In defense of the troll

Five years ago, back when I was a very large fish in a very tiny puddle - the so-called Romanian blogosphere - I was also the only to verbally and programmatically defend trolling, and more generally freedom of expression. All expression. Such as the expression of your mother being a streetwalker, which is how you've learned everything you know. Obviously this comes second place to people who defended it by, you know, actually doing it, but what can you do.

Anyway, there were all these fucktards representing (in their own mind) "the community", and common sense, public good, all that stuff. They never amounted to a significant fraction of my circulation, but then again that never ever stopped anyone, from anything. They are meanwhile mostly disappeared and thus forgottenⁱ - yet at the time they agreed, perfectly impervious to their irrelevance, with that fecalous consistence typical of fucktards impervious to their irrelevance, that "trolling is bad mkay" and that "everyone agrees trolling is bad mkay mkay" and so on and so forth.

I abandoned that space, mostly because Bitcoin is an all-devouring eater of worlds. So now I write in English. Guess what happens in English ?

@ligayaya "Behind every troll is pain." Community wisdom @nrrrdcore #PassionProjects

@Mircea_Popescu This is like saying "behind every nigger is stupidity"

@ligayaya actually, I don't think it is. at all.

@Mircea_Popescu Of course you don't think so. Oppressors honestly think they're just being nice.

Surprise, surprise. The exact same thing happens in English that happens in Romanian : fucktards representing (in their own mind) "the community", and common sense, public good, all that stuff come to agreements as to what's what. Agreements that are perfectly divorced from reality, yet in their own mind binding "for the entire world". Apparently self-sufficient stupidity is not culture specific.

To be clear, there is no difference between a nude and rude assertion of an imaginary right to be stupid and an attempt to blacken the sacred, hallowed name of the troll. Anyone saying "trolls are bad mkay" is in fact saying "my stupidity is acceptable and must be accepted, by everyone". That's all it is, nothing else, nothing more. If the speaker weren't stupid, the troll couldn't exist in the first place.

The situation is exactly homologuous with the debate around trade tariffs. If your industry didn't suck, if you weren't lazy and useless, if you didn't make shit products, if you weren't wasteful and a scourge upon humanity you wouldn't be going to the government to ask for protection because otherwise "the foreigners are bad mmkay" will drive you out of existence. Quite on the contrary, you'd be all over the foreigners, driving them out of existence. Any appeal for trade tariffs is, simultaneously and in the same breath, a declaration not only of failure, but moreover of the programmatic, deliberate choice to fail. Equivalently, any complaint about trolls is not only a declaration of stupidity, but moreover of the actual intention of the stupid party to remain stupid for the indefinite future.

Beligerent stupidity, much like organised mendacity or entrenched lazyness have no place in civilised society, from which they exclude themselves by the very nature of their being. And exactly by the same token, nobody who complains about trolls can be part of a community. Any community. Because the things people who complain about trolls are part of aren't communities. Circle jerks aren't communities.

Grow out of your playpen already, dare set foot into the real world, dear everyone. The water is lovely.

1. Tell me not how many "views", I do not care. Tell me not how many people you imagine follow your whatever, I do not care about that either. Tell me instead how many people will be following what you do ten years after you've stopped doing it altogether. Tell me whether that number is larger than today's or not. This is the sort of stuff that matters, and this is the sort of stuff you ain't got. [↩]