It's lovely that you read so much into what I posted. Perhaps you're an idiot. Perhaps not. Perhaps I didn't explain myself properly. Perhaps it was explained just fine. Without context, it's somewhat difficult to tell which one is more likely. Even if we were to try to come to a conclusion based on a "preponderance of the evidence" - we have almost no evidence to base things on. You have no character to bring to trial (no, not a court of justice, but even a court of opinion). All we have is what you actually say - in absolute isolation. Perhaps you're the same as the previous anonymous monk. Perhaps not. We cannot assume. Even if you were to claim to be the same anonymous monk, there is nothing to substantiate this claim. At least with the "troll" monks, we can substantiate their character claims based on their login (admittedly fallible, but still substantial).

If I find that I agree with someone most of the time, or disagree with that person most of the time, I can use that to predict (with reasonable certainty) whether I'll (dis)agree with them again in the future. Perfect? No. Prejudicial? Yes. Lazy? Hell, yes. Wrong? That's in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I don't see a problem. Because if I were to spend time minutely investigating everything some well-known troll says, just to find out that this is, yet again, another troll, I wouldn't have time to learn things of serious value, or to spend with my family.

Does that mean I agree with or like everything that TheDamian or TimToady says? No. Will I follow all of TheDamian's suggestions? Definitely not. I completely disagree with some of the things attributed to him in his book that I've read on PerlMonks. But I've found that, by and large, what he says makes sense and is well-defended, and will likely spend more time reading what he has to say about style and advanced perl programming (though maybe not political or anything I've not concluded he's a reasonable expert in yet) than, say, perl_lover_girl (the owner of the current "worst node of the year"). Not much different than how most monks are likely to read jesuashok's and madtoperl's posts with some skepticism about originality.

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" holds true in both directions. We're probably hypervigilant on plagiarism - but being accepting of experts of their expertise does not seem to be a problem.

Am I proud of this stance? You seem ready to label me as such. I am not. Nor am I ashamed of it. I see no reason to be proud nor shamed by what I think is natural human tendency, especially when I see no better option that gets me better results for such a relatively small cost.

You decry my convictions - how pathetic. I said why I didn't want to label people: just because I find someone to be trollish is no reason to make that a public label that may influence others to label them one way or another. I'm doing not much different than you - you don't want people to be influenced by your nick as to the value of your post, I don't want people to be influenced by my nick as to the value of these others - either positively or negatively. Except I'm following the other rule: if I have nothing nice to say about someone, I'm simply refraining from saying anything at all. Rather than taking potshots, hiding behind full anonymity, I'm stating my position, and staking it to my public persona. Sure, there is some pseudo-anonymity since my nick isn't associated directly with me, personally. But I'm betting there is more than one monk who could know the association between my nick and my real identity if they cared enough to pull it from their archives. A few choice google searches would probably expose the link as well. That said, this pseudonym I use here is already associated with my history on this site, something that remains for all to read/search through at any time. It is that "good name" that I keep, and it's that which provides my posts with context.