Rather than bicker…I’d prefer to say thanks (A BIG THANKS!!!) to Pam, Russ, EE, Terrance and all the other regular and irregular contributors to the Blend.
Please know that your work and dedication are appreciated.  Thanks for all your hard work, great content and thoughtful replies.
Just can’t say thanks often enough!

thanks PamI’m glad to read this.  I have always been reluctant to engage trolls, but have broken that rule a few times lately.  It first happened when the Imus firing brought out the straight-conservative-white-guy defender trolls.  After that, and more recently, I jumped in over religion.
Then I thought, “is this why I first started to visit and participate at the Blend?”  It’s not.  I learn so much here and enjoy what people have to say.  I hate that I stooped to contributing to ugliness.
I’m also not above feeling bullied when things get mean.  I’m less likely to comment on something when I feel like I’m going to experience name-calling or other attacks that have nothing to do with the info, experience, or opinion I could offer.
I’ll do my best to remember that trolls just aren’t worth responding to and that they do go away if not fed.  Wikipedia has a great entry and external links offering on trolls.  I’m also thinking of a link I saw in the comments at ABlog once: Internet Trolls and personality disorders.

Josh still livesPam, “The” Josh posted on 11:27 AM, June 3rd. He’s not dead yet.

Yeah, I came here for the sweetness and submitted and contributed to the sourness.

I have tried to be good since the last dust up.I sort of lost my cool on one post, where I used the term ‘fucking’. I will try to eliminate that word completely.
Whew! I have newfound respect for Jackie Robinson.

Those are great links (and mea culpa)Internet Sociology should be a new offering at hip universities. Fascinating stuff.
In real life there are certain comments that I don’t allow to go unchallenged, because I don’t want to give the impression of approval with my passivity. In the internet world, however, even disagreeing says, “That comment is worthy of debate”. I will try to avoid the trolls in the future.
Sorry if I have soured anyone’s experience of PHB in the last few days.

thanks for injecting that levity!It just made me laugh, as I’m sure no one posting inflammatory remarks on a blog could actually have the hubris to seriously compare himself to Jackie Robinson.

Thanks Pam…Pam, may I make a suggestion?  Repost this every month or so. 
I don’t know if anyone has noticed that the progressive blogosphere is becoming more aggresive and angry over the past few months.  I should say, the comment sections have become a breeding ground for rage and contempt.
I don’t know what is going on.  Blogs that had good discussions and debates about important issues have turned into rant forums and high school hallways.
It has made me wonder if it isn’t some sort of regressive idea to stir up the progressive blogosphere in hopes that the netroots will become so exhausted that we shy away from our normal net-homes.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but I just can’t understand what’s going on.
Anyway, thanks PHB’ers and keep our eyes on the prize.  ’08!

I don’t intend for them to beinflammatory, just interesting and apt. Why can’t interesting subjects be discussed on here?
By the Jackie Robinson comment, I just meant his behavior was being scrutinized more than the others, and he couldn’t afford to lose his cool.

Interesting is in the eye of the beholder. Just because you intend your comments to be such, doesn’t mean others find them so. Posters engage with you here because we are accustomed to defending ourselves against defamation and many will do so regardless of the forum. It doesn’t mean we find engaging with you interesting. I don’t frequently do so because I would find it annoying and energy-sucking, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt at this moment and consider the possibility that you may actually not realize how you are perceived.

Thanks Pam!Thanks for this post – sorry to see that you had to ban someone.

I’ll stop baiting the troll too.I know that I have said this before but I won’t reply to him any more.  Thanks, Pam, for being so patient with everyone. 

dozens comments of arguing pointlesslyand predictably to be contrary on a blog that is so polar opposite to your politics is not interesting, it’s disruptive; too often it’s just draining because, unfortunately, some Blenders take the bait.
For instance, I cruise Free Republic but don’t sign up there because I have zero interest in debating that crowd. I’d be banned in a flash anyway, but there’s only so much time in a day, and I’d rather be strategizing with my friends here at the Blend than wasting precious time on Freepi.
A contrary comment here and there to make a point is one thing. 100 comment threads of drivel and bile is not acceptable — you for being argumentative, the other Blenders for repeatedly upbraiding you expecting a different result or change of thinking. We all can do a better job of making the coffeehouse conversation both entertaining and thoughtful.

