Putting an opinion about something on the internet allows –encourages, even — a kind of hate-filled, vitriolic response that one never sees in real life. Part of this is due the protection that anonymity provides, and part of it due to the lack of any kind of human connection between the person posting and the rabid, mind-numbingly hateful responses from individuals we politely refer to as “Trolls.” Zo and Bill have both been through it and they have some honest admissions to make about what that experience really is like.
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18 replies on “Trolls”
Yeah, the whole thing about not going out there on college campuses — I feel you. We each have to weigh how much we’re willing to shoulder. Ben, Michael, Matt … they’re heroes. They’re Breitbarting. They’re walking INTO the fight.
That’s awesome, man. It’s monumental.
That was a long “um…” Bill. Which I took to mean, “no, I don’t feel sorry for them” 😀
Griefers. Griefing … never heard of it, because I’m not a gamer. But you nailed it. That’s it. I think it’s actually part of what’s going on with mass shooters.
I had given up on stratosphere lounge because it stopped appearing on Stitcher. Bill mentioned recent episodes in this TVS. Can someone see to it that Stratosphere lounges make it onto Stitcher?
I thought Stratosphere Lounge was off the menu because it no longer appears on the Stitcher app. Then Bill mentioned it in this Virtue signal. I know it’s meant for youtube but could we get it up on Stitcher again?
don’t like being a slave? get rid of your freedom card/drivers license.
Comment threads longer than about 50 to 80 comments are too long to get much out of, and, as the guys said, often degenerate into a sub-thread of flaming that adds no value to the otherwise more reasonable discussion.
So banning folks that disrupt the thread that way is actually analogous to firing the worker who is continually disrupting the proper performance within a business. With that person gone, everyone else can concentrate on the core reason to be there, commenting on a blog or running a business venture.
For me, the concept of virtue has a psychological component and a cultural component. We have a sense of fairness, etc., and we have rules and practices and behaviors expected within our respective societies. Of course those rules vary from one society to another, and are followed as useful as long as they don’t end up destroying the society following those rules.
Thus some of us view the Bible as a set of documents capturing the prior experiences of various tribal societies and early civilizations and the rules that seemed to work for them, until they met other rules or societies that overcame them.
The rules derived from the Christian generated cultural elements led in time to Locke and related ideas captured in our founding documents and in what others call the American Creed.
Regarding natural rights …
I completely disagree with Zo’s claim that there are no such things as natural rights, because he claims that nature doesn’t know anything about human rights. Zo wholly-disregards the idea that God created what we call Nature, and part of that Creation includes the inalienable rights we strive to protect. Ergo, the term natural rights was born. Our society and culture have mutated the definition of natural rights to be something they are not — that does not mean they don’t exists.
I recognize this is a few days late, but I think Zo was trying to call the rights by another name but being shy and sly about it. I think he meant to say they were God given rights, not nature given, and did not want to come right out and say that, maybe he did not want to trigger the haters he was talking about or he wanted to pull back from the “God talk” that he said the show wasn’t directly about. I’m not sure.
If you are correct, then the basis of his whole commentary was a useless quibbling of semantics. God-given rights, natural rights … they are the same, and I believe that the Founders of our Great Nation would agree.
I think some times in these off the cuff conversations, the guys mis-hear or misunderstand each other. Sometimes they think they disagree and verbally spar until they understand their agreement and other times miss the comment and just end up off on their own tangents.
I believe that Disney’s Goofy offers the best explanation of this syndrome
https://youtu.be/mwPSIb3kt_4
Humans are not built to communicate by text without all the other cues that go with face to face conversation. It’s way, way too easy to take someone wrong and take offense. Even in face to face conversation this can happen.
Whether someone has a YouTube account with videos posted on it or not is not a measure of the worth of what they have to say. I don’t post videos on YouTube. I’m not ever going to post videos on YouTube. Not ever under any circumstances.
I ran into this phenomena the other day arguing with some presumably young person who had posted a video caught by her Ring doorbell. She wanted to claim it was some ‘spooky’ government phenomena but what she had actually posted was a moth in infrared flying by the camera lens. I see this sort of thing in my cameras all the time, I knew exactly what it was.
