A nice cup of rabies

I'd be more interested if someone formulated a Universal Argument Theorem or suchlike, based on observation of various online flamewars and troll-fests, the styles and strategems of argumentation (ranging from outright ad hominem attacks, cunning circumlocution and weaving snares of words, to the typical FYAD troll approach of maximum crassness and juvenile behaviour) and then compare the success-rates of various strategies of debate and argumentation in various venues. Sort of like game theory, but applied to debating tactics - so if someone argues in this manner then derail or stump them with this sort of response, if they argue like this then a specific counter-argument is likely to defeat them.

Or possibly it'd be more akin to some sort of verbal martial art. Flaming strategies would change and evolve to best deal with a threat and trounce them with most efficiency, or most humiliation, or whatever. That'd be pretty cool.

Forum-kata.

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trikotomy.livejournal.com

Not quite what you're looking for, but close. (http://www.proft.org/tips/conv-terror.html)

Y'know, I bet internet flame wars would make a good subject for a collectable card game. Someone plays a topic, and each player gets access to various argument, tactics, and minions of either the "Logical" or "Troll" variety with the goal of reducing their opponents' reputations to zero.

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Consider the idea stolen. :D

And that link is deeply amusing, also, mostly because the examples given can be seen so frequently, online and offline. Thank you kindly for that. n_n

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I think

kevin_pease might've already done something similar... but then, IIRC, his game was called "Debate" so it probably had nothing to do with Internet discussion. ;>

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Oops, nix the underscore.

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sister-bluebird.livejournal.com

I hadn't really been paying attention to this whole thing, as I am neither in the SA or furry camp (beyond "Animal people can be neat to draw and there are some interesting people who do it"), but, well - I can't help but notice that the majority of the trolls seem to have worse attention spans than a small rodent. Did anyone tally the number of times someone said "it's too long, I didn't read it?"

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<relurk,>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

I hadn't really been paying attention to this whole thing, as I am neither in the SA or furry camp (beyond "Animal people can be neat to draw and there are some interesting people who do it"), but, well - I can't help but notice that the majority of the trolls seem to have worse attention spans than a small rodent. Did anyone tally the number of times someone said "it's too long, I didn't read it?"
<relurk, apologies for blither>

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"Too long; didn't read" (or its more common form, tl;dr) is something of a catchphrase at SA, generally posted as a response to some over-long or over-boring anecdote or (more likely) considered, verbose and articulate response to some argument or other. Or at least, it was until it became a banning offense in the GBS forum.

It's, like, ironic self-referential SA humour. Or something. So not only does it snub and derail someone's argument which may offer valid points, but it's also a crafty wink-and-nod to the watching Goons, who can tee-hee to themselves about the joke that teh furreys aren't getting. And saves them the trouble of thinking up counters to their target's point of view.

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sister-bluebird.livejournal.com

Ah. See, that's what I get for not paying attention. :)

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non-grata.livejournal.com

I resent that remark. I have a very good attention sp— ooh, look, a butterfly!

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rtdn.livejournal.com

there's the same sort of divisions in the poe. you've got the general discussion forum and the news forum and the friends-of-poe forum, and then you've got poechat, most of whom don't read the forums anymore at all (and where I do most of my interacting wrt the site, though not often anymore), and then even in the general discussion forum you have people that hang out pretty much exclusively in the furry site fora. the heirarchy works sort of like this: furry fora are at the bottom, then newsies, then general site discussion, then friends-of (except recently friends-of got subjugated by a few trolls no the rank of friends-of is disputable right now), then poechat.

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doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com

And if you haven't heard, it's a double win today, since that Eat All The Furries LJ group has been killed.

Good things come to those who wait.

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Wow, you really can't tell the players without a scorecard, can ya. This is better than Calvinball! :>

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doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com

TRIPLE KRANKO!

From: (Anonymous)

Lowtax: "The Intarnet shall be a Force For Good! Go, my Forum Goons--attack the furries! FLY, FLY, MY PRETTIES!"

Postvixen: "Ohmigosh SOMETHING MUST BE done bastard culture fursecution oppression Harvey Milk!"

SA Goons: "Fag!"

Postvixen: "HAHA you mean nothing to us!"

SA Goons: "Uh--fag?"

Posvixen: "VICTORY YESSSSSS what an IMPORTANT DAY FOR US ALL!"

Watching you guys--and I mean all of you, SA goons and furries alike--I'm reminded of Kipling's bandar-log: you hang around the Internet, the forest canopy of modern civilization, flinging poo and nuts at one another, thinking you're settling important issues and doing great things. But in fact you're doing nothing, influencing nothing, and amounting to nothing. And unless you chose your moment very carefully, if you ventured out of your secure little world you'd be made a meal of in short order.

