Trolling Yourselves

[Valkyrur]

Just a while ago, I was up on Garena, and I witnessed this really massive argument. The people were all going nuts on CAPS, scolding each other and all that... But for what? They were all Singaporeans, and they were arguing about how Singapore sucks.

Well, not that all of them were... It's actually one guy, and the rest were trolling him... But my focus' on that one guy. It's not hard to realize that he's actually Singaporean, going by the words he used, syntax and all.

Which only made me feel stupid for even reading it. But I did have a good laugh as well, because the people he talked so badly about would have seemed so much better when compared to him...

But what do you think of that?

Suppose a hypothetical situation where you come across an argument. This argument involves people of your nationality, and on one side, you have people talking really badly about your country. They're talking about your country's more infamous bad points, and about how bad your country's people are...

But you know full well they are Singaporeans. What do you do?

How do you feel about it? Why is that?

 

[coffeecup]

I think it's a bit of a mischaracterization to call that "trolling." If someone feels a genuine distaste for certain governmental policies, then expressing their opinion is probably meant to either spread information or be a form of advocacy rather than just a means to piss other people off for the hell of it.

But usually I find that a lot of individuals who complain about their own nation have conclusions that aren't really substantiated by anything more than their gut feeling that "something is wrong" and a disillusioned view that "things could easily be a lot better." But when asked to clearly articulate the source of their problem and explain certain solutions that could be implemented as a remedy, the source is usually some abstract or imprecise problem and the proposed solution is generally full of large holes that fully neglect an abundant number of external problems that could arise with such implementation. It's generally a very short-sighted solution that will likely produce more harm than good.

But if people in the population are angry, that's a good indication that some major defects (there are a lot of small defects but that's reality) exist that should be fixed up in some manner or another. But that's about as far as you get when you see that the general population is angry. The many sources of the problem and the mode of treating it is a far more difficult analysis than just listening to distorted public opinion.