Simplifying a great deal, and summarising a century of social theory, what is stable in society are second-order expectations, i.e. what others expect myself and others to do. But social expectations are not directly observable, which is a problem. Trolling is a form of behaviour that teases out others's reactions which gives us information about their boundary between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable behaviour.

It's unfortunate this brings selfish joy at the cost of other's suffering, all without external attempt to solve the dissonance behind the disagreement.

So I read your comment as dismissing the concept that words actually have meaning. It seems like a very nihilistic point of view.

Yeah. Uh huh. Exactly.

If I could roll my eyes any harder, they'd fall out the back of my head.

I could walk down the street wearing clothes made from $100 bills and gold thread, and it's the person who attacks me that is to blame for that attack. They initiated the use of force and violence, contrary to law, custom, and human decency.

Any claim to the contrary is, unambiguously, "Well, if she hadn't been wearing that dress..."

In fact through your intentional misunderstanding and inflammatory rhetoric about unrelated topics I now suspect you have successfully trolled me in a discussion about trolling. Well played, sir!

And I'm saying the troll is the predator. He views his entertainment as more important than his "victim's" emotional state, and justifies it with arguments like, "Well, it's the internet, maaaan!" or "It's only a joke, lighten up," or "Serves them right for being so sensitive."

I flatly repudiate that kind of self-serving rationalization. If you fuck with people's emotions for your own amusement, you are a predator. Doesn't matter how "easy" it is. Doesn't matter how "sensitive" they are. You (that is, the party trolling someone) are in the wrong.

Does it change the fact that there are predators in the world? Of course not. But that still doesn't justify predation. And if you say it does, the same logic applies to muggings and sexual assault.

That's the parallel.

But if you mean an e-ego has to be defended and proven superior to others in order to maintain e-streetcred... yeah, sure it will amount to nothing but entertainment for someone else.

Words and ideas have meaning whether the situation is trivial or earth-shattering, whether the communication is face-to-face, online. To view otherwise is to reject meaning at all levels, to be nihilistic.

This is a leading question. Leading questions are obvious when the question they ask cannot be answered with a simple statement. Leading questions are a sign of dissonance and should never be answered, unless one desires the dissonance for themselves. Dissonance itself creates suffering, which is an inefficient process that attempts to resolve the dissonance in a way that causes the holder the least amount of suffering in the near term. "Thicker skin" is simple a reference to burying dissonance. "Troll back" is a reference to spreading the dissonance to others. "Finding different company" is impossible as the Internet now connects all of us. Better buckle up.

It's been my experience people will rationalize being an asshole until they start accepting themselves for who they really are. What is fun is to see someone solve that dissonance on their own and realize the truth that willful suffering is more efficient than offloading your suffering to someone else.

This reminded me of the famous questions the Buddha refused to answer.[1] Your mentioning 'dissonance' and suffering made me see it in a new way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unanswered_questions

That's a highly conflicted argument which I do not accept.

You are welcome, I feel you have earned my downvote now.

In person, body language and tone are often enough to understand when someone is playing the devil's advocate or when they are otherwise stating things that they may not actually believe. When both parties understand this is going on, there is no trolling. Alternatively someone may have honestly come to the controversial opinions they are espousing. Again, body language and tone can often (not always) communicate the honest advocacy of controversial ideas and in this case there is also no trolling.

But when one party is misrepresenting their opinions in a way that the other party can not discern, you've moved away from just 'controversial' to fraudulent.

Online, almost all of the nuance of tone, body language, mannerisms, age, and so on is gone and all you are left with are the words making it much, much, easier to successfully execute the fraud.

To be proud of trolling is to be proud of engaging in deceitful and fraudulent interactions with other people.

Curiously I think there is at least one scenario where I don't think that deceit and fraud are necessarily unethical and that is in response to deceitful or fraudulent behavior. So pretending to go along with an online scam just to keep the scammers resources tied up isn't a bad thing. I believe in self-defense.

