Dispassionate

We have all had many online interactions. If that's not the case, then you likely aren't reading this blog post. One thing I've learned over the years is that people think if you reply to something - particularly more than once - then you are passionate about that topic.

The natural next step, if one is passionate about a topic, is that this person gets upset over things they see posted. This would be a natural conclusion if this person continues to post replies.

On a side note - this is how trolls work. Based on the presumption that the poster is passionate about the topic, the troll will deliberately mischaracterize the poster's comments in an attempt to illicit a passionate reply.

The funny thing in all this is if a person is, by nature or by nurture, a fairly dispassionate person, then he will not be so easily moved to further posts. If however, the person has a strong sense of purveying the truth, then further explanatory posts will likely follow. And this would seem like, to trolls, a passionate reply.

By nurture, I was forged into an extremely dispassionate person as a young man. However, accuracy has always been a goal of mine, and this didn't sit well with the concept of "don't feed the trolls." For years, I'd hear people say (or write) "you got all huffy," or "there's a lot of intensity," etc. - but I couldn't figure out where they were getting that.  Then I stopped replying to these situations, and saw the difference in how people talked about it later.

Puzzle solved.

These days, if I post a second reply (and that's rare), I'll add the phrase "but you knew that." It tends to stop the trolls cold and then they get all huffy about it. In the absence of that phrase, then I simply parlay that concept. Works wonders.

But sorry to those that were misled, I do not write as a passion, per se. Yes, I enjoy it. But at the end of the day, I write most everything you see here because someone wants my thoughts on something.


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