Merry Christmas, to everyone who celebrates it. To everyone else, Happy Tuesday!
After you’ve finished off your Christmas and/or Tuesday dinner, please nominate your favorite troll(s) for Man Boobz’ Second Annual Troll of the Year competition!
Also, there’s no reason why we can’t have more than one category for the troll awards. Suggest some inventive categories! Most Persistent, perhaps?
Here is a great Christmas Present. Dude harrassed a woman, she blew him off, he persisted, she sent screencaps to his mother.
Then he tried to fat-shame her.
She lit him up like a roman candle.
http://jhameia.tumblr.com/post/38890853836/cocoku-deeplezstonerwitch-sugaryumyum#
Ooh, I found it! Here in the bingo card post: http://manboobz.com/2012/10/08/the-man-boobz-bingo-card-project/comment-page-1/
@Pecunium: I saw that the other day on Tumblr. It was glorious.
Whatever happened to Peter-Andrew Nolan (c)? Did he go to jail or something?
Oh damn, the Bingo Project is only a continuation of the pull-ups/upper body strength trainwreck. How long was he on about that?
@ Pecunium
In its essence, I think the entire MRM is a troll movement. Diehards like JtO and Pierce Harlan relish the audiences that they get but I think are true believers. A guy like Chapin I think tries to market his brand of ultra-right politics on the back of it (figuring that a lot of younger, disfranchised dudes will identify). The overwhelming majority of the handful of bloggers and “activists”… They contain a very high proportion of trolls, vying for attention.
@Pecunium (again)
Respectfully… I don’t think she should have carried out that threat. His mom would have been really upset by that.
Carnation: Realistically… he should never have harassed her. He was so secure in his “manliness” that he was offensive as all fuck (come blow me for fifty bucks, then I’m going to come in your ass). She called him on it, and then he got all religious about how “oh that was bad, I’ll make it up to you”.
Fuck that shit. He made his bed. He knows what he did was wrong. I don’t think he’s going to stop. I don’t even think her sending it to his mother is going to stop him.
Not the first time.
Assholes like him count on women not being able to affix repercussions to the shit they fling. She made some of it stick to him (I hope).
I don’t disagree. What I’m saying is that his mom had nothing to do with any of it, and she would be probably the most hurt out of the whole sorry mess. She could’ve (should’ve) reported him to POF.
POF?
The thing is… yes, his mother will be hurt. But it’s not as if there is any other sort of sanction one has to hand. The cops won’t care. The phone provider won’t care (they will just say, “block him”). He’s hurting people, willfully, and repeatedly.
He obviously cares what his mother thinks. Which means telling her will have some effect. He did a shitty thing. There ought to be some recourse when someone is hurt by it. If the only one available is to rat him out to his mother, so be it.
Because the hurt here isn’t that he did something bad to his mother… it’s that she finds out what sort of a shit he is. He’d still be that sort of asshole if she didn’t know; she’d just be protected from finding out.
Ah.. the dating service.
Yeah, the odds are they will just say to block him. Not a reasonable response. That’s just putting it back onto him to behave; which he clearly isn’t.
If my kid was acting like that I’d want to know about it.
I mean, I’m not too keen on the fact that she went and looked up his details on other sites, that’s going into “nope” territory for me, but if there’s an issue with what she did it’s that (ie invasion of privacy), not that his mother might be upset to find out that her kid is a jerk.
The dude should be ashamed. If telling his mom (which he was clearly worried about) makes him think twice next time he gets the urge to show his ass, I’m all for it.
Cassandra: Actually the ease with which she was able to find him elsewhere is part of the reason I think telling his mother is ok.
He’s that confident that what he’s doing is harmless to him that in a setting (a dating service) where one should expect people to try and get some further information he is brazen about harassing someone.
See, I would never think to look someone who I encountered on a dating service up on any other forum unless I was setting up an actual date, and probably not even then. I’m just not down with any sort of taking a dispute from one forum to another, or with internet sleuthing, it feels creepy and invasive to me – it’s what trolls do, basically. No doubt this guy was a jackass, but I’m still not really comfortable with the idea of that triggering a search for more personal info on him with revenge in mind.
I feel like the feelings of the mother are completely irrelevant to this conversation, and I’m not sure why Carnation even brought that part up.
With any kind of luck his mum’ll have his guts for garters after that.
If it were me, I don’t think it would have been out of a desire for revenge. When someone I don’t know shows up to start some sort of personal interaction, I am curious about them. Someone comes to my blog and wants to engage me in some oddball bit of tangential political discussion… I look them up.
I want to know where they are coming from; I’d like some idea of just what sort of argument they are going to make/what they will respond to. It may be because I’ve had a lot of people who are the sort Dave doesn’t let out of moderation decide to try and take a strip off of me; or score points in debates going on elsewhere by attacking me.
But when someone is a gold-plated asshole… I want to know who they are, because I want to know how close they are to me.
I just don’t do that sort of thing unless I feel like I might be in immediate danger, and even if I did I wouldn’t reveal the information to anyone else. Even when Mr Al was being super creepy I never tried to find any more info on him, because it feels weird and unethical to me.
Surely there’s less of an expectation of anonymity on a dating site than on the general internet?
I would have done the same thing in the same situation. I’m generally too lazy to look someone up, but if some chucklefuck thinks it’s OK to behave that way, I’d look.
The only time I’m not too lazy is when we get irate, profane, abusive emails at work (I have one that’s such a work of swearing art I almost want it cross stitched on something). I just like seeing who cares THAT much about what we do. I found one guy’s mug shot.
Obviously I’m in the minority here, but the idea of tracking someone from one venue to another just sets off my “nope!” meter big time. Granted that it was funny to see him go from “lol I can bully you and you can’t fight back” to “please don’t tell my mommy”, but I still feel sort of uncomfortable with the whole thing. If she hadn’t posted the conversation to Tumblr I might feel less weird about it.
Cassandra, I generally agree with you.
@Cassandra: I’m similarly uncomfortable with it, but I’m generally going to give more latitude to somebody who was a target. (uncomfortable parallels with other internet-goings-on I have been following)
Is using troll tools automatically wrong all the time?
Didn’t we have this discussion about the Redditor who was outed? The one behind all the seriously creepy stuff?
There’s not a lot of clear bright lines in the sand here. And saying that using troll tools is automatically wrong will eventually (if not immediately) end up as ‘you can’t defend yourself, if they attack you there you have to swallow shit.’
So… I dunno. I dunno about this case, I dunno about other cases, and I’m not sure which principle ought to trump.
For me the bright line is “I think this person might have serious intent to harm me”. Obviously everyone will draw their lines in different places, and I wouldn’t say I’m outraged by this particular case or anything, it just falls into the “I wish the internet wasn’t like this” category.
Also, and this is totally a personal preference, I don’t tend to engage with guys who pull that crap at all. My logic is that when a guy does something like that he’s basically looking for a reaction, not for sex, ie what he’s hoping for is to get a woman flustered and upset. So I feel like engaging with people like that usually ends up making them happier than they deserve to be. I usually respond by shutting them down right away, like “I don’t talk to assholes” or “This is why you can’t get laid” or just “Bye”, and then block them. Sometimes I might go for a more detailed response if I happen to feel like it, but I never give them a chance to argue back or in any way get the satisfaction of ongoing engagement. Obviously that’s a personal preference, and everyone can figure out for themselves what they’re most comfortable with and what might be the best approach with that particular asshole. I deal with crass comments from men in the same way offline too, if and when it’s possible.