Malignant Trolls in Madison, Wisconsin Congregate at Next Door Social Media Site

A first-person encounter with malicious, damaged primates

Madison, Wisconsin — A friend and I dropped by a Walgreen's on the City's southwest side to pick up some items May 14, Thursday morning.

I believe she was not expecting to be accosted and verbally assaulted by a Walgreen's employee on Raymond Road/Whitney Way. I certainly was not, being tardy, in my view, in defending my friend.

I posted a summary of the incident on a couple of local neighborhood-community sites, including Next Door, filled out a Walgreen's online survey, and phoned the on-site manager to memorialize the incident that occurred at an establishment that has lost our home's business.
 
But the resultant trolling, defamation and venom on Next Door in reaction to my summary left me bewildered by an apparent derangement and malignancy that would embarrass the lunatic in the White House.

My friend — a care-worker and an attractive woman in her 20s who was just accepted into a grad school program fulfilling a long-time wish — is among the more affable people one could meet. My wife and I feel privileged she is in our lives before she moves to Boston.

But our friend has come across a few who loathe her for being happy, fit and possessing a verve and intelligence that apparently constitute a threat. Who does she think she is, hisss?

Yet, these folks pale in comparison to the Next Door folks, several who seem —   my god, you might not believe — to congregate at this site and others like it for the sole purpose of injecting venom and inflicting emotional injury.

These are adult human beings, but redolent of enraged, maldeveloped psyches.

Within hours after my posting a summary, Next Door commenters accused me of the following:

• Fabricating the whole incident
• Being a racist
• Engaging in an extra-marital affair
• Being a criminal, with suspicious motives, and working to avoid the police for unknown but nefarious reasons

And on and on, among wild and unfounded speculation of my character, profession and political advocacy. Online demands from trolls ordered me to explain all manner of personal family and professional detail.

A couple of subsequent [and sane] private Next Door messages to me explain there is a small number of people who commonly come across Next Door posts with, yes, intention to injure and defame, implying that I ought not necessarily take the defamation and character assassinations personally.

Sounds like good advice to me. 

But I may be contacting the University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology Dept to pitch an idea for a line of investigation into abnormal psychology among online trolls.

For example, one Frannie Lyons — who was not a witness to the assault of my friend, nor has Ms Lyons ever met my friend — exhibits symptoms that appear clinical to me.

Writes Ms Lyons among her flurry of impassioned, perverse commentary, false statements of fact, and smears and innuendo:

Walgreens should be able to provide video footage of the incident. If your friend doesn’t want to take police action perhaps there’s an underlying motive for not doing so. Bringing up the race and “attractiveness” of a person is a disturbing thing to read here. I also work in journalism and quite honestly your absence of both grammar and standard news-speak non-racial description reeks of significant unprofessionalism.

Innuendo‽ Oh wow! You obviously have no clue what that word means (it has a sexual connotation). I smeared NOBODY here and all these judgments you cast on me are discrediting your post more than I ever could. Why bring up being a journalist if you are going to write something that comes off as racist and ignorant? Honestly, I’m doubting the legitimacy of this entire post.

To borrow from Eric Bogosian and Oliver Stone, (Talk Radio), I'm glad Frannie Lyons is out there, and I am safely staying at home.

My Next Door post was taken down, likely because of the unhinged defamations from the trolls.

This self-granted license to malign complete strangers for no apparent reason than to injure and inflict distress seems a warrant for personal destruction, often found among the most vile of political movements.

Obams Is a True Believer, Says Michael Goodwin

Michael Goodwin's piece in the New York Daily News this morning is a ridiculous knock that Obama is to be feared because the public is behind him and Obama is eloquent and confident.

Typical of rightwingers Goodwin just wants to smear; that it has no grounding in fact or evidence is besides the point. Nor is it important that Goodwin likes to quote from books that he hasn't read. Good enough for the Daily News.

Goodwin borrows from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements by insisting that Obama is a scary "true believer" because he seems so well-spoken and confident.

One has to believe that Goodwin never actually read Hoffer's book that popularized a serious domain of social-psychological research in the 1950s that tried to explain why people would do stupid things like join fascist movements and align themselves unthinkingly with authoritarians.

The true believer is a fanatic. He has no intellectual curiosity, no sense of history, and no need to critically examine any aspect of the ideology or the authoritarian to which he assigns himself, and certainly no need to read the book from which he cites. Writes Goodwin:

It's too early for Obama to back up all his claims, but midway through his compelling press conference on Wednesday night, after he had asserted a list of accomplishments, I scribbled the words 'The True Believer' in my notebook.

After only 100 days on the job, our talented new President shows no signs of doubt.

He is a follower who can be found jumping from one crazy movement - NAZIism, Communism, Nationalism - to another.

Considering this uncontroversial thrust of Hoffer's work, are we then to assign the term "true believer" to Obama as an unthinking follower or an authoritarian?

Goodwin doesn't even try to make the case.

- via mal contends