s be perfectly blunt: Partisan blogging does not promote dialogue and debate and rarely, if ever, dissuades anyone of their opinion. Partisan blogging is motivated by self-amusement – a kind of ultimate video game - as bloggers from the left and the right taunt and engage each other in pointless and interminable arguments. How do you score this game? Trolls measure their success by the number of comments under every post – inspired, no doubt, by mischief.  Personally, none of this appeals to me.

Fox News Boosts Preposterone to the Max

By (O)CT(O)PUS

I don’t think Greta or Megyn will be fetching coffee for Erick and his sidekicks anytime soon. Here is the latest imbroglio from Fox News, a gender comedy in five acts:

Act 1.  Breadwinner Moms: Mothers Are the Sole or Primary Provider in Four-in-Ten Households with Children:

“These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers” (Pew Research Center).

Act 2.  Fox News: Rise In Female Breadwinners Is A Sign Of Society's Downfall:

“You're seeing the disintegration of marriage, you're seeing men who were hard hit by the economic recession in ways that women weren't. But you're seeing, I think, systemically, larger than the political stories that we follow every day, something going terribly wrong in American society …” (Juan Williams).

“When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role” (Erick Erickson).

Act 3.  Fox News Host Rips Sexist Male Colleagues:

“Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother… maybe I need to have a little chat with them) (next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women’s right to vote?) …” (Greta Van Susteren).

Act 4.  Some Women Believe They Can Have It All, And That's The Crux Of The Problem:

“ I also noted that the left, which tells us all the time we’re just another animal in the animal kingdom, is rather anti-science when it comes to this. In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture … One notable exception is the lion, where the male lion looks flashy but behaves mostly like a lazy beta-male MSNBC producer” (Erick Erickson).

Act 5.  Fox News Host Demolishes Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs Over Sexist Comments:

"I didn't like what you wrote one bit. To me you sound like somebody who's judging and then wants to come out and say 'I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, and now let me judge judge judge, and by the way it's science it's science it's science it's fact fact fact fact. Well, I have a whole list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong” (Megyn Kelly).

At Fox News, you can always count on the slogan "Fair and Balanced" to serve as a cover for "stupid."  Here is how other networks covered the Pew Research story:  Unlike Fox, CNN And MSNBC Turned to Female Panelists for Comments on "Breadwinner" Study.  Instead of R-2, E-2, and Lou-too, perhaps what Fox News really needs is a comment troll:

“Because who better than men to comment on women's issues? Sheesh, you libtards understand nothing. Obviously a noted mysoginst [sic] like Eric Ericson's [sic] opinion is far more germaine [sic] to the debate than some broad's. oh, and tell the dames to vote Republican, if they know what's good for them, rant, rant, foam, foam, blather, blather, my old man's a chipmunk, etc, etc... "  (remKuzucu).

Facebookin' III

Hmmm... I don't know if this is a good sign. I mucked with one idiot, and it's like Lays potato chips.


Somebody break it to me gently. Am I in danger of becoming a Facebook troll?

(Click to embiggen.)

Right-Wing Harassment of Liberal Bloggers

For seven years, our good friend Libby of The Impolitic has been writing a column for the Detroit News. Hers is a thankless task because she is a token liberal at a right-wing rag, which means she is also a frequent target for harassment. On any given day, trolls will gang up on her, fabricate lies from thin air, lift phrases out of context and misquote her, and assassinate her character. Ugly stuff! To make matters worse, the folks who run Detroit News hold liberal bloggers to a different standard, which means rapacious right-wingers get to ride roughshod and rampant while comments from liberals are sometimes deleted. The latest example is Libby’s post, Another 'Lone Wolf' attempts domestic terrorism, about the arrest of the would-be bomber of a Detroit mosque. Predictably, the rabble ganged up on Libby … shamelessly attributing "anti-Bush liberalism" as the motive behind the madman. In Libby's defense, I left this comment:

Libby,
I referenced your links including the Detroit News coverage of this story, and NOWHERE DO ANY OF THESE SOURCES MENTION ANYTHING about the partisan leanings of the accused. Nowhere is the name “Bush” even mentioned. Yet there are three critics below who fabricate stuff for only one purpose: To HARRASS ANY LIBERAL in this forum. Notice the same bogus claim and parallel structure in each of the following comments:

IFindThisHumorous - the guy was an anti-Bush liberal [my bold]
Sensical Thinker - he was a Bush-hating liberal [my bold]
Herb Smoker - He is a Bush Hating pot smoker just like you [my bold]

These comments confirm the impression that there are Freeper trolls who single out liberals for bullying, harassment, and ultimately persecution. I am even more shocked that your bosses who run this forum tolerate this kind of gang-up mentality, especially in the aftermath of the recent Tucson massacre. Evidently, Detroit News has learned nothing from this tragedy and continues to purvey a business-as-usual form of low-life partisanship. This is junk journalism at its worst.

A quick Google search of “anti-Islam" rhetoric retrieves 421,000 articles in 0.14 seconds, articles such as these:

White Supremacists Find Common Cause with Pam Geller’s Anti-Islam Campaign

Media rife with anti-Muslim rhetoric

Anti Muslim Rhetoric Reaching a Dangerous Level

Anti-Muslim rhetoric threatens fundamental rights

Over 420,000 more just like the above; hate speech from pols and pundits such as Newt Gingrich, Martin Peretz, Patrick Buchanan, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Morris, Tea Party candidate Lou Ann Zelenik, and Republican Congressman Peter King; in towns and cities from coast to coast such as New York, Gainesville, Murfreesboro, Oklahoma City, and now Detroit.

Predictably, right wing trolls crawl out of the woodwork and double down on stereotypic rhetoric … accusing all liberals of “Blood Libel” in the name of that dreaded liberal conspiracy of all conspiracies, political correctness. Character assassination, sandbox bullying, and slander - these are not free speech. We do not allow children to bully children at school; yet we tolerate this kind of bullshit from adults!  How many innocent bystanders, judges, and children will be killed on the street before the mental and moral midgets of the far right finally get the message!

You Might Be a Troll If... (A Long Essay on Trolls and Trollery)

By Bloggingdino

We use the term “troll” gleefully across the Cybertubes, so how about some reflection on that concept? A while back, Octo brought to our attention a fine pair of April, 2008 essays by Interrobang (apparently an old student of rhetoric) entitled How to Argue Like a Right-Winger, Part 1 and Part 2. What I write below is loosely inspired by those essays, and in some cases I’ve borrowed or adapted from IB’s categorizations; but on the whole, I’ve tried to respect the uniqueness of IB’s work and have rearranged and added categories, etc. Please have a look at the originals – they’re excellent and they offer concrete examples. I’ve also stepped back from making this all about right-wingety deviousness, although obviously I don’t think we “Marxist sociopaths” do as much troll-work as the right.

First of all, let’s just say that no matter who engages in Das Tröllerei,* none of the tactics detailed below would be necessary if the people self-consciously using them were interested in the truth or had the slightest chance of prevailing by means of sound argumentation. If you do this stuff on purpose, you’re just being a jerk and trying for some nefarious purpose (or maybe even no purpose at all), to frustrate the conversation amongst well-intentioned, well-informed, intelligent people. If that’s you, John Milton has you pegged – the man had a way of tracing everything back to its grand origins. Okay Belial, thou raiser-up to bad eminence of bogus persuasive speech, read it and weep, straight from Paradise Lost 2:110-17):

A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seemd
For dignity compos’d and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas’d the ear ….

