Troll Avoidance

I don't mean avoiding trolls, I mean avoiding being one. It's so tempting, sometimes.

Maybe I should clarify something, first: The term "troll" as regards 'net silliness derives from "trolling," not the other way around. It has nothing to do with warty underbridge denizens, it has to do with a fishing method. To troll is to drag bait behind your boat in the hopes of eliciting a reaction from the fish, who assume that the bait is live food.

The metaphor should be pretty clear at this point.

Trolling is obviously very tempting to those who require attention, whether positive or negative, to validate their existence. You put something out there designed to get an emotional response, and boom, people chime in to prove that you're alive, even if your bait is just some smelly fish guts.

It's also very tempting if you keep seeing the same idiotic fallacy being committed over and over, staunchly defended by ranks of other untruths and fallacies. Add to this the obnoxious habit of manufactured mass outrage over tiny things, quickly ginned up and quickly forgotten, with precious little consistency of argument or principles from one little fist-shaking session to the next, and it becomes very difficult indeed to resist.

Usually I repeat to myself, "You are not the idiot whisperer. You are not the idiot whisperer." Usually it works.

Today my annoyance level was easily roused, for no good reason I can think of (my weekend was very nice on all counts), and I was tempted to post this:

Good morning, Social Media Land! What quickly forgotten moral emergency shall we puff up our egos over today?

I didn't post it. I probably still should. But something better caught my eye in the news feeds that tempted me instead to post this:

Half of all men have a ‘Plan B’ - in the shape of a woman whose arms they can run into if their current relationship turns sour. A study carried out among 1,000 men found a substantial percentage have managed to keep another woman waiting patiently in the wings should they end up single.

And, worryingly, married men are more likely have a Plan B in the background than those who are merely in a relationship. It also emerged the Plan B is likely to be an ‘old friend’ who has always had feelings for the man in question.

This news may cause a few women in relationships to think twice about not making dinner or choosing a girls' night out in favour of a cosy night in with her partner. This could spark fear in women across the UK and be great news for men looking for that extra bit of love and care so that their attentions aren’t swayed.

One thing is for certain, women across the UK today will be giving their partners that extra kiss goodnight this evening.

This should probably be posted as well, to get some reactions (screen cap'd for posterity) before eventually "remembering" to add the link to the original article. Which, of course, has been exactly quoted but with the sexes switched. It's classic entrapment, and yet as effective as ever.

I haven't posted it yet. I may.