'The Great Awakening'? How Does A Piece Of Q-Anon Conspiracy Garbage Make It To No. 1 on Amazon?

Can any sane person really believe this Amazon ranking for this piece of trash?  People interested in conspiracies - REAL ones - are better served going to my book on the JFK assassination:

My book is the product of  35 years of research into the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, incorporating acoustic analyses, image analyses as well as exposing the sundry deficiencies of The Warren Report. In other words, it's grounded in reality,  not fantasy.

By contrast, 'The Great Awakening' was hatched by QAnon freaks,  likely on an all night bender of booze, bennies and  opioids, mixed with  MJ candy .  It is designed to appeal to the  indiscriminate Pizzagate conspiracy trolls and gullible gobblers,  the ones who believed (in 2016)  Hillary Clinton had a stable of child sex slaves.   I would say also  similar to  the wacko  delusions of Alex Jones of Info Wars fame, but even he has now admitted his false flag ideation about the Sandy Hook massacre was a result of severe mental illness.  What excuse do these latter dispensers of toxic mind rot have?

The Amazon book, which says it was written by a dozen “anonymous Q followers, decoders and citizen journalists known collectively as Where We Go One We Go All (WWG1WGA),” takes up where the Pizzagate rubbish left off. It claims that Democrats murder and eat children and that the government created AIDS, polio and Lyme disease. Then there’s the belief that the world is run by a Satanic cabal led by Hillary Clinton.

NBC News, which first reported on the book's placement on the Amazon charts, noted that the book received an algorithmic boost from product recommendations. The book, written by an anonymous author, averaged 4.5 stars and has been flooded with positive reviews.

Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy-theory expert, told NBC that the book is just another way for the QAnon movement to cash in on its gullible followers, calling it “a bold new step in the endless grift at the heart of Q.”

Nevertheless, the book keeps selling and racking up questionable glowing reviews, which Jason Kint, CEO of the trade association Digital Content Next, chalks up to manipulation and the lack of oversight on Amazon’s part.  As Kint explained to NBC:

“To be clear, they absolutely shouldn’t be censoring the availability of books like this. But the fact we’re left only with the publisher’s own description of the book and a clearly gamed set of 5-star reviews — how is the average shopper supposed to know this is toxic garbage?”

Uh, how about critical thinking? How about having an I.Q. that exceeds room temperature digits? 

Amazingly,  even Reddit now appears to be coming to its senses.  Last September it banned a forum dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying users repeatedly violated its content policies.   This isn't difficult to parse because after Pizzagate nearly incited a tragedy (unhinged Trumpie entering D.C. Comet pizza parlor with loaded rifle to "liberate Hillary's child sex slaves")  there can be no issue these are dangerous loons.

Let's also get it very clear from the get go that the assorted nonsense being peddled does not qualify as conspiracy theories. They are conspiracy claptrap or refuse. In  previous blog posts I noted Barbadian psychologist Pat Bannister's categorization of those who invoke conspiracies and how she differentiated them. As part of her construction of a theory of mind, specifically showing the role of lying in young children, she also noted adeptness at detecting lies was linked to accurate detection of real conspiracies.

Dr. Bannister's classification was simple:

1- Conspiracy analysts

2- Conspiracy theorists

3- Conspiracy crackpots or cultists


At the top of the hierarchy were conspiracy analysts, such as Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Harold Weisberg, Richard Charnin and others (like yours truly)).  These were serious people possessing some measure of intellect who brought their scientific, mathematical and other aptitudes to the investigation of multiple aspects of a putative real conspiracies like Iran-Contra and the JFK assassination.  These people put in real man hours and actually published their work in authoritative media (e.g. BOOKS - real books!) and respected forums as opposed to spreading bunkum through half-assed posts in the lowest dreg regions of the net, like 4chan and 8chan.  

By contrast, the 'conspiracy theorist' put forward conspiracy conjectures but didn't back them up with evidence. Or, if evidence was provided, it didn't meet elementary scientific standards for acceptance, such as consistent selection, coherent and accurate data assessment, and avoidance of confirmation bias.

The bottom feeders of the classification scheme were conspiracy crackpots or clowns, like Alex Jones.   Jones is most famous for his off the wall bunkum that the Sandy Hook/Newtown massacre was a federal "false flag" operation. Those slain  kids weren't really dead, they were merely actors- as well as the teachers- in an elaborate script to befuddle the public and make them demand gun confiscation across the land.  Jones claimed he'd watched "films over and over and just seen those kids walking in circles".  At least now he's admitted to being mentally unbalanced.  We now await the authors of The Great Awakening to do likewise.

