Craigslist advert seeks jolly right-wing trolls to help conservative message during election campaign

Is that really the size of the image you were sent?

Hi ebodyknows -- I've blown it up a bit but have been having trouble seeing the blownup image, though colleagues assure me they can see it. Let me know. Apart from this, the link works but the font size is small. Cheers.

Good news! Just found a much larger sized copy. Please click in story or here: " took a Print Screen grab" 

Looks offensive enough to be authentic. I do not think an imposter would have thought of the conditions at the bottom. More proof that they will do anything to control the discussion/discourse. Just wish more of the North American Left understood this.

I don't know if these tactics are really on the Canadian radar enough for someone to think that forging something like this would get very much traction in the press, anywhere. But they're certainly not without precedent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/17/us-intern...

But considering the spelling and grammar, if it's authentic, our Breitbarts aren't very good with language.

That said, I highly doubt that Harper and team would have been this indiscreet.  His backbenchers, however, have a spotty record on approaching propaganda intelligently: http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/timothy-bloedows-suga...

LEFTIST SEEKING POLITICS

Rabble staff's definition of troll and trolling seems a bit off the mark here.  Wikipedia defines troll as: "In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[2] In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself, as in "that was an excellent troll you posted". While the term troll and its associated action trolling are primarily associated with Internet discourse, media attention in recent years has made such labels highly subjective, with trolling being used to describe intentionally provocative actions outside of an online context. For example, recent media accounts have used the term troll to describe "a person who defaces internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families."

I would distinguish a troll, who might be doing the trolling for fun and have no real stake in the activity and as an end in itself, and an activist.  There is probably a better term that can be used in this case, such propaganda, or maybe what Peter Sloterdijk defined in his book, Critique of Cynical Reason, as a cynical "inscription on the other's defense."  Sloterdijk contrasts cynicism, which sees no real possibility of changing things for the better, and kynicism, which is a body-based joviality, like Diogenes' public masturbation, which disturbed the good people of ancient Greece.  Kynicism refers to the love of truth and conscious living in which life and doctrine must be in harmony.  To expect a gay man to live like a straight is to expect him to become a closeted cynic.  Sloterdijk cites the Lutheran saying: "A timid arse seldom lets go with a joyful fart." (p.101)  Zizek makes a further useful distinctions between cynicism, knavery, foolishness and activism.  Whereas a propagandist is either an activist or a cynic, a troll is more likely to either be a fool or a knave.  We could say that trolling is to propaganda as flash mobs are to protests.  One seeks to disrupt everyday life only so that it can return to what it was before, whereas the other seeks to effect real change.  One is counter-cultural, the other is radical.  

One of the critiques of today's "post-political" politically correct left is that it seeks to culturalize politics rather than politicize culture - and so topics like trolling become more pronounced and gain more significance at the expense of radical analysis.  A left culture would not feel so injured by trolling if the socio-symbolic universe was better geared toward its vision of the good life for all.  Instead, we watch the game of politics in terms of what Karl Polanyi referred to as something like capitalist deterritorialization countered by conservative reaction.  While we should work to build a culture and a politics that are not based on such capitalist deterritiorialization, one of the difficulties for a culture based on postmodern communicative media (as opposed to what Hardt and Negri refer to as an older transcendental mediation) is that today's split subjects have difficulty knowing their own desire from that of the superego communicative big Other.  We do what it wants without knowing why - which is probably an apt description of the prospective Craigslist "troller."  In this communicative media context, politics comes increasingly to look like culture and culturally oriented activists naturally like to get in on the game - especially when it's their ass that's on the line.  

So while trolling might be a new sport for politicos, one might think of ways of not being open to biocapitalist normalization just because it's inherently transformative and productive of new hybrid subjectivities.  In this regard is it the fact that they're right wing or the fact that they're jolly that distrubs?  This only exacerbates the issue of the close connection that Zizek points to between ideology and enjoyment.  The inscription on the other's defense is a means to steal enjoyment, which Freud elaborates in Civilization and Its Discontents.  The culturalization of politics refers to what Henri Lefebvre described in 1940 in his Le Matérialisme Dialectique as "the canonization of the vague discontent of the lower middle classes."  Against this he proposed that we have to achieve a "new stage of civilization and culture" that would allow people to realize their potentialities by altering the conditions of their existence, and indeed, to move beyond abstract negation from the point of view of productive activity.  "All production presupposes the organism," he wrote, "the hand, the eye, the brain."     

"or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion" - if this is part of the accepted definition of a

troll than the rabble staff are fine. Po-mo trolls are also annoying.

The point is that the Conservatives will go to all any and any means to sway the discussion. And

they will use clear language to do so. Unlinke many on the Left.