Know Your Troll – Custode (BETA)

The Bad-Faith Interrogator

johnhenryus — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 17:45:11 +0000

The Bad-Faith Interrogator is a variant of the “just asking questions” technique often employed today by media personalities to make an assertion without appearing to make any assertion.

In the case of the Bad-Faith Interrogator, the purpose of the question is a little different. Rather than attempting to make a statement while appearing to be engaged in reasonable questioning, this breed of troll’s entire purpose is to make you waste time and energy explaining things that don’t require explanation or demanding impossibly oversimplified answers to complex issues.

These questions tend to be the type that make you facepalm and wonder “why would anyone even ask this question” or “why would they frame the conversation like this?” The sorts of things that leave you thinking “how am I supposed to answer this without communicating a four year education in the subject, plus a few survey courses in logic and critical thinking?”

You: “Working people deserve a living wage.”

BFI: “What exactly is a living wage, how much is that?”

You: “Enough to live on.”

BFI: “No, I am running a business [probably a lie] and I have a [insert some phrase denigrating the work or workers, e.g. “coffee server” or “dishwasher”], how much exactly am I supposed to pay them per hour?”

Clearly there’s no answer to this question without further information – a living wage in Plainwell, Michigan is going to be quite different from a living wage in Brooklyn, NY or San Jose, CA or even in Lansing or Detroit.

Sometimes these questions will target information so basic that the average person will have forgotten it entirely: “but how do you know the Earth isn’t flat?” The average person is likely not going to remember how this proof was historically developed. Indeed, the concept predates history entirely; the earliest documented mention of the theory references long-held belief documented by Greek historians in the fifth century BCE based on information exchanges with cultures on the Indian subcontinent, and the sources of their information are largely lost to history. Attempting to explain the evidence will likely leave out examples or perhaps spell a name wrong or misremember a date, or provide other minor errors or holes in the information. Then the troll can focus on that error and claim it as evidence you don’t know what you’re talking about, and therefore the world is flat or Barack Obama was born in Kenya or vaccines cause autism or what have you.

This is a critical aspect of the tactic: to goad you into saying anything that can be seized upon to discredit your position artificially – a spelling error, a bit of linguistic laziness, a euphemism or analogy that can be twisted out of shape, or a simple answer to a complex question that the troll can then build up into an argument – not a refutation, mind you, just quibbling over minor and often irrelevant details – discrediting the respondent.

BFI: How much exactly is a living wage?

You: Twenty dollars an hour.

BFI: That wouldn’t last five minutes in Berkeley, you clearly don’t understand regional variances in cost of living!

or

BFI: That’s ridiculous, here in Fyffe Alabama that’s enough to feed a family of six with money left over, why should I subsidize the luxury lifestyle of a coffee server? Obviously you’ve never run a business, I suppose you think the bus boy should make $40!

or

BFI: What about people who don’t live in the US? Dollars aren’t going to do poor people in the Democratic Republic of Congo any good, why do you hate poor people/emergent economy nations/Africa?

…and we’re off to the races. Now you’re on the defensive, your character is under attack, and you’ve been labeled as a racist or some other irrelevant and inaccurate ad hominem that further diverts attention and energy away from the core point, that being “working people deserve a living wage.”

Dealing With Them

Frankly the best way to handle this line of attack is to refuse to validate it at all by engaging. The troll will then accuse you of being unable to prove your point. At this point it’s entirely acceptable to say out loud, “you’re not asking a question in good faith or seeking discourse, you’re trying to bait me into a pointless argument and I choose not to participate.” If they persist, reach for the block/ban/ignore button and move on.

Know Your Troll (And Shut Their Mouth)

johnhenryus — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 14:53:55 +0000

Sometimes it can be entertaining or educational to employ humor, sarcasm, cynicism, and “snark” to make a point. Other times it can be malicious and destructive – even deadly. In this section of the site we do our best to break it down so you don’t get wrapped up in a time-wasting exercise…or buy in to deadly disinformation.

Posts

Know Your Troll

The Bad-Faith Interrogator

by johnhenryus

October 8, 2023

The Bad-Faith Interrogator is a variant of the “just asking questions” technique often employed today by media personalities to make…

About “Know Your Troll”

Among the key media literacy skills in the 21st century world of “everything is online” is the ability to identify and neutralize “trolls.”

Contrary to popular belief, “trolling” didn’t start with the internet. One can readily see examples of the behavior throughout history.

For one classic historical example, there’s Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (Full title: “A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick”). We encourage the reader to take a look for themselves, but also the Wikipedia article on this essay does a thorough job of deconstructing the reasons why the troll was effective.

Frontispiece of the original edition of “A Modest Proposal,” published in 1729

It’s hardly a “spoiler” three hundred years on to summarize: Swift first sets up a narrative decrying conditions of extreme poverty among the Irish while narrating in a tone intended to evoke distaste for the narrator, who is clearly intended to be of the “upper classes.” Then he slowly reveals through the narrative that the fundamental basis of the proposal is for poor Irish to sell their children to the wealthy and privileged…as food.

A little later in the same century some of the works of Benjamin Franklin, published under feminine pseudonyms “Silence Dogood” and and “Polly Baker,” continued this tradition, which extends to the present day.

Unfortunately as with nearly any worthwhile human endeavor one could point to lesser practitioners and those acting with malice and avarice have often appropriated and usurped these tactics to do considerable harm. This harm includes causing people to lose their jobs over fabricated accusations, sending police on fake calls that in the hopes they’ll go bad and someone will get hurt, engaging in other forms of stochastic terrorism on every level from the personal to the international, and even intentionally driving marginalized people already suffering from mental illness to self-harm and even suicide.

In a more odious and ominous example from the 20th century, the choice to label the unquestionably hard right wing fascist-totalitarian government of Germany leading up to and during World War II as the “National Socialist German Workers Party” represents a type of trolling as well – one that neo-Nazis to this day continue to lean on in attempting to support claims that the Nazis were leftists. Every single one of the disinformation tactics and strategies described by Orwell in “1984” of information manipulation can be found in the tactics of “trolls,” both online and offline, often with consequences as dire and severe as those Orwell described in his fiction.

For nearly any given identity or interest group represented online, the majority of those assuming related labels these days are, to be entirely blunt, frauds. Social media is flooded with “leftist” pages run by obvious crooks and thieves; ethnic identity groups selling t-shirts to those who romanticize and exoticize other ethnic groups (in a recent bit of investigative analysis for an article on another site, this author found only one “Native American” group that was provably operated by people of Native American descent; the rest are clickbait farms and t-shirt shops operating out of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Pakistan).

This section of Custode.Org endeavors to help the reader more readily identify and understand the various tactics of trolls and how those tactics are used to distract, delegitimize, and disempower those who are already marginalized, oppressed, and abused. While it’s true that some trolling is entirely harmless and humorous, it is a dark reflection on the human spirit of the twenty-first century how often these tactics are engaged to inflict serious harm on innocent people, often by the very systems and ideologies that were already oppressing those people in the first place.