Having visited the valleys of the Trolls

Oh what fun. I pay a couple of daily visits to the UK Daily Telegraph comment threads between tasks for a little light entertainment. The most entertaining are James Delingpole and Christopher Booker, not so much for the articles, but for the silliness of a small number of trolls, including I think a couple of Turing 'bots.

Just for fun, I like to do a little hit and run posting, but I just don't have the stamina for the stuff like Richard North's heavy duty anti-troll sniping, or the near continual presence of contributors like Reality Returns or the ubiquitous Horace. One can only admire their persistence against a horde of hostile commenters.

The thing that nudges my curiosity button is why do those espousing leftist views spend so much time there? They only end up getting roundly ridiculed for their half assed attacks on the articles and their general poor understanding of the world. They convert no one and convince even fewer. If the left of centre philosophy were so superior it would be self evident. It would have produced the perfect society by now; but it hasn't and it won't. There are mass graves as memorials to such hubris.

At present the Libertarian movement is being equated with being 'right wing' and bad. As one whose sympathies lie with greater individual freedom, I find a lot of the trollish assertions baffling. Their pervading view appears to be 'Individual choice = bad and state intervention = good'. My reasoning is as follows; given that the 'State' is remote from an individuals day to day life, isn't the expectation of cradle to grave intervention a bit well, over optimistic? To me the greater state is very much a blunt instrument which is unable to react in a timely and relevant matter to specific circumstance.

Dealing with such an entity always reminds me of the old analogy of kicking the tail of an Apatosaurus to stop it eating all your trees. It takes a metaphorical week for the message to arrive at said slow Saurians brain, which then only has a limited number of options available to it. Then it takes another week for the message to travel back before you get slapped sideways by a flick of said tail. Which is the only way it has of responding. Spend any time trying to talk to UK local Government, or any large bureaucracy for that matter, and you'll understand what I mean.

Based on the above, does it make sense to put your trust in a large, amorphous organisation which only deals in a limited number of one size fits all solutions? Or to leave the problem solving to smaller, more autonomous units closer to the issue in question? The Leftist trolls don't understand that small can not only be more beautiful, but far more reactive and efficient. However, that won't keep them in non-jobs or cosy little sinecures, which is what they really desire. Those kind of jobs are predominantly the purview of an enlarged, bureaucratic state or large corporate entity which can afford such luxuries.

However, the days of these jobs are rapidly coming to an end unless some bright spark can come up with a new way of generating money, apart from trying to tax the very air we breathe or water we drink, or the cost of travelling. There are too many people in the Western world who think the world owes them a living. Too many who do not produce something tangible but deign to tell others who can, what to do. This is the lesson waiting to be learned. In the valleys of the trolls.