How I Fell for the Troll - End of Chapter One
Færytale Beginning XIV: Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic

As a diplomat based in the now temporarily occupied Severodonetsk 2015-2018, I marvelled at two Georgian special forces operatives who lived in the same hotel as I did.
Every morning they emerged with a whole arsenal of weaponry - Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles, RPGs, ammunition,… - in giant bags, like tennis coaches.
They’d neatly decant all their materiel into a bashed up Skoda. And then go off to work killing Russian invaders at the front-line, where I also worked in a different place, 30km away. Every evening, like suburban salary men, they’d return from work like clockwork to the hotel, and eat hearty suppers.
When I heard of the Georgian Legion supposedly a constituent regiment of the Ukrainian army, it’s these two warriors who come to mind: professional, indomitable, focussed, and fearless. That’s my vulnerability.
In the case of Disinfolklore about how many Ruschist Wagner Nazis were killed over the ten months it took them to occupy Bakhmut (another vaporised city I knew well), it is quite easy to avoid being trolled into falling for their trolls about the number of men and materiel Ruscia and its “Wanger Nazi” chef-driven mercenaries lost in endless meat assaults trying to conquer Bakhmut.
That said, too many people fall for such obvious Disinfolklore, including the legacy media outlets that constantly reprint Russian Disinfolklore without alerting superficial readers to the Russian Mana immanent within it. And, remember my mantra: the moment we feel superiorly immune to falling for the troll, we’re at our most vulnerable. Pride Comes Before a Fall became a linguistic meme for a reason! And Disinfolklorists play on our over-confidence in our immunity to Disinfolklore. They draw us into a conspiracy of community, so that we’re inside the in-group watching others’ fall for the troll: just think of those who support Donald or Q-anon or who think Covid is a giant conspiracy looking down knowingly on mere civilians like us taking care not to participate in chains of infection that lead to many deaths and disabilities.
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Well, the joke’s on them, from our perspective. They’re persuaded into becoming the conveyers of manipulative memes, by Disinfolklorists’ triggering their pride that they’re in on the joke that you and I, beings less come to sense, fall for.
Once you have that feeling of superiority over some mere mortal who’s more gullible than you (so you think!), learn to recognise that you’re at your weakest. Your defences down. You fall for the troll.
This very week, I fell for the troll. A lot of controversy’s been brewing online about a civil society organisation in Ukraine called the “Georgian Legion.” Many of us were surprised to discover that the Georgian Legion was not a constituent regiment in the Ukrainian army. Instead, it’s an umbrella NGO that supposedly looks after Georgians who are fighting in legitimate regiments in the Ukrainian army. That’s Troll No. 1.
Georgian Legion apparently raised millions, and many of us thought we were contributing to helping heroic Georgians actually fighting in the Ukrainian army. Maybe we were, maybe we weren’t, but the leadership of the Georgian Legion now appears evasive in the face of questions about what happened to the cash.
Troll No. 2, though, is the Russian Disinfolklorists who jump on the bandwagon of this scandal, and purport to publish new revelations about corruption.
A particular group of Russian Disinfolklorists posing as Ukrainians has been immanent in pro-Ukrainian info-space since the beginning of the war. After a couple of months many of us working daily on interpreting and countering Russian Disinfolklore learned the signature of this group and blocked them.
Yet this week in the face of the Georgian Legion scandal, they popped up again with supposed evidence of corruption among the legion. I shared one of their Tweets, until a trusted pro-Ukraine ally drew my attention to evidence that the author of the Tweet I had shared was part of this specific Russian Disinfolklore operation. I unshared the Tweet and blocked. And now having fallen for these two trolls, my Troll Detector mental algorithm has been improved. I will always fall for trolls. But I’m always aspiring to improve my Incoming Troll Radar’s sensitivity.
In other cases, it is really hard to identify the quality of the Mana in Disinfolklore - if for example you encounter that twenty-five thousand number of dead in Bakhmut without any further information, you might think it is a shockingly high number (which it is) of casualties, without understanding that it is a shockingly low estimate given what we know happened day-to-day over nine months in the struggle to defend that city from Russian occupation.
One solution to the complexities of determining the quality of the Mana immanent in Russian (and other forms of Disinfolklore) is to read Counter Disinfolklore!
We will soon learn a set of criteria that will help us benchmark and distinguish between Disinfolklore and, what I am engaging in here, counter Disinfolklore; between positive, negative, and neutral trolling.
Effective counter Disinfolklorists only accept my interpretations of Disinfolklore after, like a goldsmith, you have assayed by rubbing, cutting, and melting the truths I share with you.
Accept my word, not out of faith, but because it has passed your stringent mental testing regimen. By the time, you finish Counter Disinfolklore you will be such a goldsmith and you will also be an alchemist. You will be able to parse information to determine the quality of its Mana. And, like an alchemist, you will be able to cook up in a cauldron of Disinfolklore of common-or-hi garden ingredients potent quantities of effective counter Disinfolklore.
Congratulations: You’ve reached the end of Chapter One!
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