The Critics Respond, Part Forty
Sea lion woman, black dress on For a thousand dollars, she wail and she moan Sea lion woman --- "See-Line Woman", traditional
The common name for disrupting or attacking someone under the guise of a legitimate concern or lack of knowledge is "concern trolling", but I also like the neologism Sealioning. It's a tactic that is currently enjoying a sort of Golden Age on the Internet because it's hugely passive-aggressive and because it is generally supposed to be immune to a libel suit. You can't go on a stock-trading website and post "WMT (or the stock of your choice) is headed for a big fall because they're engaging in massive Social Security fraud," because you will be the target of a civil suit before you get home that evenings. Seriously. Don't do that, no matter how anonymous you are or think you are. People have lost everything they own, and more, doing that. You can, however, probably get away with posting, "I'm just really, really worried about all these rumors about Social Security fraud regarding WMT. What does that mean anyway? I'm just trying to understand these rumors I've heard."
Yesterday, a commenter on something I wrote posted "What is a MILF? I don't understand." You'd have to be an utter fool, or suffering from recent head trauma, not to understand that the sole purpose of making that post is to "sealion"; after all, it's literally three times as difficult as getting the definitive answer yourself. The easiest thing for me to do would have been simply not to respond, but instead I made fun of the troll character who posted. Now we're in the middle of yet another civility discourse over at TTAC.
My purpose here, however, is not to comment on the rightness or wrongness of the original comment, my response, the responses that followed, or the subsequent site-wide convulsion. I'm no longer the E-I-C over there and I don't set policy; I don't even really want to comment on TTAC policy in public. It's tough enough to run that site without having your predecessors second-guess your decisions. Instead, my purpose is to discuss why I treat some commenters with absolute respect, even when I disagree with them or they are personally offensive to me, and why I treat some commenters like they are utterly beneath contempt and completely deserving of the worst ridicule that can be heaped upon their heads. How do I determine who is "real" and who is not? The answer: fingerprinting.