CCK08: Trolling for Trolls

Um, Om? Do you realize that every minute you spend kvetching about trolls and whining about someone whose posts you don't like is time spent away from the substantive course material. It's a waste of time even for me to bother with your nasty invective, but I do it to keep the record straight, and to help sway any weak minds that are undecided on these matters : )

<What a nutball.

Gosh, that was indeed mature, and I notice Stephen Downes isn't running to the rescue to cry "ad hominem". But that's ok, I don't mind people calling names, it's ok and allowed in a robust democracy.

>The post itself was rude etc. having nothing to do with your personal history (which is impossible to ascertain from the post you responded to).

No, Jayne Little was rude herself, as is her amen corner (which includes the professor). As for my "personal history," I don't get the reference, but it's immaterial, you're welcome to Google witch-hunt. Just spell the name right.

>The rudeness was a perfect example of a Troll-like activity. A sour Geek might also be called a troll... but are you saying all Geeks are trolls? What about Geeks that don't blog, don't like SL, breastfeed more passionately than they code and have a clue about the real history of the net, not your warped version? It really is getting tiring seeing your interference when you could be assisting the process here. I'm not asking anything of you other than to stop making ridiculous generalizations that you can't hold up, like the Geeks and Nursing tripe.

Geeks tend to subscribe to one level or another of the Geek Religion, which is variously described as the California Ideology or technolibertarianism. In fact, those most obsessed about "trolls" exhibit the traits themselves, as you do. I hardly think I need to accept these warped histories of the net told by you or Jayne Little or anyone else with a biase toward the Founding Fathers. As for passionate breastfeeders, in my experience of various forums, the geeks are in fact very much anti-breast feeding, I can think of some really nasty posts in this regard putting down the practice.

I'm not interested in "assisting the process" which is some collectivist subbotnik that I'm not going to be forced on, as I will not subscribe to the party line. If you find my statements "ridiculous generalizations," you can either look to your own eye-logs, or turn the page. I think I've fairly well established my generalizations *yet again* -- there are always a handful of hard core "group minders" like yourself who begin to berate and browbeat and bully and use coarse and harsh language and vivid horror pictures to try to drive someone who criticizes their tribe off the forums. Sorry, it won't be working on me.

>Others I have been subjected to include some endlessly ongoing diatribe against whatever you think a Geek is. and a Communist. I can only guess that because you claim to speak Russian, you assume the mantle of expert opinion giver of all things Communist. Seriously.

I don't have to "make up" something about geeks. Geeks are in full regalia, in full peacock display on this forum, which is a rich matrix of some of the geekiest in edu tech. And the behaviour has been abundantly true to form. Some people hate it when you make judgements and observations on group-think. Group-think is real, and at work here, and naturally the group-thinkers won't like to be called on their group-think lol.

I don't "claim" to speak Russian. I *do* speak Russian. I don't claim to be "an expert" but in fact I do know a lot, and certain have a qualified opinion about Communism. Seriously. You're simply bullying and name-calling and harassing.

I have good company in my opinions on open source software -- programmers, proprietary software makers from companies like Dell, even leaders of the OS movement itself who have turned critical of it. Like my favourite, Nikolai Bezroukov, example here. My opinion may be non-expert, but it isn't hastily made or cobbled together, but the product of many years of observation. As for Second Life, well, your mileage may very. It has way more non-geek users than geek users, and the battle with the tekkies plays out there very vividly as a result.

Let me suggest that you exhibit thin-skinnededness by having to huff and puff and write long answers. It's long past the sell-by date. As for me being "far off base," well, here's a course where the professor claims that knowledge is "no(thing)" and isn't transferred and scarcely exists except as a set of connections, and where people have posted all kinds of wacky stuff. I'm pretty much in the mainstream with my ideas, which are merely outside the magic circle.

Once again, my research here about the blogs isn't in reaction to one line in one speech on a broad topic. It's merely that a link to that one line was provided. But you can find a dozen posts here in the forums and on the Daily where Stephen Downes is driving people to the blogs and deriding the forums. This doesn't need providing, you just need to look for it. It's completely scientific to remain curious about the obvious falsity in Stephen's propagandistic drive, after of course seizing the telegraph station himself in The Daily and on his blog, which of course has the lion's share of eyeballs.

