On 10 Nov 2007 at 13:39:02 -0500, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 11/10/07 1:26 PM, Daniel R. Tobias at
dan(a)tobias.name wrote:
A Twilight
Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", provides a
fictional illustration of the tendency of a community to be its own
worst enemy.
That's where this comes from:
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and
fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices,
to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill,
and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a
scapegoat has a fallout all of its own." - Rod Serling
And, to make that episode's example particularly relevant, there was
in fact an external enemy that wished to destroy the community in
question; it wasn't just a figment of the imagination. However, the
technique used by that enemy was the very clever one of manipulating
the people within the community into scapegoating and attacking one
another. This is a technique that works fine for trolls who want to
cause trouble on Wikipedia, as well, whether they pursue it
intentionally as in the enemy in that episode, or simply as an
accidental byproduct of their other actions; I'm sure they get a lot
of merriment out of getting Wikipedia admins to do a lot of
collateral damage in the course of fighting the trolls' alleged
activities. If they play the game well, they don't need to do very
much actual direct damage themselves; all they have to do is plant
enough hints of their continued presence to cause massive witchhunts
to be launched against them, dragging in innocent victims.
--
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