picked a handful of violets in my name

jimhines

To me, a troll is someone who shows up solely to stir things up and piss people off. There’s zero interest in the conversation, zero interest in listening. It’s a game for the troll’s amusement, to poke buttons and see who s/he can piss off.

To me, clueless =/= troll. Angry =/= troll. Even blatant violation of Wheaton’s Law doesn’t necessarily equate to trolling. We all act like jerks sometimes. (I might still ban you for repeated offenses, but I wouldn’t automatically assume you were a troll.)

A Norman Rockwell painting from 1995: You can almost hear the modem connecting over the course of 90 screeching, howling seconds. A man’s back is framed by a desk chair—because he’s at a desk, the only place he can use his computer, a 16-pound beige rectangular desktop model with a loud fan that has three plugs connecting it to various electronic conduits. The person is alternately posting on a message board and trolling a chat room under an assumed name, and probably an assumed age, sex, and/or location. There is safety in the scenery of this painting: the basset hound curled under the desk, the tapping of fingers on keys, the fantasy of being Petunia, 18 years old, from Princeton, N.J., when in fact the person at the desk is really Robert, 49, from North Hollywood.

And off the three go toward the highway — and the suburbs — complete strangers, with not the least concern for personal safety, trying to shave 20 or 30 minutes, maybe more, off their afternoon trip home. “People are cooperating … to commute?” says Marc Oliphant, underscoring the novelty of what is going on here. “It’s like the opposite of road rage!”

Let’s compare and contrast a few female leads and see if we get a pattern. As I said above, we don’t have enough to consider this statistical, but we’re just looking for a starting point. Besides Aliens, I can think of one other female-led action movie that was successful enough to at least spawn a franchise: Underworld (Kate Beckinsale). And two female-led movies regarded as financial disappointments would be Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) and Catwoman (Halle Berry) – neither of which even made back their budgets on the gross revenues.

But here’s the thing. Here’s why I’m not deleting Tiger Beatdown: They only do it if you’re good. Seriously. They only do it if your work reaches people, and convinces people, and if they literally cannot frame an opposing argument that they think might have any chance of winning. They can’t beat you in an argument; that’s why they abuse you, that’s why they try to make you feel as worthless and self-loathing and incapable of self-defense as any other abused person, that’s why they abuse you till you can’t work or even think about anything but being abused, that’s why they try to make you believe that it won’t stop till you stop publishing or die. That’s why they make you want to stop publishing. Or make you want to die. Because after all of it, after all the “bitch” and “cunt” and “die” and “dyke” and “ugly” and “smoker” (???) and “I’monna rape ye, woman,” there is actually one threat scarier than ALL of that: The threat that you’re right, and you’re going to win. And that’s the threat that you pose.

Unfortunately, after six months of Skype and e-mails, and spending quite a bit of money to visit him, I began to get the feeling that while things had improved somewhat over the past three years, they hadn’t improved enough. He says he wants to move back to New York soon…but, well, he told me the same thing three years ago. His shit is slightly more together, life-wise, but it turns out he’s not a whole hell of a lot more emotionally available. I kept extending myself, but he was doing a pretty crap job of meeting me halfway. He tends to be a brooder, and while dealing with his issues, likes to retreat into complete radio silence. Being met with a week or two of zero communication feels horrible when you’re in a long-distance relationship—especially when you notice that he updates his FB page, thus eliminating the possible explanation that he has died or is trapped under something heavy and can’t get to his computer.

tim

The conspiracy of silence in which Chua participates, and which psychologist Alice Miller (for example, in her book For Your Own Good) has written about, involves perpetuating this myth: What adults do to you is for your own good. Be grateful for it, and suck it up, cupcake. It's a politically useful myth. Kids who internalize it turn into obedient workers (bosses naturally replace parents) and into supporters of authoritarian politicians. They also tend to turn into bullying parents themselves. And the cycle goes on. But people like Chua aren't helping break it. Read Chua's essay while asking: "What is it doing for her to treat her children in all of the ways she describes?" This is a question she never seems to ask herself. But it's a question that would decenter her perspective and show that claiming that coercion is "for your own good" is the act of psychological coercion that enables all others.

flourish

Here is a summation of this: Schizophrenia may have been one of the factors leading to Jared Loughner's actions - I don't know - but it is not enough to say "well, he had schizophrenia," and shrug it off, as though there are no other factors. That's like saying of a rapist, "well, he's a man," and considering that the end of the discussion - no, actually, it's even worse. 99% of rapists are male. In comparison, only about 10% of people who commit homicide have schizophrenic disorders, or possibly less. And yet, if I were to make a statement like "Oh, well, he's a man - probably completely pumped with testosterone - that's all we need to know to explain why he's a rapist," people would (rightly) have my head on a pike. If I make a statement like "Well, she's schizophrenic - probably having delusions at the time - that's all we need to know to explain why she's a murderer," nobody gives a damn.