Look down at your system clock. And take note of the number of seconds right about…. NOW!

OK. If that number is PRIME, you’re a dirty rotten PRIMEY! You’re a mean, know-nothing brat who is arrogant and full of his or herself. Heck you can’t even be DIVIDED by anything? How can you know what it’s like to be REAL NUMBER if you haven’t ever experienced being divided? And yet some of you, in fact a growing number of you, have the AUDACITY to act NON-Prime! HOW DARE YOU!!! 

I weep for this decline in the primey kind. It’s so sad that they were taught so little in the way of morality that they don’t know how to act like the ignorant primeys they are. Wait until you have some divisors before you dare to pretend you know what you are talking about! And take the time to listen to the inherent WISDOM of your non-prime brethren like ME.

As for you Non-Primes, thought you’d get off easy too didn’t you? NO! I’m seen far too many of you Non-Primes acting pathetically like PRIMEYS! Pretending to have no divisors! That’s just backwards and stupid. STOP IT RIGHT NOW! You look like idiots when you do that and it’s embarrassing to us other non-primes. Being a Primey is not something to be proud of! Start acting like the Non-Primes you are!

Now I’m sure most of you non-primes will see the wisdom and truth of what I’ve said and post comments in absolute agreement with me. Good. That you agree only shows you are acting appropriately like a non-prime.

Those few of you primeys will undoubtedly post comments whining about how you’ve been wronged by my fair words. You won’t even realize I’ve been equally critical of primeys as I have of non-primeys. Of course.  It’s to be expected.  It’s not your fault. I mean you ARE just primeys after all.  You just don’t know any better yet. One day when you visit this site and read this entry at a time where the seconds are non-prime you’ll understand though. You’ll get my point.

In the mean time of course between the primeys who prove my point with their whiny primey-like comments and the far greater number of non-primeys who agree with me I think that I can easily say I’ve PROVEN my position.

QED.  I WIN AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!

W00T

P.S. I am not drunk. However, I AM a Jerk. At times. And I’m also about 89% still asleep as I write this….

I know this blog is probably going to be controversial. I’ll probably piss a bunch of you off and you’ll all de-friend me. But that’s ok. The truth must be told!

You see, in all my research and based on all my years of experience in blogging and my obvious inherent wisdom I’ve come to the following conclusion:

Now I know some of you are going to reply to this with rude, offensive, angry, and disgusted comments. Some of you will say “But I’m not a whiny little brat!”  and others will say “How dare you make such a baseless generalization!” .

I mean really? Such childish comments. How immature can you be? Quit your whining!

That’s ok though, every single one of you who responds that way will just prove my point: that you’re all a bunch of whiny little brats! I’ll write numerous posts describing how you’ve with your bratty behavior on my blog ironically proven exactly my point. 

See? No matter what. I WIN!

W00T!!

It’s amazing how the right wing can turn an article used to REFUTE bogus claims about illegal immigration into support for their positions.  It’s important to actually take the time to read what FactCheck.org ACTUALLY has to say about illegal immigration. Here’s the article:

Yesterday I went to Target. No not Walmart. I no longer buy from those evil bastards. Target is probably just as evil but if I go that line of reasoning soon I’ll have to make everything myself by hand. And while that might be an interesting learning experience, I suspect it would get boring, fast.

Anyway I bought:
A vacuum cleaner
A steam cleaner
Cheap Gardening Shears (that look like scissors)
Cheap Ratchet Pruning Shears
Gardening Gloves
A Small Shovel

I would have gotten one of those paper masks that you use to keep yourself from being exposed to flu viruses too but I couldn’t find it. I also was supposed to get one of those Air purifier thingies but I forgot what brand I had decided to get. I will get these two things as soon as possible.

Today I picked some red berries that were growing on a plant that leads up to my office.

Those are your clues. Now it’s up to you to determine what my nefarious purpose must be! You have less than 48 hours or else it will be too late!

Last night I dreamed all night.

ALL NIGHT.

I never dream all night. Rarely do I dream at all and almost never so that I remember it and very rarely such that I am aware I am dreaming. But last night I was aware of all my dreams and they were quite extensive.

One dream was like the best dream I think I’ve ever had. There was nothing tense about it. No stress. No worry.  Nothing sexual or romantic or exciting or adventurous. There was like no story to it nor any challenge or striving. No triumph or victory and yet no loss or despair or fear or sorrow. No sense of disappointment.

