They just don’t make trolls online like they used to anymore.  A long time ago, on a forum long gone, there was a troll called Dennis From Oregon.  Dennis was a psychopathic liar, but he was very good at what he did.  It took more research than usual to prove he was lying.  Oh sure, he’d answer in vague terms a lot, but every once in a while, he’d slip up with the details.

I learned a LOT from what he wrote.  I learned about emotional manipulation in real time.  I learned about symbolism, and about mind control techniques as well as subliminal messaging from him.  I learned about propaganda.  Today’s fake news?  Pfffft.  Pales in comparison to the stuff Dennis From Oregon wrote.

The trick to the quality of what he wrote was to include a lot of real stuff along with the fake stuff.  So, he wrote over ten years ago, that he was bulldozing all of his topsoil into a pile, and covering it with a tarp, in order to protect it from the nuclear fallout which was going to come.  This was a doomer forum, so nuclear fallout was a given.  After all, all pipelines leak, so eventually, all nuclear stockpiles get released into the atmosphere.  That’s just the way things work in Murphy’s law, right?  Plus, he was digging a nuclear fallout shelter into the bedrock, just like his father and grandfather did.

The trouble is this.  If you’ve been a doomer long enough, you’ll have read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, or at least watched a few videos on how topsoil is created and maintained.  Soil is alive.  It contains millions of types of microorganisms, all of which are dependent upon the plants on top to keep them alive so they can make the nutrients in the dirt bioavailable to the plants in a very interconnected dependency web.  Tarping topsoil for a decade will kill it.  The moisture won’t get to the soil.  The sunlight won’t get to the soil.  The bacteria and fungi will change to anaerobic, and become toxic to the plants humans tend to like to grow.  Tarping topsoil to prevent nuclear fallout is a dumb idea.  If you’re a psychopath, the better way is to plant stuff that is very good at heavy metal uptake, like corn, and the harvest the corn and feed it to something that bioaccumulates heavy metals very well, like pigs, or sacred cows.  Oh look, now you’ve reduced the radioactive content of your soil!  Then, you just don’t eat the radioactive animal products.  Now that all the radioactive particles are concentrated, you can better dispose of them safely.

Dennis from Oregon also wrote quite a bit which pointed me in the direction of finding out how the money works.  He wrote about centralization of currency with “globos”, which were a fictional currency distributed by the one bank to rule them all, and about the business cycle, and about enterprise corruption.  He introduced me to the concept of “confidence.”  It wasn’t enough, but combining it with a little David Graeber later on cemented a better model than the stupid gold fractional reserve banking model which is so outdated it doesn’t work anymore.  Green pieces of paper with symbols and incantations on them, backed by, well, backed by a whole bunch of nuclear and conventional weapons, a bunch of oil flows, and a bunch of narcotics and human trafficking, that’s what money is.  When cryptocurrencies can buy any of the above?  That’s when you’ll know it is backed by something more than confidence.  And why wouldn’t it do that?  Theft and tracking of black market money are important variables.  The black market is always bigger than the official market.

Agrarian Peasants Must Die was a line too far.  Even that, though, planted seeds for me.  It made assumptions about doomers.  The assumptions are that doomers are loners, who will defend their bunkers with ammo, and live off the grid farming all the time.  The farmers knew better.  Even the non-farmers knew better.  We all live in community.  Some of our communities are healthy and functional.  In the end, we will protect our farmers, because we’d be dead without them.  When they lose their crops, because their climate shifts from time to time, and bad weather happens, the community should provide them with single-payer seed insurance instead of having them go bankrupt in debt up to their eyeballs.  Farmers are absolutely essential to a community, and keeping them out of tax prison, or regulatory hell, should become something worth fighting for.

The right kind of troll is very useful for newbie education.  The right troll provides the spark of curiosity.  Which part of what they said was true even though nobody talks about it?  Which part of what they said was a lie?  Which part of the official narrative is true?  How much of the official news is a lie?  That’s why we keep skeptics around to question everything.