This is sensible in the current social climate.

Yeah, all the time. It's the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don't have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don't like them, but at least they're engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people's buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That's an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don't bother voting while I'm there, so I answered inaccurately. I'm just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don't downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it's probably not a troll, I don't downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don't downvote through people's comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don't upvote very often either, since I'm reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we're still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn't realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn't necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn't know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It's like when you're trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much what they do, isn't it?

If either of those figures is actually accurate from an end-user standpoint, then the entire downtime must be coming during my primary periods of usage.

Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

How do they change their innate intelligence? We're not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?

We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone's capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.

We'd just get a new one made out of water vapor. I'm sure everything would be fine.

People are allowed to support whatever political causes they wish, so long as they are willing to engage civilly and fairly with other people. This is how the modern world works, with dialogue and debate instead of censorship, cowardly avoidance and control.

As possible as anything else, but it would be unusual. I find it strange that people are so eager to reach for unusual explanations when the actual, conventional extremist trolls absolutely exist. This would be 100% in-character for them, and would benefit their goals very clearly.

Occam's Razor.

Additionally, they would try to point the finger at absolutely everyone except for them, as that would clearly serve their goals of general misinformation and distrust.

Huh... so this probably is more sophisticated than a single acct breach then. Lovely.

This'll definitely be remembered. It's good for us, we needed the wakeup call.

Life is nothing but slippery slopes in all directions. Get used to it and stop falling for it as a line.