It was just, a series of very simple ordinary scenes of a simple ordinary life, peaceful and tranquil with the only interesting aspects being a perpetual animosity-less joking sort of fight I was having with a girl I meet during the course of the dream whom I’ve never met in real life. It was really weird and hard to explain. Almost sort of like we played practical jokes on one another but there were a lot of other people involved who were living in this big house in which most of the content of the dream took place. I got the impression some of the people were my family members and some were hers.

In the end of the dream there was a hurricane coming and we were getting ready for it and there was some concern levies might break and we’d all drown.  There were questions of how we should get news and whether we should go to the roof. But there was no sense of fear except for the slight fear that some of the people wouldn’t make it home in time so we could wait out the hurricane. But almost as soon as the thought crossed my mind they arrived.

The dream shifted after that and I was in a store getting contact lenses, something I’ve never warn in real life. And there was a ton of dreaming just revolving around the process of getting and trying on contact lenses. There was some reason in the dream that I really needed to get them and the eye doctor was like really pleased that I was finally switching since my prescription was so bad that I really needed contacts or something. It was weird as it was like they had very special procedures just for people with eyesight as bad as mine. And there was talk that this was much cheaper than me ultimately needed surgery. There was some sort of new contact lenses technology that made it much more effective than normal glasses.

There was at least one other extensive dream after that but for some reason it’s escaping me right now. Serves me right for waiting so long to write about it.  But anyway it was another weird non-threatening mostly uninteresting and entirely restful dream.

And when I woke I felt fully rested and in a very good mood.

And at the same time entirely creep-ed out.

I don’t like weird dreams. I don’t like it when I dream in ways that I don’t usually dream. Or when I sleep unusually comfortably.  This didn’t feel like something I would experience, didn’t feel like something my mind would come up with, didn’t feel ordinary at all. It contradicts my general expectations and I don’t like that. I don’t want any force messing with the way my mind works, even if it’s just my twisted subconscious. I like things to be simple and concrete. Things I can understand.

BTW I’ve been playing this stupidass game called Vampire Wars on Facebook almost perpetually. I’ve also been playing stupid farmville a bit too. Why are games on facebook so cheesy and yet so addictive? I don’t even like vampires. OR farming for that matter. Weird.

I have read some lately believe it or not.

A book called Godplayers I read was really good. I read it in two days so it was addictive enough. The ending was stupid and didn’t make any sense and all and all it had very little in the way of coherent plot. But it had a lot of fascinating interesting stuff about the scope and shape of the universe. Lots of math and linguistics and physics and computer stuff all mixed together with mysticism and history to create a weirdass universe. It was more of a classic Scifi novel that you don’t see that much of anymore these days. I was never a huge fan of those, but even so I enjoyed this. Next I have to read K-Machines which tells the same story from a different perspective.

I also read a book of short stories taking place in the world of Mercedes Lackey. It was alright. The first story was Scooby Doo with Heralds. That was just silly. Some of the other stories by other authors were bad enough that they pissed me off. It was reminiscent of when I was a kid I’d read these Dragonlance books of short stories only to realize that I should only read the core books in that series cuz everything else pretty much just sucks.

I reread Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn a book I haven’t read since I was really young, in High School I think. It wasn’t as good as I remembered it being. Very sappy. The end was dark. Sort of a soap opera-ish book. And this time the main characters really annoyed me. Oh well. It was still well written and very easy to get into.

I also read the manga Tarot Cafe, all the issues that are out right now. It was interesting especially since I’ve recently gotten interested in Tarot largely because I think I can turn it into a multimillion dollar TCG. But also because tarot is interesting. The manga was less interesting though, but still alright. Hard to get into.

I need to read the Mistborn series of books as soon as possible because I learned while I was in Texas that the author who wrote them is going to be the one to finish the Robert Jordan series. He’s going to do it in 3 books apparently instead of just one. I hope he’s good enough.

Next up for reading is some PERN book. I’ve already read a few pages. It’s weird. But at least soon I’ll know what the heck everyone is talking about when they reference pern in forums and whatnot.

Was planning on writing a long entry detailing my adventures in the great land of Texas but I’ve been really lazy about it. I may yet do it.