And just to be clear, when I read the parent comment, I did ask myself if it was a some sort of self-referential trolling attempt. Who really knows?

Doesn't really change my point.

If I make a joke, and the other person doesn't understand it as a joke, is that unethical?

If I say something untrue, is that unethical, regardless of intent?

It seems to me that you're saying that the only ethical use of communication is an emotionless exchange of concepts and pieces of data.

Telling jokes isn't fraudulent in general but obviously telling a joke or pranking someone at their expense could be fraudulent and deceitful.

I didn't say "intent" didn't matter, in fact I said the opposite. Intent is important and when you are fraudulent and deceitful in your intent you are being unethical.

I didn't say anything about 'emotion'.

The way I understood your comment, is that saying something untruthful or presenting something in a way that the truthiness is difficult to determine is inherently unethical, unless it is very explicitly for a good cause.

I personally enjoy ambiguity in my interactions with other people, online or offline. I'm not personally sure how misrepresenting yourself for no evil purpose can be considered inherently bad.

You have a thought that I want to understand, but i'm just not sure how to read/interpret it to make sense. Perhaps your understanding/definition of "trolling" is so different than mine that it is incomprehensible to me.

My favorite form of trolling is saying something ambiguous to people arguing with each other so that both of them at the same time go "see? qb45 agrees with me!" Then they both realize what happened and resume previous thread as if it didn't happen ;)

Edit: add "try to", not because I feel I didn't win but because it feels so useless as that kind of trolls seems to be unable to recognise when their views have been shot to pieces.

Unable to recognize... or maybe they just don't care. Either way, I feel this is essentially a prerequisite for being a proficient troll.

I started trolling back - occasionally. In order to troll back you need to know how to troll, because the chance of a fruitful conversation is very low. Nice stories like the one above are... nice, but outliers. The problem is there will never be another "meeting" between the two parties, so putting effort into the "relationship" is just not worth it - please note that I'm not giving normative advice here, this is a description, "game theory" like. Places like HN and reddit are almost exclusively for chance meetings of people who will never meet again, or if they do won't realize it because there are too many user IDs.

Key points to troll - and I collected those points over years, watching my own reactions, what frustrated me the most:

- Never act smart - act stupid! There is nothing that riles people more than "stupid", especially when it's directed at you. Also, it is much harder to get through to a stupid person. After all, arguments don't work!

- Don't bother putting any effort into your replies! Goes with the first point, but it also helps you remain detached. Whenever the other guy posts a reply, don't bother reading it, just post your prepared (stupid) statement. At some point it's enough to post the same thing again and again. It shows the other person how futile their position is. Also helps to keep the effort you put in very low.

- Reply (mechanically!) for as long as needed. I have never met someone who would stop a lot sooner than me. Simply because I have next to zero emotional investment with the above methods, and it costs very little time, such a response is just mechanical. They put so much effort in though that it feels like losing, which is mirrored in their replies.

- Caution: If you do end up with any emotional investment at all, the moment you stop before the other person does you will feel bad. Really bad. You will dread the next time you open reddit (for example) and see the red icon on the inbox, because you know it's going to be another response. The only way to avoid this is to do the whole thing mechanically. Imagine you are an mobile carrier company's customer service person. Instead, you want the other person to feel that way!

- Responding quickly for a while is okay. However, what is far more effective at getting under people's skin is when you continue the next day or even days later. Imagine your own experiences: You were caught in a nasty troll fight. It is over, you go back to normal. Two days later, out of the blue, you expect nothing but normal conversations - you click on your reddit inbox - and there is a very nasty reply continuing that dreaded trolling thread! It's not over at all, your troll has stamina! See above, this is doable at no emotional cost to yourself only if you have no emotional investment. If your mind is healthy no amount of impersonal Internet-based anger lingers on to the next day, not normally! Instead, if you were emotionally involved, the last thing you want the next day is to even think of that nasty exchange. So if you plan to be a long-term troll: Make sure you are not invested at all. I think I repeated this piece of advice a few times by now. It is key. And the key to this key is to be "stupid", if you think you cannot help but be invested, or at least I can't help it.

