taniwha's Journal: Trolls ....

Trolls United Regarding Defamation

An open letter to the internet from Trolls United Regarding Defamation:

First an introduction - what I'd like to talk about are "Trolls" - we've been much maligned over the years but we've decided to come out from under our 'bridges' and once again take our rightful place in society.

Many of you older readers may remember the friendly little man who lived under the courthouse steps in your home town, he was a well-liked and respected member of the community, your parents approved of his occupation and understood that "it was a tough job, but someone had to do it". In small town America in the '50s no one questioned the valuable place your local trolls played in society.

Readers who grew up in the '60s may remember being distraught by Oppie's special friend Max's sudden disappearance from Mayberry after the actor who played him was blacklisted following the McCarthy hearings.

Let me try and explain the whole sordid story as briefly as possible. It all started with what we trolls commonly refer to as "that goat incident". Back in the spring of 1964 there were wild press reports from Eastern Europe about a poor hungry troll eating some goats who woke him up while sleeping under a bridge - naturally the press blew it way out of proportion, someone noticed that not only were there trolls behind the iron curtain, but here in the US too - Joe McCarthy (a lawyer!) came out of retirement and started up 'HURT' the 'House Un-American Reaction to Trolls' - Trolls were subpoenaed, question, publicly vilified and driven from their occupations all across the country, in the south trolls were driven from town by the KKK on horseback. Those trolls whom survived moved to the wilder parts of the country to hide out, some even moved north to Canada.

At the time our knowledge of ecology and ecosystems was not great enough for anybody to predict the horrible results this would cause. As the Soviets were finding out by the '60s if you take away it's usual prey a predator will turn elsewhere. They banned lawyers in most communist countries, which of course explains the plight of that poor hungry troll under that bridge that started this whole mess.

After banning Trolls the US is now suffering from a most horrible scourge. Just like removing the wolves from Yellowstone resulted in Elk herds that multiplied out of control and devastated the grazing for all other species, taking your local troll out from his usual place below the courthouse steps has resulted in lawyers multiplying completely out of control with dire consequences to all parts of society.

We intend to once again become the respected useful members of society our parents and grandparents were. And after much soul-searching we realized that we would need good legal council. As you might imagine this was hard to come by, so we decided that we needed to train some of our own people in the law. I, and my colleagues, worked our way through law school, it was hard, we suffered under much discrimination from the faculty, we spent long nights suffering working through the law books, and days resisting temptation in class. In the end we graduated top of our class - in fact in that year we were the only ones who surv^H^H^H^Hgraduated.

We moved into private practice as "Troll, Troll, Troll and Bandicoot" mostly doing civil rights law for other trolls. Recently you may have heard of the very substantial out of court settlement we received from the Tolkien estate in our libel case. We intend to use this money to fund future legal work for our clients.

Which brings me to the main purpose of this letter .... it has come to our attention that some people on the internet have been using the name 'troll' in a negative, derogatory manner. This must stop immediately. Along with our co-litigants the Spam Industry Council we are today serving a class action suit, on behalf of all trolls everywhere, on all people who have participated in the practice of 'trolling'.

We were lucky that the law firm of Canter & Siegel after some initial reluctance were yum^H^H^H able to help us in searching the Usenet archives to discover the perpetrators and to electronically serve all those who were found responsible.

I hope that this will be the end of this matter.

Thank you for your attention

Timothy T. Troll
Attorney at Law
Troll, Troll, Troll, and Bandicoot
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Trolls United Regarding Defamation will never be defeated!
Take a lawyer to lunch!
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