You won't win arguments with people like this, so you wither ignore
them and get on with your life or you deal with them in such a way
they can't / won't upset you again for a long time.
These "rules don't apply to me" people are generally of low moral
integrity and generally untrustworthy and will often stab you in the
back. So if dealing with them, you have to fix it firmly once and for
all or walk away from it. Just like dealing with the playground bully.
This may work in the playground and in prison, Dilwyn ;) but internet
trolls are harder to combat. One strategy that seemed to work for me
(though I dont have that much experience) is to ignore any remarks by the
troll by merely pointing out to the general reader of the thread, in a
succinct, matter-of-fact, non-aggressive language, that the previous
remark was written by a troll and may blithly be skipped unread together
with any future remarks from the same account. Trolls feed of others' pain
and discomfort, and starve if that cannot be had. If the majority of other
members on the list are genuine and mature, with only one or two trolls,
the trolls soon auto-combust or wither.
The important thing is to not engage in any way with the troll or his/her
"arguments", comments or abuse, and for one's own piece of mind, not even
to sneak a peek at them oneself for any reason!
Trolls, yes, absolutely, because they hide behind the pseudo-anonymity of
the medium. Deprive them of this horrible demented self-satisfaction and
they soon starve, as you say. Just like dealing with persistent junk callers
(the real bane of my life), all you can do is not engage them in
conversation - they persist with people who talk to them until they make a
sale/take over your bank account/steal your life and there's generally not a
lot you can do about it except being mentally prepared to hang up or put the
phone to one side and refuse to talk to them (firewall your sanity). My
generation got bullied at school, now much of the bullying takes place by
Bookface or whatever the kids use these days and on the whole we ain't
dealing much better with it than traditional bullying in my school days -
will we ever learn to?
Dealing with trolls and the whole electronic harassment thing is pretty new
to society and the old ways of dealing with people like that are no good.
The inventers of the internet never foresaw that for every good thing it
brought, there was bad as well and the internet was never really devised to
cope with criminality, kids accessing porn and abuse and so on. Which is why
the bad guys always seem to be one step ahead.
I do reserve the right to imagine myself punching them on the nose though
(even though I never would of course).
Anyway, this is creeping away a bit from the original discussion, sorry.
Dilwyn
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