When do I do this? Whenever somebody replies to a comment that I put a lot of effort in, so it wasn't just some funny joke (on those comments I take the downvotes like a man and don't care), and when it is obvious that they don't care about the actual subject, instead I somehow triggered an emotional response (in 1 out of 1,000 people, it's unavoidable) and all they are after is to "get me" (emotionally).

Why do I do it? I want to put a cost on their trolling. You troll me for my honest, long and well-thought-out comment I want you to pay.

So I don't know what people reading this might think, I realize it depends a lot on context, but I can't think of an example right now. It's not like I do that every day, it's rare.

Should I ever meet my match it does not matter - because since I only posted mechanical replies I don't really care. I could stop at any point if I find something better to do. It really feels more like a chore. I don't enjoy it, but it's "a job" at that point.

----------------------------

I would like to say a lot more about the reasons for trolling, but there already is so much text now...

Anyway, one reason that I already hinted at and would like to talk about more is that no actual real conversation is possible!

I invest a lot of time at a great and well-sourced reply - and what does it gain me? 10 people read it, 5 misunderstand or don't care. I don't build any reputation, I don't build any followers - while you can do that, sort-of, on reddit for example (and there's a "friend" feature here I think, no idea what it actually does) if anyone uses it at all it certainly is niche.

These discussion forums by their nature encourage memes and jokes and 1-3 paragraph "short stories" at most. Each topic must be started, talked about and completed within a handful of sentences per person, at most. Anything deeper and more meaningful is not actually possible, at least not on a statistically meaningful scale.

So sometimes, when a topic would require exactly that, longer conversations, I just give up. I don't even try to convince that guy who misunderstood my comment, I take the shortcut, frustrated less about the comment and the person but about the medium.

The moderation system also helps (i.e. it doesn't), that's yet another topic I could write a few pages about. I have come to the opinion that it would be better not to have any negative votes at all. The few comments that really deserve it are outweighed by the many many more that don't, where somebody just didn't like it. Downvotes create frustration when they come unexpectedly, i.e. especially when somebody put an actual and honest effort into a comment.

Pasted below.

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There are likely multiple evolutionary factors behind the tendency to create mischief.

Several concepts are interconnected with the idea of mischief:

- Playing fair vs. ignoring the rules (following/breaking social norms)

- Playing for fun vs. purposeful goal directed activity

- Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors

- Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others

- Strategic reasons to create disruption

- The role of anonymity

Most of these have been studied separately, and not all of them may be required for an activity to be considered "mischief." Each one has its own set of evolutionary stories.

Breaking the rules: There are evolutionary advantages to the species as a whole (e.g. stable organized societies) for having everyone predisposed to following the social norms. Similarly, there are advantages to breaking the social norms: personal advantage in a world where others are unwilling to cheat, collective advantage to having a society that isn't 100% conformist (if the norms are bad, that will only be discovered if some people start breaking them and succeed).

Playing for fun (not goal-directed): Studies on play behavior in animals suggest that play during development serves several functions. It develops practice with give-and-take social interaction for more harmonious social order later, and physical play develops coordination that can help in adult behavior later (puppies playing and becoming better at fighting as dogs).

Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors: This may fall a little bit outside of mischief, however the desire for revenge has been studied, as has duper's delight (pleasure from fooling others), or pleasure from cheating. In general, any behavior that could have an evolutionary advantage for some individuals is likely to have pleasure associated with it somehow, since that ensures that the behavior will be expressed. In any competition, using a strategy that would not occur to the opponent is to the individual's advantage because the opponent won't be planning to counter it. So whatever rules the opponent assumes you are playing by represent opportunities for advantage by ignoring them. There is the risk of winning the battle but losing the war (getting caught and punished), however this is a risk/reward trade-off.

Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others: There are rewards on multiple levels (neurological, social, existential) from getting others to respond:

- Neurological: Experiencing perceptual feedback to an action is inherently rewarding, which may relate to why kids enjoy hitting things and knocking things over. It is part of experimenting with and discovering the causal mechanisms of the environment.

- Social: A displaced or repurposed desire for social interaction, for example when preteens chase and hit girls or boys they are attracted to, or when adults "play the victim" to elicit sympathy.

- Existential: Feeling that one has an impact on the world, that one exists, that one matters. This might relate to enhancing the feeling of personal agency: the sense of power and causal control over the environment.

- Curiosity and personal amusement: Finding out what will happen, and watching the predictable reactions of others play out can be amusing (credit Naman Kumar).

There are also strategic reasons to create disruption in the specific social setting of a dialog (e.g. "trolling"):

- The disrupter wins social points for being dominant, tougher, funnier, and less naive than other participants.

- The bad boy (or b* girl) is admired by peers for being immune to the judgments and approval of others. From an evolutionary perspective, being revered by peers makes one attractive to potential mates in a social species (credit Ernie Bornheimer).

- Humor can be a way of moving the discussion away from an uncomfortable topic (credit Marcus Geduld).

- Sarcasm, ridicule, and shaming can be a strategy for shifting the power in a dialog, silencing opposing viewpoints, and changing the official view in the disruptor's favor (as with political debates).

Lastly, there is also the role of anonymity in mischief. Acting anonymously can be a way of playing out a fantasy without consequences to one's reputation in society. It certainly resolves one of the inner conflicts to antisocial behavior, the risk to one's reputation, by eliminating that risk altogether. Anonymity also facilitates pleasure derived from superiority, power, or knowledge. If you know something that no one else knows -- who is behind the mischief -- then you may be getting pleasure from what would normally be a positive evolutionary behavior: acquiring more knowledge than the next person, understanding causal mechanisms in the world, accumulating power.

Research on the neural basis of breaking the rules:

Moll J, et al (2005) The neural basis of moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Spitzer M et al (2007). The Neural Signature of Social Norm Compliance. Neuron.

Sanfey AG et al (2003). The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game. Science.

de Quervain DJF et al (2004). The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment. Science.

If you would take a look at the "victims" you often discover that a meaningful exchange of arguments wouldn't have been possible in the first place. If someone runs with the -ism crowd, has his eyes opened by using the ideologys inherent errors or has otherwise encapsulated himself in his own little information cyst, any disturbance from the outside will be a troll. If you dislike the troll, you just can starve him, by being reasonable, emotionless and calm.

If you demand special protection rights for your opinions, and are unwilling to rebut attacks with good arguments you disserve to be trolled else you could damage the public.

Now my argument may sound like political correctness, but it's not for a few reasons. You avoid prejudice by avoiding topics of gender, race, etc. You ensure people have the opportunity, which doesn't guarantee an outcome. You don't need equal numbers, just don't alienate. These 3 things encapsulate my beliefs and are the antithesis of political correctness.

So, you are right in that individuals should have the right to their views and should expect them to be challenged. Also recognise that Facebook and co will magnetise these marginalisers to each other, giving them a collective voice which can easily turn into a mob (as it often does). If you don't have responsible leadership (and we don't), these mobs become vicious and destructive. Compound this with political correctness and you have a toxic, self righteous and highly prejudiced mob of hate and bullying!

With policies of both US candidates being so openly prejudiced (eg. Trump on Mexicans, Clinton on her gender card), the future for more hate and bullying looks certain.

From a European perspective it's hard for me to understand this. It seems like a textbook case of false equivalence.

I watched the last debate. Trump talked about "very bad hombres". If Clinton were equally prejudiced against men, I'd expect her to have said something like "men are selfish shitbags". Of course she said nothing of the sort.