Whenever someone says "inter-web" they are inherently faux, and inherently cynical and in bad faith.

Actually, not very people have been asking questions about the assumptions and methods. There are actually only about 3-4. The rest ask questions to imbibe the doctrine as they don't want to be left behind on the lastest fashion, but they aren't critical. In fact, what most of the replies consist of are as follows: George: "we'll get to that later in the course, thanks" and Stephen: "actually, you're wrong, as you can discover by reading my dense article on the subject."

As for "why geeks suck," you're proving my point. Are people who work for Microsoft saviours? No, they just make a product that works for most of us, unlike Linux, which isn't usable.

<Double Ugh with a pound of your flabby ass on it.

Well, that seems like I really over-the-top personal attack. It's good that you can then be easily discredited with making this sort of vulgar statement.

<Ol' Bill stole DOS, deliberately lied to his customers, illegally manipulated the market and literally destroyed the livelyhoods of a fair number of creative entrepreneurs while creating the tech industry of "Partners" to install, configure and repair his broken proprietary crap and who had to sign agreements to NOT offer anyone else's product solutions. Is that what capitalism is all about and why communism is stupid? Get off it.

This is a narrative that script kiddies and opensourceniks tell each other from Mom's Basement. It's their narrative of victimology. Microsoft strikes me as being about oligarchy, not communism or capitalism, but it practices oligarchy within an open capitalist system that could make choices and doesn't -- Linux is unusable.

>Much of the OS community released their wares precisely because what the commercial market was making (vs what it was worth) was obscene.

Thanks for making this sort of lurid comment, it lets us know we are dealing with a pathological cultic opensourcenik.

>Many 'tekkies' spent a great deal of time trying to explain this to people like you I'm sure. Fundamentally though, the technology shouldn't have been so slow to develop. Your free market actually retarded progress to maintain another product marketing cycle on more than a few occasions along the way.

Gosh, um, the horrah. I'll see what I can do to manage "my product cycle" in "my free market" better next time.

>PLease for the love of whatever feathery faery winged SL god you chew the toenails of, please try to pull a creative idea out of your thinkhole and contribute to what is happening all around you Catherine the "could-be-great". We get it. You are deathly afraid that Mr. Siemens will take over the world with his ideas. ok.

I am contributing. I'm not afraid of either Siemens or Downes. George is a pretty nice guy, and has a redeeming virtue: he believes in objective reality, and he also wants this ideology to be "nice" and "sell". He is looking for consulting gigs. He will not become too extreme as a result. Stephen is the more dangerous and destructive of the two as he doesn't believe in reality. However, perhaps he can be reached by invocation of certain practical shared experiences, such as staring at the same hotdog going round and round on the rotisserie at the 7/11 (that is where his first Connectivist seditious and insurrectionist thoughts may have occurred to him).

>Meanwhile a whole lot of interested people are looking in his box to see what he has. If it works, then fine. if they come across a better idea, then, better. What you are doing seems to be confusing the issue and possibly turning people away from this place for no reason whatsoever. Why not let others see what is going on here and find a way to converse with, instead of against them? It isn't so hard to do.

Oh, once again the horrah. Imagine, grown people with DSL lines and high-end computers, many of them employed as edu techs and IT geeks, being "driven away" because somebody said "I prefer not to" and "I don't believe". Imagine, "confusing the issue" because I ask merely common-sense questions from a pretty mainstream non-specialist and non-technical perspective that seldom penetrates the magic circle. I fail to see why people can't see the material they want to see, and if their sensitive thin-skin is set aflutter at the idea of criticism, they can turn the page. There is always another thread.

>Love is the most radical, revolutionary act you could engage in right now. Steer this titanic another direction with the powers of thought that you posess. I'm hearing that Connective-ism is what you don't want to take over education... mindless following of a potentially dangerous educational fad concerns you... how many times can you make the same point? Are you seriously waiting for George to shut down the Moodle, burn his notes and go home crying? Really?