Xanga message system really needs a save draft option. It’s annoying that I started to write a really long letter and it got deleted, when my browser weirded out on me.  And now I have to copy back and forth from google docs to write it to be safe. Anyways, I suppose I’ll finish it, like all my other projects, some time before the end of time.

Final Fantasy IV The After Years is amazing. It’s too expensive but if you loved Final Fantasy IV you should play it! It’s sooo true to the original it’s nearly perfect. It’s for the Wii btw.

I on the way to being all powerful in Lost Odyssey. Just throwing that out there. Next up is Fable II or Assassin’s Creed or Portal. Eventually I’ll get back to Blue Dragon too.

Transformers II was pretty good like I said but I liked the first better. I like movies where things blow up.  Star Trek was the best movie of the Summer hands down. UP was also quite decent. Terminator was a severe disappointment. I can’t remember if I saw any other movies.

I’m watching an anime called Utawararerumono or something like that. Not sure how many wa, ra, re, ru, whatevers are in the middle of uta and mono and I’m too lazy to look it up right now. It’s ok so far. It’s like a strategy game turned into an anime. In fact, that’s exactly what it is, a strategy erogi game. 

Haven’t really watched much anime other than that lately.

I’ve been watching a TV series called Kings. It was canceled, but it’s still interesting.

Torchwood Season 3 was AMAZING.  But the writers are evil murdering *bastards*. I hate them.

I have gifts to send to four people and I owe $350 to my parents for an investment club thingy (which I highly doubt is a good idea, but what can it hurt to try? we should probably be investing in China…). Life is EXPENSIVE.

Mostly I’ve been reading stuff online. Politics and all that. Twitter is an amazing resource for getting links to really good articles about a large plethora of interesting topics. It might seem like a silly tool, but it’s an extremely powerful platform that will have a huge impact on life and society for the foreseeable future.

You should all watch Democracy Now EVERY DAY. It’s the best and most honest news show that exists. More recommendations for where to get information will come in a later post.

Enough rambling.

Now back to programming.

Watch this video to learn interesting things about how our financial/political system works:

Basically what this tells us is… we live in a pretty fucked up world. Nothing we think is happening is happening for the reasons we think they are happening. Our entire economy is a big betting game played by rich people at our expense. It’s enough to make a grown man weep. This HAS to change. Now.

Really seeing this trailer was the best part of watching Transformers II:

I can’t fucking WAIT for this movie. It looks like they did an incredible job of it.

As always, here’s me jumping into a conflict long after pretty much everyone has forgotten about it….

Anyway, it was suggested that Transformers II was racist because of the portrayal of The Twins: Mudflap and Skids. Namely that these two characters reflect and project negative racial stereotypes of black youth culture. The most offensive line supposedly is the one where they claim to be illiterate, which combined with their other less than brilliant behavior makes the two characters seem rather dumb.

I see where the critics are coming from, I really do, but honestly I find it hard to get behind this critique.  When taken  by itself, sure, The Twins are a horribly non-flattering portrayal of a particular societal stereotype and if it were in another more serious movie I’d be the first to condemn them.  And at first before I saw the movie I thought I would hate these characters even more than I despised Jar Jar Binks.

But then I saw the movie.

And after having seen it, I just have to laugh at this controversy. It’s so absurd. Yes the Twins are bad stereotypes.  BUT SO IS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE MOVIE!

Seriously. It’s all non-flattering portrayals. From the typical white suburban family in the form of Sam’s Family, to the portrayal of a drugs infested party crazed 40K a year college scene complete with a narcissistic creepy astronomy professor. Nothing here is flattering. It’s ALL cliche. The potrayal of white America is at least as bad as black. The portrayal of women in this film is particularly worthy of scorn. Even the military is a big standard cookie cutter military cliche. The cowardly hispanic hacker kid along with his nerd allies are a cliche. The ex-CIA agent who lives with his mother and whose family owns a meat locker is a cliche. The whiny director of intelligence who arbitrarily wants to shut down the transformers program for no apparent reason and ends up pulling the wrong parachute chord is a cliche.  The whole movie is like this.

