A Troll By Any Other Name Is Still A Troll

WARNING:THIS IS A RANT. I DON'T OFTEN HAVE THEM. My apologies and thanks for your indulgence.

Trolls used to live under bridges and bother billy goats; now they seem to frequent the Internet.They no longer pop up and intimidate  innocent little creatures...but they do appear frequently in message board threads. Why can't we just throw water on them and watch them melt?

Why hasn't anyone invented Troll Spray? It would be so much easier to be able to whip out a can and aim it at the nearest Troll until s/he evaporated, leaving no greasy residue behind.

Here's a little something for the mass-marketing talking heads to chew on: Being politically correct is not the 'new' version of civility or manners. It's so much BS wrapped up in cyber-psycho babble. I suspect it was invented by some Ivy League grad student in need of an intelligent-sounding thesis or a intern spin doctor trying to fit the 'Young Turk' image. No matter. It's still not passing the smell test with me because it's all a load of crap. There. I said it. PC should stand for Pure Crap. There is a difference, Gentle People, in being mindful of common decency and  applying the rules of civility. Civility (surprise!) has little to do with being political correct, or 'niceness', for that matter. It has to do with treating others with the respect that you hope others will have for you. This is beyond the unspoken rule of human dignity...everyone needs recognition just for being human. 

No one gets a cookie or deserves respect for being an insufferable bore, or to be rewarded for outlandish stupidity or ignorance when they are aware of it. Awareness is the key point here. There is a difference, and I am going to show you how much of a curmudgeon I have become by saying that many of our younger folk lack an innate sense of that difference. It is not admirable to drop the 'F bomb' into a sentence just for shock value while beaming like a retarded (yes, retarded, not "mentally challenged") jack-o-lantern as you congratulate yourself on your extraordinary cleverness.

I am off on this tangent because I have just come from a discussion forum of occult folk on Facebook, where everyone posting in an otherwise wonderfully intelligent thread was being bullied by a self-styled Jehovah's Witness Witch (!) who wanted to argue-although not a single person wanted to argue- that Christians who went to fortune tellers were hypocrites. Everyone else was trying to shut Troll Girl down and move on in the conversation by pointing out that the Tarot was full of Christian imagery, and that it was no longer a big deal in modern society and Christianity's terms if they did. But she just kept harping on it,going on and on  and on...attempting to provoke someone and  then further muddling  the waters by pointing out that this was only said in the Old Testament, not the New Testament...you get the picture. Here was someone who wanted everyone else to be aware of her superiority and knowledge of the subject.She had hundreds of facts. She was insufferable.  The conversation soon morphed from being about the Tarot and fortune tellers, to being  about this young woman ( from her photo) wanting all of us old people  to respect her for her knowledge. Duly noted. No one was rude, and I thought that everyone on the thread was unusually patient. She was a convert from Jehovah's Witnesses (whom mainstream Christianity still regard as a cult, by the way) trying to quote the Bible, only the version she was using is the one adapted and rewritten by the JW because the original in all it's many versions didn't justify their needs. 

This tact was backfiring on her at every turn and at that point it was stated by the person who started the thread in the first place that  the conversation had nothing to do with what she was interjecting and that it was her issue, no one elses.And then he called her a Troll. By that time the page moderator stepped in and invoked the PC rule,  No matter how outrageous, stupid, ignorant or unenlightened a individual is about a subject, they can be a bore and the rest of us have to just smile and nod,or words to that effect. The realization that this individual was trolling and purposely bating others into disagreement was  not addressed. The fact that everyone has a right to agree or disagree was squashed in favor of a twisted PC version of "everyone is entitled to their opinion". We were all  told to accept this person's perverted version of the subject in 'unity and community'. Why is it that when someone is purposely saying nothing at all, it should be tolerated because they have a right to be redundant?  This type of behavior used to be  identified for what it was-attention seeking and ego feeding- and was quickly dispatched. Individuals with this sort of agenda thought twice about even joining in the conversation because they knew they would have to hold forth their end with no excuses or intervention from Big Brother or what is nowadays showing itself as 'Mommy'. Mommy is an invention of PCness to protect the irresponsible from the general community. It allows the trolls not only to freely exist, but to justify their behavior. This is not only wrong, but it's why the Pagan Community is so prone to flame fests every time we get together. Trolls are seldom called out and identified for what they are.Because when they are, true magick happens....they go away... and there is peace at least until another one shows up. Stop feeding this type of personality, and they will starve for lack of attention!