How would Dr. Bannister, if she were alive today, describe a convoluted, paranoid -infused mental mosh pit like "The Great Awakening"?   Basically, she'd probably call it a psychotic's phantasmagoria and schizoid ideation attempting to make sense of disparate, suspicious elements in the contemporary U.S. - driven by social media. 

 She'd also make note that such fever dreams don't need a whole lot of external memetic fuel to get started: a coincidence here, a loaded word from Trump there, an obscure reference to "deep state" there- oh  and some "genius" who first puts it all together in his mother's basement and posts it on 4chan. Whereupon a susceptible brain will be infected and spread it on to other gullible souls, searching for meaning in their vacuous lives. Well, to be sure, it's probably a bit better than using opioids!

 It would be great if we could just ignore these looneytunes-  or dispatch them to an asylum for general ECT and lithium therapy. But alas, their fevered baloney can have real world consequences and act outs - especially when a virulently infected zombie gets activated - like the guy who fired a round into the D.C. pizza parlor looking for child sex slaves. Or the other screwball who tried to block traffic headed for the Hoover Dam.

These people desperately need help, but it seems there are just too few professionals around now to get the job done.   Where is Dr. Bannister when we need her?

"MAGA Bomber" Terrorist Busted For Mail Bombs: Will The Right's Degenerates Now Crawl Out Of The Land of Denial?

The Trumper mutt - Cesar Sayoc- in MAGA cap at Trump rally. Now known as the "MAGA Bomber" after his mass assassination threat.

The jig was up today at about 1:00 p.m. MT when the FBI and DOJ released details of the mail ("MAGA") bomber: a confirmed Trumpie by the name of Cesar Sayoc. Investigators found Sayoc after finding a latent fingerprint on the envelope sent to California Rep. Maxine Waters, which has been confirmed to belong to him,  FBI chief Chris Wray said. They also believe there is DNA on other packages.

Sayoc has been charged with five federal crimes, including interstate transportation of an explosive, illegal mailing of an explosive, threats against former presidents, threatening interstate commerce, and assaulting current and former federal officers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a press conference.. He faces up to 58 years in prison.

We also now know this domestic terrorist is no "leftist". He's a 56-year old registered Republican, has Trump designs festooned all over his van (including one with a Hillary Clinton image and a sniper's cross hairs overlaid). An image of the van is shown below:


His Twitter account is also loaded with pro-Trump B.S. and hate for Trump's political opponents, almost fully reflecting the hate displayed on his van..

In fact, Sayoc is an open and outspoken Trump supporter with a long trail on social media. He posted memes attacking some of the targets of the bombs, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and promoting conspiracy theories about them. And he posted fervent support for Trump, including images of himself at a Trump rally and in a Make America Great Again hat. Authorities also seized a white van covered in political decals.He also has an extensive criminal record, with at least 8 arrests. One was for threatening to bomb a utility company. 

 The busted perp has been arrested nearly a dozen times in Florida, including a 2002 arrest for making a bomb threat. His criminal record in the state extends to the early 1990s, starting with his arrest for larceny at the age of 29, according to state records. Other charges of larceny, grand theft and fraud would soon follow across the southern part of the state.

In the 2002 bomb threat case, Sayoc pleaded guilty to the felony without a trial and was sentenced to probation, the records show.

Of course, there will now be reams of deflections in the wake to try and make this asshole seem as innocuous as Saint Francis of Assissi. Even his lawyer, Daniel Aaronson,  gushed:

"None of my clients were as polite and as courteous and as respectful to me."

Ever heard of putting on an act, bub?   But see, in the end it doesn't matter one whit how "courteous" this slime ball was to a lawyer, but rather the amount of harm he might have potentially inflicted on his targets. And, no,I do not buy the codswallop he peddled that "all of those were harmless" referring to the mail bombs.  As FBI Director Chris Wray made clear: "None of these were hoax bombs".   

The reason is that NY and federal  investigators all made it clear they were damned dangerous, even equating them to IEDs. The one that ended up at Robert DeNiro's place, for example, could have blown his eyes out or fatally injured him had the mail not been intercepted by a former NYPD detective.  (Give that guy an extra raise, Robert!)