And on the transformers side there’s even a reason for it built right into the plot at least if you’ve seen the first one. Each of the transformers takes their speech patterns from watching television and listening to the radio. They explain that quite clearly in the first movie. So it stands to reason that they might model their speech patterns based on predominant cliches in said same media.  Hence you get sniveling starscream, and trigger happy ironhide,  and you remember poor fallen hip hop oriented Jazz from the first movie? Not to mention the quintessential old man stereoype of jetfire. And let’s not even get started on Wheelie. They’re all like this. Even Optimus Prime and Megatron are even classical cliche portrayals of basic heroism and villainy. It was like this in the original cartoon too.

Really if one is to take great exception at the portrayal of skids and mudflap then they should take exception at the entire film. It’s full of sexism, racism, stereotypes, and gratuitious violence and sexual innuendo. And that’s the point.  The point is to be a completely cheesy cartoon action film. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more. It’s not meant to be a work of art. It’s supposed to be funny and exciting in a silly overly exaggerated way. Nobody turns out looking particularly golden with the exception of the cheesy epitome of good Optimus Prime himself. The film even manages to make President Obama look like a moron even though he isn’t even in the film. And iirc the previous film likewise bashed Bush.  No, all the major characters come off as sometimes a bad joke, sometimes a heroic figure.  And yes even Mudflap and Skids have their moment of heroic triumph when they do some serious damage to the far larger and more powerful decepticon Devastator. 

The illiteracy thing is really dumb. The symbols the two were referring to, *nobody* could read except for the ancient Primes and the oldest of the autobots and decepticons like jetfire. So skids and mudflap admitting they can’t read that is like admitting I can’t read ancient sumerian. That hardly makes them stupid.

I’m sure the writers are today wishing they had used a different phrase for them to express their ignorance than “We don’t do much reading”. But even that I think has been blown way out of proportion. They were referring to the text at hand in particular and even had they not been, saying you don’t do much reading is not at all the same thing as saying you can’t read or that your are stupid or ignorant.

Really if you are LOOKING for a controversy it’s often not hard to find one and then find more and more evidence to back it up. But sometimes you ust have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What you think you are seeing might not actually be what you are seeing.

If there is a problem with black portrayals in film and television as projecting bad negative stereotypes (and I wholeheartedly believe there is), Transformers 2 is not a particularly illustrive or even interesting example of that problem. If anything all it does is make us laugh at all kinds of silly film and movie stereotypes with equal fervor.

Honestly I thought the Jar Jar thing was a big stretch too. Sure I hated him. Sure he was a horribly uninteresting bad excuse for comic relief of a character who should never have been in StarWars to begin with. But racist? Maybe a tiny bit but hardly worth mentioning. His horribleness transcended all notions of race.

But this transformers conversey taken in context is IMO astronomically further away from being offensive than Jar Jar was. I mean it’s not for me to say what should or should not offend someone, but for myself I can say, I wasn’t offended *at all*. I thought the two characters were in fact pretty cool and if I were a kid I would have loved to get the toys of them. It would not have hurt my self-esteem at all nor would it have it made me equate “black” with fighting or ignorance.

I can understand if you just think that Michael Bay’s entire body of works is just awful. That his entire style of storytelling is offensive and terrible and just makes for horrible movies that nobody should ever watch. That’s fine. That’s a principled position that I can fully respect. I just happen to disagree because I quite enjoyed both the first and the second Transformers movies. And I enjoyed the bad boys films too which Michael Bay also directed.

However, if you think that somehow with Mudflap and Skids crossed some imperceptible line into total impropriety that nothing else in Michael Bay’s works crosses, I think you’re just being completely absurd.

Sometimes it pays not to overanalyze and take things too seriously. When I went to the theatre more than half the audience was black and nobody got upset at the potrayal of Mudflaps and Skids. Nobody walked out in a huff or a rage. This whole issue seems to be manufactured by a few commentators who seem to either have a beef with Michael Bay or just completely ran out of stuff to talk about.

Seriously there is no controversy here and there never was. Lighten up.

There is a tendency when trying to prove your point to conflate ideas. Never is this MORE true than in discussion of the economy and government spending. There are a lot of people who are anti-government spending On Principal. Doesn’t matter what spending it is, if it’s the government doing it, it’s BAD.

But there’s far more people who *pretend* to have that principal only when it is advantageous to do so. When the country is up and arms against the bailout, they jump right on the bandwagon, but when Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are racking up the bills they are remarkably silent, especially when it’s a Republican President in office that they happen to approve of.

