Troll Police // Jan 11, 2010 at 4:48 pm
It was very deliberate. I’ve met each of Carolyn, Jill, and Debra, but I’ve never met Slevin, and if I had, I still would use only his last name, sans honorific, so as to not create an impression that he is part of what I consider civil society.
The dynamic that Carolyn identifies is all too common, but it turns out that this wasn’t an example of it.
Another all-too-common dynamic is not giving fellow Libertarians the benefit of the doubt.
Troll Police // Jan 11, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Carolyn, please see our message immediately below yours. The Troll Police have a consistent and gender-neutral policy for how we choose among 1) first name, 2) last name with honorific, and 3) last name without honorific. Our policy treats genders equally, but it is absolutely not “about treating everyone equally”. We already expained why.
Other policies of the Troll Police are not (yet) consistent. We don’t always use the first person plural. We are still working out policies for how to maximize shame for troll-feeders, and how to answer police brutality complaints from trolls without feeding them in the process. But none of this has anything to do with gender. Neither you nor we can prove it either way, so this will just have to be a character test of what conclusions people reach when the evidence supports none.
Roll Tide, as we wrote yesterday, not everything that an identified troll writes constitutes trolling. However, the Troll Police welcome good-faith efforts at citizens’ arrests. Indeed, if troll-feeding were properly handled through community self-policing, then the Troll Police would be able to demobilize.
Carolyn, your initial accusation @30 said nothing about alleged gender inconsistency in who we accuse of trolling and troll-feeding. The first two trolls we’ve named have been men we’ve never met, and (after “Rorschach”) the first three people we cited for feeding were women who happen to be our acquaintances. It’s not tenable to claim this dataset exhibits evidence of gender selectivity.
Your “little sister” and “schoolgirl” insinuations are simply unfair. The flip side of the LP’s gender problem is that you probably see no problem in dealing the gender victim card from the bottom of the deck in this way, even after we confirmed Brad’s correct (and far more charitable) interpretation of the event. Our use of first names had zero to do with gender, and we’re sorry if that basic historical fact doesn’t fit in with your agenda in this thread.
The goal of the Troll Police will continue to be to maximize the shame of trolling and troll-feeding in the eyes of civil society here. If your own tactics can minimize trolling and troll-feeding even more effectively than ours do, so much the better.
As for “please stop feeding the trolls”, that was precisely our inaugural effort, over on the Seebeck thread. Didn’t work. So we started experimenting. We still are.
We don’t understand your point about how we allegedly shamed Mr. Holtz differently than you. We won’t insult your intelligence by repeating yet again our policy about when we use first name vs. last name. If your agenda here demands that you disbelieve our self-report about our policy, that’s something we’ll just have to get used to.
We don’t understand how you can say we “treat trolls with such deference”. Our policy with Milnes is to react to his trolling with the nuclear option: citing his stalking conviction, his history of mental illness, his homelessness problems, his utter lack of an LP activism resume, and the abject failure of his alleged presidential nomination campaign. Our hope is that knowledge of these facts will dissuade at least LP officers from encouraging Milnes’ delusions of LP prominence.
R.T., the few parts of your ramblings that we skimmed indeed went right over our heads. If you’re aiming for troll status, the first thing you need to do is split your long rambling comment into a series of much shorter ones.
Brad, we hadn’t noticed it until just now, but you’re right: Carolyn apparently thought that “Shame on all of them” only applied to the female troll-feeders, and not also to the male troll. We won’t speculate on what led her to such a wildly tendentious reading, even though she presumes to know why we sometimes use first names. Mind-reading may be her forte, but it’s not ours.
Deb, we’ll have to remember that one about blending a kitten. Perhaps Mr. Holtz is not such an irredeemable troll-feeder after all.
