What makes a man start trolling?

[washing machine]

Why is this an instinct in some of us? It's not kind and it doesn't help endear newcomers to the internet. Trolling has always been around, but I feel like it used to be less common. Now it has spilled into our politics. What happened?

[BurtReynolds]

Trolling should be done not to tear people down, but to build them back up. Correctly.

Trolling should be done out of a place of love.

[washing machine]

Yeah there's something to that. Are you saying that sometimes trolling can help people not take themselves so seriously so that they can confront their blind spots?

This doesn't answer the kindness aspect, though. Trolling people to enlightenment might not be the way.

[washing machine]

Maybe before we get too far into this thread we should define trolling.

Is it synonymous with bullying or is it something different?

It would be really great to hear from both trolls and people who feel like they are being trolled.

[tree_]

i do some light trolling sometimes, but it is usually at my own expense, meant to entertain people with my apparent stupidity.. in a Norm kind of way .. i do it because i think it is funny

[washing machine]

I think that's why I do it too, with a little bit of what burt mentioned above sometimes as well.

My problem is that I'm kind of tone deaf and a little awkward/autistic so often the direction I think the board's arrow is pointing isn't calibrated to reality.

[tree_]

yeah, same.. that's why i've cooled off quite a bit for a while.. i've opened up to the idea that people here actually have real lives they live and may actually experience reality differently from me most of the time.. and it's good to be respectful and mindful of these realities, to be an agent of peace and understanding instead of chaos and comedy

[washing machine]

You're a good seed, tree.

[tree_]

i'll always think upon you fondly because of the Free Soloing thread

[washing machine]

It's still there anytime you want to go for a climb.

[BurtReynolds]

I've been wondering: why did Dev - my best rm friend - choose me of all people to start trolling this time around?

At first I was like, "Oh, he just has TDS. Many such cases."

But then I realized that maybe he correctly saw that my intellectual superiority and deep understanding of the world has made me arrogant. Haughty even. Maybe he's right. Though I'm disgusted by humility and want nothing to do with it, I should try to be less disgusted by my lessers. They are fighting battles I know nothing about.

Where someone like Ello or Spike are driven by resentment, self loathing and miserable envy, Dev seeks not to hurt me, but make me a better person. I appreciate him for that.

[tragabigzanda]

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot's hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

[wease]

Dev is perhaps the only purely enlightened person on RM

[wease]

i do some light trolling sometimes, but it is usually at my own expense, meant to entertain people with my apparent stupidity.. in a Norm kind of way .. i do it because i think it is funny

Who is norm

Norm Peterson

[tommy]

It's probably mostly boredom

[washing machine]

I'm participating in some light trolling with wease in the Trump thread right this second, actually.

I didn't plan to, but here we are.

Wease, I think I did it because you responded to a tongue-in-cheek post I made to spike in a humorless way. I doubled down on what makes Trump likeable in an effort to help you relax and laugh a little bit with me about the absurd moment we find ourselves in.

[washing machine]

It's probably mostly boredom

That too. Or a brief reprieve from the stresses at work?

[BurtReynolds]

yeah, same.. that's why i've cooled off quite a bit for a while.. i've opened up to the idea that people here actually have real lives they live and may actually experience reality differently from me most of the time.. and it's good to be respectful and mindful of these realities, to be an agent of peace and understanding instead of chaos and comedy

I thought this was out of line:

Wait, wasn't Nietzsche a nihilist?

[tree_]

what is the most egregious example of some failed heavy trolling? balki? numbers up does a good job with some heavy trolling? i use the word "gay" once and i get a warning

[tree_]

yeah, same.. that's why i've cooled off quite a bit for a while.. i've opened up to the idea that people here actually have real lives they live and may actually experience reality differently from me most of the time.. and it's good to be respectful and mindful of these realities, to be an agent of peace and understanding instead of chaos and comedy

I thought this was out of line:

Wait, wasn't Nietzsche a nihilist?

it was a serious question... isn't he known as the dawg who coined the term?