I don’t understand this way of thinkingWhy can’t any controversial topic be discussed without people getting personal? Since our last heart-to-heart, I haven’t gotten personal even though people have done so with me.  I have even ended conversations when I felt the tone was getting too nasty.
Some call responding to a comment ‘taking the bait’. I say it means people find the topic interesting enough to comment on. I don’t know why that isn’t a good thing as long as people can control themselves.

Give and take that is endlessly only assertion/rejoinder/counter assertion/counter rejoinder is very different from thesis/antithesis/synthesis. To date, when has a comment here changed your mind on

Sorry…..To date, when has a comment here ever changed your mind on anything?

Hate crimesJoshWaterman, as much as I may not care for that particular chatter, did open my eyes on the reason for hate crimes. Formerly I had thought of them as unnecessary and something used as a battering ram rather than a real tool for justice.  I hadn’t thought of the terrorism and fear aspect targeting crimes could bring upon a group. I can’t say I’m absolutely for hate crimes legislation because I still see room for abuse, but I can say I am now ambivalent on it.

I’m with you, bkmn!And if I’ve contributed to any nastiness, I sincerely apologize.  I have nothing but respect and affection for the vast majority of Blenders.

I’m glad to know you have considered a counter argument sufficiently valid that it merits incorporation into your thinking.  FWIW, I also am not wholly convinced hate crimes legislation is the best idea out there.  I can see merit in both sides of the argument.  It drives me to distraction that hate crimes legislation is countenanced for some, but not for what is probably one of the groups most likely to be targeted of all, but that’s an irritation having to do with hypocrisy.  It isn’t about the merits of hate crimes legislation per se.  As I said, I can see both sides of that matter as a theoretical concept.

Thanks for all you do.I certainly get passionate about my issues.  I try to not get personal.  Still – thanks for the civility reminder.
Kat

My personal goal,is to post my opinion ONCE and if nessecary defend myself ONCE. Then I’m done!
You may find some contradictions if you care to, but it’s still the rule I try to follow.
Like Pam said, “You’re not likely to change any minds” anyhow.

re: Trolls, Feeding ofThink about this quotation:
“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither” Thomas Jefferson
and then think about the ramifications of editing and controlling/censoring comments.  True, trolls get on my nerves, and honest debate is generally only possible when people play fair and use their brains, which trolls usually are incapable of doing.
Ironic, isn’t it, that we, the lefties, the “freethinkers” sometimes edit and disallow.  In this instance, do we “trade a little liberty for a little order”?

not a censorship issueI have posted twice asking people why they bother engaging with circuitous banter that grows increasingly harsh.
My question has nothing to do with silencing the opinions of others.  They have to do with the art of conversation.  If you followed any of the howling that goes on around posts by Josh, then you might know what I am talking about.
Ignoring his agitation doesn’t stop him  – or anyone – from expressing themselves here or anywhere else in the endless void of the internet, let alone on street corners, am radio stations or in newspapers. 
Discussion threads in one among zillions of blogs are not the tests of a healthy democracy.  Deciding not to engage in a needling and pointless exchange with a total stranger is a sign of stability. 
I completely understand how it is possible to be drawn into a game like that.  If I can blow a loud whistle to get the nonsense to end, I’m happy to do it. 
Thank you, Pam, for devoting so much time and energy building a site that allows hot heads and know it alls like me an opportunity to experience community. 

It is hard not to react to him,  as he hits a nerve, or one feels a slamdunk and its over.  I am guilty of that, but no more responding from me.  Thanks Pam for all you have done. Glad you got laptop running.

