Hoisted from comments

Jesus. It’s true enough that I’d put it in the category of ‘wish I said that first’. I’ve been hanging out at Mark Kleiman’s site a lot since the AZ shootings, and I was thinking Thomas and Brett Bellmore were in rare form–but the Thrilla from Wasilla really does make them look like pikers.

Still, if Rick Perlstein’s right, then RMN himself was the über-troll before there was even such a thing as trolling. He helped to shut down reasoned deliberation in the US for running on to five decades, and still counting.

Not a new phenomenon. Trolls have risen to lead nations before, with nasty results.

I think she’s John McCain’s doomsday machine for not getting elected.

—In the true spirit of vitrol (100 proof)

You defame the name of “troll”

I once had a patient who was an actual troll, in the sense that he literally lived under a bridge. Well, it wasn’t actually a bridge he lived under. It was this extended section of I-10 that was elevated as it passed along Claiborne Avenue right by downtown New Orleans. My patient had lucked into one of the very few storage spaces in one of the abutments of the Interstate that was not in use, and was left unlocked. Not only did he thus have a roof over his head, putting him at one stroke into upper middle class status in the world of the homeless, but this place of his was right by Charity Hospital. Location, location, location.

I met him in his capacity as a troll in the medical sense (someone who frequents ERs more for social rather than purely medical reasons) precisely because he had recently lost this living space to another homeless person who grabbed it while he was hospitalized for an exacerbation of his Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia. It had turned cold and rainy, and he no longer had that roof over his head, so he decided to have an exacerbation of his insanity for the eminently sane purpose of getting a bit warm and dry for as long a he could cadge from a heartless (but not nearly so heartless then as we have become since) system.

Well, everybody in the intake sytem at Charity knew this gentleman, knew about his recent fall from grace in homeless society and that his visit to Charity that night almost certainly had more to do with a change in the weather than any change in his medical condition. You get better service if you’re a regular, you know. So it was thought sufficient to have a medical student evaluate his condition for the appropriate medical disposition, and thus I met my troll.

One of the few things they told you when you started out doing this work — they certainly didn’t give you any instruction in psychiatry, you were supposed to pick that up from your own reading — was to always sit between the patient and the door. Well, I had been doing this a while, had never had any really out of control patients, was starting to appreciate the truth that these folks are infinitely more likely to be at danger from others than a danger to others, I had been told that this patient wasn’t really thought to be out of control, but just in for a warm cot, and lastly, he just smiled so congenially when I entered the room, that I didn’t make him get up from the chair nearer the door, but took the one on the other side of the table.

Starting with the smile, even a beginner such as I was found it fairly easy to build up a picture of a very, very well-compensated schizophrenic. He was on his meds, which he could name and recite dosage schedules for without error, and his meds were obviously working. His affect was somewhat flattened, but less so than the average General Surgery resident, if slightly more than the average Ob-Gyn. Yes, he did believe that people, especially a distant relative and former college roomate from his immediately pre-psychotic days, were plotting against him, and he did have his delusional system, centered, as was almost always the case with schizophrenics in New Orleans at that time, on religion (Even here he showed unusual coherence for a schizophrenic, in that he felt confident enough to discuss the theological underpinnings of his system. I recall that he explained the animus to the former college roommate as arising from his commission of the one unforgiveable sin, which he identified correctly, I mean, correctly if you follow the Baltimore Catechism, as the Sin Against the Holy Spirit.) But he was able in his current state of compensation to set those concerns on a back burner, and grew most animated in our conversation when describing such practicalities as the recent loss of his home, and the discomfiture this had caused him. Most impressively, he was able to admit, without putting it in so many words, that he was really there that night to get out of the cold and damp. The ability to tell a white lie, and more than that, the tacitly admitted white lie, with grace and tact, may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but it is a social skill beyond, say ,the average Academic Internist, and quite an achievement for a schizophrenic. Even I, in my then beginner’s state of training, could recognize a schizophrenic who was very well compensated and clearly not a danger to self or others, well except maybe at danger from the weather, so I would triage this patient to 24 hours of observation. That’s plenty of time for a New Orleans cold front to pass.