How do you see Clinton playing the gender card? On the abortion question, she talked reasonably about the difficult situations that women face, while Trump was yelling about "ripping babies out of the womb one day before birth". The rhetoric of the two is so different, I just can't see why you equate them as hateful bullies.

From a (my) European perspective it's hard for me to understand any of the Trump/Clinton ... thing.

Really? Getting trolled online is like the holocaust?

It boils down to the old who watches the watchmen question, making trolling the police brutality of internet conversation. A troll community internal communication media would be necessary, that allowed too question the motives, and display your biases by showing whose opinion is harassed how much. It would allow to separate those "knowing-nothing" from those who know everything and just spread the hurt. I find both extremes disgusting, the mob - and the state media, that try to propagandize everyone into sleep. And i still like some of those trolls.

We manage to help children from sex predators despite the fact that it's taboo to talk to children about sex. In a similar way, we don't need to discuss race at the office to prevent racial discrimination.

If the discussion is towards feeding more people, then yes move the kitchen. If the discussion is about equality quotas, dismiss it and move on. Almost all race-based charity could be targeted at the poor and actually reach the same people, but it hurts everyone to dwell on that fact.

The real problem with "X" based charity, where X isn't "need", is that they adjust slowly to the changing landscape. And they waste money on the needless question of who to help rather than helping anyone who needs it.

How does that work with opinions that are demonstrably false though? How many times must we keep supplying creationists, flat-earthers or any other conspiracy theorists with rebuttals before it's enough? The problem here is that what constitutes a "good argument" is entirely subjective to your view of reality and these days you can find any number of websites that will support whatever opinion you wish to take.

This is it for me....whenever I encounter someone passing an opinion as fact, it is irresistible to have some fun. I make no claim to expertise in most any subject, but the benefit of spending 10 hours a day thinking in a nearly pure logical form, it is pretty easy to tear apart any incorrect position, the logical inconsistencies are usually plentiful enough to make it like shooting fish in a barrel.

Of course, very few people will ever change their mind based on logic or facts, but it's still fun.

He referred to his community as "petty". This is much like somebody who disagrees with what other are saying (e.g., in an online forum like this), and thus dismisses the community as a group of idiots, rather than using the disagreement as an opportunity for introspection.

Haters use simplified terms, leading questions, "thoughts of others" and visualization seeds to transmit their internal blaming views onto others. Those seeds are then propagated by those who don't know these recursive thoughts are dangerous to play with, as they lead to increasing blame, judgement and speaking for larger groups over time. I say "dangerous" here, but what I really mean is "increasingly inefficient" given everyone involved in the hate has to start rendering future realities that don't exist. ISIS, for example, does this quite well using Armageddon (a foregone conclusion) as their excuse to be involved in massive suffering. Gandhi observed that our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, our character becomes our destiny. Causality happens somewhere in there, even if we don't want to admit it.

If we choose to judge and speak for others, the expectation is that others will continue to increasingly judge and speak for us. Or as Erlich put it best : "Richard, if you're not an asshole, it creates this kind of asshole vacuum, and that void is filled by other assholes, like Jared. I mean, you almost gave him shares. You need to completely change who you are, Richard. A complete Teutonic shift has to happen."

Or my favorite form of trolling where I merely use the thing I am commenting on as a sort of plot device, a writing and thought prompt even, that helps me think through a thing. Like right now. This comment is more for me than it is for anyone else, it lightly disagrees with the OP, perhaps even trolls, but it's not for OP, it's for me.

The upvotes and downvotes then help tune me to the community and/or society. Yes, I troll like this IRL as well. Just say something outrageous, see what happens. The resulting debates are often great fun and tell you a lot about the people around you.

I explained to my children about the 2 US candidates. I described both of them as bullies and said they promote a culture of bullying. We discussed how they set a bad example for the broader community and how media condones this behaviour.

I was picking up my children from school when one young boy called me by my first name in a mocking tone. I approached him and asked how his day was and took a moment to ask about him. When I now see this boy, he goes out of his way to say hello.