According to a Washington Post account:

"Social media profiles that apparently belonged to Sayoc were filled with conspiracy theories and antipathy toward liberals. "

Let's correct that: His assorted twaddle did not have conspiracy theories but rather paranoid conspiracy ideations. (See my previous post).

We will wait now to see if the Right's liars and fomenters finally admit their guy is one of them and not a "leftist plant" or "secret FBI agent".  I am not sanguine about any of them becoming mental changelings because they have already taken the Trump kool aid - as disastrous for their brains as Jim Jones' cyanide-laced purple mix was for his followers at Jonestown, Guyana in  August, 1978.

Besides, even Trump is more concerned with the effects of the arrest on "GOP momentum" according to a tweet this morning, not the lives that could have been snuffed out or bodies permanently maimed. He also still spouts hollow bollocks about stopping political violence but don't believe it for a second.  The words are empty,  totally detached from any heart felt investment.  The man possessed the moral capacity of a slug before and that hasn't changed.  The toxins destroying this nation will not and cannot be diluted or removed until Trump is out. As in gone. 

I can fully understand the Right's millions of Reddit, 4Chan, Gateway Pundit, FOX and other trolls wanting to bolt from this character, but eventually they will have to suck up reality- especially after the midterm elections and voters finally declare with their ballots they've had about enough of Donald J. Trump running amuck and Trumpie lunatics providing cover for his crimes.

Enough? You bet after a rally last night, where his shrieking cultists kept on with "CNN sucks!" while the maggot-in-chief did nothing to tone it down though he yapped through his ass again about "civility".  Meanwhile invoking the tired false equivalence trope that "when a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to murder congressional Republicans and a great man named Steve Scalise and others we did not use that heinous attempt at mass murder for political gain."

Except there's a world of difference, you fucktard!  Bernie Sanders, unlike fucktard Dotard has NEVER incited or called for violence at ANY rallies he's ever held.  By contrast, fucktard Dotard has regularly called reporters "enemies of the people" and encouraged his zombies to "knock the crap out of protesters" and recently praised a congressman (Greg Gianforte) for body slamming a Guardian reporter.  So don't even go near any such false equivalence.

Trump is a blight and cancer on this nation and the sooner he's removed from office, the more quickly we have a chance of regaining some semblance of sanity.

Update:  10/ 27

Of course, realizing ordinary false equivalence might not work, the WSJ's editors decided to try a different ploy today ('After The Mail Bombs', p. A12), insisting:

"We cite the Hodgkinson (Scalise) shooting not for the purpose of establishing moral equivalence  between these two events, but to make clear both came from the country's extreme lunatic fringe."

Nice try, but you'd have done better to admit the Right's lunatic fringe is 100 times the size of the Left's with its "Q" Anon conspiracy bunkum, and massive online enclaves of dregs like 4Chan, Reddit, Gateway Pundit etc. where Trumper zombies gather and trade lies and hate by the millions. There is no comparable social media wasteland on the Left, hate to break it to you.

See also:

Broad-Daylight Fascism and the Bombs of October

And:

Laura Flanders

Article Tools E-mail | Print Comments (0)

Donald Trump

Is Donald Trump Responsible for Violence? Yes.

Did "Conspiracy Theorists" Troll The Parkland Students? No - Lowbrow Loons Spreading Low I.Q. Memes

David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas student and now gun law activist, is being targeted by the pseudo conspiracy trolls inhabiting 4Chan, Reddit and other nether regions of the net.

Recall it wasn't long after the Sandy Hook - Newtown massacre that a crackpot conspiracy clown named Alex Jones, e.g.









began spinning his delirious, drug-addled bullshit that the whole tragedy where 26 perished was merely a federal "false flag" operation. Those twenty  kids and six adults weren't really slain, they were merely actors in an elaborate script to befuddle the public, forcing a mass  demand for gun confiscation across the land.

Now we see these wretched, half witted memes and crappola resurrected again by a bunch of nitwits occupying the nether regions of the net, e.g. 4chan, Infowars, Gateway Pundit,  Reddit and related enclaves of web trolldom.  This time the pseudo- conspiracy crazies are targeting the outspoken students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas for their newfound activism and eloquence in speaking truth to power. It appears the loopy conspira-tards simply can't handle that presentation of acumen and brilliance,  thereby resorting  to painting the kids into being "paid crisis actors".