The IssueGood morning, Pam.
I have been online for years. I have seen quite a few trolls over that time, both on what are now called Weblogs (“blogs”… and, by the way, could anyone have tried to invent such an gruesome word) and, before that, on what were called “bulletin boards” and then “message boards” before and right after the turn of the century.
I have seen and been the unfortunate victim of what trolls can do. Almost invariably, once they show a persistence in attenuating to one online conversation after another, they become increasingly emboldened. At some point, they cross a line of rationalization in their minds where they believe themselves so familiar with the participants that they can also then feel justified in moving from rhetoric to expressed (if furtive) aggression.
And when I use the word “aggression,” I mean just that: trolls can and do become dangerous. They can hurt people in the real world. I know. I had it happen to me on a scale that I cannot herewith describe.
You’ve seen it, too, Pam. The troll named “Michael” took a specific and acidic dislike of me. I wanted to warn you, but only obliquely, in one cryptic comment, did I ever do so because I feared you would think me hyperbolic in my description of what could happen. Knowing what he could do, for several months I absented myself from Pam’s House Blend. Sure enough, like an already-armed torpedo spinning in the sea, Michael found another target: Russ.
Radical Russ and I share several (only several, but they’re important) characteristics, and it is those that set off a certain potentially dangerous type of troubled personality.
That “troubled personality” is related to, but interestingly not the same as, the deeply disturbed type that goes after a Melissa McEwan or The Fat Lady Sings. Across the board, though, trouble-makers do share the common trait of looking for a way to become familiar with the soon-to-be target (either by active or passive review) and then inventing a flash point in their own minds. The flash points for some of the criminals who attacked Ms. McEwan and The Fat Lady Sings were respectively suggested by dominant authority figures who, by the merest of suggestion, can at once validate potent, if latent, fury and exonerate conscience and ingrained ethical consternation in the executors of the actual, palpable threats.
Blocking persistently troublesome commenters is not censorship when the issue is framed in terms of risk management arising from experience. Suffer me, then, in conclusion examples of speech circumscribed that does not mean speech that is unfree:
As a soldier, I did not restrict free speech when I told a fellow soldier to shut his mouth lest we get discovered and consequentially shot dead by those looking for us.
I am not restricting speech when I successfully petition a court to make an adversary stop declaring me a murderer when I am no such thing.
I am not restricting speech when I prevent the school board from bringing into a local high school a religious man who is seeking virgin brides.
I have not restricted speech when I, as the owner of a restaurant, tell a creepy customer to leave because he won’t stop trying to pick arguments with the fellows sitting at the coffee counter, who are otherwise minding their own business chatting among themselves.
And finally, I do not restrict speech when I tell a Christian fundamentalist student that his vocal disagreement about something I’ve said concerning evolution will cease in my classroom.
To that last example, it’s not that I have no patience; it is, instead, that I have a goal to achieve, and that goal—covering the material set forth in the syllabus—takes precedence over some malcontent’s putative right to make a scene.
That, Pam, is the case here at Pam’s House Blend. Your mission takes precedence. In fact, it takes precedence even over my putative right to bloviate endlessly in a comment on this thread.
The Dark Wraith should have thought of that before he went for dissertation length in this piece.

You’re both funny and scary, Dark Wraith, as we all……should be. 
Regarding trolls and the rest of us, we all have an alleged agenda and various hidden agendas, which range from the benign to the malignant.  For example, my alleged agenda is to be a good Blender.  My hidden agendas (at least the ones that aren’t also hidden from me) are distraction, to obtain my daily required dose of drama, to be Holly, the Heroic, to do anything but write the words I’m paid to write, to test my mettle, to vanquish the wicked, and so on.  Trolls, being of the same species, have the same agendas, but trolls deviate in degree.  For example, a troll’s daily required dose of drama is monstrous.  But I think the primary difference between a troll and the rest of us is that just folks can admit to being a little creepy and a little sneaky, as I just admitted to having hidden agendas and alluded to agendas that are even ickier, albeit beyond my ken. 
If a troll is cognizant of perfidy, that troll lacks the backbone for introspection.  Trolls are navel gazers, but none of that gazing induces introspection.  Rather, they gaze on their dogma, all of which can fit within their own navel.
But in the end, I like your casting better, Dark Wraith, so I’m glad, once again, that you have spoken.

