Blood, Devastation, Death, War, Hate, and alt.slack

On Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:27:03 -0700, Zapanaz <

Sometimes I look at alt.slack and worry if it will just get taken over
by trolls. It's not something I take very seriously, because really I
find our kook-and-troll circus pretty entertaining, all things
considered. And it kind of provides the show with a plot. But when
Sicker Vicar brought it up recently I did think about it again.

Alt.slack is perfectly entertaining to me now, but I see other
newsgroups where it is different. You see a lot of it spill over on
alt.slack, those big insane five-group-crossposted threads, where
everybody apparently knows each other and have been fighting the same
fight for years. The ones where posters have 300-line sigs telling
the WHOLE WORLD what a TERRIBLE PERSON AND PROVEN LIAR AND CHILD
MOLESTER AND INVETERATE JAYWALKING CRIMINAL their hated enemy is.

It's different from alt.slack. They kind of pretend to be doing the
whole thing in a humorous way but there is really nothing funny about
most of the humor. It's really just different forms of "FUCK YOU!"
and "FUCK YOU BACK!"

They seem to think of themselves as trolling, and in a way they are.

But it's one thing to post to a newsgroup in a way you know will make
them mad, for humorous effect (which, to me, is good trolling). What
they're doing isn't really that. They are trying to make their hated
enemies mad one more time, draw them into another round of
feces-flinging.

That's what Michael Alcandor! is trying to do, with his hit-and-run
posts. He's pretty typical of the people I see on other newsgroups.

But somehow it doesn't really work on alt.slack. I mean it never
really becomes the cesspool that other newsgroups become. Maybe it
comes close at times ... when somebody gets to the point that they are
just sick of the back-and-forth fights, it has become dangerously
close. At times I get tired of some of the long ones that have run
out of steam, although not really all that often.

But some of these other newsgroups are completely eaten up by it.

Recently I posted a question to rec.martial.arts. I had a martial
arts book I was trying to learn from and I was wondering what people's
opinions of it were.

So I subscribed to the group and downloaded headers initially; if you
use something other than Google for Usenet, you have probably been
through this. The first time around, you will usually download years
of old posts, then usually I will delete all or most of them. But in
the process you get a glimpse of the kind of conversations that are
going on.

Then next, after I delete the ancient material, I will download a
couple hours of the group, and identify spammers and obvious trolls.

It was unbelievable. Something like 75% to 90% of the group's traffic
was troll/long-term-locked-in-a-death-struggle threads, like I was
talking about above.

WHITE GIRL RAPED BY MEXICAN GREASER IMMIGRANT! NIGGERS THIS! JEWS
THAT! CONSPIRACY THEORY THE OTHER!

That kind of thing. You've seen the threads.

And it was hard to identify who were the trolls. Everybody seemed to
be adding to it.

Somehow, whatever draws this kind of crap to a newsgroup, the
rec.martial.arts guys are doing it to the hilt.

So I really watched some of the threads. And basically these guys
would get sucked into it bad, every time.

It's ironic. Theoretically, somebody who is into martial arts is
supposed to be self-controlled and non-violent. In practice though,
to my experience, although I have known a certain percentage who
really lived up to that, the majority of them don't.

Most of them are massively aggressive people. Tightly wound and
easily angered. Which isn't really all that surprising, when you
think about it, because really what kind of person, REALLY, wants to
learn how to crush an opponent's skull with one karate-punch or tear
out his adam's-apple with his bare hands? Usually, somebody really
angry.

Like I say, I have known many exceptions, so no offence to those of
you who are into it. I have to admit, when I got into it, looking
back at it now, I wanted to kick somebody's ass. Anybody's. And I
was violent. Looking back now I realize I was at times dangerously
close to being a bully.

Maybe in Asia they really teach students humility and non-violence,
but in America, to my experience, they pay vague lip-service to it at
best. Mostly, people don't want to hear all that lotus-blossom crap.
TEACH ME HOW TO KICK SOMEBODY'S GLOTTIS INTO HIS SPINAL COLUMN. I'll
meditate or something after I death-kick him so I sort of have all the
Little Grasshopper stuff going.

And that is the thing with their newsgroup, these guys all just
instantly rise up snapping and frothing at the least provocation. And
then they can't let it go. Pit bulls in a fighting-pen.

It's ironic. These guys who supposedly have learned the ancient Asian
secrets of self-defence are their own worst enemy. Who supposedly
learned to twist like a bamboo tree in the wind and use their enemy's
strength against them are the worst and stupidest hotheads on Usenet.

Their newsgroup is a screaming Bedlam.

So what's the point and what does that have to do with alt.slack.

The thing is, alt.slack, in my opinion, is the farthest thing in the
world from a screaming Bedlam of assholes, the way so many newsgroups
become.

On alt.slack the trolls become a source of entertainment. They get
dissected and flayed, and it isn't even completely in order to beat up
on them. To a large extent, you, we, do it purely for our own
entertainment. We don't do it because they piss us off so bad and we
want to piss them off in return, but because it's FUNNY.

Really I'm not as good at that as some other people here, I fairly
often really want to hurt them, and usually at that point I think my
posts start becoming dull and annoying.

When you lose the entertainment value, you are losing everything.

So that's my REAL point.

SLACK IS MIGHTIER THAN KARATE!!

As I am sitting in a bar typing this, there is a Jean Claude van Damme
movie on TV. He is in a martial-arts pit fight, against what's his
name, Sammo Hung * ? The gigantic Chinese guy who was in Enter the
Dragon?

Jean Claude is losing, getting kicked all over the ring, he's getting
beat up all through the commercial break, and the crafty evil oriental
is clearly going to win.

So how does he turn the tables?

He gets MAD. He gets REALLY REALLY FUCKING MAD. He raises his arms
and SCREAMS, and in slow motion yet, and as any fool knows screaming
in slow motion is much badder-ass than just regular screaming. He
gets so mad THE VERY MOUNTAINS SHAKE! He's all like

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Then he kicks the guy's ass.

You know, they love that shit in movies, but if you have ever been in
a fight where you got mad like that, it's not really all that
effective. If the other guy is one up on you, getting hysterically
angry usually means you just flail wildly and he/she tags you at will
and you just look a little more foolish getting your butt kicked than
you would have if you weren't yelling and screaming hysterically.

And it really doesn't tend to work all that well in real life in
general, either.

It definitely doesn't work well on Usenet.

But they love that shit in the movies.

* Nope, this is the guy:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001866/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_Yeung

http://www.bodybuildingdungeon.com/forums/attachments/bodybuilding-discussion/1 1166d1193914015-bolo-yeung-bolo3.jpg

This was the movie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodsport_(film)

--
Zapanaz
International Satanic Conspiracy
Customer Support Specialist
http://joecosby.com/
a cult is a religion without an army.

- nikolai kingsley

:: Currently listening to Deep, 1991, by Pearl Jam, from "Ten"