One of the prime targets has been  David Hogg, 17, who went from Florida high school student to mass shooting survivor to inspiring  advocate for gun-control laws in a few days. And just as quickly, online conspiracy clowns in the mold of Alex Jones' Infowars (I call them conspira-tards)   began spinning viral lies attacking the teenager’s credibility.

By Wednesday — a week after a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle killed 17 people at Hogg’s Parkland, Fla., school — online media sites including YouTube swelled with false ­allegations that Hogg was ­secretly a “crisis actor” playing the part of a grieving student in local and national television news reports.

Hogg wasn't the only one targeted by an online campaign that flared up on anonymous forums such as 4chan and Reddit before it reached conservative websites, Twitter, Facebook and Google’s video platform. Collectively the posts questioned the honesty and credibility of the grieving students as they spoke out against gun violence.  In some cases they publicly challenged President Donald Dotard, the National Rifle Association and lawmakers opposed to gun control -- and this is likely what brought out the Trumpian Trolls from their crevices and rat holes.

Many of these lowbrow kooks, which is what they are, were  also foursquare behind helping to spread Michael Flynn's  Pizzagate conspiracy, i.e. that Hillary Clinton was keeping child sex slaves in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor and exploiting them.

One is led to inquire what engenders this fulsome crap.  What defects in the brains of these losers causes them to spawn such bollocks, say instead of applying what gray matter they have to researching real conspiracies?  Well, one answer is that researching the real ones - like the JFK assassination  - actually takes hundreds of man hours of real work.  Just plowing through Oswald's CIA files - e.g. the  OS-351- 164 file from his  201- 289 248 CI/SIG file or his 74-500 file. as reported in the Appendices of  John Newman’s book, ‘Oswald and the CIA’- can take hours.   It's a damned sight more exacting than merely reading a bullshit text on 4 Chan or watching a fake video on YouTube.

But that's where we are now, and who can blame the conspiracy skeptics - like Michael Shermer and others -   for going after anything that remotely smacks of conspiracy when a gaggle of clowns and conspira-tards have taken over the zeitgeist and converted it to clown fodder?   Such as the likes of Alex Jones and this currently resurfacing retinue of goofballs trying to paint Hogg and his fellow Douglas classmates as liberal pawns or actors.

It was Barbadian psychologist Dr. Pat Bannister who once invoked the idea of  a "conspiracy culture",  to distinguish it from "conspiracy research community". The latter she envisaged as the province of mature, rational, educated adults. Serious people possessing some measure of intellect who brought their scientific, mathematical and other aptitudes to the investigation of multiple aspects of a putative real conspiracy - whether that be the BCCI banking conspiracy or the JFK assassination. These people put in real man hours and actually published their work in authoritative media and respected forums as opposed to spreading bunkum through the lowest dreg regions of the net.

The "conspiracy culture"  by contrast was defined by the  resident "conspiracy theorist",  who put forward conspiracy conjectures  but didn't  advance adequate evidence or documents to  support them. Or, if such were advanced, they didn't meet elementary scientific standards for acceptance, including consistent data selection. For example, the lot who claimed no men actually landed on the Moon and it was all filmed on a Hollywood lot.  This, despite the fact we can actually use lunar ranging instruments - planted by Apollo astronauts, to make incredibly accurate measurements of lunar distance.

If Dr. Bannister were alive today I warrant she'd also include another more debased category, the conspiracy clown.  Into this group would go Alex Jones and his gaggle of anti-intellectual loawbrows of the type now burping out nasty "conspiracy" memes against the FLA students.  This lot - I am sure- she'd bracket as  members of that half of the population with subnornmal I.Q.  i.e.  that their low intelligence spurred them on to attack kids like David Hogg because they could see their intellects were superior to their own. Unable to parse Hogg or his classmates  as  "regular" students, it became easier to simply dismiss them  as 'hired crisis actors" or vilify them as  "liberal pawns". Who also had to be "taught" by liberals what to do and what to say in front of the assembled  media.  Of course, because the lowbrows themselves were too mentally deficient  to do it on their own, they couldn't imagine anyone else  - especially a student - able to.

This is what low intelligence gets you in a nation whose median I.Q. is sinking ever lower by the day, under Trumpdom.  When the 1.8 million DACAns are dispatched it will sink even lower, given the average DACA person has an I.Q. 25 points higher than a 4Chan internet  troll.

But perhaps the best put down of this  nonsense was a humorous one from one of Hogg's fellow students,  Sarah Chadwick. She, tweeted that Hogg “can’t act to save his life,” adding that the fact some people think he is being paid “is hilarious.”

