Duncan's Ménage à Trolls

Updates below:

This is a blog post that I would never have written without repeated provocation.

Eschaton is a blog were I used to be a regular commentator, I thought it was a blog worth going to and participating in, with potential to help move American politics to the left.  I don't think that anymore.

Over the years many of its most active commentators have left.  Some of those who left regularly had more interesting things to say than what was said in the ever diminishing posts written by Duncan Black,  Atrios, the owner of the blog.  These days he hardly writes anything for the blog, which I'll document in a later post.

Some of those who left provided Eschaton with its most original and interesting material.   Some, such as the well established Eschaton institution,  "Holden Caulfield," ('Holden's ponies") started or increased their writing for their own blogs and either decreased their participation or left, entirely. "Athenae" is arguably another of those, though she posts comments once in a great while at Eschaton.   Some, such as one of the most original and informed of former Eschatonians,  "Phila," seem to have become discouraged and given up on blogging altogether.

Others left for other reasons.  In one case, that of "Woody Guthrie's Guitar," it was reported that Atrios banned him in 2007 for being overly rude to the dead Jerry Falwell.  It was also reported that another participant I'd always found interesting and informed, Tena, left as a result of his banning.

The next year, I took about six months off during the 2008 elections due to the flood of sexist comments made against Hillary Clinton and her supporters from those who supported Barack Obama for the nomination.   Also,  and to a far lesser extent, due to racial comments made about Obama, though as I recall those were almost always made under extreme provocation from the boys who unloaded mounds of sexist vitriol there.  I didn't think there was anything good in those comments.  Writing for another blog, Echidne of the Snakes, I thought it would be irresponsible to join in the potential of dividing the left and, so remained uncommitted to either, both in my writing and in reality.  I didn't vote in the Democratic caucus that year, the only one uncommitted in my town's record breaking Democratic caucus of 2008.

Eschaton and alleged leftists elsewhere were aiding the Republican party during the period when it was possible to end the most corrupt, the most criminal and the most indifferently incompetent administration in the history of the country.

I made it a point to not take sides but said, repeatedly,  that I'd support which ever of the candidates won the nomination.  But that wasn't the POV expressed on Eschaton comment threads.  They were an example of what was bound to be counterproductive.  Those things being said on what was presented as a major new voice on the left,  by Atrios, other leftish bloggers and in the self-congratulatory comments on Eschaton, had enormous potential to damage the efforts to keep Republicans from continuing on the crime wave of the Bush II regime.  What reportedly got Woody banned didn't have that potential.  It was merely rude and in arguably bad taste.  That demonstration of irresponsibility in allegedly liberal-leftist blogging and commentary had a profound and decisive effect on my political thinking and action.  But that isn't something I really understood , myself, until 2011.

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When I went back after the 2008 election I noticed a definite change as many of those who had been valued members of the commenting community had also left, especially those who were angered and disgusted with the tidal wave of sexism that the boys of Eschaton had unleashed on Clinton and her supporters.  A few of those gradually trickling back, but it had changed.

Increasingly, a clique more interested in imposing ideological speech and thought codes than pushing political progress seemed to have taken over.  Turning what had seemed, before the 2008 campaign, to have so much potential for positive change, into something that seemed all too familiar to me, the same kind of thing that had stalled out the progress of the early to middle-1960s.  I should have realized that it wasn't what I'd assumed it was in the preceding years. But I held out hope for a lot longer than I should have that it could return to what it had seemed to be*.

Another thing that happened in 2008, another  regular commentator who would also leave, NTodd, documented that some of the supposedly right-wing trolls who had annoyed and harassed the commentators over the previous years, were actually members of the Eschaton community using assumed identities to attack other regulars.  He made quite a convincing case and there were a few angry deniers whose too-much protests seemed to me to rather confirm his point.

Trolls had been a regular and annoying presence at Eschaton, I was one of those who took the time to counterattack, writing derisive limericks and verses in the form of Burma Shave signs as well as refutations.  I also came to believe, along with many of the other regulars, that some of the trolling was organized and, we speculated, funded for the purpose of disrupting what might have developed into an important political force for the left.  On one occasion, by the merest of chances, Pheonix Woman outed one of the trolls and associated it with a name I just happened to know,  between us and with the help of others tracing him to a frat house at The University of Southern Maine, more or less proving that some of the trolling was, in fact, organized.

