Tricks of the Trolls

I sit here convincing myself I have but the vaguest influence on other people's thinking. I dribble weakly through a gap in the floorboards, dissolving through nylon weaves and underlay. The stillness here screams an intensity belying the violence that brought these worthless commodities to me. The three-piece suite vibrates with an inertia insistent and arresting; the coffee table sings with an overbearing motionlessness.

I cannot be the only one who's noticed: the blurring of words and ideas to actively muddy the clarity of pure progressive intention. Online trolls on social media comments sections conspire to tarnish left wing thought through feeble but persistent comparisons with fascists, or through the masquerading of right wing ideas as viable progressive notions. It is clear to me here the voice of many is really the voice of the few: multiple convenient personalities united in a single slur.

The tricks of these trolls do not work on me. I hold no allegiance with any group, so the unspecific criticism of any group will not elicit a rise out of me; nor will the incessant dimwitted assertion that the Nazis were socialists. It matters not to me if the Nazis were socialist (they weren't): they were wrong and I do not follow them or the right wing bullshit of the average muddy troll, working professionally or amateurishly for the good of the glorious status quo: using the puny tactics of one without an argument: asserting that the left are authoritarian fascists; accusing the left of reducing freedom of speech through political correctness, forcing people to accept equality, the trigger warnings on popular culture products …

These tricks of the troll cannot work on the thoughtful and the learned; they cannot work on people who read, who learn, who educate themselves daily. They cannot work on people who think; and this demonstrates the limited insight of the average troll: only able to comprehend the world through the fog of the stunts and deception that bind them to their regressive state. Their trick is simple: it is nationalism in its most primitive and everyday incarnation. It is persuasion not through reasoning and logic, but through name-calling and the spreading of bad reputation. It is the simple case of dissuasion through suggestion and innuendo; but this is precisely what brought the troll to her current political paroxysms; and it can only work on the like-minded and the intellectually raped; it can only influence a person prepositioned to accept assertions without question.

Not me.

Over and out for now, guys!

xxx