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Monday, October 31, 2011

Online Trolls, and Foolish Dissidents

I have participated in a number of different online forums, on a variety of different topics. Mostly, they have to do with politics, culture, and sexuality.

As is the case in the medium of online forums, protected by anonymity and faceless avatars, there are ways that forum participants feels enabled to activate their "troll" selves.

Trolls

According to the Indiana University Information Technology Services (which I was linked to from the wikipedia article about trolls), trolls and the culture of internet trolling are described as follows:

"In email discussion lists, online forums, and Usenet newsgroups, a troll is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers-by, but rather a provocative posting intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses. The term can also refer to someone making such a posting ("a troll") or to the action ("trolling", "to troll").

The content of a troll posting generally falls into one of several categories. It may consist of an apparently foolish contradiction of common knowledge, a deliberately offensive insult to the readers of a newsgroup or mailing list, or a broad request for trivial follow-up postings. The result of such postings is frequently a flood of angry responses. In some cases, the follow-up messages posted in response to a troll can constitute a large fraction of the contents of a newsgroup or mailing list for as long as several weeks. These messages are transmitted around the world to thousands of computers, wasting network resources and costing money for people who pay to download email or receive Usenet news. Troll threads also frustrate people who are trying to carry on substantive discussions."



While I am easily infuriated by trolling, most trolls who write on online forums are simply impulsive bullies or self-conscious irritants... The best way to deal with them is to Ignore Them.

But there is a more sinister sort of Troll... and I call these trolls the Foolish Dissidents...



Foolish Dissidents


an example from communitychannel (Natalie) on Youtube, responding to a racist message on her forum with a vulnerable and honest acknowledgement of her irritation, in good humour

By "Foolish Dissidents," I mean that these specific sorts of trolls are usually individuals or a set of individuals who seem to genuinely believe that they are engaging in substantive discussions, making worthwhile contributions to an ongoing debate about this or that topic. I call them such, because they are often contrary, and typically blind to their own logical or dialectical shortcomings, or else, just as typically, blind to how their views (and/or the ways that their views are articulated) are irresponsible abuses of privilege.

It is here that I bump into a sort of existential conundrum... How Do I Deal WIth These Foolish Dissidents?

On the one hand, I follow the calling of the Buddhist teaching: That all beings are suffering, and that the proper response to others' sufferings is to cultivate wisdom and apply wisdom in compassionate service.

And this call truly does extend to include ALL Beings, including the Trolls themselves. Trolls, assuming they are not Bots, are just as human as anyone else... but I designate them as simply more suffused with a certain brand of ignorance. What are the rightful expedient means to dispel their ignorance, thus liberating them from their suffering?

But then I bump up into that next part of the conundrum:
Who am I to Educate them? Who are they and who am I in the larger scheme of things? Online forums are but blips in the entire corpus of human history's addiction to Conversation and Dialogue, Dissidence and Demagoguery...

By all this I mean that I come up against the need to monitor MY own trollish-ness... MY own exaggerated claims to moral superiority or secret knowledge. My own hubris, my own propensity to abuse privilege... in short: My own suffering.

What is the 'correct' response then?

Of course it varies from circumstance to circumstance, forum to forum, troll to troll, topic to topic. There are sometimes even gems of wisdom that peek out underneath the smatterings of rhetorical waste that some Foolish Dissidents spew. I can begin by looking for these gems, to honour what it may be that may have been their intent underlying their garbage. The other aspect is to also make a certain distinction, what illdoc1 calls the "What they Said/Did" conversation and the "What they Are" conversation (which he talks about in the context of challenging racist speech).

As he puts it, "those are two totally different conversations, and you need to make sure that you pick the right one." And of course, he is advocating that, in most circumstances, the right conversation to have is the conversation about What They Said/Did, without necessarily extrapolating FROM that around WHO THEY ARE. This, after all, would be allowing myself to become that Foolish Dissident myself.