If Atrios did anything about that, other than to strike a libertarian pose - one he had certainly not taken in the case of Woody - and protesting that he didn't have time to police the comment threads of HIS blog, I didn't see any evidence of it.   I don't know exactly when NTodd stopped commenting at Eschaton but, eventually, I noticed his absence.   Those who left seem to have left a hole in Eschaton that would be filled.   Those who NTodd exposed weren't among those who left.

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One of the regulars who stayed past the 2008 election went by the name "Rootless".  Over the next few years, as the inevitable happened and Obama fell short of hopes and expectations, the former supporters of Barack Obama, those who had slammed Hillary Clinton in the most sexist terms, turned on him, sometimes making racially tinged comments against him.    I was also very disappointed, though I'd known all along I would be.  Considering the investment we had in him and the enormous effort it had taken to defeat the Republicans,  I was willing to give Obama 2009 to see if he would turn out to be a better Democrat and more politically skilled and imaginative than he turned out to be.  I never turned on him the way many at Eschaton did, though I lost any expectation that he'd return the country to the road Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson took in domestic policy.

Rootless, however,  remained something of a true believer,  increasingly at odds with the commenting community, increasingly harassed and increasingly targeted for trolling on other blogs by other regulars.  At least one of those who had been exposed as a sock puppeteer, Steve Simels, made reports of his trolling of Rootless a regular feature at Eschaton, to the delight of some and the tut-tutting of others,  Though the disapproval of his doing to others what we'd all protested when it was done at Eschaton, didn't go far.   In looking at the Eschaton blog threads to research this post, I saw he was doing it within the past few days to the approval of ql, someone who had agreed with NTodd's condemnation of it in 2008.  Indeed, things are different at Eschaton.

I'd have happily gone on ignoring my former regular blog, Eschaton, except for the trolling of my blog and my comments by people who still go there, such as Steve Simels, and who regularly report distorted versions of things I wrote to the remaining Eschatonians, obviously eliciting their derision of things they haven't read and apparently don't intend to read.  I'm far from the only former Eschaton community member who is being trolled and harassed in that way on their own blogs and in comment threads of other blogs.

Last week it was called to my attention that one of the formerly most popular members of the community in my time, GWPDA, was being harassed at TBogg, by cahuenga, another Eschaton regular who, as GWPDA showed in her later comments, had declared his intention at Eschaton of harassing both TBogg (I seem to remember him as a former regular at Eschaton) and GWPDA at TBogg's blog.

Postlude

As I said, I'm one of those who left a couple of times before I left the last time, for good.   After I wrote a couple of blog posts critical of the commenting community and, by implication, Atrios, he apparently banned me from commenting.  It took me a while to find out because I'd decided to stop commenting there and had so stated, at Eschaton, earlier that day.

When it was pointed out to me that some of his regulars, especially Steve Simels,  were lying about what I had said in recent posts on my blog at Eschaton, a blog that still has some influence and many hits, I was unable to refute what was said due to being blocked.  I could do what the real trolls did and use various subterfuges to get by the blocking but I'm not interested in that.

Now it's personal, Duncan Black.  Your blog is a safe harbor for trolls at least one of whom is indisputably trolling me and has been for years, now, crowing about it at your blog.  I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for you to ban the people who are using your blog for what you used to decry when it was done to your blog and your commenting community. But, then, you didn't do anything about it when they were exposed five years ago, either.

* The pubic face of the occupy movement seems to have had a similar history, anyone who had nothing to say insisted on time-wasting theatrics and ideological snarking turning it into an assertion of their personality and anyone who had anything of value went in other directions.   It's happened often enough to the left that studying that has also had a major effect on my own thinking in the past two years.  Liberals need to stop wasting their time and too few resources on what turn out to be platforms for jerks, grandstanders and pseudo-liberal-leftist ideologues who will only drag us down with them.

Update:  I'm busy with a family situation that suddenly came up, until Wednesday, so I'm going to leave this at the top of the page for a while.  I will have more to say about Eschaton, its owner and commenting community soon.   UPDATE TO THIS UPDATE:  My sister got Monday off to help so I'll be posting today, after all.

Update 2.   Answers to e-mails.  1.  It would be rather difficult for me to say at Eschaton what I've said here as I was apparently blocked from commenting.   2.   If you are going to express bafflement as to why I've said what I have, maybe you should try reading what I said instead of what the people I've criticized have said about it.  But, then, you probably don't even know I've written this answer because you didn't read the post before flaming me.  Typical Eschatonian behavior these days, apparently.