#tactical trolling

[anthroxlove]

[vanthedork]

Zekhan, aka Zappy Boi!

[neodarkdark]

svern is a horrible person to argue with because he could be talking completely out of his ass and know that he's talking completely out of his ass (he's almost definitely doing it on purpose) but he'll still find some way to make it sound like it could almost make sense or at least wholly sell that he's confident and has conviction in whatever bullshit he's saying

9/10 times he has no investment in whatever he's saying he just wants to see what the other person's reasoning is so he can dissect it and see what their emotional responses are

[torchstelechos]

I think if Shen Yuan went to therapy instead of becoming Internet Troll TM we would have had a whole book series with SY becoming self aware enough to realize hes the new main character of the book series and then abusing that to the fullest extent

[eggjungwoo]

[mesmerblossoms]

oh god I just remembered my NA alt is on Maguuma

[marklikely]

i literally just watched an 80 minute movie that i decided was unwatchable at around 12 minutes in but i said well ill stick it out because its a found footage horror so the main character is going to die and i need to see it. and then she survived the whole movie and didnt even die.

[many-gay-magpies]

im gonna make merlin turn jim into a changeling

[sarilolla]

No context writing/WIP

Tempted to give Poppy a tactical shovel

I think she deserves it

[zzkt]

Concern trolling

Concern trolling is basically when you pretend to care about an issue in order to undermine and derail any measures that would be taken to address the actual, underlying problem that’s affecting society. Instead, it’s a tactic that’s used to:

trigger infighting among the groups/people who are actively working on the true problem,

reframe the argument to try and take power away from an actual, effective movement,

and to flood the public discussion with noise and distraction, often with tremendous success.

This is a particularly fruitful tactic when the seeds of fear are already present, as it’s extremely easy to take an already fearful (sometimes, justifiably so) group and point them toward an imagined boogeyman, causing them to attack and fixate on a completely extraneous, possibly even non-existent, problem instead.

via https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/concern-trolling/

[itsjustpoopeh]

I'm rewatching Ted Lasso bc what else am I supposed to do with a hyperfixation and I'm currently convinced that by season 2 Ted is absolutely pretending not to know anything about football. like some of it is genuine but definitely that bit where he doesn't know what friendlies are called in season 3? he's trolling and Beard is playing along

also he's been holding on to that offside reveal for at least a year just waiting for the right moment you can't tell me otherwise

[signs-of-the-moon]

[librarycards]

Pigeons are doves. They are rock doves, and I wonder if we began to call them that if people would hesitate to hate them, as doves have that history as messengers of peace. It is true that in my neighborhood nobody hates the mourning doves, dusky and elegant with wings that squeak as if they flap on rusty hinges. They roost on the wires like little Audrey Hepburns, while the pigeons troll the ground, tough and fat, some of them look like they should be smoking cigarettes. They look poor and banged up, like they could kick the mourning doves’ asses but are wise to the divide-and-conquer tactics we use on one another, so they coo wearily at the mourning doves and waddle forth in search of scavenged delights. What you may not know is when you call a pigeon “a rat with wings” you have given it a compliment. The only thing a rat lacks is a pair of wings to lift it, so you have named the pigeon perfectly. When you say to me, “I hate pigeons,” I want to ask you who else you hate. It makes me suspicious.

I once met a girl who was so proud to have hit such a bird on her bicycle, I swear, I thought that it was me she hit. I felt her handlebars in my stomach and now it is your job to feel it also. The pigeons are birds, they are doves. They are the nature of the city and the ones who no one loves. When people say they hate pigeons, I want to ask them if they hate themselves, too. Does it prick the well of your loathing? Do they make you feel dirty and ashamed? Are you embarrassed about how little or how much you have, for how you have had to hustle? Being dirty is not a problem for the pigeon. You can ask it, “How do you feel about having the city coating your feathers, having the streets gunked up in the crease of your eye?” and the pigeon would say, “Not a problem.” You will now stop blaming the pigeon. It is not the pigeon’s fault. The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst our decay, came to hate it for not dying. The pigeon is your ally. They are chameleons, gray as the concrete they troll for scraps, at night they huddle and sing like cats. Their necks are glistening, iridescent as an oil-slick rainbow, they mate for life, and they fly.

Michelle Tea, Against Memoir. [emphasis mine]

[prokopetz]

Some of y'all have gotta learn to recognise that when a popular blogger claims your favourite piece of media is shit based on a superficial, barely-skimmed-the-Wikipedia-article understanding, then proceeds to wildly misinterpret every effort to explain what they got wrong, you're not participating in a discussion – you're getting smooth-sharked. This is a trolling tactic. The person employing it is 100% aware they're full of shit. That's the point.