Get thee behind me! You know the work of civilization is hard, with its demand that we rise above our sordid selves by means of artifice; by an insistence, that is, on civility, decorum, and reason. Proper treatment of language is a big part of all this. Just maintaining our ability to think clearly, to concentrate, is the product of great care and persistence, and everyone knows how easily our minds wander, how easily we are swallowed up by triviality, linguistic abuse and wrangling, egotism, and anger. But always to set this care to naught is your perpetual task. You would bring our noblest ideals and designs to nothing, replacing them with the fruits of evil, fear, and confusion. I’d call you a stage villain, but that would be giving you too much credit.

I don’t write any of this material in the naïve expectation that we will arrive at some discursive utopia wherein people who disagree profoundly can all be good friends. In fact, I suggest that it’s hardly worth bothering with the old model of writing to win over those who identify with a perspective inimical to our own. I’m kind of with Wilde’s Lord Harry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray on that one: “I never argue. Only the intellectually lost ever argue.” A minute spent trying to win over a fool is probably a minute wasted, one that I could have used to read some Italian or French, or whatever. Heck, staring into space would be more productive than trying to convince some jackass that 2 + 2 = 4 and not “2+ 2 = 7 times 3 divided by Barack Obama is Hitler.”

One thing I really like about IB’s essays is that they often counsel calling attention to the devious tactic itself – rhetorical outing, so to speak. That can come across as a bit rude (almost like correcting someone’s grammar, however much that someone may deserve a whole can of syntactical whoopass right in the beak), but I think it’s true that it’s effective because it calls attention to the metadramatics of the argument; people in general don’t like being taken for suckers, so if you point out that somebody’s using a slick rhetorical tactic because he or she thinks we’re all too dumb to notice, the audience may well sympathize with the pointer-outer, not the slickster.

Still, a word of caution on all this is in order before I roll out my whimsical and incomplete slickster categories. The word “troll” itself is an easy categorization that shouldn’t escape scrutiny. The tactics described below aren’t all necessarily extrinsic to or mutually exclusive of genuine means of persuasion, i.e. “rhetoric.” Maybe the worst of them are, but at some level, even those trying to be honest may end up engaging in some amount of categorization, word-play, and so forth: the work of interpretation isn’t easy, and thinking relies on categorizations. Anybody who’s read Nietzsche should know that “concepts” and “categories” are in themselves sort of an essentialist sham that can trick us into thinking we know things we really don’t. So there! Also sprach Zarathustra. And then there’s the fact that many people may ignorantly, but in good faith, proceed in a manner that is indistinguishable from self-conscious trollery. As with obscenity, “I know it when I see it” is fun to say and worth something, but it’s hardly an absolute standard. I don’t know that there’s a solid way to make a universal-assentworthy judgment about troll-speak the way Uncle Manny Kant says there is for making a judgment about a beautiful shape or object. I may be able to say, “this rose is beautiful” and insist that y’all agree, but I’m not so sure I can say, “this writer is a troll” and insist that y’all agree.

And who among us has not sinned? Who hasn’t called an opponent an ass, or gotten snippy, or been presumptuous about what others “must” think, and so forth? Reflection on our own tendencies is in order, too: with me, for instance, it’s erudition – I can bedazzle people with book larnin’ – quotes in half a dozen languages, references to literary authors both canonical and obscure, etc. But that sort of thing can easily degenerate to the level of the cheap pun, and it shouldn’t take the place of sound reasoning. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know with certainty the intentions of another, so let those who are perfect be quick to cast the first e-stones. And may our own minds be as free as possible from temptation as we lay up our rhetorical edifices from one day to the next, for Nisi Dominus ædificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui ædificant eam. (Psalm 126, Vulgate Bible; KJV: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” The Lord really ought to do something about those sub-prime mortgages, though. Okay, so here goes:

YOU MIGHT BE A TROLL IF:

1. You make big claims and sweeping philosophical statements based on no discernible evidence or justification, and simply expect others to grant you this initial point. Your opponent is in trouble now because you control the argument’s initial premise and should be able to steer them towards your own conclusion. (Bullying Assent to First Premise)