But I wasn’t experienced enough then to trust what was quite obvious, so I asked him the obligatory questions about homicidal or suicidal ideation or planning. Yes, indeed, he answered he did think often about killing the former roommate. And, yes, he did have a plan. For the first time, I was a bit apprehensive about the patient being between me and the door. It’s the quiet, controlled ones you have to worry about, you know. But hoping to get more reassuring answers, I sought further clarification. Now, he had mentioned earlier that the roommate now lived in Chicago. Did he have any way to get to Chicago? Well, no, of course he couldn’t even afford bus fare. But the distance didn’t really matter, the patient reassured me. He was going to kill his ex-roommate with brain waves, you see, flashing his warm smile at me.

I think about my troll, and brain waves, and my brief unneccessary fear before he had clarified that he was going to do his murder most foul via brain waves, whenever we have one of these Shoe Bombers or Underpants Bombers that everyone is encouraged to get into such a fright over, but whose homicidal ideation boils down to a plan no more dangerous to others than brain waves.

I also thought of him again when we had this shooter out in Arizona, but this time about the vast difference between this crazed person and my eminently sane schizpohrenic. Perhaps Loughner is indeed schizophrenic, an untreated, poorly compensated schizophrenic, as everyone seems eager to assume. But a politically centered delusional system, and murderous action resulting from that delusional system, are so much more characteristic of the True Believer than the schizophrenic, that I tend to doubt this diagnosis for Loughner. Both are paranoid, but the schizophrenic no more than the True Believer, and the craziness of Loughner’s website musings do not differentiate between these two possibilities.

And now we have Palin linking herself to this chain of mental illness.

Now, when I think about the Underpants Bomber, and the Shoe Bomber, and Loughner, I am sad and angry. My troll was a sad case in many ways, but was able to carve out of the very unpromising material circumstances of his life a human space that all of us could admire, and even perhaps envy. Trolls, bums, schizos, terrorists –however low the status we accord them, they’re still recognizably human.

I don’t know what to think or feel about Sarah Palin. I’m sure she has some reality as a person, somewhere, but she has chosen to recreate herself for us, her public, as a fake person, a pretend person, apparently in order to win an office that is already metastasized almost beyond the human, and would need only her assumption of it to break its final connection with reality.

You defame the name of “troll” when you call Sarah Palin a troll.

@ Glenn Tomkins. Thank you.

Glenn Tomkins: that was the single best comment I’ve ever read in 6 years of pretty intense blog reading.

Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” is just an extension of the opportunistic use of the term in other contexts. I see, for example, that Alan Dershowitz is now defending Palin on the grounds that he himself used to the term to criticize the Goldstone Report!

8: get that man a blog.

12: no, no, I find the level of discourse pathetically low too. I just turn up to make myself feel frightfully superior by comparison. It’s like going on holiday to south-east Asia if you want to feel tall.

@Glen Tomkins: Thanks for your insightful and unrelentingly humane comment. (I second ajay at 14 – perhaps it already exists?)

More or less anybody who writes in the music press is a troll by some definition, since the saying exaggerated and provocative things for effect is not only common practice but almost universal.

I suppose this comment might be thought of as trolling the music press. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

@12

Myself, I don’t usually venture down into the kitchen very much, what with etiquette and all – it’s important to keep a strict distinction, don’t you know – but the other day I had some chums from the Conservative Club over for a quick bite to eat, when we discovered a hair – a hair! – in one of the vol-au-vents. Needless to say, I attempted to laugh it off, as a gentleman does, you know, but eventually I decided I had to go downstairs and tell those cretins that they’d perfectly ruined my day.

Took me an hour to find the place of course, but when I got down there, boy, did I let rip! Really told ’em. Now those plebs know quite where the limit is, and the limit is the foot of the stairs.

/grumble

I think Henry got it right at The Monkey Cage when he said (my paraphrase) that: (1) there is in general an association between violent political rhetoric and increased likelihood of violent acts but (2) there appears to be, at least based on what we now know, no direct link between a specific piece of rhetoric (e.g. Palin) and this shooting. The more that people persist in trying to tie Palin to this in some direct way the more she will have occasion to utter absurdities and engage in what Machina calls ‘trolling’. Maybe we should drop this particular thing and then she will drop it. That would be desirable, no? That certainly seemed to be one message of Obama’s speech at the memorial service, and I tend to agree.

Just to add my voice to the chorus of praise for comment #8 — an excellent read and I look forward to reading more from Dr. Tomkins.

Glen Tomkins: also, people like the Doodle Bomber, who is doing 30 years for basically nothing, and also btw just to add to his misery keeps getting seriously attacked by other inmates, for example by having hot oil poured over him.

I’m interested on the True Believer/schizophrenia business – the former is presumably not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. And in paranoia – what do you take this to be, and in what way does this latest advert for the US gun laws* manifest it?

I’m assuming there is a nascissistic or over-egocentric element, and a delusory one in psychotic cases. (Which also begs the q: what do you take this guy’s delusions, relevant to political paranoia, to consist of? Do we even have any info about what if anything he conscously took himself to be achieving?)

Basically, just a request to expand on your remarks as they relate to this specific case.

*In the UK he would probably just got increasingly into self-med ganja, and the worst damage he would have done would have been to provide an anecdote to assist the Daily Mail et al. in their whipping up of drug hysteria, via his parents latching onto the weed as a handy exogenous cause for everything.

T Wilkinson @28 —
I think this is not solely a U.S. problem; see e.g. Chris Brown’s comments in the thread attached to this post.

there appears to be, at least based on what we now know, no direct link between a specific piece of rhetoric (e.g. Palin) and this shooting

Maybe so, but if so, it’s Palin’s good luck. (Well, all of ours, I guess — in that a related shooting would be in addition to the unrelated one we already had.) The gunsight map is well up into turbulent-priest territory, and the early speculation that the obvious might have happened is not any kind of libel, let alone an ethnic slur involving cannibalism. It just happens to be, in this case, wrong. If we’re really lucky, it will stay wrong.

Anyway, it’s a long way from “there is no direct link between Palin’s rhetoric and this specific instance of violence” to “there’s nothing wrong with Palin’s rhetoric” to “anyone who criticizes Palin’s rhetoric is just like the perpetrators of a crime against humanity”. Criticism is not censorship, and even censorship (bad as it is) is not a pogrom.

It occurred to me the other day that Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes is who Palin is.

It was not a big surprise when Google showed that I was far from being the first to trip over this insight.

I was just discussing this on an email list, where I claimed first dibs on publishing t-shirts with pictures of Ms. Palin and the “DNFTT” logo beneath …

Which is, of course, itself a big feed. Wittgenstein Prop 7 for the succinct troll strategy win.

Although somewhat in the spirit of the Unfogged ToS -> Pauly Shore rewrites, I’m thinking there is some third-rate celeb (or character in a book or movie) that it would be refreshing to imagine giving her lines (and no need for rewrites!). Not that I’ve come up with a good candidate.

Trolling is a pretty good description of what she is up to. She just can’t believe that there can be anything important than herself or any public event that isn’t first and foremost about her.

The problem with Conservatives is that they are abject cowards. They know that the game Palin is playing is thuggery and intimidation. Whatever the consequences might have been from Palin’s ‘crosshairs’ poster, the intention was clear: to send a message to liberals that people who disagree with Palin put their lives at risk.

Palin knew exactly what message she was sending at the time. When asked to repudiate it she doubled down with a speech that was clearly intended to intimidate.

What I find particularly disgusting about the right is their total lack of self awareness. They throw a daily panty-twist about some obscure anonymous comment found on a liberal blog that might be interpreted as advocating violence, then attack liberals for criticizing their political leaders for advocating violence. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are rather more significant in the Conservative movement than any of the commentators they have got themselves in a panty-bunch over.

When they talk about second amendment remedies they are advocating that their supporters further their political goals at the point of a gun. That is called treason in my book.

This may all seem like a jolly little game to an intellectually challenged know-nothing like Palin. But such words can have real consequences as anyone who follows the history of Northern Ireland knows. Without the hate filled rhetoric of Ian Paisley and those like him the UVF might never had existed. It was the threats to the Catholics and the attacks of Protestant para-military groups that started the troubles.

To ignore more recent comments and jump back to Glen Tomkins’, which I also praise, it may or may not be interesting, in light of his experience with the military, that the most extreme psychopathic troll I’ve ever encountered was posting from a .mil address.

I don’t think it useful to conflate trollery with demagogy. It obscures the extent to which Palin has taken to heart Paul Ford’s internet tendency as applied to broader media.

I tend to think that demagogues should boast an agenda of some sort – even if it’s crude. I’m not sure what Palin’s for. She’s adopted a false persona, made sure that it’s aggravating and diverted people into fruitless arguments. That bears all the hallmarks of trollery (with, perhaps, a dash of the ideological astroturfer (and, perhaps, the added bonus of being a sockpuppet)).

I see that I am not alone in having overlooked the jewel that is Glen Tomkins. And we have no excuse — his stuff has been sighted here before. For example, on the topic of quasi-recreational testosterone:

If you are ever tempted to start getting your weekly or monthly shot of essence of manhood and youth, just think of it as an opportunity to become more like Strom Thurmond. You, too, can have a reptile brain! Well, you can have a placebo that gives you an excuse to act like you have a reptile brain. Strom probably came by it naturally, you’ld have to fake it.”

3rd and 4th grafs above should be indented as well.

But Loughner didn’t have a coherent ideology.

So? Lots of people have incoherent ideologies, I don’t see that it holds them back much. Paranoids are perhaps especially likely to be incoherent by ordinary standards, with seemingly unrelated or opposed groups secretly working together as arms of the conspiracy. Any belief that the government is coming to take your guns or impose socialism or kill your grandma or whatever could fit enough for the crosshair map to be interpreted as a call to action (as indeed it was, even if the intended mode of action was electoral rather than homicidal), and most paranoids will probably fit the government into their conspiracy theorizing somewhere, anyway.

Much is made in some circles of evidence that Loughner supposedly had some animus toward Giffords dating back years; but he didn’t attack years ago, he attacked now, after the 2010 elections failed to remove Giffords from office. IMO, there is currently not enough information to be sure one way or the other whether the ramping-up of rhetoric surrounding the election pushed Loughner from just disliking Giffords to trying to kill her. It may never be determinable without telepathy. But it’s not an obviously ridiculous suggestion, even if no rational person would be driven to murder by the same rhetoric.

Can someone explain to me how it is possible to have an ‘elevated’ political discussion of anything to do with Sarah Palin?

@Engels 52

By burying her under the mountain of horse manure she spews forth daily, turfing it over and sticking a park bench on top with a WiFi hotspot.

Hi,

It is admirable that CT didn’t become just another venue for emotional, ill-considered, immediate, leaps-to-judgment and commentary on these atrocious and tragic events. However, perhaps we can now respectfully once again consider the lessons we seem to have such a hard time learning.

It would appear that Americans actually love these massacres because if not, we would have long ago done something about the widespread availability of the unnecessarily lethal personal firearms that make them possible. It has amost always been possible for us to protect our persons, homes, and families, from local violence, without also giving every fragile personality among us the “right” to commit extreme acts of mayhem and anonymous genocide on large numbers of our population. And when that has not been possible, these instruments of mass murder have not been the solution.

Although this is NOT an attempt to blame the victims, we must all be conscious of our own personal responsibility for the “way things are”. For example, in the latest issue du jour, it’s ironic, that both Judge John Rolls, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords, were apparently supporters of “gun rights”.

Giffords opposed the Washington, D.C. ban on handguns in 2008. She even bragged that she is the owner of the same kind of semi-automatic, easily concealed, high-capacity, Glock pistol that was used to shoot her. She said she considered gun ownership a constitutional right and an “Arizona tradition.”

She said, “As a gun owner, I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. In February, I was proud to sign the Amicus Brief in District of Columbia v. Heller asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling that overturned the long standing DC gun ban. This is a common sense decision that reaffirms the Constitutional right – and Arizona tradition – of owning firearms. I commend the Court for ruling in favor of restoring our right to bear arms.”

Rolls was a George Bush appointee, and probably a Republican conservative, and it seems he apparently issued a ruling in support of “gun rights” from the federal bench. I can’t find the reference to that ruling at the moment, but I recently read about it. In any event, I’m sure he was put on the bench in order to support the conservative interpretations of the 2nd amendment.

No, these people absolutely did NOT deserve to get shot for holding these views. Let me reiterate—these victims did NOT deserve to be victims of this atrocity. However, until we understand that we are ALL the potential victims of our national policies and laws, none of us can believe we are safe from the lethality of the weapons we allow to circulate amongst us in large number without significant controls on who has them, or why they do.

It is particularly unseemly that this recent new atrocity has become such a big, important, urgent, issue, because this time it was a federal judge and a U.S. congressional representative who were the ones to get shot. Without that fact, this event would have once again been a quickly passing news item. It seems it is only a matter of minor concern when dozens and scores of children and anonymous civilians are killed in the frequent, regular, predictable, shooting massacres in our country. When the suggested remedy is to make it illegal to carry or use firearms against U.S. Government officials, never mind the rest of us, it seems to not matter that others of us without such official powers are also killed and victimized. In fact, the greatest loss in this latest atrocity was 9-year-old Christina Green who never had the time in her brief remarkable life to be responsible in any way for the circumstances that led to her murder. What are we going to do to protect her?

With both liberal and conservative justifications, our country has now long and systematically put mentally unstable people outside the reach of our “helping” and custodial systems, so that many of them continue to sink deeper and deeper into alienation, depression, and pathological behavior. That’s where most of these tragedies and atrocities emanate, even in this “Age of Terrorism”. I have very little optimism that will change any time soon.

With a rational understanding of the problem and risks to all of us, we could at least finally marginalize the extremists on this constantly recurring issue, and fix the problem of easy and indiscriminate availability of these high-lethality, easily concealable murder weapons. Do we really need to be able to have these murder weapons for hunting deer, or even for protecting ourselves? Who do you need to kill today?

Have a nice day!
Antti

51.2 — This woman has a large and devoted following, and serious ambitions to be a kingmaker (if not a queen). Whether her agenda is, as her fans seem to think, revolutionary, or as her detractors think, venal, the stakes here are awfully damn high. I see a whole lot more underreaction than overreaction.

While I wouldn’t want to claim more celebrity for her than she’d claim for herself, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that over at Making Light, Abi Sutherland has been comparing Geert Wilders to a troll for quite some time. See eg here

If she’s right – and there are few people I’d rather go troll-spotting with – then the Palin phenomenon is to that extent precedented.

This does not apply especially well to Sarah Palin because she is one of a kind, and Republicans are not personally responsible for the actions and words of all the people who identify with them and goals their political goals (any more than Palin is responsible for, say, the Sarah Palin Prayer Circle), but they should either take some concern for the consequences of their own speech or decisively repudiate those people. Wrapping themselves up in the pretense that facts, which they are in the best position to know, are ridiculous, is reprehensible.

I tend to think that demagogues should boast an agenda of some sort – even if it’s crude. I’m not sure what Palin’s for.

She’s for everything that the rest of the Republican Party, as currently constituted, is for. The only differences between her and, say, John Boehner or Eric Cantor are purely stylistic. She feeds red meat to the base while they keep up appearances for the benefit of the inside-the-Beltway crowd.

I’d like to heartily endorse Antti Nannimus’ comment above. The fact that it relegates its author (and me) to the lunatic fringe of current American political discourse is…rather sad, to put it mildly, but I don’t know what to do about that.

Gun massacres are a consequence of the widespread availability of firearms (especially high-rate-of-fire ones), but they are not its goal.

Really? Every gun massacre becomes a cue for the NRA and Republican congressmen of very little brain to demand even greater availability — nay, mandatory issue — of firearms under the spurious pretext that having the entire populace weighed down with ballistic steel will somehow do, uh, something. (The latest shooting was followed a rush of purchases of the exact gun model used to carry it out.)

Gun massacres might not be an explicit goal of the more-guns-everywhere crowd, but they’re clearly a highly valued waypoint.

Why CT’s HTML differs from the HTML of, you know, THE WORLD is baffling.

or as Atrios has pointed out time and again – pissing off liberals is pretty much their sole guiding principle.

But Chris Bertram, Dersh used “blood libel” as shorthand for “destructive lie about Jews,” which is not rare among people of his political persuasion. How he gets from there to a defense of Palin’s using the term is beyond me: I guess his mode of reasoning is, as ever, “Spew non sequiturs and don’t let your opponents talk.”

I think that Sarah Palin is something far more dangerous than a mere troll. She is the latest development in the blurring of the line between politics and celebrities who are merely famous for being famous. I don’t believe that she will be the one to become President though. Our political culture needs to degenerate further. But in another 30 years, it’s conceivable that the Snooki of that time could be a President or Senator and P.T. Barnum will be regarded as our nation’s greatest political philosopher.

Tim Wilkinson @28,

They say that owners gradually come to resemble their pets. The same seems to hold true of physicians and their patients, and you are quite correct that True Believer is not any sort of diagnosis. I’m afraid it’s more of a term of reference, a phrase that a schizophrenic has appropriated to a private meaning.

That said, I don’t really mean anything exotic or strange by the term. I’m simply referring to the frequent paroxysms of widespread belief in clearly delusional content, and often the spasm of murderous action on such beliefs, that wrack whole nations from time to time in their history. We see in such ideas as that witches threaten us, or that there is an International Jewish Conspiracy, or that Obama wasn’t really born in the US, a level of distortion of thought comparable to that in schizophrenia, and even with similar patterns of distortion, but occurring to whole populations, not individuals. Not that these individuals would meet criteria for CPS even if anyone dared call “sick”, the victims of so widespread a “mass psychosis” (another term of reference!) that the sick outnumber the sound of mind. They don’t have social/occupational dysfunction. They’re joiners and followers and obeyers, rather than anti-social loners, and that social success, that clubbishness, is what makes them destructive, where CPSers tend strongly to harmlessness to all but themselves.

This difference between the True Believer and the CPSer made me very skeptical from the outset that Loughner had CPS (of course, the diagnosis wouldn’t get the Chronic part of that label anyway just based on the first break). The fact of the murders itself tends to decrease the probability of, though obviously not categorically disprove, the idea that he’s schizophrenic. Though people rush to that explanation for any murder, especially mass murder, that can’t be explained as a crime for profit or a crime of passion, actually, very few CPSers (it’s not a rare disease) kill people. I haven’t seen statistics on the subject, I don’t think the police keep murder statistics by mental status of the killer, but if such statistics were available, I would be very surprised if the results were not that schizophrenics were much less likely than “normal” people to commit murder.

I also found the materials on the web site, also available right away, quite unconvincing for the diagnosis. Sure, there are all sorts of manifestations of disordered thought — ideas of influence, terms of reference, loosened associations, perscutory and grandiose delusions, etc., etc. — but all that is par for the course on the Right these days. Nothing there you can’t find in the “thinking” of Constitution in Exile people, and Paulites, and Posse Comitatus people. I have been out of the game for a while, but back in the day, I never had a single patient whose delusional content was political. So this factor too seemed to make CPS less likely as a diagnosis.

Put these two factors together, a murder that is political, and politically-centered delusions, and in the combination you have someone who is far more likely to be a True Believer, a victim of mass psychosis, than of individual level, actual diagnosis, schizophrenia.

That said, the more recent revelations about his recent social and occupational dysfunction, do tend to make at least some diagnosis, if not paranoid schizophrenia, more likely. This dysfunction does give him the other main criterion of that diagnosis, but there are plenty of reasons — physical health, mental health, or not at all medical in any sense — for people to have social/occupational dysfunction. You would still need to link the disordered thought to the dysfunction, see that the disordered thought is thus global and not just political, before you diagnose CPS.

Even if such linkages could be made, it is unlikely that they could be made without talking to the patient, with interviews of family, friends and witnesses to the outbursts helpful but not decisive. Based on what has been revealed so far, I would rate a manic episode, and/or a personality disorder, as more likely diagnoses, with it not being at all clear that any diagnosis is possible. People do grossly irrational things all the time without falling under suspicion that they suffer from any thought disorder.

Glen,
This was quite some time ago, and although a Google search turned up some troubling facts, is probably of mostly academic interest now. The person did stop using the .mil account for postings and unsolicited offlist e-mails, and someone with a similar name and similar attitudes began posting shortly after that from a free account, and though the topics touched at the edges of the acceptable (including several of the standard bugbears of the borderline paranoid), and was extremely hostile, there was no mention of real-world groups of any kind or activity more organized than a chess club (at least by the troll and in the threads including the troll).