The Puddybud Series: Monomaniacal!

monomania/mɒnəˈmeɪniə/
▶noun obsessive preoccupation with one thing.
– derivatives
monomaniac noun & adjective,
monomaniacal adjective.

 The world "monomoniacal" appears, as of the end of November 2010, in 238 comments. Let's see who's used the word over the years:

Puddybud shows up quite prominently. In fact his various handles account for 222 out of the 238 usages. Since this series is about having some fun at his expense, some laugh-out-loud yucks, let's drill down into why.

First a quote with some explanation:

You gotta love when one of your own peeps nailed you as monomaniacal. HAs clueless village knuckle dragging idiot is monomaniacal!

One of my own peeps??? Yes, fellow liberal-leaning commenter "Proud  To Be An Ass" in the process of  reacting to Mr. Cynical's "congratulations" to yours truly for solving one of Lee's Bird's Eye View puzzles, kind of, sort of, hinted that along with being a bit odd and a computer nerd that I was - monomaniacal. It's here. Judge for yourself the gravity of what PTBAA said.

So what did Puddybud then do? Snatched the ball and ran with it of course. From 3/8/2009 through 7/20/2010 Puddybud called yours truly the "m" word over 222 times in 222 or so comments. As usual the fantasies got a bit grotesque, overwrought and inflated. Again with some commentary:

LMBBAO, Oh Yes it is moron… Who called you the monomaniacal one September 2008? A leftist just like you. Spotted your filth from far away.

Uh.. Slight correction there Puddybud - it was March 2009. The "m" word was not used once in 9/2008... (and "called" is debatable). And the "filth"? Could that have been solving the Bird's Eye View puzzle?

You see clueless wonder, when you are a higher life form peeps support you. When you are the HA knuckle dragger even your own kind call you monomaniacal.

Yeah right. Again, one guy - maybe..

Keep hope alive monomaniacal clueless wonder, porno king.
LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO

blah, blah, blah - at least 220 more times...

So what ended it? I like to pat myself on the back and say it was the database. On 7/18/2010 we see the beginning of the end:

Remember it was one of your kind who called you monomaniacal.

Once and as you’re so fond of reapeating yourself:
mylaptop:~$ b cols “-f=c -c=handle:matches~’*puddybud’,body:matches~’*monomaniacal’ -C”
+——-+
| count |
+——-+
| 209 |
+——-+
1 row in set

Stupid I’d call THAT.

That particular thread is worth a read-through in my humble opinion. Not only did I use the database to expose the OCD repetitiveness of Puddybud's "m" word attack but in that same thread I fielded other attacks from some hit-squaders. (Puddybud's use of "we" in that thread is interesting in that regard.) I believe hit-squad activity, at least those attacks directed at me, dropped off markedly after that.

And Puddybud? He used the "m" word against me a dozen or so times over the next couple of days - till 7/20. He hasn't used it since. He had apparently, as he likes to say from time to time, "moved on".

Final notes:

Not one single commenter of any political persuasion has used the word "monomaniacal" since Puddybud last used it here on 7/20/2010.

Someone once referred to Puddybud as "monomaniacal" here. This was a little bit after PTBAA's comment. No, the commenter was not a right winger.

Let's chalk this all up, as my fellow liberal commenter Steve would say, to Psych 101 "projection". Doncha' love it?

Brackets

One half of one percent of commenter handles, 80, belong to an elite group. They are handles each associated with over 1000 comments posted throughout the lifetime of HA.org. I posted the top 10 a while back.

Browsing the list of 80.. All the names are quite familiar to me, troll and hero alike, and as the picture above shows, they account for over 62 percent of the comments posted. They represent HA.org's hard-core community of political junkies and hanger-ons and they include the most dedicated and unrepentant of right wing trolls.

A somewhat broader community of 306 handles have posted somewhere between 100 and 999 comments each but they only account for a little over 22 percent of all comments. Quite a few of them may one day soon pass the 1000 mark. Many of them enjoy participating in the HA brouhaha but are either fairly new to it, have dropped away or HA is far from a priority for them.

A modestly more numerous bunch have posted between 10 and 99 comments. I speculate that many of them are again new to the community or they may have started, felt lost in the crowd (or disgusted) and then quickly dropped away.

Lastly there's a very interesting group to me. They account for over 88 percent of the 15,078 handles recorded and yet each handle accounts for fewer than 10 comments over the life of the blog. Quite a few of them if not most of them for sure are just spammers.  Many others are just hit and run commenters, responding to a provocative blog post that's gotten some traction in the wider blogosphere and elsewhere.

But this group also contains some of the most vicious, nasty and vindictive trolls of all.

This group includes the HNMT and members of The Hit Squad.

Late thought: the big lesson to draw is that if I concentrate on 1,748 handles and tag them, then I've in turn categorized over 94 percent of the comments. Pretty useful little report. And I just picked the brackets on a hunch.

Bit of an update: The 88 percent group of handles mentioned above also includes a lot of people making fun of the trolls by doing a variation on their handle. Goldy calls his comment threads "the cesspool". Sue me, I'm a part of it. But this 88 percent group of handles which accounts for less than 6 percent of all the comments I call "the swamp". There's some fun to be had there but only as long as you don't wade in for too long.