These conversations are not easy; they rarely are.
But with some skill, an adroit use of humour / developmentally appropriate language to engage all in the forum (not least of whom the troll(s) him/her/themselves), a healthy moderation of my own ego's propensity to over-exaggerate the worth of my own voice in the context of a heated conversation, and ultimately, of course, compassion and forgiveness for all involved (including myself for those times that I have failed to live up to my heightened expectations of spiritual servitude)...

...perhaps I can catalyse at least THIS beginning dialogue into how to be a responsible citizen of cyberspace.

Break? Fast!

I've been taking a break from writing on Psychonaut Erotica.

Part of this is related to my practice of humility: I am aware that, as one of the co-founders of this blog, I unwittingly play or am ascribed the role of moderator, mediator of its content. This is not exactly the easiest role to play, given that the four of us who write here live in disparate locations and do not necessarily know one another in person very well (or perhaps even at all!). So that leaves me as the 'unifying factor' that holds each of us together in a shared vision (I happen to know everyone on here).

Another issue is the ever-shifting landscape of my own intellectual, political, and social needs. I've been re-exploring the tool of facebook, and it is on there that I have been collaborating and sharing ideas around spirituality, integral theory, psycho-spiritual growth, sexuality, politics, and current events.

And lastly, there is the issue of plain old Busy-ness... Negotiating many different relationships at once, both local and international, is in itself a full-time job... which then leaves me without the requisite spaciousness to properly construct the essays of a quality that I unwittingly continue to hold myself up to.

I promise nothing:
I may not write again for awhile, or I may contribute 5 pieces tomorrow.
What I do know with sufficient certainty is that there is something in me brewing... and when the time is ripe for it to be shared, it most certainly will. But I suppose this is as true now as it has ever been.

And so again I return to silence.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Education!

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.


Manissa McCleave Maharawal, over on Racialicious

http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/03/so-real-it-hurts-notes-on-occupy-wall-street/

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Hunger strike against human rights abuses in California prisons

New York

Like many other prison systems, the California prison system has completely given up on rehabilitation (if that was ever really the goal of such systems in the U.S.), and instead has embarked on a widely acknowledged and well documented campaign against those locked up in its prisons. Its tools include deliberate fomenting of racial strife, gender policing, sanctioned rape and sexual abuse, labor exploitation, systemic humiliation, social deprivation, degradation, and denial of legal due process. One of the most dehumanizing of the prison system's tools (and there are many), is long term isolation, through solitary confinement in facilities euphemistically called "Secure Housing Units" or SHUs in California prisons. The prison system offers, as a thin justification for the use of these techniques, the need to maintain "discipline" and "order."

In the face of the ongoing human rights abuses in California prisons, as of Thursday of last week, almost 12,000 people in prison are participating in a hunger strike. They have only five demands, which, to me, are devastating in their simplicity.

It is an outrage that it takes a hunger strike to have these demands heard. And it is an indicator of how spiritually and morally bankrupt, corrupt, unaccountable and fundamentally broken the prison system (including the private corporations and prison guard unions that are part of that system) has become that CDCR (the California agency that runs prisons) has refused to adequately meet these demands.

There was an initial hunger strike that people locked up in Pelican Bay prison started on July 1, 2011. Thousands of other people who were locked up in other prisons joined that strike in solidarity. Leaders inside called off the strike after almost a month when the CDCR offered to meet some of their demands.

However, it has since become clear that CDCR did not bargain in good faith, and abuses in prison continue, with no clear commitment on the part of CDCR to end them.

People in California, the U.S., and internationally should pay attention to what is happening. Despite a systemic attempt to debase them, people in prison have come together to organize against abuses, and to assert their dignity. They are a shining example of the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of towering odds, and deserve our enthusiastic and grateful support.

A 2009 article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande examines the use of isolation in prisons:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

For updates on the strikes:
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com

Some history about Pelican Bay
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/pelican-bay/305-2/

Saturday, October 1, 2011

WOW

uni acronym (feat. anne-james chaton) by alva noto