2. You make bald and even grandiose assertions (as stated in 1) and then put the burden of disproof on others. When they provide the necessary disproof, you insatiably demand still more evidence. This tactic turns your opponent into a servant who can never please you or meet your demands. (Moving the Goalposts)

3. You don’t even try to make a coherent argument but instead toss out incoherent assertions, premises, facts, questions, and whatnot either in toto or on the fly, as you respond to others’ criticisms of what you’ve said. The point is to confuse and frustrate your opponents until they give up, at which point you will seem to have won the argument. It takes time to refute even one false claim or logical fallacy – hit them with twenty and you’ll drive them to distraction. You’re still a bad person. (Gish Gallop)

4. You have a Belial-like love of word wrangling and contextual confusion-mongering that would put the Medieval Schoolmen to shame. At some point in many of your exchanges with those wicked people who dare to disagree with you, your comments start to sound pretty much like this: “If only you would pay attention to my words! I didn't say what you said I said because you didn't say you said she said I claimed you said x and I never said y in the first place even if you persist in saying I said z. So there!” You do this even when your honorable opponent is manifestly quoting what you’ve just written, verbatim. (The Maze/Word-Wrangling & Quibbling)

5. You consistently and boorishly misuse words that have a long history of meaning a certain thing, or you use them as taunts. You almost always refer to your opponents as “Rethugs” or “The Democrat Party,” the latter even though you know damn well that the proper adjective is “Democratic.” You sling around terms like “socialism” and “fascism” with abandon either without knowing what they mean or without caring even though you actually have a pretty good idea how to delimit them properly. The power to choose the terms by which we proceed with an argument or define our opponents is immense. But in a more sordid vein, the point of this tacky and abusive exercise is to annoy others, to get under their skin and waste their time. You know they’re right and you’re brazenly misusing language, but you don't care because you’re with Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.

“Of course you don’t -- till I tell you. I meant ‘there's a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that's all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. . . .

6. You state your opponents’ philosophy and arguments in a preposterously extreme manner so you can demolish them with ease. The resulting viewpoint is well beyond the level of caricature since the latter, after all, is based upon an accurate conception of its original,* while the strawman argument need not be. Caricature has been the instrument of great artists; strawmen are for triflers. (Strawman)

7. You attack the character and integrity of your opponent. We all know how common this is in political campaigns, and it works online, too: no matter how patently false the charge, a percentage of hearers will believe it to their dying breath. (Nothing is easier to destroy than a person’s reputation.) A variety of the ad hominem tactic is to attack the opponent for his or her very erudition and literacy. Any three- or – gasp! – four-syllable words in there? Just ignore the annoyingly precise and correct substance, call the writer “arrogant” and “elitist,” and then shore up solidarity with those who agree with your own stupid-ox, monosyllabic point of view. Smarty-pants eggheads! You’ll fix them! (Argumentum ad hominem)

8. When somebody is getting the better of you in an argument, you change the subject and get upset if anybody points out what you’ve done. Ever try to have a conversation with a person who blocks all attempts to pursue any one topic? Immensely frustrating and, therefore, effective if your rhetorical goal is to evade capture by a more powerful, wiser opponent. (Changing the Subject/Scatterbrain)

9. You persistently associate things that really have no connection: one key purpose here is to devalue or condemn a given idea, term, practice, or person by asserting a link with another that people don’t like. Want to invade Iraq? Easy -- Saddam: al Qaeda | Saddam: al Qaeda, | Saddam: al Qaeda (and/or WMD) | Saddam: al Qaeda (and/or WMD), etc. Result: Oh, alright already – bring it on! We might even call this a species of The Big Lie™: “nobody would keep making that connection if it weren’t true! They dare not, for shame!” – except, of course, dear blogger, that you have no shame. (Conflation)