I recently went to a computer club open day. The rules were "we will only allow the same number of boys in as girls". I looked around and saw about 20 boys and 1 girl. I went to this girl and her mother and said "good on you for giving it a go, a variety of experiences is essential to helping you find your true self". The mother went on a sexist rant about patriarchal societies (the usual politically correct thinking) and I said "why would you deny any child the opportunity? Why would you force the same numbers of girls and boys? What's gone wrong in such basic thinking?" She stopped the hardcore feminist routine and apologised. She was big enough to say "no one has ever put it like that, that really makes sense".

The problem with hate is that the Internet has given it a collective voice of monumental proportions. Our community leaders have let us down by selectively promoting prejudice (eg. Emma Watson is glorified for hypocrisy) while aggressively condemning others, especially passive people like Matt Taylor. What's worse is that most people don't recognise hate and bullying when they see it, or they are apathetic to it.

My simple rule: if someone promotes one group over another, they are as bad as someone who excludes or vilifies a group (especially politically correct people who are huge bullies). These people who marginalise are the true haters and bullies. The article really misses the breadth of hate and bullying.

Thought for the day. Do a search on breast cancer websites. How many of these sites do you think alienate men who suffer from the condition? Why do you think many of these sites quote percentages of male victims?

Why do you equate the meanness of Trump and Clinton? In what world are their personal faults comparable? Donald Trump is petty and vindictive to an unusual degree. Clinton is a normal politician.

You cannot change society without criticizing it. Social justice activists spend a lot of time pointing out injustice in society, in the hope to persuade people to become less discriminatory. This doesn't make them mean or bullies. The problem is that any time sexist, racist or otherwise nasty behavior is pointed out people tend to get angry, and they want to lash out at person who criticized their behavior instead of reflecting on the merits of the accusation.

It's embarrassing to see your post at the top of this thread. And people wonder why there aren't more women and minorities in tech...

   nasty behavior is pointed out

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the communist tradition has murdered millions of people in the name of social justice. And older people who still remember the communists often can't help but see that eerie similarities ...

   Clinton is a normal politician.

Given recent events in Europe, I will wait for election day, polls doesn't mean anything. Also, the fact that nearly all mainstream US media I read is extremely pro-Clinton might have an unexpected backlash a-la Brexit.

> This doesn't make them mean or bullies. The problem is that any time ... behavior is pointed out people tend to get angry, and they want to lash out at person who criticized their behavior instead of reflecting on the merits of the accusation.

I elided the behavior qualifiers because I think you're getting at a deeper point that works in general. (Please correct me if this is unfair.) The way the criticism is presented is important. There's an effective difference in listing faults, presenting evidence, or making accusations that put people on the defensive (and they're no longer listening to you), and figuring out ways to take into account human psychology in ways that are more likely to make a change. As you said, "people tend to get angry, and they want to lash out ... instead of reflecting." Engaging people in a way that encourages that reflection rather than the anger is hopefully going to be more productive.

This can be increasingly difficult when tensions are high. And that's usually when it's even more important. And sometimes I feel like this is a slower path, but then if the alternative isn't likely to make a change at all--or make it worse--, slower seems like a better alternative.

This comment is in part me working through my thoughts. The fact that it's attached to your comment is because it prompted me to think more about this, so thank you!

To the general reader, in the hopes of better communication, if you'd like to down vote this comment, will you also take the time to add a brief reply? I appreciate it.

But it sure seems to have attracted a flurry of disturbing posts (eg my grandparent and sibling post's)

My reaction was that we should find a way to handle social gathering, political parties. It's so easy to turn into an echo chamber based distortion field.

There's something about our minds and how we interact that creates walls. We should approach things a bit like buddhism, with new eyes and not prejudice. And ability to amort people which are already walled up so they can climb it down themselves and go back to relaxed open minded, honest interactions.

