Today is the 9th anniversary of HA. So I thought I would celebrate by remembering the top nine most memorable trolls who have lurked in the comment threads.
Any such list is necessarily subjective—trolls are memorable for may different reasons, sometimes rather personal ones. Some have invoked anger, some have provided “entertainment,” some were just very, very…VERY different. Okay…so here goes:
- Mr. Cynical was Goldy’s first real troll. He showed up during the Great Election Contest of 2005, and loudly and boldly tried telling us how things would come out. Cynical was largely a propagandist for Republicans, so his many, many prognostications almost always came out dead wrong. Cynical was so wrong over the Great Election Contest of 2005, that the took on the moniker, “Mr. Irrelevant after his side lost. At least he had a sense of humor. An example of a Cynical long term political prediction, from the summer of 2005:
Santorum and Rice will win in 2008 and 2012….
Then Rice will become the first African-America and first woman President of the United States in 2016 and 2020.Mr. Cynical occasionally returns to the comment thread to offer his opinions on important events, like presidential elections. During the 2012 election, Cynical came back as Ryanistheman, Jody, and likely other commenters. A little know fact is that Cynical was the first troll to really get under Goldy’s skin…until Goldy got toughened and jaded into the troll-aloof person we know and love day.
- Another of HA’s early trolls, JCH, was hell-bent on simply being disruptive. And he left lots of comments in attempts to disrupt. He was also a racist, spewing anti-Semitic slurs ad nauseum. It’s hard to know what drove him. He admitted that he lived in Hawaii, and I was able to deduce that he had previously lived in California, where he actively wrote letters to the editor of his local newspaper, pushing wingnut causes, of course.
JCH has the distinction of being the first troll to be banned from HA. It was largely for his unwillingness to stop the barrage of anti-Semitic insults. And even his banning came after a long spell of having his comments moderated.
- Chardonnay was HA’s first “concern troll,” but really stood out for being an (apparent) female in a largely male-dominated field. Something else that stood out about Chardonnay: she was excessively stupid. Now, whether this was an act or real is hard to tell. But she specialized in taking Republican talking points and re-framing them as “concerns” that were promptly demolished by other commenters. Here is a fun Chardonnay comment that came during the Ron Sims, David Irons, Jr. King County Executive election:
oh ya Ivan, King Ronny is toast he’s as wacked as algore if not more. ronny f’d up with his trumped up enviro BS. and his election dept debacle. stick a fork in him.
I’ll tell ya what ivan, if ron wins I’ll donate money to Goldy’s beer fund. You ‘buddy’ get zip unless Goldy wants to share his beer with you. If David Irons wins you buy Goldy a beer.
I cannot say whether she ever donated beer money to Goldy. Chardonnay disappeared (under that name, anyway) after that election in late 2005. She made one more appearance in 2007.
- Christmas Ghost is notable as another female commenter. She was much brighter than Chardonnay but, perhaps, crazier. A notable characteristic of her comments was an absence of upper case characters. Eventually, she moved to the Bay area and quit commenting on HA, but not before EFFin’ Unsound had some fun with her.
Interesting, odd facts: She was a raging asshole to Goldy in the comment threads, but he reports that she was a nice and reasonable person in her emails to him. Goldy once posted a missing person piece on behalf of Christmasghost. The niece was eventually found, though I don’t know any of the details.
- Piper Scott makes this list, because no commenter was more full of himself than was Piper. He was seriously insufferable and really did take himself seriously. Everyone else…not so much. In fact, Lee started a series of posts about him called The Crackpiper Chronicles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).
Part one highlighted one of my favorite protracted exchanges with any troll. It’s still a fun read that shows, in the end, underneath all the pretense, Piper was reacting emotionally like a very typical reality-challenged wingnut.
- Puddybud. Ahhhh, yes. What can we say about our beloved Puddybud. First, he gets kudos for longevity, having first posted back in 2005. Puddybud is a smorgasbord of illogical thoughts, nonsense, child-like arguments, illiteracy, hatred, bigotry, and right wing tripe, oddly mixed, on occasion, with pious religious fervor. And to add to it all, Puddybud has some deep insecurities as evidenced by his need for silly bragging. (Anyone remember the conversation about Puddybud serving in the military?)
An interesting thing about Puddy is the he has actually engaged with some of us in person by coming to Drinking Liberally. In person, he is a friendly, articulate, and intelligent person—really, the antithesis of his online persona. How could this be? The answer is that Puddybud is a character. The person producing the character is engaging in performance art. This explains everything about Puddybud. Think about it…if your objective is to maximize disruption and “make liberal heads explode,” then debate using emotional arguments, use bad logic, be inflammatory while saying stuff that is barely comprehensible, misuse data. Hell…just blatantly lie—it’s the character Puddy, not the God-fearing person playing Puddy lying to you.