10. You assert that two phenomena are equivalent – equally outrageous, prevalent, important, or problematic – when they clearly aren’t. If a piecemeal army of right-wing militiamen is running around in the nation’s forests preparing in deadly earnest for Armageddon, you simply compare their activities to a couple of rude words offered up by lefties at some town hall meeting, or dredge up an account of the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weathermen from decades ago. See? Everybody’s doing the Extremist! Trouble is, they’re not. At present, violence-tending radicalism is almost entirely the province of the far right. (False Comparison/False Equivalence)

11. You do unpleasant things such as lie, distort, misquote, harp, carp, nitpick, accuse, slander, insult, heckle, engage in angry outbursts, fail to appreciate irony and humor, etc., all the while accusing your opponents of precisely such behavior even though they’ve exhibited no more than understandable frustration with your incivility and incoherence. Freudian stuff to the core: deflect contemplation of your own anxiety, guilt, dishonesty, bad faith, and bad conduct by projecting them onto others. This allows you to externalize your inner demons and completely derail the argumentative process because now the other person – who actually does care about honesty and good faith -- is busy responding to your false accusations rather than advancing a claim or view. (Projection)

12. You make ridiculous, obviously false, or hateful comments and then act wounded when somebody on the other side bluntly says your statements are ridiculous, false, or hateful. Oh Lord, where is civility to be found in this naughty world? Then, since your nicey-nicey opponents don’t like to hurt others’ feelings, you can take maximum advantage of that weakness on their part. But you’re an outrageous provocateur and an extremist – ’tis your own incivility that has tried the patience of others. And now you want them to feel guilty? (Tone, Plea for Civility)

13. Pretend to agree with your opponents’ policy/candidate suggestions or general outlook, but introduce some sham concern just to distract them and derail the argument, undermine the candidate they support, etc. You really like that Barrack Obumuh feller, but this or that (bogus) concern about something he did ten years ago, or, better yet, about what others less generous than yourself might opine, makes you anxious about his candidacy. Meaning that you really support some other Democrat anyhow but won’t admit it, or that you’re on the other side altogether and don’t want Obama to win the primaries because you are afraid he is the most likely Dem to get elected president over your guy. (Fellow Traveler/Concern Troll)

14. Instead of bothering to read your opponent’s nuanced argument – who has time to do that nowadays? – you pick a couple of key terms and fill in the rest, thereby turning the opponent’s complex thoughts into simplistic, third-rate hack work, parroting the party line, ideological twaddle, and so forth. It’s easy as apple pie to demolish such rubbish, no? Whenever you find yourself assuming, “the writer is a liberal or a conservative, and therefore thinks x, y, and z,” bingo! (Keyword Fallacy/Instant Categorization)

*Whatever Aristotle may imply in his Rhetoric or Nicomachean Ethics or Politics (I forget which—I am getting lazy these days!) about how we kaloi androi or honest, good people may be free to wield certain devices without bringing ourselves down to the level of knaves; and whatever Plato may say about how it’s perhaps okay for the rulers to tell a fib or two for the people’s good.

*Dickens’ phony ultracapitalist Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times is an example of a caricature that strikes home. His absurd “I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” posturing mocks laissez-faire ideological abstractionism.

HOW TO SABOTAGE YOUR OWN CAUSE (AND SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT)

The climate change deniers have their legions of climate change denier trolls out in force, and the trolls have been trashing and bashing the liberal blogosphere.

If there is proof of one hypothesis, one can well understand why climate scientists want to insulate themselves from reactionaries who would waste their time and harass them at every turn.

This is how reactionary wingers divert public attention at a crucial time: Hack into a computer system (illegal by the way), steal 20,000 e-mails (illegal by the way), invent a controversy, start conspiracy rumors, slander a scientist, make news and noise, distract, distract, distract. The bastards are damn good at it too. Witness how teabagging astroturfers derailed the healthcare reform debate. Now they are stalking global climate change (they love their see-oh-two more than life itself).

