A few years back, after spending a lot of time participating in various Usenet newsgroups and attracting a fair bit of unwanted attention along with the wanted, I found the collection of kookologists at alt.usenet.kooks, who made it their mission to identify, classify, and horrify nutjobs.  Not people with legitimate mental health issues - these folks were, in fact, excepted underwhat was known as the Formosa Rule, to wit:  "The truly nuts have enough problems without us adding to them."  No, these are the kinds of people who threaten lawsuits against those who disagree with them, or call the police when someone tells them they're idiots, or forge messages in the names of their enemies when they can't manage to actually make a salient point.  The kind of folks who believe that rainbows are a government conspiracy.

In the process of participating in the study of kooks and kookism myself, the other kookologists and I managed to codify some of the most frequently-seen kook behavior into a list of red flags, warning signs, big flashing WTFs that can be used by the discerning reader to determine when they are faced with a Frothing Whackjob.  This, then, is...Teh WAY of teh KOOK.)  

• Never learn from your mistakes.
• Always practice your mistakes; you may get them right.
• Always pick on those smarter and tougher than you.
• Always believe that only you know the TRVTH.
• Never allow logic or reason get in the way of a good k00k.
• When being overwhelmed by logic and reason: k00ksuit!
• If you are going to be wrong, do it at the top of your lungs.
• When caught in a lie: LIE! Follow up by claiming that you never lie.
• Plagiarism is your friend. Use it.
• Whenever contradicted; morph, start calling people names, and make false accusations. Include the children of your target in your allegations, even if they don't have any.
• When nobody else will listen, post to your own fan group.
• Obviously, since you have your own fan group, this must mean that you have fans. Post prolifically to your fan group - you wouldn't want to disappoint them!
• Everyone reads usenet. Approval here means approval everywhere.
• Post numerous blank posts, or posts containing only a message id.
• Post numerous copy&paste web articles from crackerpot websites.
• Never forget to call kookologists "k00ks."
• If there are several, call them "sockpuppets" too
• When all else fails, accuse various and sundry kookologists of e-mailing viruses to you.  This is a sure-fire method of garnering sympathy and ensuring that the General Public will always see things your way.  An especially effective sub-strategy here is to accuse them of infecting you with the 'Sasser' worm via e-mail.
• Quote notorious scientists or writers - it makes it look as if they approve the drivel you are writing!
• Anytime your computer is infected with a virus, bogged down by spyware, attacked over your internet connection, or otherwise suffers from preventable problems, it's a sure sign government agencies are responsible and are trying to silence you and are monitoring your computer files.
• Ignore all traffic signs and feel free to trespass, you don't have to obey any rules.
• Scare your enemies with lawsuits, police escorts and whines.
• Always back up your empty (albeit noisy) threats with phony LARTs, false police reports, and harassing letters to the FBI and other gubbermint agencies.
• Be vigilant in your redundancy. The more you repeat yourself, the more likely others will believe you!
• Be vigilant in your redundancy. The more you repeat youreslf, the more likely others will believe you!
• Be vigilant in your redundancy. The more you repeat yourself, the more likely others will believe you!
• If you can't find anyone as crazy as yourself to support you in the flamewars you start with the normal population, create sock puppets and use anonymous remailers that shamelessly hang on every word you write.
• When dealing with law enforcement, remember that it is they who have the problem, not you.  Be sure to inform them of this at every available opportunity, as they will surely appreciate your constructive criticism.  Be sure to make them aware that YOU KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!  ("The cops like that, when people know their rights.  That way they don't have to read them to you on the way to the station." - George Carlin)
• The more your fake personalities adulate you, the more respect you'll get!
• When confronted with a reality that you don't like, announce loudly that you are departing, never to return as long as there's an Internet.  Come back in three or four days and claim you were drunk, hacked, abducted by alience, or forged.  Alternately you can just not even mention your prior departure, and if anyone asks you about it, either ignore them or respond with something along the lines of "YOUR NOT THE BOSS OF ME!  *PLONK*!"  People really know you mean business then.
• Always remain clueproof.
• Anyone who does not believe that you are the reincarnation of [$DIETY_OR_PROPHET] is obviously an infidel lacking in faith whose soul in in peril of everlasting damnation.
• When responding to one line challenges, post paragraphs of rants and screed in response.
• Incoherency is not a roadblock to poasting.
• Neither is illiteracy.
• Delusions poasted often enough become fact.
• Claim you will destroy <insert newsfroup> for attacking you.
• When spnaked, send cmsg for Fanboi newsfroup(s).
• Find your Lame, Use your Lame, Be your Lame!
• Post Edit when the TRVTH hurts.
• Always sneck the offending newsfroups.
• Always poast pictures of yourself so you can be admired in all your k00ky glory.
• Always accuse others of the very acts you are guilty of.
• Post lots of boasts about your high IQ and incredible talents.
• If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Anybody who fails to understand this is engaged in a deliberate campaign of misinformation and character assassination.
• Always <plonk> somebody just before replying the plonkee!
• The k00k considers itself the most intelligent person in any conversation, possibly on the planet. Other people are benhighted and ignorant, and have been waiting their whole lives for the k00k to rescue them from intellectual darkness.
• Write a self-published book and claim it a success. Bonus points for comparing it to "Mein Kampf" and/or the Bible.
• Declare yourself equal to a deity of your choice.
• Claim that you've come from other planets.
• Claim thousands of past lives.
• Frothing complaints carry far more weight when you send them from "legal@" some domain.
• Nothing strikes terror into the hearts of your detractors more than telling them that you're archiving their messages for possible use in the future.
• Never forget that everyone else posting to Usenet is a paid disinformation agent looking to discredit you.
• Usenet is governed by US law. If a poster in Romania killfiles you, he's obviously violating your 1st Amendment rights and can be sued.
• Every news admin in the world hangs out in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, and they're just dying to nuke the account of that meanyhead who just called you "f*cknozzle". Drop 'em a line - that's what they're there for, after all.
• alt.usenet.kooks will be closed down. Just you wait and see.
• They've nuked hundreds of accounts in the name of free speech and *yours* will be next.
• The k00k will, without any trace of irony, lie, manipulate, impersonate, censor, and declare themselves powerful in ways ranging from the ability to have an account shut down to being God Herself, in order to convince people that they are not liars, manipulators, censors, or insane.
• Abuse women while telling how many hundreds you've loved. Nevermind that youlook like the love child of Ernest Borgnine and George "The Animal" Steele" and every woman you meet thinks you were a scumbag with bad teeth. You're a stud who knows how to keep his broads in line.
• Remember that your ko0ky klaims are 'facts', and that 'facts' do not require proof.
• Do not neglect to poast your responses to forums that the originator doesn't read. This will make the people in that forum very impressed with how you tear him to shreds without him being able to respond. They like it even better if you are off-topic for that forum.
• Keep in mind that lack of evidence supporting your konspiracy theory actually _is_ evidence, of how effective the konspiracy is in hiding.
• When spanked, always retreat to the safety of the Ad Hominem.
  
