I’ve been clicking things and checking boxes in Disqus’ moderation mode, banning several iterations of our latest virulent troll. (I may need to click a few more things and check a few more boxes to nix the work-arounds for this blacklisting as well. Please, please, please let me know via e-mail if that isn’t working.)
I’m not at all ambivalent about banning trolls like this one. Banning Scott* made me sad. Banning Josh had me quoting Hamlet (“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown”). But banning poo-flinging vandals doesn’t bother me at all.
Still, though, even though such trolls are determined to bring me nothing but negativity, I’d like to think I’d offered them something positive during our brief interaction.
So I offer the following as my gift to them. This is a recipe for escolar — a mouth-watering fish with a taste and texture that are sheer delight. I first had this recipe last year, and I can honestly say that it was delicious. My wife and I savored this delectable fish and we still talk about that as one of the most memorable culinary experiences of our lives. The sheer pleasure of tasting this recipe might even be enough to make a troll happy.**
Escolar. Ask for it by name. It’s unforgettable.
Escolar with Garlic Butter
Ingredients:
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 cloves garlic, finely minced
- salt and pepper to taste
- fresh dill
- dash paprika
- 4 escolar fillets, about 4 ounces each
Preparation:
In saucepan, combine butter, garlic, pepper, salt, dill, and paprika. Heat over low heat until butter is melted and starts simmering. Remove from heat. Brush a little of the butter mixture in the bottom of a shallow baking dish then place escolar fillets on the buttered area. Brush top of each escolar fillet with the seasoned butter mixture.
Bake at 350° for 12 to 15 minutes.
Serves 2 to 4.
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* During the first six years of this blog, there were precisely two commenters who wound up getting banned.
You may remember poor Scott. He was not a troll. He was capable of good jokes, delight, whimsy, celebrating others’ good fortune, and many other behaviors that trolls are incapable of — i.e., he was sometimes happy. But on his bad days, his inchoate resentment at the universe curdled into obsessive abuse — 30 or 40 posts an hour lashing out at anyone and everyone around him. As nasty as he could get, sometimes, most of us had gotten to know him enough that we weren’t concerned with what he was saying about us, we were just concerned about him.
But eventually, Scott’s bad days began to outnumber his good ones, and he left us with no choice. Allowing him to continue meant allowing him to make this site about nothing other than him and his resentment, so he was the first commenter ever banned here. He’s still in my thoughts and prayers once in a while. I really hope he somehow, some way, finds whatever it is he was looking for.
The other commenter who got banned here was a former pacifist who had a bit of a post-9/11 freak-out and turned into a zealous missionary for the gospel of humanitarian military invasion. He was a bit of a one-note obsessive who wasn’t inclined to listen, and that was a bit troll-ish, but he wasn’t a textbook troll either — posting just to disrupt and to upset others by exposing himself. His nastiness here wasn’t an attempt to spread his own misery or to destroy for the sake of destroying — it was just a woefully misguided attempt at persuasion. He initially agreed to a deal: He’d be free to continue posting several long screeds every day sneering at me for being both the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain and the Ku Klux Klan (both actual quotes), but only so long as those screeds were directed only at me and not at other commenters. When he proved unable to abide by the terms of that deal, he wound up banned from this blog. (The good news: I think the fever broke a few years back and he’s doing much better.)
We’ve also been honored by brief visits here from the kind of narcissists and single-issue obsessives who spend their days tracking Google alerts for their own names and/or their pet subjects (cough *Greenwald* cough). Whatever. Those folks never stick around enough to chat, and they don’t seem to understand that the Doppler effect distorts whatever it is they’re trying to say in those drive-by posts into an unintelligible vrrrrrooooooom.
The real damage done by that kind of drive-by trolling may come from a form of self-censorship — the chilling effect of not wanting to attract their inevitable attention. I’ve written here on several occasions about the “Men’s Rights Movement,” because it’s sometimes necessary to speak out against things that are vile and harmful. But like everyone who’s written about those boys more than once, I’ve also had the thought, “Oy, is this worth it? Last time I wrote about this, so many of those jackwagons showed up here that it it took three days for the smell of Axe body spray to dissipate. Do I really want to expose my readers to another round of those bro-dudes with their bro-fiving and har-de-har-ing over the shared misogyny they mistake for cleverness?”
Fortunately, I have an asset that many bloggers don’t have. I’ve got a host of really sharp-witted, funny, knowledgeable regular commenters who are very good at convincing drive-by trolls that it might be in their best interest to slink away quietly before they embarrass themselves any further. It’s really quite wonderful to see.
Lately, though, we’ve seen an uptick in visits from classic trolls — racist, misogynist, misanthropic. These folks are just vandals. They see others creating things and, frustrated by their own inability to do the same, they’ve made destruction their life’s work. These guys (almost all male) tend to drift from site to site and blog to blog, soiling the bed wherever they go and smearing their handiwork all over the walls.
The latest such visitor here added another bit of flair from the poo-flingers’ handbook: sock-puppetry and posting using others’ names. This goes back to the schoolyard — “A-derrrrrr, I’m Billy and I’m a big jerk and nobody likes me!” Most people abandon that tactic after grade school because they eventually realize that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make Billy look bad. In fact, it makes everyone think more highly of Billy. “That’s a horrible Billy impression,” they think. “Billy is nothing like that.”
Seeing our sock-puppet troll posting ridiculously out-of-character comments under the names of real people here mainly served to remind us of what those folks’ real character is like. We weren’t fooled into thinking that Lunch Meat had suddenly gotten dumb and mean and unfunny. We just saw something dumb and mean and unfunny and thought, “Ah, that’s obviously not Lunch Meat.”
** I’m not joking about the taste. Escolar really is delicious. But this is a very special recipe intended only for those who have been banned from commenting here.
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