I’ve long since concluded that I must be living wrong. I’ve prayed and lit incense and tossed coins into fountains on four continents all fervently wishing that someone anyone would be offended enough by these blog posts to troll me. But, alas and alack, they have not. That is they haven’t until earlier this week! Praise Jebus and pass the offending plate, a MAGA troll has stumbled across Ye Olde Blogge and was offended enough to troll us. Now, I can relax and enjoy my vacation!

Maybe there is a god because it finally happened!!! It did. I have a TROLL. For now, I’ve kept him locked in the spam dungeon of unapproved comments while I determine how I can take him out and show him off to all the other cool bloggers and social media folk without him ruining the carpet by dripping his trolly juices all over them. Here, let me tell the story from the beginning.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when someone with moniker, mocskerr, dropped in and left a comment that was as innocuous as it was baffling on the post, Why Is He Putting So Many People At Risk For #COVID19? Trump Lacks Empathy– Part 1, published almost one year ago. What a coincidence! A year ago. How’d that happen? The coincidences keep piling up suggesting to me that there must be a god lurking in the hedges somewhere.

He wrote, Dude Trump aint a Doctor. Duh.

Hunh. Ass scratcher. Did he think I was claiming that Trump was a doctor? That only doctors have empathy? That Trump is putting people at risk for because he isn’t a doctor? What could he possibly mean?

Did he mean it as a hostile rebuke? A sympathetic agreement? A bland neutrality? It didn’t even have CONNOTATION. At least the guy who called us all a bunch of deranged idiots had connotation. A definitiveness. You knew where he stood and it was right on your big toe, you know the one with the ingrown toenail so it really hurt? At least the whinging Bernie Princesses had connotation when they were stamping their little feets, gnashing their braced teeth, and shaking their wee fists in their sputtering outrage of being compared to royalty, oh, and by the way, do you mind helping me get this pea out from under my mattresses, they asked. I just can’t seem to get a good night’s sleep with it down there. Their impotent howls of indignation were at least as indignant as they were indulgent, self-indulgent that is. But, this guy was drowning in ambiguity.

What was worse, his comment had been lost in the spam folder amongst all the innocent inquiries about where to find CDB oils and negligees and vaguely worded praise for some random post. I only found it by luck when I went in to muck it out because I read my spam.

So, I asked him what he meant. And apologized for not getting to it sooner because spam.

Of course, he answered with a screed. A veritable deluge of MAGA half-twitted half-truth. A turd of Trump tropes.

Of course, it landed with a resounding thud in the spam file.

A few days after my response to his initial comment, I figured I had lost him as a commenter by the delay in responding due to the spam file thing. Then, I noticed that there were comments in the spam file. Well, egg on my face because he had answered, and there it was.

My dilemma was born. Do I approve the comment and try to refute it? Do I answer point-by-point or just with a general dismissal? Should I just ignore it?

Another ass scratcher. It is a good thing I have an itchy ass.

So, I answered with what I thought was a thoughtful polite response explaining that I appreciated any and all commenters and hated to turn people away but I could not in good conscious publish disinformation. Also, there were a few factual errors in his claims that I refuted. Not many. Only six. Six of the most egregious.

I was done with the troll, or so I thought. That ought to have been the end of it, but I couldn’t let it go. Some of the stuff he claimed was just so stupid it was screaming to be debunked at decibels that Ted Nugent and AC-DC could only dream of. It was way past eleven. It was feeding back and reverbing around in my head. I had to consciously make myself not write out the point-by-point refutation, but I couldn’t stop thinking of it. Like some PTSD-induced intrusive memory, a claim he’d made would pop into my head and I’d begin mentally arguing with him.

Fuck.

He got me.

Still I persisted. I resisted.

And, then, the other day, I saw that I had a small explosion in my stats. I was a good fifty visits over my average. When I looked, I had a three to one ratio of views to visitors. Someone had come to the blog and looked at a lot of posts.

Hunh.

Usually that’s the end of that. There was no referral source that reflected that many views. There was no country other than the States that could account for it. There was no blog post that was garnering that many views. The stat page, as usual, wasn’t revealing much of any useful information about my visitors or their views. You just never know where your visitors come from, why they were there, how long they stayed, or anything. All you get are cold hard low numbers lining up in columns on a page. There is little there to warm any blogger’s heart.

Man, another ass scratcher.

But, then, I noticed that my spam file had filled awfully fast from the last time I had mucked it out and found mocskerr’s last screed.

Jackpot and BINGO! There were twenty-seven comments in the spam folder, twenty-six of them were from him! Twenty-six. There were comments on blog posts. There were comments on comments. There were comments on my comments, on Bob’s comments, on the comments of other people. None of us were spared. He commented on recent posts, posts from years ago. Something had pulled his string. He was on a roll. He was a troll on a roll. And covering all of the bases: the fraudit, abolishing the central bank, states’ rights, Trump apologisms. There were one liners, multi-liners, a couple of paragraphs. They were repetitious, incomprehensible, nonsensical.

I had gotten under his skin, more than he had gotten under mine! Ha! Take that mocskerr!

And, every freaking one of them landed in the spam file. For the life of me, I don’t know why. Other than there is a god. Because if there were ever a spammy spamming spamster trolling the Interwebs, it was this guy. And, the patron saint of bloggers, Saint Francis de Sales, had obviously intervened with god or jebus or someone on my behalf and tossed this sucker into the spam vat where he belonged. I’m telling you, god has never made her views of someone any clearer than landing this troll right where he belongs.

When someone tells you who they are, you should listen, but when god tells you who you are, you should straighten up, listen, and mend your mo’fo’ ways.

So, I did what I always do when a Trojan horse is wheeled up to my doorstep, I think about the psychology behind it all. I came up with three cognitive tendencies that explains the utter stupidity of MAGA Nation and their willful fucking ignorance of the world, but you’ll have to read the post that explains all that cognitive Tom fuckery. When I tried it along with the story, TL;DR.

Now, I have a new dilemma. When I get trolly comments, I don’t approve them, but I don’t delete them, either. I leave them in the pending stack and take some satisfaction at watching their ineffective impotent attempts at everyday sadism remain as flaccid as Trump is. I’m up to eleven — See? The hand of god at work again? Eleven. I’ve turned it up to eleven? When a comment erroneously lands in the spam folder, you have to approve, dig through the approved stack until you find it (it goes in at the date it was submitted) and then respond to it. Believe me, it is a pain in the ass that WordPress should fix. Then, if the comment is offensive and you wish that no one would see it, you have to unapprove it, and it moves to the pending stack.

Now, I have twenty-six trolly comments in the spam file. I don’t want to approve them all and then unapprove. I’m going on vacation in a countable number of hours. I guess I can leave them in the spam file in some kind of offering to Saint Francis de Sales. If you have any suggestions, please put them in the comments.

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Image Attribution

“St Francis de Sales blessing“ by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0