A pie fight broke out in the comments on Shaun King's excellent analysis of the unredacted convenience store video of the events that the Ferguson police and a right wing campaign want to use to depict Michael Brown as a worthless thug and portray Darren Wilson as a hero victim. The pie fight broke out in a thread discussing the relevance of whether Michael Brown behaved aggressively as shown by the video. Because the original comment in the thread received dozens of recommendations, I became concerned that too many Kossacks had bought into the Michael Brown = thug meme. But it soon became apparent that only one party was prolonging the conversation, with a series of comments and replies with various other users.
The instigator's comments hammered the theme of Michael Brown as a dangerous, strong-arm robber, but avoiding full frontal right wing talking points, while skating close enough to the edge to earn threats of HR. I rolled over the username and saw a recent, but not too recent UID. Reading on moved me to look further at the user.
The user registered ten months ago. No diaries. Fewer than 200 comments. Until recently, the user didn't cause much trouble, garnering a rare HR but receiving recommendations almost as rarely. This user once managed to post seventeen comments to a recommended and widely republished diary about homophobia in East Texas without a single one of them receiving either a recommendation or HR. That seems a feat in itself.
More recently, particularly since last August, the user had found a more provocative voice in George Zimmerman, GunFAIL and Michael Brown diaries, earning a spate of HR's at first, then moderating the tone just enough to stay out of that kind of trouble. To this eye, the profile of this user's activity on Daily Kos amounts to the very model of a troll, and a successful one, at that. Anybody can get BOJO'ed. It takes some skill and effort to comment provocatively using themes of right wing talking points and still avoid that fate.
If spotted, however, a troll can be useful. Troll spelled sideways is tool. The messages delivered by a clever troll can represent the best intellectual arguments the right possesses, as feeble as those may be. It is worth knowing what those arguments consist of. It is tedious to follow their "news" sources.
It is also useful to know a troll when encountering one. Given that arguments with a troll amount to a fool's errand, many innocent pixels can be saved for ourselves and our posterity by refraining. It is equally useful to know that such trolls are few, if vocal, and that their brand of delusion really has no office or audience here at Daily Kos, despite the occasional verbal misadventures of White folks still recovering from a racist upbringing.
Trolls are an unavoidable feature of blogging, but the Daily Kos Community does an excellent job of self policing our discussions and keeping us honest. May it ever be so.