Responses to trolls

I recently had the interesting experience of someone trolling me and attempting to press my buttons but missing. They picked on something I might very likely been sensitive about, but actually it turned out that I wasn't.

The rest of the comments were interesting, however, in that I treated them as a thought exercise, "can I justify this apparently reasonable opinion I hold against a skeptical questioning?" and actually found it interesting. However, I thought it was a purely intellectual exercise: I didn't think there was actually very much legitimate doubt about what I meant that could do with clarifying, just that it's a good exercise to try justifying ANYTHING you'd accepted as obvious.

But several friends have spoken up in favour of the technique of challenging people's assumptions, and I resolved to answer the question: WHEN is it a useful edifying Socratic approach, and when is it purely provocative? I am now going to use an analogy which doesn't add anything factual to the question, but hopefully commits you emotionally to the points I'm about to make.

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Stoke on Trent

I am going to investigate the possibility of moving to Stoke-on-Trent in order to move in with livredor on a trial basis. Woo (but scary)!

Fiction: Hailstone and Magmae

"Paradoxically, the more powerful a psychic, the less likely they are to have any affect on society. They just explode – pfoof – in a shower of frogs and that's--"

"No, Violet. They don't ALL explode in a shower of frogs. Some of them explode into a shower of sunbeams, or a shower of rain, or a shower of sudden urge for electoral reform--"
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