Lowtax, SA Goons et al: a reminder for you--THE INTERNET IS MEANINGLESS. All the agreement you may get in blogs and online forums doesn't amount to a hill of monkey-poop in real life. Change for good or ill will only be effected by those who know how to go out into the real world, comport themselves as grownups, and earn the respect of people who are are NOT COOL OR HIP beacause they're too busy doing REAL THINGS to maintain a blog or a website. Don't believe me? Just ask Howard Dean.

Postvixen: same to you. Plus the pre-op bitchiness really spoils your attempt to pass.

--Mogachogalagka Dadaism

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Yeah, well, it amused me for a few days. Distracted me from some horrible shit I don't want to deal with that just smacked me upside the head. Again. Every two weeks I get some fucking drama whether I like it or not, now, it seems.

So fuck you, mister oh-so-anonymous. Oh, you're superior, you're detatched, you're out in the Real World. You're so important you can't even be bothered to consistently own your snide remarks on my web journal. Must be busy. Must be important. Must be rich. Yeah. Must be.

Suck my dick.

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My advice for dealing with any troll who has the word "Dadaism" in their name: "make random shit up and they'll be satisfied you're cool like them." It's just a trendy name for the net.hipsters to drop these days -- they wouldn't know from Dada if Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache on their ass, stuck a flower in it, and paraded them around on a unicycle.

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But then, you know, they are shaping our dialogue. Are we getting more jaded and ironic in order to accommodate them and defend against them? Maybe we should have a perfectly serious and naive conversation about sex in inflatable plastic fursuits just to defy them.

But then OH MY GOD, what if that's what they want us to do!? They could be friendly aliens, sent to break our culture down into useless rubble and free us from our own mental prisons! And to think I almost accused him of masturbating to The Baffler ;_; And this whole war has brought the two of us closer together... *impulsively dips monster-dickgrrl low to the ground while kissing her* Maybe our naive counterculture refusenik dreams have finally come true and the Invisible College has found us. Wait, King Mob, come back to us!

Of course, any Dadaist surely realizes that these are all games in the first place, and if I want to amuse myself for the rest of my life by pushing trolls into eye-pleasing arrangements, that's no less noble a goal than heaping bombs upon Kabul or playing currency speculator. I think my next goal is going to be to do to trolls what spam-blockers did to spam: guide their speech until they form beautiful beatnik poetry. In inflatable fursuits.

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I Am Not A Postmodernist (or at least, I've little real understanding of postmodernism beyond the definition by Moe from The Simpsons that it's "weird for the sake of weird"), but yet another take on things is that the layers of irony and double- triple- quadruple-meaning that infests discourse on the SA forums could be the start of a cunning cultural revolution, which will soon be spread throughout the internet and beyond so that it becomes so impossible to tell at first glance whether or not someone actually means what they're saying, or the exact opposite, or something else entirely. This forces people to stop taking what they read/hear at face value, and start questioning everything to determine whether or not it's true. Death to dogma, blind belief and unthinking acceptance! Onwards with inquisitive curiosity and the asking of questions!

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. :)

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xydexx.livejournal.com

I think my next goal is going to be to do to trolls what spam-blockers did to spam: guide their speech until they form beautiful beatnik poetry. In inflatable fursuits.

Can I help? -:)

From: (Anonymous)

You lack Postvixen's continual screechiness. You've got the sort of passive-aggressiveness usually found in wives who are involved in long, bad marriages. And you've been working in the animation industry--how long?

Rich? Important? Relative terms. Compared to you and most of the PVC Bohemian crowd--yeah. But that's not saying much.

My motivation? I can only tolerate seeing the obvious overlooked for so long. Then--and this is my great failing, I suppose--I have to stand up and tell people they're wasting their time--despite the fact that I'M wasting my time by doing so.

You don't wanna get ragged on by people on the Internet? Make your Livejournal "friends-only." Then no one can can see and laugh at the details of your life. Otherwise, be prepared to take some shit.

It's a rough scary world, kid. Either get good at hiding or good at fighting.

And "good at fighting" does not mean "getting your cross-dressing rooommmate to snark at people for you."

--M. Dadaism

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You've got the sort of passive-aggressiveness usually found in wives who are involved in long, bad marriages.

