How miserable does someone have to be to ‘troll’ a cute dog picture?

By David McElroy · April 30, 2019

I got home just past sunset Monday evening. I took Lucy out into the back yard and she ran around a bit. Then she ran over to me and looked up with this sweet expression. I had the camera with me, so I fired off about five shots. It was almost completely dark, so I didn’t expect to get much.

One of the shots was in focus, even though the shutter speed was a sixth of a second. She had stayed still for that instant and I had miraculously held the camera steady enough, so I got a good shot in the dim light. I’d gotten lucky.

After cropping and editing the picture as usual, I posted it to Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. Although it’s nowhere close to the best picture I’ve seen of Lucy — even lately — it was well-received, especially on Reddit.

But then the trolls started on Reddit. Although the vast majority of people loved the photo — and it had received more than 17,000 upvotes by 3 a.m. — there were a few bizarre people who were attacking me over the picture. Why? I still have no idea.

It seems as though some people saw the reflected blue light in her eyes and concluded that somehow the picture wasn’t what I claimed. I’m still completely baffled about what the point of this alleged deception would have been.

There were people who said the reflections in her eyes indicated that it was blue skies and white clouds, presumably meaning they thought I shot it during the daytime instead of when I did. In reality, the reflection is the last blue in the sky plus the trees over us. Again, I’m completely confused about what the purpose of such deception would have been.

None of it made any sense.

I can ignore these trolls, of course. This isn’t anything that matters. It won’t affect me in the long run. But I can’t figure out why this happens — because it happens to me every time I have a photo on a public site that becomes popular.

When a lot of people like something, a minority will show up to attack me for the most bizarre things. And it never makes any sense.

How miserable does a person’s life have to be for him to decide it’s fun or worthwhile to become an anonymous troll just randomly attacking people on public social media sites? I have no idea what turns a person into that sort of banal monster. I’ll never understand it.

This isn’t just about this picture. It’s not just about me.

It’s about social media in general. And it’s about what human beings are at our core.

Why does social media make these sorts of attacks possible so easily? Why are certain sorts of people so likely to jump on the bandwagon of an attack, even when there is no possible motive for the deception they are making up? Why are they so eager to tear people down?

Why are humans so likely to hate anyone who does something which is praised? Why do people look for reasons to hate any innocent thing — even a cute picture of a dog — instead of just moving on to something else they might prefer?

What makes us invest our time in attacking and destroying — in big ways and tiny ways — when it’s so much easier to just let others live their lives?

I don’t have an answer. I don’t pretend to understand it. But my gut tells me that this is part of an irrational hatred inside the human race. I suspect there’s at least a little bit of this inside all of us — and I think it comes out in irrational ways that we try to justify to ourselves as reasonable.

I don’t understand how the human race has survived this long. I don’t understand how we’ve stopped ourselves from killing each other off

The experience reminded me of a recent chilling episode of the public radio show This American Life which looked at the online conspiracy theorists who invented bizarre explanations about why the Sandy Hook elementary school murders never happened. I don’t mean that me being attacked over a dog photo is the same as parents having their lives turned upside down by insane people, but the mechanisms involved seem disturbingly similar. (I strongly urge you to listen to that show.)

Online trolls might usually seem inconsequential, but I suspect they are indicative of far deeper issues embedded in human DNA — and I suspect all of us are just a little bit insane in ways we don’t understand.

Most of us manage to keep our insanity under control most of the time — at least enough to allow society to function — but I fear these online trolls hint at the ways in which human society remains hopelessly enmeshed in hidden forces which still threaten to destroy us. I hope I’m wrong.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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