Right now I am having an argument with a liberal forum that cross-posts my articles. I complained about trolls, but the forum does not believe in censorship. "The trolls should be allowed to embarrass themselves," goes the argument.

I say: “Trolls never feel embarrassment, and intelligent readers don’t need a demonstration.” Furthermore, a forum that enables trolls enables their cause and merely intensifies the distractions with self-defeating tolerance.

Why the hell are liberal bloggers having this argument? Yup, another distraction, another casualty of the climate change deniers and their trolls. The deniers and their trolls have their own blogs and websites; why should we let them hijack and disrupt ours?

DEMOGRAPHIC CLUSTERING AND THE SELF-SEGREGATION OF AMERICA

This post is long overdue. It is inspired in part from this commentary, Suffer the Little Children, by Southern Beale and this incident, Hate Begets Hate, reported by Southern Female Lawyer, who recalled this conversation with a stranger while shopping:

They have a young child and just couldn’t bear the thought of their child growing up in this sort of cultural environment … But the straw that broke their hearts was when they were at a local flea market … and there was a vendor there selling Klan material. And as it turns out, this woman and her family are of a group that is frequently targeted by the Klan …

Here is Southern Beale’s follow-up commentary:

What is the point of all the battles over de-segregation and all of the ground gained over the past 30 years if we’re going to self-segregate anyway? I certainly can’t fault anyone for doing what they think is best for their children … But the entire conundrum depresses me.

Indeed, one can hardly fault any family for wanting to keep their children safe from bigots. Yet, this tendency to self-segregate runs deeper than we realize. We no longer cluster along ethnic, racial, or economic lines; we self-segregate along political and cultural lines … with potentially dangerous consequences.

This is the thesis of Bob Bishop’s landmark study, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. According to Bishop, the terms “red state” and “blue state” no longer refer to those states that return Republican or Democratic majorities, but to groups of people clustered within communities who self-identify across an array of opinion: liberal versus conservative, urban versus rural, and religious versus non-religious, as examples.

As evidence, Bishop cites major changes in the electoral map over the past 33 years. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the presidency by a razor thin margin; yet 26.8% of the vote came from landslide districts where Carter won or lost by 20% or more. The number of landslide districts had grown to 48% by 2004 … almost double since the Carter era.

Another study compares educational attainment and geographic mobility. In the 1980s and 1990s, 45% of Americans with a college degree moved from state to state within 5 years after graduation, compared with only 19% of the population having a high school education.

It is not difficult to imagine how and why we make conscious decisions that alter the electoral map. When we canvass neighborhoods looking for a place to live, we tend to notice the McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden signs in front yards. We may look for a bookstore or a gun shop, or a fundamentalist or Unitarian church in town. When choosing where to live, our decisions are not necessarily guided by economic considerations, but by cultural and lifestyle choices.

(O)CT(O)PUS is no less guilty. I am a northern transplant living in a southern state. There is a saying where I live: “The further south you go, the more likely you will meet northerners.” I have witnessed racism at both ends. Racism is palpable and visible in the South; racism renders you invisible in the North. In the South, racism is a snake that strikes suddenly; in the north, racism means a slow, agonizing death by venom.

After the hurricane season of 2004, I turned refugee. I sold my beachfront home and moved to Lake County along the central ridge where I learned: Racism is cultural and systemic, not merely historical.

Lake County Florida is infamous for the case of the Groveland Four, an all too familiar story about the alleged rape of a white woman by four men who were beaten and forced to walk barefoot over broken glass until they confessed. It is the story of a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall who appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, about a sheriff who was a Klan member, and the murder of two civil rights activists whose home was bombed on Christmas Eve.

I witnessed weekly acts of racism in the local cafes; the harassment of a black woman at a lunch counter; epithets hurled at a black family by a passing bigot. As I witnessed these encounters, I felt assaulted. When I spoke out, I almost got assaulted.

