A3 India Community Forum

1.Namecaller: This defines the flamer. "Flamer" means "namecaller." Their primary purpose in life seems to be to make others feel bad about themselves. When their namecalling hits home, the FPD flamer seems to become stronger while the victim weakens; as if they steal self-respect from others to add it to their own. Sometimes the namecalling seems like mental illness because it is unconscious: the FPD-er seem totally unaware of the namecalling they use, and they'll honestly deny it when confronted.

The namecalling has another interesting aspect: the flamer tries to alter reality by constantly applying 'important labels' to people, and by trying to convince others to accept those labels. Where a normal person would just express his viewpoint on your behavior, the FPD flamer tries to make his viewpoint become something real, and does so by relabling you. At first glance this might look like a stream of namecalling, but a more insightful description might be "attempting to distort reality through application of sussinct labels."

2. Competitive/argumentative:FPD flamers are verbal brawlers, they obviously enjoy fierce arguments and flamewars. And their stance is pure aggressive competition, "kill or be killed," where giving ground or working cooperatively with colleagues is impossible. "If you're not a winner, you're a loooooser!" Often they are extremely uncreative, and see success as something to be stolen from opponents. They don't manufacture their own "joy", instead they want to take YOURS. To get them to change even a single opinion, you must utterly defeat them in a public battle. And more often than not, they will conveniently forget the entire event, and restore their original opinion the next day. At the same time they (ahem!) label themselves as "Open To Reason," as if applying the label makes it so. Very twisted stuff.

3. Amoral: they believe that their insults, verbal abuse, character attacks, lies, and even death threats are perfectly acceptable behavior once "justified." Zero empathy, Zero compassion: totally blind to the pain that their behavior brings to others. Love has no place in their mental toolkit. The very existence of other feeling beings is not really real to them. If they still have a tiny sensitivity to others' pain, they crush it with words like: "she deserved it!", or, "well, they started it!" If you honestly complain to a flamer, expect their response to be "oh, you're so sensitive," or "You're Not Hurt!", said with sneering contempt.

4. Vengeful: Unfortunately, FPD flamers constantly start flamewars: they have an enormous NEED to respond to all insults, even the tiny ones, and even to the ones which any bystander would see as an obvious misunderstanding. Some FPD-ers see others' lack of vengefulness as being disgusting weakness: "I insulted you, and you're such a weakling that you just ignored it."

5. Deceitful: FPD flamers see nothing wrong with lying as long as they're not caught. They constantly lie as a defense, but are extremely skilled at keeping the lies from being seen. As a result, FPD people sometimes seem far more honest than a normal person. They duck responsibility for problems they have caused and put the blame on others; often upon the victims of their attacks. They're dishonest about their identity, often creating "fake personality" or sock-puppet users who SEEM to provide support to their fights on forums. Some FPD-ers believe that their undiscovered lies are not "real", and will smugly say "you can't prove that I was lying," when you have discovered that they are.

6. Narcisstic:They cannot let small perceived insults go by, but must respond. This is because they're using a false, artificially good "self-image" in order to remain blind to their own rotten behavior. Their fragile false image is easily damaged by how they're seen by others. As a result, their sensitivity to "What People Think" is very large, and they will go to enormous lengths to avoid being labeled with negative descriptions. Often they will do almost ANYTHING to avoid having their flaws noticed, or to avoid being embarrassed in public. When things aren't going their way, sometimes they'll drop the thread and go silent for days, then upon returning, lie about being "on vacation" or some such. Escaping embarassment definitely includes amazingly desperate attempts to avoid being proved wrong in front of colleagues.

7. Paranoid: They constantly display secretive behavior, being careful never to freely discuss personal info about their schooling, experience, everyday lives, etc. They commonly hide behind "handles," "online names.

8. No expressed self-doubt. It never occurs to the flamer to first check out if their perception was a mistake. And lacking self-doubt, they will use YOUR self-doubt against you by constantly calling your motives into question during an argument. But note that they never take their own advice and sit down to analyze their OWN motives

9. Self-blind: They cannot see their own mistakes no matter how obvious they to others, and as a result they often act like superior and perfect beings who are surrounded by contemptible inferiors. A capsule description of the pure flamer personality could be "haughty superior arrogance" or "smug sneering contempt." It's not really blindness when someone is fiercely keeping their eyes tight shut.

10. Hypocritical: They constantly give advice to others, but it's very obvious that they don't practice even a tiny bit of what they preach.

11. Egocentric: they have a very low opinion of others, and an exalted opinion of themselves. Their humility is almost entirely absent; they act as if they think they're spotless. They never apologize, ever, and if you should ever apologize to them, they will use it to emphasize your embarassing error.

12. Denying/projecting: They cannot see reality honestly, but must constantly manipulate it by erasing some parts and distorting others. Sometimes their victims don't even have those flaws at all, and the reason for the flamer's attack is nothing but a delusional "projection" of the flamer's flaws onto their victims.

13. Pervasive, long-standing, intense symptoms: Anyone can get angry and "flame" you. And everyone, including both you and I, has a very large "flamer" side to their personality. But having a temper is not the same as having a mental illness. To have a "Personality Disorder", a person has to BECOME the symptoms, so their whole world is ruled by symptoms and little humaness remains. There is a difference between acting like a flamer from time to time, versus taking on full Flamer-hood 24/7. Of course Personality Disorders are also on a spectrum; just because somebody acts normal occasionally doesn't mean they're not FPD flamers.

However, if you are CERTAIN that not the slightest SCRAP of the above information could EVER apply to you in any possible way, and it's a TERRIBLE INSULT that someone could even THINK such a thing about you... well...