- Mark the Redneck is a typical, if once prolific, propagandist/troll. What puts Mark the Redneck on this list is an infamous bet he made with Goldy…and reneged on.
- Marvin Stamn was a prolific, nearly robotic troll. He had commenting down to an art:
- Open up Drudge and find an “outrage”
- Excerpt a quote from the piece
- Write just enough commentary so that it constitutes “fair use”.
- Go to 1
Marvin eventually did himself in when he admitted to getting paid for his propaganda. It is hard to know if he was serious or joking, but since he lived in Southern California, commented for many hours a day, and had nothing to say about local politics, it seems more plausible than not. I don’t miss him.
- I had a hard time picking just one last troll to memorialize. I considered pbj, chuck, manoftruth, howcanyoubePROUDtobeanASS, Max, YO, josef, and so on. But I choose Klake. What I remember about Klake was his long, rambly, semi-coherent comments, with random parts of the text in bold. Like here and here. Classic stuff.
So those are my “top” nine. How about you? Who are the trolls you would memorialize and why?
Darryl – Klake still lives. You can find him in David Horsey’s editorial comments section in the LA Times. He’s posting as the Gray Ghost. And yes, he’s still as rambling and incoherent as ever.
1) Horsey got picked up by the LA Times? How mny Pulitzer prizes does he have, and how many did the troll have? That’s right, they don’t award those to trolls.
I got a kick out of being able to out redneck MTRN.
Puddy was fun for a while, but the act got really old and stale.
Lost In A Sea Of Blue always bummed me out. He seemed like a nice guy that really was lost, had turned mean, and started to drink.
herzog @ 1,
Interesting! Thanks.
Michael,
I remember lostinaseaofblue…I picture him as the loner at the end of the bar staring morosely into the glass he is swirling….
I’d go with josef as #9. The obsession with Mary Lane (is that the right name?) always gave me a (very slightly uncomfortable) chuckle.
And you didn’t mention Pudge!
Darryl, you forgot to mention Cynical’s weird predilection for goats. You want to watch your kids around that guy.
As for JCH, didn’t he claim to be a stockbroker? I hope he lost his ass in the 2009 crash. Somebody did, because I met a trainload of money that year. People were GIVING AWAY stocks in the spring of ’09. The dumbshits shouldn’t have bought on margin. Anything you owe money on isn’t really yours. It would give me great satisfication to know I was the rabbit who made off with his.
And klake, of course, lives on in the HA ad hoc posting rules:
1. This is a liberal blog.
2. Anyone can post here, except JCH.
3. There is no censorship.
4. As liberals, our mission is to verbally kick the living shit out of America-hating traitor trolls.
5. No mercy for wingnuts!
6. Our terms are unconditional surrender, and there will be trials.
7. klake is a nazi
Any questions?
It is noteworthy that JCH and klake are the only trolls in HA history to achieve the distinction of being permanently memorialized in the HA ad hoc posting rules. Many others have applied but only those two were chosen.
@2 We’ll see how long Horsey lasts at LA Times if the Kochs get their hands on it.
I always thought Cynical, Proudtobeanass, Manoftruth and sideshow Bob were the same guy under different nom de plume’. The styles of bullshit seemed to be very much alike. Of course, when people are getting all their information from the same source, and they have no real intellectual capacity to actually muster their own basic cognitive abilities, I suppose it’d be natural to expect a forest of parrots like that.
One fuckin squirrel and that sets the whole neighborhood barking.
One commonality I did notice, is that they all, every single troll you’ve had in here, is a raging alcoholic. That shit’s poison, fucks peoples thinking up in the worst way, especially when they’re already genetically predisposed to being assholes.
Come to think of it, when was my first posting in here? Seems like I’d been reading for several months before I actually posted anything.
Dang if I can remember his name, but I miss the guy from a couple of years back who argued that renters should not be allowed to vote on property taxes and people out of state, should be allowed to vote on Washington issues.
I found a web clipping about that..
The guy she ran away with was pimping her out.. She was arrested for prostitution..
So that’s how her family “found” her..
Beyond that I have nothing more.. Was this volunatary/involunary? Drug related? No idea.
Zapporo was a old favorite.. Really full of himself right up until the day of reckoning..
2nd and last time..
Really freaking crazy..
Then there was the Hateful Name Morphing Troll..
