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Manchester's Self-Described 'Internet Troll' Jailed For Offensive Web Posts
noob22 writes "According to BBC Online, 'An "internet troll" who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed. Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog. The 36-year-old "preyed on bereaved families" for his "own pleasure," Manchester Magistrates Court heard.'" My favorite line: "Unemployed Coss was only caught when he sent residents on his street photos of himself saying he was an internet 'troll.'"
You mean scale of how the Albanians, Bulgarians, Armenians, etc, don't all have relatives with controlling shares in major Western media outlets to make sure we never, ever get to stop hearing about it? After all, to quote Adolf Hitler, "Who now remembers Armenia?"
It's also stemming from sheer stubbornness and lack of contact with reality sometimes. I'm reminded of the bit in Douglas Hoffstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach", where the Tortoise character gets into an infinite regression: "So if I accept A, B, and C, then I have accepted your premise? Not so fast - lets call that statement D - don't I have to include A, B, C, and D to really accept your premise? Now lets call that claim statement E - Don't I now have to accept A, B, C, D, and E to accept your premise? We can see where this is going - How dare you demand I accept your infinite series of claims without inspection!".
Part of the frustration many of us feel over, say, the climate change or abortion debates seems to be the same sort of thing. There's always some person on the side we don't agree with, taking an 'obviously impossible, absurd' stance, and the possibly more reasonable people on that same side don't distance themselves from their own fanatics. One of the things I saw during my own involvement in the abortion debate was that on the Pro-Choice side, there were a few women who claimed all sex with males was rape, so the 'except in cases of rape and incest' clause always applied anyway. Some of these wanted to do away with all men and use cloning to copy human females only. There's an odd feeling when somebody casually advocates the genocide of 3 billion people and the use of a technology we don't actually have as the solution to all the world's problems, and nobody else in the room is willing to call them crazy. On the Pro-Life side I saw people (mostly Roman Catholic priests), who saw banning abortion as only the first step in passing laws banning all extramarital sex, then banning masturbation and all pornography including the bra section of the Sears catalog, bringing back the laws that required showing all married couples in movies as sleeping in twin beds, the ones dictating skirt lengths, and on and on.
I suspect many organisations would actually be stronger if they tossed out some people who claim to be part of their coalitions, even if their overall numbers of members dropped. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to say "He doesn't speak for me, even if he claims to.".
The real key is, whether somebody is lying (as you suggest), or insane (as I suggest here), doesn't really matter, and nobody ought to be given a free pass to disrupt discourse because we can't tell if they are one or the other. I don't know if Glenn Beck is insane or mendacious, and the people who say he is crazy like a fox may be the rightist of all, but what he does sheds more heat than light, either way. I don't have to decide if he is nuts or faking it to realise he isn't contributing anything useful. That goes in spades for the holocaust denialists. A specific statement of theirs may seem insane, or a deliberate lie, or sometimes a reasonable statement, but examining a whole series of statements they make, sooner or later you realise they are not adding anything constructive to any of the processes of debate, discussion or education.
It's also stemming from sheer stubbornness and lack of contact with reality sometimes. I'm reminded of the bit in Douglas Hoffstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach", where the Tortoise character gets into an infinite regression: "So if I accept A, B, and C, then I have accepted your premise? Not so fast - lets call that statement D - don't I have to include A, B, C, and D to really accept your premise? Now lets call that claim statement E - Don't I now have to accept A, B, C, D, and E to accept your premise? We can see where this is going - How dare you demand I accept your infinite series of claims without inspection!".
Part of the frustration many of us feel over, say, the climate change or abortion debates seems to be the same sort of thing. There's always some person on the side we don't agree
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville