Thursday, 21 May 2009

• How I Killed the Troll

  More than anything you must carry your movement through to cutting him.

   

  I credit my victory over the troll to my several readings of several translations of A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Despite the book's popularity with Japanese negotiators, I remained skeptical of the application of Musashi's martial arts and warfare strategies to noncombat situations for the longest time, but this experience proved why it is an invaluable text for a warrior in any arena.

   

  What the troll did

   

  We started our battle on a Revelife feature, but we’d already had a run-in over my blog about drugs and addiction. Even then he was already poking at my family, my children no less, but I wasn’t inclined to block him. At the time I just told him to get lost.

   

  The next time we clashed he started right off calling my mother a slut. You'll find this exchange in godlessliberal’s entry recently featured on Revelife.

   

  The troll said I should expect that because I disrespected God when I asserted that “Jesus…was the product of either a rape or an indiscretion covered up…”

   

  He came at me in a rush out of nowhere, fuming: “…you are obviously the offspring of a slut…”

   

  [Complete exchange begins here (a little below SerenaDante's comment) and ends here (not quite half way down)] 

   

  Clearly we were in a fight.

   

  It was all decided when he insulted my mother. It’s not so much about defending my mother, you understand, although that’s enough I suppose. It’s the fact that an insult to one’s mother explicitly means “I want to fight you” in a very serious way. It dares me not to defend my mother. It means a man is prepared to settle things out back, so to speak.

   

  You can trace a lot of the exchange in the comments on some of my more recent posts. You’ll see that his strategy is to throw at me whatever criticisms people have been leveling at him – as if these are his own, original thoughts. As if. If you really want to know how full of shit he is go visit his blog.

   

  My Strategy

  Once I entered into combat I committed every move to the objective of cutting him down. The primary reason for doing this is simple: victory must be secured as quickly and as decisively as possible. Every comment I made was loaded with direct language, goading insults.

   

  I quickly decided on three strategic objectives:

   

  1. To cut him, of course.
     I focused my insults like strikes.

   

  2. To force him to reveal his weaknesses in the heat of battle.
     For example, I called him a “pathetic coward” on his own blog. This was calculated to probe what appears to be his bloated sense of honor. My hope was that it would cause him to reveal more about what really gets his goat. It did.

   

  3. To force the combat to the most advantageous ground for victory.
     I didn’t want to fight him in the Revelife feature for a number of reasons. What I needed was to get him over to my blog where I might most effectively get in the last word. To do this, I basically dared him to come over and read about himself. But, as a feint, I attacked him at his blog, too – allowing him to believe my strategy was less focused than it really was. I had no intention of trying to finish the fight on his turf.

   

  I don’t care to pick apart and analyze the entire exchange. For your reference, most of the links are already displayed above.

   

  Victory

  Nothing is ever certain. Who could tell how it would play out? Each exchange included the possibility that I might be countered or struck.

   

  Ultimately he undid himself and all I had to do was point that out, close it out and block him. My relentless attacks caused him to reveal a terrible trauma in his life and at the same time also cast light on some of his most irrational, ugly fears.

   

  If you examine the final exchange you can see that he says I called him “gay.” But I never actually did call him gay. To use the term “gay” as an insult would be reprehensible to me. But by then I was certain that if I gave just enough of that feeling, he would fall for it. And he did.

   

  The Kill

  It was a devastating blow. He gave me an opportunity to be cruel, but that’s not what I was after. It was enough to allow him to expose himself ingloriously, painfully, pathetically, and to illuminate that on my blog.

   

  The Block
  Why did I block him? I never blocked anyone before. I don’t care if visitors to my blog disagree with me. I have no need to prove my authority. Mainly, it’s his tendency to strike obliquely and viciously at my family. Dude makes me really nervous. If you check out his blog, you’ll see what I mean. As a commenter, he’s relentlessly combative. Beyond his troll aspect, he clearly has a lot of misplaced anger. And some time. And some rudimentary mental abilities. I don’t need to encourage one small, insecure man’s obsessions. I got what I was after and that was enough.

  Compassion
  I'm still processing the real lesson for me in all of this. He should have known better than to attack a stranger like that, and he should have had a better sense of proportion. It was almost too easy, the way he gave himself away. He was hurt as a child. For all his bombast and quasi-academic stylings, he is nothing more than a hurting child. And I let him have it. It definitely hurt me to do that to him.

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