She swore up and down that I couldn’t prove it was a moth and not some nefarious mechanism that the evil government people were operating unbeknownst to us civilian sheep. She considered her moth in infrared video to be proof beyond any shadow of a doubt that the government was conspiring to operate a device meant to destroy us all.
Her claim that I could not possibly know what I’m talking about was that I don’t have any content on YouTube proving otherwise.
That’s an absurd argument.
Making that absurd argument allowed her, in her mind, to discount and trivialize anything I had to say on the matter. So she will go on making a fool of herself in public when she had a perfectly good, true explanation of the object in her video. Provided by someone with years of experience with video surveillance cameras.
But because I had no content linked to the personna I use on YouTube I couldn’t possibly know more than she did. Because I had no content is just not a good measure of the validity of what someone says and I’m surprised Bill brought it up.
If I were to post video content debunking everything I run across on YouTube I would get nothing else done. YouTube is full of absurdities because people PREFER to be absurd when it suits them. You can’t talk them out of their absurdities no matter what you say or post. Whether or not I have any content posted under my general use account has nothing to do with anything.
Thanks, Bill for “I don’t regret what I said, I regret how I said it. I lost my mind.” You own it, and you move on. Onward & upward.
This post is in response to the Stratosphere Lounge episode which will forever be known as the “My Guy” episode. For those who’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m referred to. So, here goes with my parody of My Guy.
Read these lyrics with your internal voice being that of Mary Wells who in 1964 wrote a song called “My Guy.” For those who don’t know the song, it was used in “Sister Act.” Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WT7nBGX5eU
There’s nothing you can say that can through the tiny brain of my guy…my guy.
There’s nothing you can do he probably sniffs a lot of glue, that’s my guy…my guy.
He’s a commie, he’s Marxist, he’s a social-IST
He wrote a dumb comment, and damn!, Bill’s pissed.
There’s nothing you can say can through the tiny brain of my guy…my guy.
I’m sure some of you can add to this little ditty.
I frequently run into people who, in the process of being seen for a medical problem in my office, will spout something like “I also have a house in Florida, and I’m glad to be away because that governor is doing crazy stuff.” Or “Can you believe Trump even got elected in the first place? He’s ruining America!” And “Aren’t you happy that Warnock won the Georgia Senatorial election?”
It takes every once of my Christian heritage not to leap up and strangle their puny necks. (No it doesn’t, but I thought I’d throw that in there to encourage conversation.)
I guess I’ve been in my bubble of information-gathering so long that I cannot reasonably participate in conversation with these folks. If pressed, In the past years, I would warn them that I’m “right of Rush Limbaugh” in my politics, and they may not want to hear what I have to say. Rush now a non-entity in day-to-day politics, I’ll need a better, more current example. People who poke around for their chance to regurgitate their political axes to grind are usually not in the business of listening to other’s viewpoints. They’re just Trolls. Not worth the effort.
I find watching their faces when I ask them what they don’t like about supplying OUR OWN gas and oil, secure borders, low crime, low unemployment? “Do you have no compassion for those who give up their everything to come to the US based on GOVERNMENT PROMISES?” I’ll go on to tell them I’m not a big Trump fan, but I vote on policies over personality. You can actually see the light go on when they hear that last remark.
Continue to rise above it. Sail on!!
In another place I hear a lot about Trump being a traitor. If I am in the mood, I simply reply with the definition of treason and then ask for evidence. Never have gotten any. No replies, yes. Ad hominem attacks; yes. Attempts to get me canceled; yes.
Ad hominem attacks are called as such and then any replies ignored.
Both ad hominem attacks and cancellation is proof they have nothing.
I do the same thing with other topics if in the mood.
Similar results. I cited the Trump as traitor reference as an example.
The hate is obvious. Sometimes I get well considered points from others making my response unnecessary.
They already made my point.
Same results as mine.
Basically, more hate.
Hate is destructive to the haters.