Does arguing against internet trolls cause your personality to do a measure of alteration?Do you become something different, other than what you started out as? ? Do you become a different person if you gloriously smash trolls?
Perhaps..
Case in point
There is a movie called Ender's Game, adapted to a movie from the book of the same name by author Orson Scott Card. In that movie there was a series of increasingly difficult choices to be made by Ender Wiggins, main character a space cadet, regarding every battle he faced.. He was notorious in his battle strategy as the movie opens, and it showed how ruthlessly he played games then later fought with the intention of winning every battle after the first battle.
This was the gift of aggression given to him by his brother Peter, who was a ruthless and an intelligent savage. Peter would make an excellent arch enemy to some hero. That hero being his sister Valentine. Who is equal in compassion to the same exact severity as Peter is in aggression. The polar opposite. And in the middle ground was Ender.. Sliding between aggression and compassion with battles and victories.
When Ender came across the wars he face .. The several battles he fought in his youth.. he would mete out an over arching retribution of severe retaliation to his enemies. So much so, that anybody who fought him either became reactively angry or seriously wounded, and didn't want to play or fight with him ever again... Some were unable to... Well for obvious reasons..
It would be safe to say that Ender had those tendencies inside of him already and the wars and battles provided an opportunity for them to come to light. Was he innocent of the things he did or reacted to? No he got tainted.
My father and I were in dialogue about fair fighting.. Taking a superior stance when your enemy attacks you do not fight them with the same or greater intensity than them, he would say.. Match them and fight fairly. Honor of fighting fair and not just kneeing the guy in the crotch and being done with the battle. I argued that letting the battle linger puts the hero at a future risk to be eventually trapped and killed at the hands of the villiain/ opponent.
A friend of mine once talked about the battle in Avatar when the Military is fighting the N'avi to move from the giant tree and the military has weapons, helicopters and bombs, while the Pandora natives had bow and arrows. It was a massacre.
A battle like that was unevenly matched.
In X-men Magneto said to the fire dude that the fire guy was ," a god amongst insects."
That means as a superior power is present among a people who don't recognize your worth..
What is fighting right?
In the 49 episode Anime series, Mobile suit Gundam Wing, the 5 Gundam pilots said (each in their own way) there was an art to losing. Losing has its glory too. A glory and honor that a machine will never feel. (They were struggling to figure out if it is good to use robot soldiers in wars versus real soldiers)
I'm not sure how that works.. because in any battle the goal is to win.. Losing in some cases mean death, enslavement, fines, imprisonment, injury, loss of family, girlfriend, boyfriend, health, wealth and honor. Losing also feels really bad.
The meat and potatoes
In counseling class we took in college, there was an analogy of a coffee cup and a fist.. When a coffee cup gets hit by the hand the coffee spills onto the floor.. Why is the coffee on the floor? Some would say because the fist hit it... The right answer is because it was no longer in the cup.. If there was nothing in the cup, there would be nothing on the floor.. Brillant right?
Do we let the trolls win? Should we even feed the trolls?
Conclusion
The strategy at play..
I think it all comes down to how much do you care about your opponent?
Is your goal to win them to your side? To learn from them? To have a friendly banter.. To test your metal? To win friends and influence people?
Perhaps?
If you care about them and need them in your life..
however. If you don't care about them.. Well go ahead and Smash dem trolls!! Right?!
Every battle reveals what we are inside. Like Ender said its not only that we win, but how we win that we will be judged by in future opponents... And friends perhaps?