Again, it takes little to no effort to imbibe such twaddle or to share it, and spread it out to like-minded morons.  This in a social media  environment  susceptible to moronic fake news infection because it has few gatekeepers. (It is estimated that Facebook and Instagram have perhaps 200 human monitors -  i.e. apart from the algorithms - to detect specious conspiracy clown ideation. and preventing it from wider circulation.)

The mainstream media then, confers way too much dignity on these net trolls from Reddit,  4chan,  Infowars  and elsewhere by saying they are spawning "conspiracies".  No, they are in fact lowbrow loons spawning and spreading low I.Q. memes.  A meme here being the equivalent of a basic mind virus first elucidated by biochemist Jacques Monod in his book, Chance And Necessity.  Sadly, as we've seen with Pizzagate, even a lowbrow can create mind viruses. The power inheres not in the meme's innate value, but in getting like minded idiots to spread it.  Receptacles who lack mental acuity, basic critical thinking skills and any familiarity with logic.

Props to Hogg for shrugging off the low I.Q. troll attacks, saying "This is just American democracy".

But in fact, Thomas Jefferson would disagree with him that this crude mode of expression - in terms of cockeyed conspiracy ideations - would qualify.   No, Jefferson would see these nutso expressions as a debasement of democracy. After all, in his 'Notes on Virginia', he wrote:

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds. This is why he harped on mental improvement. He understood that for citizens to attain this improvement  of mind they needed to read in a focused and critical fashion and not believe anything without basis.. Another Founder, John Adams, wrote:

“Facts are stubborn things,”

Because they do not admit of being merely twisted into what one wishes or prefers. Sure, the dregs of 4Chan or Reddit might hate that an articulate bunch of Florida kids could find their voices after a school shooting massacre  - but there it is.  Instead of feeding the green envy monster by concocting imbecilic conspiracy memes that don't fit the facts, they'd do better to do some real research and reading themselves.

Why? To improve their minds of course! That is assuming they have the intelligence to sustain any improvement.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/77839/two-simple-laws-could-solve-americas-epidemic-of-violence

Footnote:  A wannabe Vermont shooter -  Jack Sawyer- was recently tripped up when a friend reported him to the authorities. He had packed away an AR-15 and shotgun as well as handgun to attack his former High school. See e.g.

https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/2018/02/16/teen-arrested-fair-haven-school-shooting-threat/344409002/

He told that friend (as reported on CBS  Early Show this a.m.) he had been "excited" about the Parkland massacre because it "was just stepping up natural selection a notch".  In fact , he had it backwards: The Parkland shooting was reverse natural selection in that a mentally debilitated guy took out 17 students with vastly higher I.Q.s than he had. But this is what happens when military style weapons are allowed to be purchased by anyone.

Internet Hate Culture - Why So Many "Comments" Sections Have Been Ditched

After writing his recent article for TIME ('Tyranny of the Mob', Aug. 29, p. 27) on the culture of internet hate gone wild, Joel Stein informed the chief editor he was "going off  Twitter" and also "hopes there will be no comments in the online edition", i.e. for the net trolls to come after him. (In his 4 page piece he cites several examples of being net-stalked and receiving hate missives, including from losers like Andrew Auernhiemer who barked in one tweet "You people (meaning Jews) belong in a fucking oven".  Such is what the web, with all its initial promise, has descended into: a huge dog pit, with snarls, howls, bites and free floating excrement.

But what about the comments sections that typically accompany the major media sources, and which are usually allocated for reader inputs or exchanges?  In respect of these, Alicia Shepherd  recently wrote  on smirkingchimp.com:

"NPR is joining a growing list of media organizations that have said “finito” to comments including, ‘This American Life,’ Reuters, Recode, Mic, the Chicago Sun-Times, Popular Science, CNN, The Toronto Star and The Week."

This should not be surprising as we read in the recent TIME of the rise of hate on the Internet in media and  sites as  diverse as Reddit, Twitter and even Facebook. Sadly, hate speech and vitriol  has become the new coin of the realm thanks to mentally deranged trolls who get off on pissing in public - and crapping too. 

In the lengthy TIME article,   Joel Stein gives a number of  other examples (including the attacks on black actress Lesley Jones)  that show how far down into the toilet our net culture has deteriorated.   It wasn't always thus. I can recall from as early as 1994 having very heated discussions on topics in the old AOL forums. But though these debates (especially on the atheist  boards) were animated they never descended into the sort of invective with racial and other hate so abundant today.

