Shaking the hand of a troll.

I was flicking through the news on my dumb-phone and came across this article on HN.

I'm going to hold off from commenting until you have had a chance to read it as the subject is one that comes up on an hourly basis here in ATS and although it is usually left on the net....it was not so in this case.

The Troll burst into tears. His dad gently restraining him from leaving the table.

www.traynorseye.com...



What do you think?

What would you have done in the same situation?

I think what you did was admirable. But now let me ask you a question. What would you have done in the exact same situation if the troll had not been the son of a good friend. Please think about it and answer honestly.

reply to post by happykat39


In both instances (friend or stranger) I would have the full extent of the law imposed upon him/her regardless of affiliation.

Once or twice - meh - no biggie.

Persistently over a considerable period of time, to the extent of significantly upsetting the balance in a relationship to the point of the safety of your own life and that of your loved ones - IS a biggie.

Forgive him by all means, but only after he has suffered the legal consequences of his actions.

Play like grown-up - pay like a grown-up.

He has serious mental issues and they need to be addressed - so let the courts decide his fate.

S&F OA - this is a good piece of info and shows the extremes to which people will go when confronted with opposing views (although, I think this 17-year old had bigger issues than opposing a view or two of someone else)

reply to post by OccamAssassin


I've always known that trolls were in it for the "lulz", and that most are 17 years or younger (in mentality if not in chronology). The majority mean no harm but we're not really here to discuss intent (a huge debate by itself)......


There are quite a few things I find disturbing about the "blog" in general, but all that aside, stalking is stalking. I would've called the police. I imagine if their son thinks these sorts of activities are fun, then I think the parents dropped the ball somewhere and may need professional counsel to help deal with it. I have no sympathy for a crying kid, who is only crying because he got caught.

Originally posted by happykat39
I think what you did was admirable. But now let me ask you a question. What would you have done in the exact same situation if the troll had not been the son of a good friend. Please think about it and answer honestly.

It did not happen to me, it is just an article I saw on a news feed I have on my phone.

Personally, I probably would have gone the legal route and pummelled him but I suppose you never really know unless your in a situation like this.

I wonder if the troll in question frequents ATS?

I spoke to my friend at length. He told me how his son was always glued to his laptop, tablet or smartphone. How he couldn't watch a TV show without tweeting about it simultaneously. About how he'd become engrossed in conspiracy sites. It also became clear that the other two IP addresses had been used by his son.

reply to post by OccamAssassin

That kid would have been in jail at the very least. There is a huge difference between a snide little troll comment and threatening someones family and going to their house......that's not a troll, that's psychotic. If that was me, as soon as I found out who it was I would have called the police. If that didn't work, he would have had a baseball bat up against his head or a shotgun in his face next time he left me a little "present" at my door. You guys can say crying little kid if you want, but when I was 17, I knew full well what I was doing.....the kid excuse doesn't fly.

reply to post by OccamAssassin


the fact this "kid" went to the house, packaged ashes, threatened the family, is why i would report him to the police.

friend or not, this kid is dangerous.

"trolling online" is one thing. but going to the lengths this kid did needs to be reported.

Firstly, thanks for posting this, OP. It stands as a solid reminder that behind these avatars are very real humans.

Finding myself in this same position, I'd like to believe I'd press charges. However, I have a few friends who have truly carried me through difficult times, and were it one of their children, I must say, I'd behave very similarly to the blogger. But I think that it may be human nature that drives this tendancy: we want to believe we've pulled good people toward us, naming them "good friends" and that as good friends do, they have good children. Our drive for consistency doesn't allow for many outliers, even though the world is full of them.

Originally posted by happykat39
I think what you did was admirable. But now let me ask you a question. What would you have done in the exact same situation if the troll had not been the son of a good friend. Please think about it and answer honestly.

OK, time to answer my own question. I would have gone to the police whether I knew him and his parents or not. That kid had some really fuzzy caterpillars crawling back and forth between his ears and needed serious intervention. No matter what his parents did, unless they had bottomless pockets, they would not have been able to get him the level of help he needed without court ordered treatment and court ordered monitoring of that treatment.

I had a stepson from my second marriage who was seriously manic depressive (what they used to call bipolar) and neither his mother before I met her nor myself ever got him the real treatment he needed even though we could have easily paid for it. By the time I married her she was not well off enough on her own to manage the treatment and he was over 21 by the time we married so we could do nothing but try to get him legally committed. Needless to say, if you knew the state of Illinois mental health systems in the 80s, it was a futile attempt.

He finally ended up staying away from his pizza delivery job for about a month because he was in a serious depressive state and needed to fix the clutch in his car. When he came back the only reason he got his job back at all was because one of his younger brothers had filled in for him. But the owner of the pizza place (actually a restaurant, bar and take out/delivery place in a small strip mall) had given some of my stepson's hours to another driver who had a family and had been recently laid off from his regular job. My stepson, now in the manic phase, did not like this other driver and went ballistic over having HIS hours given to the guy.

Here are the events as they unfolded in chronological order...

1 - He trashed the other drivers pickup truck with a sledge hammer.

2 - He was sleeping at my machine shop at the time and a couple of his friends were there as well (I was already in the process of going out of business). When he came in I got a call from one of the friends asking if I had my guns there. I told him that I did not. They told me that he was extremely agitated and did not seem to recognize them or one of his brothers who was also there at the time. After he gathered several 5 to 10 gallon containers and left the friends called the police. When the police caught up to him and tried to restrain him for questioning during the struggle he bit the little finger of one officer completely off through the bone, bit part of the ear off another officer and cut the third officers face bad enough to need 6 stitches.

He was then taken to the mental ward of the local hospital for evaluation.

3 - What the police didn't know at the time of the arrest is that those containers he had taken from my shop were full of a total of about 35 gallons of gasoline and he already had them stored on the roof of the pizza place. When arrested he was on his way back to torch the place, at a busy evening meal time I might add, after failing to get any more containers.

4 - He was transferred shortly after the arrest to the county jail where he stayed for about a year during the long court trial.

5 - After the trial he was judged guilty but not mentally competent to be released so he was then sent to the forensic ward of the Elgin State Mental Hospital where he was to remain until he was deemed safe to return to society by at least two doctors and a judge.

And now we reach the point of most of this story. Had he been able to get proper intervention at an earlier age he might have been at least partly curable. You see his problem existed since early grade school. And the second point is that the mental health system in Illinois had been so severely dismantled by a governor who wanted the money for other purposes that it was impossible to keep him in the Elgin facility when the courts kept jamming new patients into the facility without funding to meet the rising need. He was eventually released, even though he was refusing his meds at the time, to make room for new arrivals. The last I heard of him was after I moved out of state and got a phone call from one of his friends (I kept my Illinois cell number) trying to see if I could do something as the stepson was talking about dreams of chopping off the heads of his "enemies".

The reason for this rather long story is to point out the need for early and proper intervention. And that is why I would have gotten the courts involved in the case you cited if it were my call. Hopefully the state he lived in had better mental health services than Illinois did.