First of all, thanks bkmnFor that lovely first comment in this thread. I now go by “ee” because of the very vitriol that Pam mentions in her post. In my case, nearly two years of hate and torment from a single person, who spewed hate on not only my original blog, but every blog on my blogroll. Sadly, it turned out to be a family member, but the ruse by that family member and others who were involved in the deceit of hiding the identity of the cyber-stalker/troll cost me relations with half of my family members.
Can be very dangerous and very hurtful. I am constantly amazed by the hate and division that this horrible administration has caused – from a single “regular” family to between entire sub-cultures in the US, and in entire countries in this world in which we all share a small part.
ee

I’m sorry about your stalkerI have also been followed and harrassed online by a family memeber. It is very disconcerting. One of the nice things about the internet is that it doesn’t have the same walls and speech limitations that other spaces do. However, when the real and cyber worlds begin to overlap, your remember that a little privacy can be a good thing.

Scary, yes.Good morning, Holly.
Before sunrise is when I usually take my first look in the mirror. Some mornings, it’s Walter Matthau; others, it’s Jimmy Durante. Last week, Ed Sullivan.
Ugliness that would flip a bulldog off a meat wagon.
So far—and I do so very much thank an all-too-frequently unmerciful Lord for this—I have yet to see either Ronald Reagan or Mick Jagger.
The Dark Wraith knows scary when he sees it (looking back at him from the mirror).

Walter Matthau is hot, therefore….So, inka dinka do believe what I say is true.
Mick does have quite a mug.  Bloodhounds, when they gaze on his puss, say, “There, there.  It can’t be that bad.”
And good morning back at ya, Scary (and Comely) One.

Trolls, all of usI like your honesty, Holly. All of us do have hidden agendas, not just online, but in every aspect of our lives. It is so much easier to construct a poker-face internet persona though. Nobody can see the real you.
Given the chance to be whatever you want to be, what do you choose? Some people choose to be unusually open and honest. That is something that you can’t usually get away with. Other people try to be someone that is more exciting or admirable. It is always telling what they think others will find exciting or admirable.
I think that you are right when you imply that being a troll goes beyond malicious intent.  Anyone who tries to ram home a particular ideology without paying much attention to the people that he or she is responding to is a troll. Failure to be open, to reconsider, to find points of agreement, or to take advantage of a new perspective marks you as a troll. Ultimately there is not much difference between trolls and spam-bots (which creep the hell out of me, btw). You will be having a long conversation that doesn’t seem to be moving anywhere and suddenly it occurs to you: there is no person behind that screename!
But again, people are like that sometimes in real life too. Or, as you say, “in the meat world”. I like that, “meat world”.

AnimalThe Dark Wraith knows a line when he hears one.

That which we all areGood morning, Cambridge Kid.
We are all, of course, meat puppets; or, as the Anglo-Saxons described, walking “bone lockers.”
Until, that is, we no longer are. But that’s when the story gets interesting, I suppose.
The Dark Wraith is, in this case, most happy to wait as long as possible for the interesting part.

The suspense is killing me

I also like your casting of a troll, CK, that being……a being who isn’t open.  They’re as open as a Disney automaton, which presents a semblance of listening, in that it looks your way and it has ears, but it cannot see and it cannot hear and it can say what’s been recorded.
I once dated a doc who’d recently finished a documentary about an Inuit village decimated by smallpox.  He emphasized that at one point, he cried.  He wanted to be seen as a sensitive man, but in his punctuation, he highlighted his emotional constipation.  So it can go on the Internet too.  What one might emphasize for effect, but one’s effect can be as toothy and untrustworthy as a viper.

Nah.I love Walter’s face. 
Be honest now: would you rather gaze at Britney Spears, with its full moon blond blandness, or behold the glory of Tommy Lee Jones’s pug-mug?  Homogenized beauty, such as Spears, bores me.  I look at it and wonder why others lust. 
I was watching a show last night about techonics and one of the geologists was obviously a man to whom Life had taken a hammer and chipped, chipped, chipped.  But he was so comfy in his skin and the utter antithesis of a naval gazer.  So many people wear costumes, but this man wore clothes.  He was a beautiful bone locker.  You know what I mean?