And so you get the silly arguments against the “Bailouts and Stimulus” always thrown together as if they were the same thing. Often the commentators explicitly CALL the Stimulus a Bailout, without identifying which if any companies the Stimulus is bailing out.

Economists see things differently. There are several liberal economists who have some substantial credentials behind their name who predicted the housing bubble, financial crises, and the economic fallout that would result and were wholly ignored by the media and the powers in charge of setting our financial agenda. Economics like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker and Joseph Stiglitz. No small names. They say almost to a man that the Bailouts were poorly handled but that the Stimulus is not too much government spending, it’s TOO LITTLE.

Keynesian economics. Basically as the economy goes into a tailspin and people start laying people off and selling stuff like crazy, there’s unused capacity in the market. To break the downward spiral you need someone to spend money to buy up some of that capacity and put it to use, get money back into the hands of people so they can buy things, build things, invest in things. And if private investors are unwilling or too broke to do so, the spender of last resort ends up being the government. No amount of market fundamentalism will change that. Somebody has to spend to get the economy rolling again. In some way shape or form that’ll be the government. Be that by giving tax cuts, infrastructure projects, grants for entrepreneurs, or jsut hiring people to dig holes and fill them back in, the government in some way will have to pay. If they don’t, the economy just sinks further and further into depression and STAYS there. Stagnating.

It was like that before Obama passed the second stimulus which was supposed to be bigger and larger and better targeted than the first Bush stiumulus. And what he proposed certainly was that. Still, many of these same prescient economists raised objections. Not that the Stimulus was wrong, but that it was waaaay too small. They said, if this is the stimulus we pass, then we’ll need another one sooner rather than later or the economy will get much worse.

So you’d think that then the President’s proposal when it went through Congress would warp and evolve into a bigger more effective bill.

No.

It got *smaller*. Under the weight of Republican criticism and because of the President’s almost excessive desire to compromise the bill shrunk substantially thanks to representatives and senators who were terrified of losing elections for being labeled “pork barrell” spenders. Absurd really.

So now the economic signs suggest as predicted that the Stimulus HAS helped slow the tide of the fall but nowhere near having reversed it. And things have, predictably, gotten much worse. So you’d think, logical people would say “Time for another Stimulus!” But no. Now we hear the chorus of “No More Government Spending! No More Bailouts! No more rising Deficits!”

Nevermind that a stimulus unlike bailouts has a real effect on middle and low income America. Nevermind that a stimulus can be targeted to give direct jobs to real people who need it, or extend unemployment benefits so that regular people can survive while looking for a job. Nevermind that a stimulus doesn’t hide the problem of toxic debts, like bailouts do, but is entirely separate and benefits individuals in all industries.

But the bailouts have all the negative sway. So anyone wanting to stop the Stimulus or more importantly to them I think, make the Democrats looks bad (not a hard thing these days), just hitches the Stimulus idea right on top of the specter of the ideas of bailouts and huge government spending resulting in dangerous Deficits and of course the nightmare of Hyperinflation.  So then any idea of further stimulus, however helpful it might be ends up crushed.

And that’s not the ONLY piece of legislation being crushed by this fearmonger tactic. Healthcare Reform is also being attacked along the same lines. As is environmental legislation. People look at these huge and wholly necessary government programs and see them ON TOP of bailouts and stimuluses and hugely expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and they think, man this is just too much. Surely huge deficits will result if we keep spending like crazy!

Of course this isn’t an irrational fear. Deficits COULD rise due to these programs to dangerous levels. Especially if they don’t WORK.  But that isn’t a fait accompli. If these are programs we SHOULD implement, that are better for our nation in the long run, then we should do so in an attempt to turn our economy around. If we end up having too little money we could always cut back on them later, or better yet, cut back on other things we ought not be spending our money on! Running away with our tail between our legs is NOT a solution to our economic woes. The market is not Magic. Things won’t just amazingly get better for the majority of the people on its own.

The deep problem here is that we’ve already spent the bad money and now that the good programs are being proposed we’re afraid we don’t have enough. Fair enough. Maybe we shouldn’t have spent all that bad money then?

I once heard a woman call into a radio program who made the point very succinctly.  She said: “Why is it that we hear day after day about billions spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and billions or even trillions spent to Bailout Wallstreet but then when it comes to Health Care Reform all of sudden there isn’t enough money to pay for it?”

The response to this brilliant and honest question was horrible. The commentator said something along the lines of this: “if the deficit grows it will be our children and our children’s children that pay the price. Government spending is bad blah blah blah.” 

Don’t get me wrong, he’s right.  Too big of a deficit IS dangerous and we do need to control it or future generations will suffer. But that has nothing to do with the woman’s point.

And her point is well taken. Why is it that the priorities of our government are exactly backwards to that of the people? Whenever progress is made in promoting agendas that people actually want like health care reform, energy independence, social programs, mortgage fore closure relief and education reform, a huge hue and cry goes up about how we’re just squandering money, spending wealth recklessly, bankrupting the country.  But whenever money is spent providing resources to keep the rich companies like banks and automobile manufacturers in business or to promote wars and maintain military bases and prisons that we didn’t even ask for, you never hear a whisper. Those monies are spent long before the people even have a chance to object to them.

Currently our total defense spending is upward to a trillion dollars a year.  Over $600 billion dollars have already spent on Iraq alone. A war we were misled into going into! Spending on the war in Afghanistan is continuing. The Treasury has guaranteed over $1.5 trillion of bank assets. And the $700 billion Tarp fund went directly as loans big banking institutions. All that we’ve *already* spent or locked in our commitment to spend. 

So it’s like only after the rich people and the military people’s interests are taken care of do our politicians ever even consider ours. Is that any surprise though? Why should a politician care about reforming health care when doing so will upset his corporate donors. After all, HE already has pretty damn good insurance. And even if he didn’t most of them are rich enough that they don’t need it. And the same is true of most of their friends and acquaintances.

I’m not saying this is deliberate evil. I’m saying their priorities are based on their experiences and their interests in the political game. The desperation of your average family collapsing under the weight of medical bills and student loans and credit card debt and an upside down mortgage is something they only hear about second hand. It’s not staring them in the face. It isn’t real to them.  So of course bailouts take precedent over health care. Large military budgets take precedent over healthcare. Nonsense debate over whether to have resolutions honoring Michael Jackson takes precedent over healthcare.  Of course it does. It’s not their fault, but it’s because they think that way that they get the money that allows them a chance of winning office.

If we were living in a democracy, we wouldn’t be bickering over saving a few bucks here or there in energy reform and health care reform. Rather, those two things would have been long since done before we even considered the amount of money we might be willing to spend to keep bankers earning their bonuses let alone on unauthorized wars of aggression abroad. We’d be spending money to enhance our manufacturing sector, and develop new businesses and improve our infrastructure long before we spent money to maintain unnecessary bases abroad or wage war in false pretenses in a country most Americans care little about.

But because all our government priorities are all crazily mixed up and have been for generations, politicians, pundits, and lobbyists can get away with this crazy tendency to have to conflate all government expenditures together and paint them all with the same dangerous brush of the eeeevil deficit.

If we’re to get beyond that though we have to start thinking now about each program on its own merits and figure out what we want for ourselves as a nation and how to get it done.

Often we draw the line in arguments on the idea that you ought not argue, out not defend yourself, ought not fight back when someone does or says something cruel to you, or bates you, or attacks you. We say we should not butt in, when our friends are attacked or ridiculed. We say that escalation is wrong. Turn the other cheek. Can’t we all just get along?

I’ve often rejected those kinds of reasoning. Far too often, such behaviors effectively allow the assholes to win. Trolling continues. Bullies still bully. People continue to get hurt. Nothing changes.

But there is some truth to the idea. I think it’s based on something important. The fact is, when people attack often what they are looking for IS the attention. That is when you fight back, you give them what they want. You give them a bigger audience. A bigger microphone. And hence, ultimately, even more power to hurt and harm. Often anything your angry words in reaction to what they say will do to them is, in their minds, a very small price to pay for the increased exposure.

That leaves only two options left. One is to do something so horrible to the person that it is far too costly for them to continue with their abusiveness. That happens sometimes. It’s pretty hard to do online. In real life it usually involves someone going and beating the crap out of the bully to such an extreme extent that the bully becomes afraid of continuing. It’s a gamble, and it might not work. Some bully’s are smart enough to turn a non-fatal beating to their advantage. But it often does work because as they say many bullies are cowards deep down.

