‘How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet’, by Joel Stein. This is an article in Time magazine (quite PC), in which non-PC speech is characterized as “trolling.” So actions to censor “trolls” are really actions aimed at shutting up critics of political correctness, just as are most attempts to censor “hate” speech.
They’re turning the web into a cesspool of aggression and violence.
It’s always “divisive” when people disagree with PC.
The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls … Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats.
Here the article mixes in any non-PC people with social undesirables, categorizing them both with the same name. An effective propaganda ploy.
A lot of people enjoy the kind of trolling that illuminates the gullibility of the powerful and their willingness to respond. One of the best is Congressman Steve Smith, a Tea Party Republican representing Georgia’s 15th District, which doesn’t exist. For nearly three years Smith has spewed over-the-top conservative blather on Twitter, luring Senator Claire McCaskill, Christiane Amanpour and Rosie O’Donnell into arguments. Surprisingly, the guy behind the GOP-mocking prank, Jeffrey Marty, isn’t a liberal but a Donald Trump supporter angry at the Republican elite, furious at Hillary Clinton and unhappy with Black Lives Matter.
So critics of PC are “trolls”. A Tea Party Republican no less. This is becoming a call for political censorship. Said troll could never find any way for his ideas to get into the mainstream (PC) media. Cripes, we cannot get straight scientific information, even as mundane as a temperature graph, into the mainstream media, despite having scientific credentials up the kazoo. If you contradict the PC narrative, they deny you any space in the media except to discredit you.
Trolling is, overtly, a political fight.
You don’t say.
But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right
Another group they then proceed to demonize with half truths and lies by omission. And the reason these people “troll,” which the article never mentions? Because their anti-PC views are never aired in the public space. People like the author of the article block ideas they don’t like, so their critics have no other platform except the ‘net.
The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.”
No. A cuckold is a person who describes themselves as conservative but promotes or goes along with PC ideas. Many right of center legislators are guilty of this — they form the B-team of PC politics, where the A-team is of course the left wing party.
Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix.
No. What’s with the obsession with feminism? Anyone who comes to question the PC narrative has “taken the red pill.”
The alt-right was galvanized by Gamergate, a 2014 controversy in which trolls tried to drive critics of misogyny in video games away from their virtual man cave.
No. Feminists tied to muscle into the video game world, bullying people and telling them what they could and could not put in their games. The gamers successfully resisted, which is the first time ever that the feminists have been defeated. Gamers are too robust, not falling into line for fear of being called “sexist”:
“There’s such a culture of viciously making fun of each other on their message boards that they have this very thick skin. They’re all trained up.”
The politically correct won’t rest until all anti-PC speech is banned everywhere. Stamp out blasphemy!
When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays–anyone who might feel vulnerable. Young people in these groups assume trolling is a normal part of life online and therefore self-censor.
What, like people who aren’t PC don’t self-censor nearly everywhere? That is the point of PC, a culture of bullying to promote a narrative. The standard PC operating procedure is name-calling, and the PC-dominated social media communities are outrageously abusive, but the article does not seem to find those examples worth mentioning.
The alt-right argues that if you can’t handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that’s arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet.
Try say something non-PC at work or in many social situations, and you may well get fired or ostracized nowadays. Cannot just turn that off with the flip of a switch.