After a year, I returned to the coast where I bought a condo. My Lake County home along the central ridge, my refuge from coastal storms, remains unsold. Having witnessed racism first hand, I can well understand a family's concerns for the welfare of their children.

Yet, we pay a price for surrender. Over time, according to Bishop, a preference for living with like-minded neighbors in extreme homogeneous communities incubates ever more extremist views. Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members to Congress while moderate candidates shun public office. Among highly polarized lawmakers, debates degenerate into shouting matches as legislators engage in obstruction and gridlock. That is how our most urgent and pressing issues go unresolved.

Due to clustering, we are less likely to converse with people holding different views and more likely to caricature them. Democrats and Republicans alike are more likely to assume the worst, each regarding the other as “incomprehensible.” Even in the judiciary, Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. As Bishop states:

“ We now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”

This discussion about clustering and the dangers of a “Balkanized” America leads me to an overwhelming question. When I look at our comment policy, we are remarkably efficient at dispatching unwelcome trolls … and rightfully so. When I read the first sentence, the one that states, “We welcome civil discourse from people of all persuasions,” I wonder: How welcoming are we? We tend to treat conservative visitors with suspicion, not always with justification.

Let me elaborate. Recently, we had a visitor who said: “Thanks for not flaming me or deriding me or calling me ridiculous names as has been done on other sites by less than honorable liberals.” Patrick of Sane Political Discourse has always been a civil and respectful guest on our beach. I reserve my highest compliments for Pamela of The Oracular Opinion. There were times when I leveled harsh criticism, but Pamela has never wavered. She treats all bloggers, conservative and liberal alike, with the utmost kindness and respect (even after being miserably mistreated by an overly aggressive cephalopod).

So what do you say, fellow beachcombers? Shall we swim against the tide and give our conservative guests a chance to establish themselves as friends and neighbors before we dismiss them as trolls? I welcome your feedback.

When trolls attack

"How's the hope and change thing working out for you, moron?" reads the comment. If you're a blogger outside the red tribe, you're used to this sort of thing. You're used to the cut and paste pop culture snark bombs: how's the _____ working out, I don't think so, Hello, etc. Of course trying to rule while wearing only the hollow crown of cynicism only exposes the nakedness and weakness of someone who has to rely on mimicking sitcom characters to simulate insight or wit; and of course the smartest people around are called morons more often than the rest of us; far more often than actual morons are. It's a fact.

Of course if you look back at every post I've made in the last few years, you'll not find a single "hope and change"slogan. In fact if you have the patience and stomach to read all or part of it, you'll note that I'm most consistently a doom and gloom nihilist with no hope for or expectation of change, unless it be decay. Still, I'm sure the armchair assassin thinks he really scored and perhaps he's getting his 5$ per post bonus from the GOP to boot. There's nothing to be done really and as I said, I'm a nihilist and a pessimist; I expect no better from my fellow apes.

If I did, I would have to feel insulted by the assumption that I was stupid enough to think a new president -- any new president -- could reverse the damage of decades in two months: two months of sabotage and opposition by people who ran the ship aground and pay sticky-fingered troglodytes to ask how the hope and change is going for us. Need we ask how the election went for them? or how the supply side, zero regulation market thing is going? Those tax breaks for Wall Street tycoons making you rich? Hello! I don't think so!

Why Respond to Disrespectful, Non-Serious Comments?

When we receive posts obviously written by those who don't mean us well, why not just ignore them rather than respond? A blog isn’t an invitation for others to call the blog’s authors names or write flippant, disrespectful comments. Differences of opinion are fine, but it’s clear that somebody who posts a comment merely to call a poster names isn’t trying to advance an intelligent viewpoint. If you respond, you’re doing exactly what they want you to do. Please ignore them. I don't even bother reading comments written by people with trollish handles -- it saves me time and spares me annoyance.