Meeting A Troll
If you've ever seen very young puppies playing, you know that it's not as cute as it sounds. There's yelping and pain, and often even blood as the puppies bite one another mercilessly. But as the days and weeks pass, that stops; by being bitten, the puppies learn that biting hurts. It takes a little while, and is perhaps not the most pleasant of methods, but it's what their minds can process.<p>Some people are the same way. It's a cruel thing to force a bully (or its net-cousin, the troll) to look in the mirror and see what they've really done; what they really are. It messes with a person's head in a way that those who haven't experienced it cannot understand. But many of them legitimately NEED that kind of cruelty; it's the language they speak, the stimulus they know how to sense.<p>It's still cruel, mind you; it shouldn't be shied away from, but it shouldn't be glorified or looked forward to either. Sometimes it's not even possible, especially in the age of the Internet. But when it can be done, I'd call it preferable to bringing in the authorities. It's less wasteful, on account of not throwing up lifelong obstacles for the troll to overcome, and when properly applied it hurts worse than the law would allow our authorities to inflict anyway. Justice and vengeance, all wrapped up in a nice, neat package.