Direct Action. What'd you think?

[Undertoad]

Recently Undertoad expressed a negative attitude towards the 'Barak experience'. That surprised me since during that time, Undertoad remained quite neutral and detached from the procedings - and they did procede.

At the time I felt like if something was absolutely reprehensible it was my duty to let it play itself out. I think I still feel that way...

Barak also advertised himself as a black separatist. His motivation was obvious to me: EGO. He loved to hear himself talk and read himself type.

Ego is at the base of every troll: if a thread isn't about them, they find a way to make it about them. The easiest way to do that is to act childish, call people out, play games, spout a lot of nonsense.

His final concept was that he was baiting the suburban white boys. But he never realized that the Cellar was just as much urban, with representation of all sorts of people. There was a dude of color who showed up at one of the earliest get-togethers, but nobody gave it a second thought; like any good e-community, we're all just words on a screen. Our color, gender, etc. are obscured, and there's a real beauty in that.

Barak's refusal to understand what he was really dealing with was just as telling as anything else he did. He came at the system from the only direction he knew: racist game playing. It was easy for him; he had developed his own little cottage industry around it, with a book, a Montel appearance, etc.

At one point I deleted his account when he assumed that he could bait the system itself as hard as he baited its users: he threatened legal action against it. Like Colonel Qaddafi, direct action in the form of a smackdown was what he understood best. Once he understood that there was a limit to his little game, his stuff improved.

You had the best way to deal with trolls: just press them with rational, adult challenges about what they're saying. At that point, the thread is no longer about them, but about their subject; and since their real goal is empty gamesmanship, the thread becomes unfulfilling and they slink away. Pathetic.