Well. A little truth to that in some ways, but I won't go into that right now. But it's also the passive-aggressiveness of someone whose natural reflexive defense is to play "ignore it and it'll go away" and try their best to project a Somebody Else's Problem field. Worked back in high school, doesn't seem to work as well any more.

And you've been working in the animation industry--how long?
Too long, I begin to suspect. ...but there are transsexuals here and there in the world of animation, if your point is that there's no way I could be one because of my career. Maybe I am one. Or maybe "suck my dick" was a general term of insult because you came along and tried to piss me off when I was already quite cranky over something totally unrelated, Mr. Funny Name. Still am.

I can only wonder what brilliant ideas you have for how I should be spending my time instead of laughing at something that I found generally funny and amusing.

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trikotomy.livejournal.com

Paraphrase: "Arguing on the internet is so pointless! YOU GUYS ARE LIKE TOTALLY IMMATURE!"

There's a word for this, but ironically, it escapes me.

I'm sure your skill at fabricating your own special versions of situations you've watched so closely that you can't even get names straight will serve you well in the "real world".

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Begins with "H", I think.

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My retort:

Blah blah blah Nietzsche blah blah blah nihilism blah blah blah Bob Black blah blah blah 18th-Century French salons blah blah blah Feral House blah blah blah Adam Parfrey blah blah blah probably sits around jacking off to Faces of Death blah blah blah totally dismissed in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone.

I wonder if this was posted before or after Dean got his ass handed to him, because that's probably the key to whether this one is a troll. If it's pre-Iowa, it's probably a troll, and good one actually, because it means people thought Dean was accomplishing things with his net base (which is in question now, but remains to be seen). I like trolls that cleverly sabotage their own arguments in order to tip off potential victims. It's the highest form of troll and IMHO it's the polite thing to do. If it's post-Iowa, he's probably just some dumbass haughty Marxist who masturbates to Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television.

Either way, two words for Peggy: "Blackline gap."

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Admittedly, it came a hell of a lot closer to pushing my buttons. Good job all around!

From: (Anonymous)

...graphical absurdism invented by expatriate European draft-dodgers in neutral Switzerland during the First World War.

And Dadaism begat Magritte, and Magritte begat an awful Fleetwood Mac video, and the cover of Chant, and a million fannish imitations amongst Burning Man wannabes.

Anything else you wanna brush up on?

--M. Dadaism

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Yes, if this is all trivial and you have nothing to prove, why did you bother proving you know something about Dadaism? (I'm not assuming any particular answer.) Which game are you playing, and why? This isn't an attack, it's a request for you to divulge your set of rules. Pure anthropological interest. You're <blatant_flattery_to_flush_out_troll> obviously smarter than the rest.</bftfot> -- and I believe it's traditional for the evil mastermind to divulge his scheme upon such flattery. Be a good sport!

From: (Anonymous)

Where did I say Dadaism was trivial?

--D. M.

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You said the Internet was trivial. Are you perhaps clacking this out on an abacus connected by fishing line to a Dixie cup?

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Late Friday evening, if you're wondering about the time. I was thoroughly full of anger and sadness because of something else that'd popped up (more stuff related to all the crypticism and angst of December), and I just went off on this guy. Who's been leaving snide comments with Funny Attributions for a long time. One of my own personal trolls, I suppose. I have a few.

This person might be

smithmcmagnum; I know he was the anonymous commenter in this thread because he fucked up and accidentally did one non-anonymous. And he unfriended me yesterday evening around the time I write that reply. Coincidence? Quite possibly.

I usually theorize that Mr. Funny Name is Steve Worth @ Spümcø. The rhythms match what I've seen in his posts on animation forums, and he's made reference to stuff I've put in here. But I could be wrong.

I didn't analyze this troll like I did the one trying to point me to SA last Friday; I just let myself go off on him because I needed to scream and he was being an oh-so-eager target.

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This, too, is a legitimate sport: one with crosshairs, a little ammo count, and an adorable dragontail swishing occasionally into the HUD.

*gulp* Shit, I'd buy it.

(Hee, it all sounds like Spumco humor. ;P )

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whois 130.134.81.15

OrgName: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
OrgID: NASA
[ etc ]

Huh. Nope, probably not Steve, then. There goes that theory. Probably someone I don't know at all iRL, then.

...you know, there are far better sports involving an adorable dragon tail. *grin*

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Hee. Well, that explains why he's(?) a smarter than average troll... and why so many missions fail. Focus! ;)

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xydexx.livejournal.com

whois 130.134.81.15
OrgName: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
OrgID: NASA
[ etc ]

I'd guess Peter "Hangdog" Schorn, but he got fired from NASA years ago.

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