The reach of hate culture  was eventually bound to extend to the comments section of the big corporate news media.  By 2004, when comments sections were initiated on news sites  like The Miami Herald, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and WaPo, they were hailed as a means to "democratize the media".  The original template also allowed a two-way conversation between readers and the journalists who served them. But that didn't last long, and the journalists themselves soon found out they were unable to enter into debates without being tracked and excoriated by assorted nuts with chips on their shoulders.

What one also found, as I have in the comments sections of The Financial Times,  is that  readers are often talking to and past each other because most of the resident journalists don’t engage. Alicia Shepherd noted there’s a reason.  She refers to how  Chris Cillizza enthusiastically embraced his audience when he started his political blog, The Fix, in 2006, on The Washington Post.  According to Cillizza:

“I would regularly go into the comments to interact (or try to interact) with readers. I incentivized and deputized regular commenters to keep order. Then I gave up. Because none of the tactics or strategies we tried ever had any real impact on the quality of the dialogue happening on The Fix. No matter what the original post was about, a handful of the loudest — or most committed — voices in the room hijacked the comments thread to push their own agendas.”

Which is much the same take that Joel Stein had in his TIME article, noting that trolls ("most likely to be sociopaths with Asperger's") have now taken over most discussion venues and filled them with their hot air and venom.  Stein also cites studies by psychologists who refer to the "disinhibition effect" by which contributing factors such as anonymity, invisibility and not communicating face to face in real time, encourage brash behavior. Stein insists this has led to "the stripping away of mores that society spent millennia building".

The point is that the journalists,  as well as many of their major media,  have finally tired of sponsoring enclaves for unhinged simpletons to vent and hate- and having to constantly monitor and censor. Hence, removing comments sections. (This blog also has a comments section but it is rigorously moderated. I welcome challenges to any arguments or posts  but they  must have a  logical and coherent basis in making specific points. They can't be just shooting from the hip in the equivalent of a verbal 'drive by')

Shepherd herself, as an  NPR ombudsman from 2007 to 2011, claims  firsthand to know  "how futile and frustrating comments sections are."  She further points out that even though NPR had a sign-up system, and hired an outside moderator to check comments before posting, a listener could still create an alias and write whatever he (usually men) liked. The comments "were often mean-spirited and did little to foster civil conversation."

Shepherd,  in a 2011 essay on comment sections for the Nieman Reports,  wrote: “The goal is dialogue, but it’s pretty clear that the debate between dialogue and diatribe is still being waged. From the view I’ve had for the last three years as NPR’s ombudsman I’d say diatribe is winning—hands down.” It’s still true today.

Why is this? Why does diatribe trump dialogue? My own theory is that too few netizens know how to conduct a civil dialogue. They are affected by the "disinhibition" effect and also lack the patience to develop rigorous and consistent arguments to build strong dialogue. It's much easier just to deliver drive -by shots with little or no information for support.  But this isn't just in comments sections, it abounds in other places on the net. It's also one reason I stopped frequenting the Deja News online discussion groups, as on the JFK assassination. There was too much noise, not enough signal.

Shepherd writes (ibid.):

"The trolls who rule the comment seas may actually have won because they often scare away people with their vicious attacks. An infinitesimal number of NPR’s 25 to 35 million unique monthly users bothered to join story-page conversations."

Moreover: “Far less than one percent of that audience is commenting, and the number of regular comment participants is even smaller,” wrote Scott Montgomery, NPR’s managing editor for digital news announcing the shutdown.  He adds:

“Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months –– 0.003 percent of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period.”

NPR’s current ombudsman, Elizabeth Jensen, noted that caretaking NPR’s commenting system becomes more expensive as the number of comments increases –sometimes costing twice what was budgeted. So basically, NPR decided it’s not worth the money to engage only a sliver of its audience  While Jensen notes cost is certainly a critical factor for any media company, the more valid question remains: What is the value of commenting unless it’s tightly moderated and journalists engage?  Well, on the evidence, not much!

That is a question more and more websites and blogs will have to address in coming years given the troll culture and its dregs is only likely to grow -  like a cancer. You can maybe treat and eliminate a biologic cancer with surgery or radiation, but I don't know exactly what the corresponding treatment would be to tame the hate-troll social cancer metastasizing across the net.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/10/ditching-online-discussion-groups.html