It's why I'm so arrested by this article and @rustynail's examples. I don't know what it is, but I feel like I'm on the verge of grokking something here.

I think you've only got the correcting part right.

The parent 's interventions, as explained, where not dismissing, and especially where not dismissive of anything and everything -- they were only answering hostile behavior or exclusion with more openness and understanding.

I clearly don't speak for @rustynails. However, I think he is establishing a genuine connection with people, exactly an application of what Kierkegaard was explaining. Rather than dismissing other people's concerns, in his examples, he is instead establishing their personhood. He makes it personal without make it personally insulting. There are probably other things I'm missing, but I'm eager to try them out. I notice similar breakdown in communication with my wife, but I think this would help a lot.

That doesn't seem very charitable. From everything I've seen Emma Watson acts altruistically in good faith and makes a point of not making her advocacy adversarial.

We say "black lives matter" not because white lives don't, but because it is a defacto truth of our system that black lives are treated as mattering much less. What you're doing is suppressing dissent in a way that maintains the status quo.

And you really think that people protesting police shootings in general, and e.g. shouting "all lives matter", whether the victim is black, latino, asian, white or whatever would harm things?

It's the NON PROTESTING that's the problem, not the change of angle from "black lives" to "all lives". If anything insisting on "black lives" is only just addressing a narrow part of the problem and alienates people from the more general cause to boot.

-- police violence is unambiguously a racial issue [0]

-- "white lives matter" contains implicit parallelism to "black lives matter" and cannot help but be viewed as responding to BLM. Its use in general has been to deny the racial aspects of police violence.

-- if you wish to address police violence for all groups, then use language which does not function to deny or derail other movements. Choose a new catch phrase. BLM is necessary to address the particularly black aspects of police violence, and trying to turn it into a race-blind movement is to destroy a core part of the problems it is trying to address.

Make a movement which is interested in the general problem of police violence, but recognize that you're not addressing the same types of problems as a movement like BLM and don't try to stop what BLM is doing.

The claim that <a movement which addresses the particularly black aspects of police violence is alienating> is a condemnation of non-black culture, not a condemnation of BLM. Race exists and has strong effects on culture and treatment, and race-blindness' only function is to deny marginalized groups the opportunity to address the oppressions specific to them.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...

I think this depends on who is blind to race, and if they really are or are just not saying it because they like the status quo. If everyone was blind (literally) to race, there would be no racism... I don't think the world is helped by everyone talking about race. It's not that exciting, it's some minor physical traits. Culture, and history, are the deep topics.

And I think it misses the point that if you're bullied by a sexist, or a racist, you're going to feel the same. We'd have to ban a thousand topics and it still wouldn't keep the bullies from bullying. It's better to go to the root of the problem and deal with bullies.

Bullies feelings don't matter, so we don't have to worry about being PC, etc. Everyone has been bullied, so everyone can get into it.

What we need to do to make this work is talk about race just enough that we don't discourage the victim revealing their bullying, but not enough to give the bullies anything to work with.

> police violence is unambiguously a racial issue

Right, but we won't fix it by being equally but opposite racists. We fix it by firing and charging any officer who breaks a law.

I'm not black, but have been threatened by police (with guns) for perfectly legal activities. But I'm not going to fight my way into a Black Lives Matter protest to try to change their story. Theirs is true - they are black and their lives matter. Their lives are the ones being systematically undervalued. I was only targeted because the cop was having a bad night, they're targeted every day by racists who think they're doing the right thing for society.

I think they feel that all lives matter (except maybe cops and cop supporters). But that doesn't help the point of focusing on those who are the most under attack and the racism causing it.

Have you found this to be effective online?

That is, the burden on proof is on the one saying she's lied.

The idea of constantly surrounding myself with enemies sounds nightmarish, but I can understand why it works.

I'm assuming that I haven't tried that. I may have. I seem to recall the troll taking even that as an opportunity to lunge for my soft spots, but I could be mistaken.

And thus the cycle continues.