[ftmtftm]

Do you really think its more plausable that a TERF knows the specific details of the Baeddel discourse so well that they can craft the perfect copypasta that refrences all the nuances of internal trans discourse (which I'm sorry but they don't really understand anything about our community) in such a way as to be the maximum level of offensive to the other side than the alternative, that there exists on this site a trans man capable of sexually harassing trans women who disagree with him? I

Are all trans mascs sexual harassers? obviously not. Are you responsible for that guy's actions in any way? No not at all. But I find the inistance that any sexual misconduct or transmisogyny purported to be from a trans masc is an outsider troll to be very off putting from the perspective of a trans woman. I think there is a problem of trans women being treated like sex objects by the broader trans community, (enby's trans mascs etc). The problem will never be resolved if we can't even aknowledge it exists without getting shouted down.

Yes actually because that is what Radfems on Tumblr do and have done and will continue to do for literally the entire time I've been on Tumblr.

Just being completely clear - I mentioned this already but to be extra extra clear - It was not even my original idea that it was probably a Radfem and I've directly said that. I honestly thought it was probably one of the trans guys that white knights extremely hard against the idea of transandrophobia trying to cause shit because of the typing style.

It was in fact my trans fem ex-gf and current very close friend who I still live with, who suggested to me that she thought it was a Radfem. And you know?

Her reasoning combined with my experiences with TERFs actively trying to recruit my friends and I into Radical Feminism because we're actively Feminist trans mascs - it would make a ton of sense.

You have probably not experienced this because you are not a trans masc, but there is absolutely a subgroup of Radfems on this website that try very hard to learn about trans infighting as a way to target trans mascs for recruitment.

Trans masculine people have HUGE targets on our back for Radfem recruitment on this website. It's something I've literally personally seen people fall into and detransition for. Radblr actively loves to target vulnerable, politically vocal trans mascs as recruitment targets, especially doing so by trying to pit us against each other, especially by trying to pit us and trans women against each other.

It's scary as hell. It's also not a new thing by any means. Like, "This has been happening consistently at least since 2015" level of not a new thing. So, I've learned to become very aware of it because I'm a trans masc who is a Feminist advocate who actively studies the history and tactics of Radical Feminism in order to protect myself and other trans people from it.

I'm also sorry, but there was literally an anon like that that went around trans masculine blogs a few months ago. Exactly the same premise but flipped in a "transandrodorks need to be fixed by being impregnated with girlcock" kind of deal. There was an almost immediate "we need to assume this isn't actually a trans fem and assume that it is a troll" response both internally and externally. If any of us had assumed it was actually a trans fem in the same way and projected our pain at trans fems in the same way this is getting projected onto trans mascs...? Could you imagine? The double standard would be insane.

I know this is something coming from a place of our own hurt, but where the hell was any of our support during that? What were we supposed to do besides assume that it was probably a troll? Like those are hypotheticals without real answers, but come on? You know?

Of course anything is possible. No one knows who that anon actually was. And it is an issue the way trans women are sexualized by the community, especially right now on Tumblr. It deserves to be addressed. But not in the weeds like this.

I believe what I believe based on what I know and the thoughts and feelings of people I trust. You can dislike that, you can even disagree with that, but a stranger coming into my askbox with a condescending tone isn't really going to contest my lived experiences or the shared opinion of someone I've known for the better part of a decade that easily.

[wilwheaton]

The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay. "One can see the sheen of desperation in the world of self-identified conservatives who make a living by "triggering" the liberals. The usual dose of outrage bait isn't working as well any longer, so the right-wingers are escalating the provocations. Tucker Carlson, for example, gave a glow-up interview with manosphere "influencer" Andrew Tate, who is being held in Romania on charges of sex trafficking and rape. Daily Wire anti-trans provocateur Matt Walsh is selling plushies of himself clad only in a diaper, which he encourages people to give to children. Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, on the other hand, made a nearly hour-long video tantrum about "Barbie," complete with setting the dolls on fire. The clawing need to get attention from progressives seems to be driving these engagement farmers a little nuts, as they up the weird-and-evil ante, hoping to get those precious clicks and plays. [...] "The escalation of shock value tactics, on both the right and the pretending-not-to-be-right political classes, are likely rooted in the same cause: The slow motion collapse of Twitter, now rebranded "X," under the leadership of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. While these folks have various outlets, both in the media and social media, ultimately their business model of trolling depends heavily on Twitter. "Grifters need people to harass and a mainstream discourse to counter. As traffic takes a nosedive and Twitter becomes less a part of the conversation, it's going to be harder for these folks to make money," Melissa Ryan, a strategist who helps counter online disinformation, told Salon.

"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate

The clawing need to get attention from progressives seems to be driving these engagement farmers a little nuts, as they up the weird-and-evil ante, hoping to get those precious clicks and plays.

[...]

"What Musk has proven through his actions and his statements is that he's committed to serving the trolls and the fraudsters first and the ordinary good faith users second," explained Brian Hughes of American University, who is the co-founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). But, he noted, Musk is "blinded by his own ideology" and can't see how this is backfiring. "As normal people, for lack of a better term, continue to leave Twitter, that's actually going to cause probably a reduction in the use of the platform by these trolls and these fraudsters. They don't have their audience of targets that they need," he continued.

(bolding mine)

HAHAHAHAHAHA die mad about it, trolls. Full offense.