About

As civilizations age, they get immersed in politics. That's where you try to convince others what they should do. At some point, that "should" totally replaces reality with an ethic of convenience and tolerance for all sorts of stupid behavior in the belief that others will then tolerate your own dysfunction.

At that point, civil argument is impossible. People prefer not to see the truth. Or in other words: the truth is difficult, therefore unpopular. Since people like to believe chummy little lies, they talk about "freedom" and "choice" when what they really mean is that they seek oblivion.

Why Trolls?

If you've been in one of these societies, you notice how frustrating they are. People act as if they're straight out of the movie Idiocracy, most things are defective, stupidity reigns over the airwaves and in politics. Anyone you know is probably spending most of their time trying to figure out how to ignore it. Oblivion begets oblivion.

Trolls are the superheroes who help destroy these societies. They destroy these societies so humans can exist at some level beyond polite and ineffectual bullshit. Trolls do this by forcing people to confront the truth, usually by hooking them into some story or activity that they think is oblivion but ends up being truthful.

Here's a list of taboos that people fear which you can use to beat them into sense:

People are not equal. Not politically, not physically, not mentally. We are not equally capable nor will we receive equal reward in life. People blame "inequality" for our problems when what they mean is that many people are not smart enough to figure out what's going on.

Diversity doesn't work. Not cultural, not religious, not ethnic. We like to think we can all get along and sing kumbaya. But that's a fiction, because for us to all get along, we'd have to abandon what makes our groups who they are. It's another form of conformity.

Civilizations have lifespans. They start out fresh, then as time goes on people get farther away from reality and into politics, and then the civilizations die. The people who aren't oblivious start new ones, and then the idiots start to creep in, so it's an eternal cycle of running away from idiots.

If there are gods, they aren't going to save us from ourselves. Who cares if there are gods there or not? Let's just save our own asses.

Any stupid activity, no matter how "personal" it seems to the idiot doing it, causes problems that you will have to pay for.

Democracy is a way of ensuring that the greatest number of incompetent, irresponsible, stupid and selfish people always get their way.

People are egomaniacs. They think their choices, preferences, and personal pretense matter, but really they're just like the rest of us sacks of meat. If you want to be important, do something great. You cannot really be important just by making a social circle that thinks you are!

All of these truths terrify people and should be used to make them angry. They will be passive aggressive, meaning that they will try to construe the troll as the aggressor. The smart troll laughs them off and points out where they are being unjust, inequitable, angry/mean or stupid. They will then panic, freak out and get angry, and prove to the world that the troll was right all along.

Successful Trolls

WHILE Israel fights Hezbollah with tanks and aircraft, its supporters are campaigning on the internet.
Israel's Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.
In the past week nearly 5,000 members of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) have downloaded special "megaphone" software that alerts them to anti-Israeli chatrooms or internet polls to enable them to post contrary viewpoints. A student team in Jerusalem combs the web in a host of different languages to flag the sites so that those who have signed up can influence an opinion survey or the course of a debate.
Jonny Cline, of the international student group, said that Jewish students and youth groups with their understanding of the web environment were ideally placed to present another side to the debate.
- The Times Online

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
- NY Times

The biggest growth in the news sector comes from what the report calls "nontraditional news outlets." This is a category that includes portals and search engines (Google News), aggregators (Digg), aggregators with attitude (the Drudge Report), bloggers (Daily Kos), and community sites (Gothamist). All featured soaring growth rates; Digg's was so substantial the report's authors had to leave it off one their charts.
- Ars Technica