Punny!

Punny strange, or punny haha?

Ha-ha, hun-hun.

He wore clothes?The Dark Wraith was once a practicing nudist, mind you.
It was quite liberating.
…except for when bacon was frying.
And nettles. Nettles were always an issue.
That, and the damned dog with the cold nose and too much time on his hands.
Or paws, as the case actually was.
The Dark Wraith should probably shut his pie hole for the day, now.

Don’t go, Dark Wraith.The Blend is better when you’re posting and ghosting.

Actually…I think that you are right when you imply that being a troll goes beyond malicious intent.  Anyone who tries to ram home a particular ideology without paying much attention to the people that he or she is responding to is a troll.
Not really.  What a troll attempts to do is to disrupt a discussion, for the purpose of pleasuring him/her/itself.  The troll may not even believe what he/she/it posts.  Take a look at, for example, this and this.  Or do a Google search for “trolling for newbies.”  A troll’s primary interest is to disrupt discussion, pure and simple.
Sometimes, it is difficult to initially determine that someone is a troll.  But it becomes evident after a while.  There was a troll who used to post on the old NYTimes gay rights message board.  He posted under several different handles–not at the same time–from the computer of a Christian university in Tennessee, but it became relatively easy to identify him as the same troll.

Moral masturbation:“What a troll attempts to do is to disrupt a discussion, for the purpose of pleasuring him/her/itself.”
So, a troll wants to masturbate and wants us to watch?
Or is a troll the grown-up version of the kid who plucked the wings off a butterfly?

You are rightI just meant that you can often identify a troll when he or she doesn’t engage in conversation or try to reach a resolution. They toss a character or an ideology into the room like a grenade and then let it play out for maximum chaos. A conservative who genuinely wanted to have a discussion on a liberal blog would try to find common points of agreement and be willing to make some concessions. Someone who rigidly clings to an inflammatory viewpoint, then drops it suddenly, only to pop up with another one somewhere else is probably a troll.
I said that malicious intent is not needed because I don’t know what motivates many posters. If the effect is to disrupt a thread and breakdown the mutual respect that is needed for a conversation, the person is still troll. A “purity troll” may really be a true-believer, for example, but is still disruptive and counter-productive.

Purity trolls swarm like lice at Media Matters.

Thank you, Pam, for posting this.I must admit that, despite my best efforts to stop myself, I have fed the trolls on occasion.
I have made a (mostly) successful effort not to tangle with Josh, and I’ve been disappointed that so many people have engaged him when it is clear that he only wants to stir up arguments, and is not open to listening to others.  It has gotten to the point where I’ve become somewhat reluctant to read the Blend of late, because every time Josh comes onto a thread, it becomes a useless slugfest.
The issue extends beyond trolls, though.  I’ve seen instances, and been the target of, people who express their disagreements with others by slandering the other person in a very hurtful way.  Back in March, two commenters called me a “bitch” (see my dairy on the matter).  There cannot be an excuse for those kind of personal attacks.  I think that if that b-word is flung at me, or anyone else, again, I will need to leave the Blend.

More like frottage, maybe……considering that it’s unwanted poking (sometimes just subtle enough to make you think it wasn’t intentional) in a crowded place.

Recipes!d’oh. hit “enter” when I meant “shift”.
Over at a progressive religious blog, when some poster persists in picking a fight, the rest of us start posting our favorite recipes. Paella, cornbread, salads, cheesecakes, drinks – you name it.
And then some joker wrote in a recipe for “troll stew”…

thanks for clarifying the sigfileI know the passage in question, but maybe some others don’t and would be scratching their heads – wuzza saris?

“Troll stew”?!I should have thought, Nancy, a recipe for “Trollhouse Cookies” would have been more appropriate.
The Dark Wraith should have done as he said he would and kept his cake hole shut for the rest of the day.

Mea maxima culpaThe first time, I really did think Josh was interested in dialogue. The second thread where I replied to him, though, I knew better. Sorry about that.