An Appeal to Public-Spirited Trolls in Every Country

from Wikipedia -

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,^[3]extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response^[4] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

We have just seen incoherently angry Arab mobs attack consulates and other Western institutions because of something they saw on the internet.  That makes them the mother lode of trollable newbies.  Unlike Danish newspapers, the internet is limitless in what and how much can be presented and, if one likes, presented anonymously.  The opportunities for trolling are limited only by the imaginations of the trolls.  Usually the most a troll can hope for is to provoke flame wars.  Here is an opportunity to provoke real wars.

What are a troll's motives?  Why do it?  Generally it is a smarmy destructiveness and manipulativeness coupled with a sense of superiority at having fooled and manipulated other people who didn't see that one's trolling remarks weren't sincere. 

Imagine the sense of superiority of getting literally tens of thousands of fools to go crazy in the streets because of what you made.  Anyone who has some computer skills and software can go platinum viral whenever they want.  It is not a pipe dream - it is available to do right now.  And it is the right thing to do.

The Muhammad (pbuh) trolling heretofore has been done accidentally and therefore without any real thought put into it.  The Danish newspapers cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) were on newsprint in a newspaper and were openly and completely traceable to their source.  The recent video by Nedoula Nedoula (pbuh) was similarly clueless.  It used real actors in a live action video.  The actors were recognizable people who were neither willing nor able to conceal the source of  the video, plus the thing cost thousands of dollars to produce.  Even less thought went into 'The Satanic Verses' .  It had the author's name and his publisher's name and address right on the book.   Stupid.

The way to do this is with animation.  The folks storming the consulates were not the intellectual elite even of their dungheap countries, so cartoons are the way to communicate with them.  One can create all sorts of characters and situations not available in live action, plus it is dead cheap compared to Nedoula Nedoula's hokey live action short which included paid actors, sets, costumes, cameras, and lighting.  Not necessary.  If one is rolling in cash one can buy Adobe Flash Pro for $700, less for students or teachers, or Anime Pro for $150, or, if one is planning on fucking up the world on a shoestring,, there is Anime Debut for $30.  Here one has both frugality and anonymity shrink-wrapped into the same box.

But why should an aspiring troll want to go to the trouble to piss off a bazillion Muslims and set off riots all over the Middle East?  The obvious answer is 'Because one can'.  But there is a deeper reason as well.  It needs to be done.  So long as the provocations are hard and expensive to do, they will necessarily be few.  If the illiterate and highly religious Muslim underclass come out to riot only every few years or even every few months, they will have the time and energy to do it.  

Even a few dozen trolls in several countries would soon inundate the net with videos featuring the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) or other subjects of Muslim sensitivity.  Soon, very soon, even the most pious and excitable of Muslims wouldn't be able to respond to all of them.  It would soon come to pass that the fellahin would come out to loot and burn for only the most ingeniously offensive videos.  The underclass of the entire Arab world would become the jury on "The Internet's Got Talent", "So You Think You Can Troll", and if one screwed up the anonymity, "Survivor".

Consider what happens among Christians and Jews when they see blasphemies against their religions, like Mapplethorpe's 'Piss Christ', a crucifix immersed in urine, a number of years ago.  There was an effort to get his grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities, or whatever it was, withdrawn.  There were loud public complaints against even that, on the ground that it was censorship.  But there is a vast distance between refusing to pay for 'Piss Christ', and personally murdering Mapplethorpe, which is exactly what would have happened had it been 'Piss Mohammed' (piss be upon him) instead.  The vast majority of Christians who read about and saw pictures of 'Piss Christ' shrugged, muttered something about Mapplethorpe being an asshole, and left it at that.  

Trolls can help Muslims achieve that same sort of weary tolerance that we in the West have long since come to accept.  The whole point of trolling is to locate someone's emotional buttons and to push them.  Here the Arabs have advertised in the headlines of every newspaper the location of their buttons and how to push them.  The Arab Street is paved with trolling gold.  Only when the button has been pushed hundreds of times will the Arab Street get over going beserk every time they see something they don''t like.  It should be the mission of every troll to produce one or several videos offensive to Muslims.  Trolls from countries not conventionally identified as the Great Satan or the Little Satan in languages other than English can be especially valuable here.

The Arab underclass would be better off if they stopped reacting that way.  The various Arab overclasses would be better off too.  And it goes without saying, so would everyone else.  It is the single most important thing one can do to make the world a better place.