Trolls

Based on comments to my last post here, I guess I'm expected to be more curmudgeonly. Something has occurred over the past couple of days on FB that I need to just vent about and that should effectively address that concern.

A FB friend that is generally just a "gamer" friend, posted about having little patience for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, citing an article that I agree was something pretty egregious. One of the comments (I'll call this person commenter 1) to the article noted how all media news outlets, save Fox News which is by far the most centrist news organization.

Although I personally know nobody on this particular line of comments, I felt I needed to comment about the fact that a "news" channel that has the tag line trying to convince you that they are "Fair and Balanced", is anything but. I also pointed out that Roger Ailes, President and CEO of the network, is an ultra-conservative so, calling his network "centrist" was an interesting idea. I further suggested that getting your news from multiple sources, including international news agencies, helped provide additional perspective. And that doing your own primary research, if it was something that important to you that you wanted independent confirmation, was also a good thing.

A third party Troll starting chiming in, with the usual Conservative repugnance. Called people who were involved in the OWS proceedings thieves, whiners, and a "cancer" on society - the typical name-calling and stereotyping of the far Right. He then went off on a traditional supply-sider rant about business being the only savior of the US economy and society as a whole.

When another commenter (commenter #2) noted that she doesn't necessarily agree with the OWS movement, but that she could understand where they were coming from, Troll went off. Since commenter #2 didn't address the financial issues, she was bashed as an unknowing idiot.

So I laid out undebateable history - after Clinton's admin, we had a budget surplus; after Bush's, we had the largest deficit ever recorded (not including off-budget war expenses) and a national banking and economic crisis all caused by policy changes in banking and real estate oversight. Obama put the war expenses back on-budget, which has resulted in the debt crises that seem to happen weekly (as evidenced by the debt-ceiling skirmishes), along with the various stimulus efforts made by the government of a failed Bush economy policy - and how the banks are sitting on money meant as the primary stimulus contributed to the problem.

To which Troll responded that business was the only savior of our economy. He addressed none of the historical fact presented - his reasoning for bashing on commenter #2.

To which I re-emphasized the lack of fiscal discipline during the Bush administration formed the foundation for our current problems, and cited some of the positive things that came out of the New Deal (the closest historical time to where we are now), with its providing many, many jobs during the worst economic time in US history, and led to the creation of both the Social Security Administration and SEC (among notable failures, as well).

To which Troll responded that the New Deal was an epic fail on all counts and was a completely fascist attempt to remake our American democracy. In his (revisionist) historical view, the Depression was made no better by the New Deal, and that WWII was the only thing that brought about a restored economy.

Well, I didn't take kindly to the implication that I was a fascist. I suggested he should withdraw from the Social Security system since it was such a failure, and that I was done commenting because a reasoned debate of the issues was not, and would not, occur because Troll was unable to do anything but name-call and be dismissive of points that did not fit with his world view.

To which Troll started talking about people from Neptune being admitted to Yale or some such thing to illustrate some point or other. (I have read the exact comments a dozen times now, and I have no flipping idea what point he's trying to illustrate.)

Um, excuse me? What does that have to do the OWS movement and the underlying economic problems that we are enduring?

Typical Far Right Bull Shit - When you can't effectively, cogently, and accurately refute facts because you believe the patently wrong revisionist history you are spoon-fed by Fox and other right-wing outlets, then you must change the subject, name-call, and scream incoherently to drown out all other comment.

Are these people REALLY that deluded?