Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been colder than normal here in central New Hampshire for this time of year. It has meant the lakes have been freezing up hard, with ice thickening quickly. On most parts of the Big Lake the ice is thick enough to support vehicles, so we’ve been seeing folks pulling their bob houses out onto the lake in order to partake of ice fishing. The timing is good because the annual Meredith Rotary Club Ice Fishing Derby started Saturday and concluded today.

At least Covid hasn’t stopped the Derby. Then again the Derby is outdoors, the participants are spread out all over the 72 square miles of the Big Lake and the temperatures are well below freezing. It certainly helps that these conditions work in favor of participants maintain social distancing.

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One thing I have noticed since the first of the year has been a major change in the people commenting to various posts. Not so much the makeup as the names/ID’s people are using.

What do I mean, or in this case, who do I mean?

Trolls.

Any of you out there who have been around the ‘Net understand exactly what I mean: People commenting on posts and about other comments, such comments being basically contradictory, make false accusations about something or someone, make inflammatory statements, perform what I have seen called ‘drive-by accusations’ – drop an accusation with no corroborating links or evidence – then disappear for a while, try to present straw-man arguments, and worse, try to push outright falsehoods as ‘fact’ (think “Russia! Russia! Russia!” as one example).Many of these trolls spend hours online every day, posting dozens of comments every day, 365 days a year. One I found posted an average of 112 comments a day and did so for over nine years. That’s almost 41,000 posts a year. This one was most likely a shill, paid to post this kind of tripe and stir up trouble.

Trolls are a fact of life on the ‘Net.

But one thing started happening right after the first of the year – trolls started abandoning their IDs in large numbers and started using new ones. From my observations I’d have to say a good 75% of the trolls I am familiar with have ‘disappeared’, reappearing with new IDs.

It didn’t take long to figure out who was who, even with their new IDs because they all had their own commenting style. Some had created new IDs and within the first couple of days had posted several hundred comments. Others had ‘spare’ IDs they had created years ago, rarely used with just enough comments made to keep it active, then after they burned their old IDs their dormant IDs came to life, and again dozens, if not hundreds of comments were posted every day.

Fortunately it is usually easy to figure out someone is a troll because of the comments they post. One giveaway is those using the Disqus commenting system tend to have ‘private’ profiles which means no one can see their commenting history. They either have a very small Upvote-to-Post ratio or a very high Upvote-to-Post ratio (they will use their other IDs to up-vote themselves).

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What’s worse than a sore loser?

A sore winner.

It seems the Democrats are famous for that and it’s no different this time. As Tucker Carlson has asked, “The Democrats 'Won Everything,' Why Are They So 'Crazy-Person Mad'?”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson began his opening monologue on Thursday with a simple question. “So why are the Democrats so angry?” “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Setting aside the fact that liberals are, by nature, far more consumed by what angers them than by what makes them happy, Carlson noted that the Democrats “won everything” in November and now have full control of the federal government. “Winning seemed to enrage them even more,” he said — correctly so.

Why is this?

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From Donald Trump after his acquittal in Impeachment 2.0, this one statement sticks out more than the rest:

It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree.

From a comment made to a related post in another blog comes this:

It is as if you need to have a scorecard to keep track of the whipsawing back and forth Democrats do on what is considered allowable.

2001 - 2008 Dissent is "Patriotic".
2009 - 2016 Dissent is "Racist".
2017 - 2020 Dissent is "Fashionable" and complete with pink headgear resembling genitalia.
2021 - ? Dissent is "Treason".

Democrats in autumn of 2020: Trump is using the USPO to rig the election.
Democrats in December of 2020: Claims of rigged elections are conspiracy theories.

It seems that it depends upon whether something works for or against the Democrats whether something will or will not be allowed, and that can change from moment to moment.

That’s one good way to destroy the cohesion of a nation.

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Even with Trump’s acquittal, Pelosi and Schumer have promised to continue their campaigns to destroy Donald Trump. To me, this further proves that this has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with vengeance for slights real or imagined.

They are misusing their offices to go after someone they hate. They keep pointing a finger at Trump, not understanding (or caring) that three fingers are pointing back at them. Their persecution of Trump is not playing well with the American people, even among Democrats. There are far more important things Congress has to deal with, yet the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader are wasting their time and the taxpayers’ money on something that will be more divisive than what has already occurred.

During the defense portion of the impeachment trial, the attorneys representing Trump presented video showing various members of Congress using inflammatory, murderous, insurrectionist, seditious, and even treasonous language aimed at the President, the GOP, and anyone with the audacity to disagree with them or get in their way. Their language egged on antifa and BLM rioters, made it seem they were all in on the rioting, burning, looting, and murder that took place over the past few years. Their language was far worse than President Trump has been accused of using (but didn’t). Where are the impeachments of those elected officials, the censure, the condemnation? What do we hear from the Speaker, the Majority Leader, and the DNC leadership instead?

Crickets.

As needs to be stated again and again and again, if Congressional Democrats didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

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It looks like we’re in for a little bit of snow today and a bunch of snow on Tuesday, something we need. (Some folks may think I’m crazy for saying so, but we need the snowpack for a proper spring thaw come April.) At the moment it looks like we’ll be in for between 6 and 10 inches here at The Gulch. I am looking forward to it!

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the snow will be falling, the snowpack will be growing, and where I’ll be shoveling some of it away once it’s all done.