One of the reasons "Love" gets a bad name is that it is wielded as a heavy ideological, controlling, and bullying stick by someone as nasty as you.

Um, I'm not going to be engaging in any revolutionary acts.

I'm hoping George will keep up the Moodle because I won't be able to digest all the material in 12 weeks, and hope to come back to it throughout the year. However, that depends on "gardeners" like you getting pushed back so that they don't "prune" everything.

>Trolls are a part of many online experiences. Asberger's is part of society. ok, then what?

Do you suffer from this condition?

>What I am getting out of this experience is that the tools being used, the connections created and methods of interaction that are already happening all around us deserve to be looked at in a way that could show us all how to help others reach understanding in a rapidly changing communications landscape.

Pablum. Overstatement. Giddy silly lala-land. The Internet is just a big telephone with trucks hooked up to it. Twitter is like a bigger, persistent version of the 6th grade book called "the slam book" or "blab book".

>Tools and methods of seeing are on the verge of arrival that will be another quantum leap forward to illustrating what we all think clearly and cannot always describe. The inherent power of connectivity is producing an energy potential that will dwarf all these interpersonal games because lives are at stake.

Oh, dear Jesus on a crutch. "Lives are at stake." Get up from your computer and take a walk. You are suffering from Internet toxicity.

>In my opinion Catherine, we need you to help figure out what is going on in a way that creates understanding. Be a maverick, show us a big idea, tell us about your experiences. Can you do it without offensively generalizing in a way that is so innacurate?

Uh, what do you mean "We", white man? You don't need to do squat. I don't need "help". Go be a maverick yourself and stop behaving like a typical geek controlling nit. It's unattractive, and a time-suck. I already tell about my experiences, I already contribute, and I also find little of value in continuing to talk to you, you are an invalid interlocutor.

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Um, Cathrine?

I love how when faced with your same invective, your tone becomes so rational and balanced. That shows some real potential.

You have no idea what brand of geekdom you would place me in. If by reading the dozen or so posts here on this forum, or the fact that I reject your use of the term makes me a geek then you are proving your own point and it doesn't merit any further discussion.

It is a wild generalization that is factually meaningless and lumps together a wide variety of people into one subclass. To come into an internet based forum and sling around the word geek is bound to garner a response or two. Trollish behavior.

Bill Gates did steal Dr. DOS and the rest of that 'narrative' is entirely accurate, no fable here. Micro$oft has been a clear example of technocapitalists taking advantage of their client's non technicality to lock in a sale. I'm not an opensourcenik. That term could only mean a person who virulently argues in favor of open source (or free as you might describe) versus commercial (or potentially obscenely overpriced and promulgated through illegal means as I might say). I have and continue to use open source tools (not linux, which actually is quite workable in its various flavors happily for millions of people) and benefit from the ability of others to participate in product development without having to rewrite the entire aplication or start a software publishing corporation in order to share their innovation with others.

Why is IBM among the more prominent commercial ventures who have "bought into" OS so deliberately since 1999 ?

Why can't you think of it as Democratic Software ? How dare you take a small group of anything and ascribe them powers over the rest of us? Or infer that since I defend x or y from your blanket statements that I am a bona fide member of that group. You express ignorance often and on many levels. Does that feel clever to you when you say such categorical things?

As for the rest of my assertions and your responses, they are meaningless. Would you like me to refute every quote? Spend time on an analysis of every inaccurate statement or blanket assertion? Would that help you to be less abrasive followed by more persistent fits of rationality? You don't "merely" push back, you instigate (Well, perhaps you do, but from what I have noticed, the initial push you are responding to seems invisible more often than not).

Are you offended by something here? You choose to stay... to help others see the light? Sounds like a noble cause, so why not act like you care about what you say enough to apply your own critic's eye to your own editing process.

You have no real idea if I am a man of color who has been educated in White schools, or even a man for that matter. Does your SL character have any female attributes? Does using the word "controlling" make you a woman-victim with the right to attack mindlessly and then act rational when reactions pop up? What does all this mean in the first place?