Every single batshit insane comment had a handle change. I’ve yet to find the time through my database to collect them all..
He must have left thousands of comments. To this day I don’t know how many.
N. in Seattle had a good name for him – “the slobbering wingnut of many aliases”..
And speaking of HNMT’s there was the late, unlamented little Maxee the asshat troll..
I’ve cataloged this jerk’s aliases way better than the other guy..
He had like 175 of them spread over 6,801 comments. No doubt I’ll find some more..
You know. Darryl you should check the IPs on some of those.. I know for a fact some of them came from either ISPs in Montana or Wyoming strongly pointing to Cynical but if they were local??
Then I believe the troll may actually have been Jeff Boly..
Something about the use of the word “fatty” as a noun – I believe that’s a JeffB ism who is a compulsive cross country runner.
And JeffB trolled the threads heavily during the runup to Bridge’s decision.. Until just after the re-election of Obama he was a compulsive regular at unSP.. Few others were so dedicated to right wing tripe even after being proved wrong again and again and again.
He left unSP in a “Obama’s re-elected, the sky is falling” kind of huff.
How can we forget Little Ricky Dumbass??
Now there was a guy dedicated body and soul to klownservative dumbassery..
Who was the BIAW shill/troll? Kevin something? Keith something?
It’s refreshing to think that BIAW is largely meaningless now. HA gets some degree of credit for invalidating them.
Wow, The crazed databaze from the unemployed salt licking moron ylb is displayed front and center!
And how many ‘batshit insane’ names did you post under? Oh yeah… the unemployed salt licking moron ylb doesn’t comment on his silly lunacy!
@13 – That was Dave, the “independent moderate”..
His silly shtick totally came off as trolling.
21 – Kevin Carnes..
You know Goldy never outed his troll handle. But I have a pretty good idea of who it was.. I won’t say because I haven’t really taken the time to run the numbers but Goldy gave some pretty good clues..
12 – I’ve got your first post as Deathfrogg on 1/2/2009..
http://horsesass.org/?p=11353#comment-888821
N in Seattle,
That would be Kevin Carns, professional troll…
@ 26 YLB
Wow, somehow I thought it was earlier than that. I think I’d been reading this blog for about a year before that.
Shawna Forde was mentioned there in that thread. Everyone was saying what a total nutball she was and just five months later, she and her psycho tweaker buddies shot a little girl and her dad in Arizona.
@28 Forde isn’t even human, and the Arizona jury didn’t think so either, when they sentenced her to death.
“Arriving at the death sentence was difficult, said Angie Thomas who sat on the jury. A picture of Brisenia presented during the trial was a significant factor in reaching the decision, she said. ‘A little girl, with bright red fingernails; she’s wearing a white T-shirt and turquoise-colored pajama bottoms. She’s on a love seat. It’s a perfect, innocent picture until you realize that half of her face has been blown off.'” (Source of quote: Wikipedia)
She’s an example of why I think society needs a death penalty option. It shouldn’t be used very often, but it should be available for cases like this one. Her triggerman, who also got death, was a serial killer who committed multiple murders including at least two in Wenatchee before he went to Arizona and blew the little girls face off with a handgun.
This was a home invasion robbery after drugs and money, and the victims were targeted because they were Hispanic. Nothing more than a gutter crime committed by low-life racist thieves and child murderers pretending to be “patriots.”
28 – Well that’s the earliest I have for the handle Deathfrogg.. If you had any other handle, I’m not aware of it at the moment.
@ 30
No, thats the only one I use for all the blogs and shit I post to. Most are just one-off postings. I was other names on Slashdot. The web was sorta already old hat for me by the middle 90’s. The BBS’s were the coolness back in the 80s, and it was boring by the mid 90’s.
Some guy did a documentary on the BBS’s..
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
One of the few and the best. Yes, I remember them fondly..
I have been off line for a bit more than a year, but this listing makes me feel as though i haven’t missed a beat at all.
Thanks for all of those nine years. I am hoping that there will be many more to come. I would suggest that it is time for some newer trolls.
@33 It’s always time for new trolls, but we’re stuck with useless old ones. but one thing that’s changed is Stefan’s sucky little blog is all but defunct.
I see Mark Griswold is still alive and posting on (un)Sound Politics. Guess he couldn’t take the heat here. He hasn’t posted on HA for a long time.
Also, “manoftruth” surely deserves an honorable mention; he also apparently is still alive (see #53 on 5/16/13 open thread), therefore it must be presumed he fled from these comment threads in a cowardly fashion, inasmuch as he cannot claim to be dead.