Endlessly agitating, unceasingly mischievous

Oh dear. Last night I realised I'm something even worse a troll: I'm a contrarian. Someone who takes a contrary position. Jon and I often lament our Interplodge participation as being essentially reactive: someone talks rubbish, we put out the debunking kit, with a sigh and a slightly demented grin. (In my case this stems partly from 90s backlash bullshit; my activism, such as it is, arose from countering anti-feminist lies on Usenet. In Jon's case it involves an awful lot of looking things up in DWM.) The nature of the net channels a lot of discourse into this, erm, channel: someone says something, someone else disagrees, and back and forth it goes, sometimes for years on end. This habitual contrariety allows others to set the agenda, so you're always battling on someone else's turf, but it does have two advantages: one, when you have already been branded a troll/racist/misogynist/whatever, you have nothing to lose and can therefore speak your mind freely; and two, you can catch fresh insights when they arise from the melee like new-hatched butterflies, while everyone else is busy violently agreeing with each other. And sometimes violently agreeing with you, which is always entertaining: sometimes when you cede a point to an opponent, they are so confused that they try to argue you out of it.

How private is your LJ?

Do you consider your LJ to be your private space, or a public arena, or somewhere between the two? I think of mine as very public, and flock anything I don't want to share with the universe, but I often bump up against people who consider their LJs to be much more of a personal space, and don't want the likes of me friending them, disagreeing with them, etc. I think that attitude is understandable and try to respect it; but it's not always obvious that this is someone's attitude, and suddenly I'm right where they don't want me, ie, in their face. who_daily has caused a bit of trouble now and again by linking to folks who didn't expect the whole of fandom to suddenly turn up in their journal, and who weren't actually looking for a debate, thank you very much. So tell me: how public do you consider your LJ to be?