Online it’s much harder to cause enough harm to discourage continued abusiveness. It’s extremely difficult to do on your own. You either need a powerful authority to help or you need to get a lot of people to help. And then what you do is something like a DDOS attack. Shutdown their website or make it expensive for them to run. Or in the world of an online forum you effectively run the person out of town by having EVERYONE attack the one person, relentlessly and obsessively to the point where being a part of the community becomes un-fun for the person. They go elsewhere looking for better targets. There are other mechanisms. You can run a big con-job against the person. You can setup an elaborate hoax. You can try to infect the person’s computer with a virus. But most likely the direct group abuse approach is most likely the most effective. In effect, you do an online mob lynching and run the offending individual out of town.

If you’re at all like me this kind of solution strikes you as no better than the problem itself. Basically it raises the degree of cruelty in the environment overall. And there will be collatoral damage. People will even when they agree that the target is a bully or in the wrong find the mechanism through which they were dealt with unsettling. Further it is natural to when subjected to such an environment develop fears that you might be next on the community chopping block. Who knows when they might happen to not like something YOU said or decide to mark YOU as a troll.  These kinds of mob mentalities can easily get out of control. Each seeming moral victory emboldens the crowd and makes the threshold of what is offensive enough to warrant a community response lower.

There’s actually an even deeper risk inherent in this kind of a solution. Mobs are just natural inherently manipulatable. A group of people once brought together even if it is to depose a monstrous individual can very often easily be manipulated and enthralled by another equally monstrous figure. Often it doesn’t start that way, but some influencial speaker or writer starts talking to the crowd bringing them under their will, possibly for good causes, and then gets drunk on the power they have over the masses. Soon they just like being in control. And they know that the only way to keep their power is a steady neverending stream of “causes” to mobilize the people to fight for. We see this kind of behavior in public figures all the time.

There is a way to fight though without playing into these nightmare scenarios even whilst not playing into the Online Bully’s game.  It’s actually fairly simple:

Learn to Depersonalize.

It’s that easy. There are two parts to depersonalization.  One is not to take things personally. The other is not to make things personal.  If you do these two things then you can counter the external attacks in such a way as to make it clear that you do not back down while at the same time not feeding into the trolling tradition. You can earn the respect of your fellow bloggers without them starting to perceive you as being “just as bad” as the person who offended you. You can even often change the perspectives of the people involved, making them see things differently thanks to the force of your cold impersonal logic.

In practice this means you DON’T mention people by name. You DON’T tell everyone you know to go after someone. You DON’T make unsubstantiated accusations about someone. You DON’T spread rumours and generalizations about someone. And you most *certainly* DON’T do any of these things behind someone’s back.

Instead you ask questions. You formulate theories. You try to understand the behavior, what happened, in general terms. You try to see where the person is coming from and why the person is attacking you. And you try to come up with a response that is consistent with as complete an understanding of what happened as you are capable of forming. When someone asks you a bating question in an attempt to start a personal attack on you, try to turn the question around. Try to depersonalize it. Make it not about you. Make it about something general.

In effect I am talking about not turning a simple disagreement into a personal vendetta. No matter how much you feel that someone has attacked you or hurt you, don’t try to draw people to your side and make it an “Us” versus “Them” thing. Instead, simply answer the criticism in a calm, rational, clear, and concise manner. If someone is engaging in behavior that is immoral or unjust by all means mention it, but mention it GENERICALLY. Not “Person X is an Ass for doing Y” but instead “Whenever someone does Y they are being an ass because of reasons A, B, C, etc.”.  See? Sure that doesn’t offend the person as much, but it’s much better than that. It creates a general rule. A principle that people can see and understand and get behind. It’s not just you attacking someone because you’re angry.

And when you do this, you may even find that the behavior you perceived as “trolling” was actually a misunderstanding. The person might actually have an answer or an explanation for their actions. They may even possible have simply acted too quickly out of a strong emotional response and said something they didn’t mean to say. They may even apologize. 

But if instead you attack first and ask questions later the likelihood of any progress being made on a resolution is slim. You’re much more likely to create a life long enemy who will haunt you forever. And maybe multiple enemies. And in the process chances are good someone, even those you didn’t intend to will get hurt.

Discussions are better than wars. If you want to interact in a civilized, adult manner, learn to depersonalize your tense internet interactions.  Don’t mention names. Be bigger than the bickering and petty name calling. Go above and beyond it and struggle instead to make the community better.