As someone who has experienced first hand the attention of a troll-cum-stalker, I have already figured out what type of personality we are talking about.
In a survey conducted by the group of psychologists, people who partake in so-called trolling online showed signs of sadism, psychopathy, and were Machiavellian in their manipulation of others and their disregard for morality.
Those of us who had dealings with Dickie Doubleday who now goes by the moniker Rickie will have seen this behaviour for themselves. An irrational hatred of those who dare to proffer an opinion with which he disagrees. He is an obsessive anti-smoker who approves of the various tobacco control fake charities stealing our money for their own enrichment because this is helping the fight against smoking. So, it was those blogs championing liberty that he targeted – in particular the pro-smoking ones. The MO a couple of years back was to deface the blogs concerned with rants, insults and profanity. Sure, yeah, we are all guilty of that from time to time, but this individual bombarded us with a stream of the stuff that was irrelevant to the discussion, It was a torrent of hate designed to shut us up. At one point, several of us found ourselves deleting comments one after another as they poured in – over a hundred in an hour.
When we eventually stopped him, he retreated for a bit. Now he snipes from the sidelines on those blogs that he can infest without being tracked, accusing those of us who banned him of stifling his freedom of speech, so we are hypocrites and he isn’t really a nasty little cunt – mostly this is blogger blogs as they don’t have the tools to deal with these people. It is interesting to observe the behaviour. Having learned who is dangerous to him, he will content himself with unnecessary insults and snide remarks but is mostly ineffective because he knows full well that even the blogger account holders will ban him if he pushes too hard, so stays within their rules in order to have a go at those of us who dared to put a stop to his activity. if he pushes too hard, he will lose those final platforms.
What we see is nothing but intolerance and hatred for anyone who dares to oppose his warped world-view. It is impossible to reason with such a creature, for it is unable to reason. He is driven by hate and nastiness. Any attempt at discussion is twisted into a strawman and I am reminded of the line from “If”.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Well, yes he is a knave – they all are, these psychopathic losers who are incapable of tolerating dissent and reasoned discussion. Although “knave” is rather too kind.
They were also given tests that measured their responses against psychology’s “Dark Tetrad”: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and a sadistic personality.
Having observed this creature on and off for a couple of years now, I’d say that was fairly accurate. He was particularly vile in his attacks on Pat Nurse, for example.
That said, troll is probably the wrong word to use for much of what we experienced wasn’t trolling in the sense that the expression was originally coined. I’d also suggest that we probably didn’t need research to tell us this. We had it all figured out for ourselves – along with the solution.
Knaves,frauds and Idiots they all get paid somewhere along the line to promote and protect the online tobacco control stories. They particularly hate the truth or facts. It leaves them looking like the pompus asses they are.
In every online battle there has been,they are defeated by the shear weight of facts we produce. A lie can only be carried so far. Its based upon the primary lie then followed up by even greater lies that depende on ever more lies to try and substiate the other lies. Mountain of evidence is simply a cover for this mountain of lies.
The only way these Knaves can get their laws passed is by shear weight of political posturing. Its not thru public discourse as they lose everytime when real numbers are counted. No they depend on the trick of statistics and the trick of polling……………slight of hand tricks and a budget us on the right to smoke side would love to have. With just 10% of their budget and a publicity team we could wipe out the worldwide bans in 6 months time.
Nobody likes to be left the fool but with prohibitionists they don’t care,in fact they don’t even care if anybody believes their lies and propaganda. All they care about is control and the money they can extort from the government to keep the fantasy alive for a bit longer. They care not the lives they destroy,they care not the economic destruction their prohibitions bring. They care only for pushing the party of socialism further down the throats of every freedom loving person the world over.
They wont stop and neither will we. But as all political agendas go this one has a death date to with history just like all the times it has come about in the past before. We will be there to shovel the dirt on tobacco control when that day comes.