If you had used the word "orphan" instead of "Geek" would you feel as justified to say "They all..." this and that? If you had merely parenthetically enumerated the word "Geek" clearly as your own invented definition we might not be having this conversation. Yet you profess to speak for all Geeks and ascribe motives to "their" actions. Pathetic.

I do not make money from the tech industry. I have raised a deaf child for three years so far and can tell you a thing or two about marginalized communities and because of who I am; prejudice. I did, ten years ago, get paid $50/hour to design/fix Windoze networks, but my beef with commercial software practices in the enterprise go way beyond that experience.

You speak in terms that make perfect but unsubstantiate-able sense to you. Awesome. I can refute every proof you provide and vice versa. Then What? Is that a conversation? I feel that I have proven my ongoing interest to engage you in a dialogue (this last post notwithstanding) and draw out your ideas in a way that might be productive. You have actually, at times, seemed to soften a bit and sound more rational. That's awesome. You don't need to fight to create change, or attack to prove a point. There are quite a few examples of questioning the basic assumptions of the experiment. Re-read the responses to your own posts for starters.

And yes, lives are at stake. I knew you would try to dismiss that one but the facts are plain. What educators decide to stand up for or let slide impacts lives directly. The policies educators accept, the rights they teach about, and the passion with which they convey important messages about history and freedom has a very real impact on what a society accepts as morally acceptable. A million or so Iraqi's are dead. More than Hussein could have ever dreamed of killing on his own. The US Gov't is complicit in horrors as a matter of foreign policy and the evidence is in the public record. No guessing involved. It usually comes out 30 years too late to sway public opinion, but the fact remains and should serve as a motivator. Interconnected humanity spreads a message that bleeds out onto the streets and can result in profound outreach among a wide diversity of population and species groups. So, yes, lives are at stake to the point of making this tit-for-tat seem idiotic. That's why I performed my own experiment, visible above.

We (you and I) have bigger things to explore here and possibly elsewhere, including solving whatever things present themselves on our personal radar screen. Connectivism is on yours apparently and I hope you use your intellect to help out a bit more, mostly because I'd like to hear your critique expanded to redirect the dominant theories toward a more accurate path.

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Blustering; not very intelligent.

Not an interesting conversation -- not worth the time to refute -- especially as the author is anonymous.

Geek Religion:

"Fan of: Paolo Soleri, Bucky Fuller, Laurie Anderson, Jello Biafra
Dream of: Shaping life enhancing experiences by providing soul satisfying subliminal user experiences
Care about: wellness, positivity, learning, expression
Learning: sign language!
Also, a meaning and use of epistemology which is anathema to a dissertation on zen

"

I hate it when people on the Internet tell you about some life hardship or tragedy in an effort to trump some argument -- not acceptable.

Most of the people killed in the Iraq war, which I oppose and urge to be ended, are killed by terrorists, not by the U.S. I don't hear a plan to deal with terrorism, other than by disabling the U.S.

Not valid interlocutor.

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"Most of the people killed in the Iraq war, which I oppose and urge to be ended, are killed by terrorists."

If by terrorist, you mean death squads known to be forming in the vacuum of power and chaos since before the 'invasion' then one must examine the motivation to create such chaos in the first place.

Not many 'Geeks' know or care who Paolo Soleri is. We are back to your personal definition which (you thankfully agree) isn't worth arguing about. You are free to have your personal definitions. It is customary to preface those with a disclaimer though.

Proving my background to you is a gift, not a trump. You accused me of participating in fables and claim to "know a lot" i.e. 'more' is how you come across. Cease and desist. I dream of and care about: would take a lot more room and time than I felt like spending at that moment. Surely you have been through the same? It does require that I accept the risk of being interpreted by the yardstick of any passer by.. and here you are.

Plans to deal with terrorism require an unobstructed view of the guilty and applying the balm of justice to old festering wounds. We would be well served to break open the CIA archives and sincerely end our duplicitous behavior. "We kill for good" is completely nonsensical. Wrecking the constitution is not a plan, supporting zionism is not a plan, and saying whatever it takes to get elected does not make you a leader.

What is your opinion on week 4?

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