• When spanked mercilessly for days on end, proving with each poast just what an illiterate and ignorant fool you are, ALWAYS claim ownership of [person(s),froup(s)]. This works on so many levels. It inspires dread in your opponents that they will no longer be able to poast in their home froup and that they will eventually have to pay rent, to name just two.
• Any problems with your poasts are the fault of the konspirators, who are trying to stop you from preventing the extinction of humanity.
• Konspiracies that are able to subvert whole governments are always unable to silence konspiracy ko0ks.
• The entire United States government is willing to spend millions of dollars for the sole purpose of harassing you.
• Hollywood is making movies based on your personal life.
• Do not consult psychiatrists or other mental health professionals. They are part of the konspiracy, and will sedate you and lock you away and keep you drugged if you tell them the truth.
• Numerology and Astrology are respectable sciences and are useful for proving your case.
• Everyone is Tim Hill, or David Green, or...
• There is a fine line between trolling and kookery. Find that line and cross it repeatedly. When you are killfiled and/or LARTed for net.abuse as a result, claim victory. If you lose multiple accounts, this merely proves that you are indeed a world-class troll, with a black-belt in manipulation.
• If you respond to every post someone else makes, they're obsessed. If they respond to less than 1% of your posts, they're even more obsessed.
• Publishing people's real names, addresses, and phone numbers when there's no other way for you to come out of a flamewar with any dignity is cool, and proves that you are a master of secret internet information stores, and Absolutely Not To Be F*cked With.
• Everyone is out to get you. You can put a stop to this by telling everyone that they're out to get you at every available opportunity.
• You are the only sane one.
• Those that give you a hard time about morally bankrupt things you yourself admit to are just persecutioners of the new inquisition.
• Yelling in all caps and cursing at your detractors is debate. Your detractors laughing at you with sarcastic remarks is obvious anger and jealousy.
• If doing something results in the loss of your account, legal hassles, or blunt trauma injury, do it again. It always works better the second time.
• Asterisks, lots and lots of Asterisks.
• Poking holes in kookscreed is stalking, and is a felony.
• K00ks LOVE to "connect the dots". They are, of course, dots that only the k00k can see.
• "They laughed at Einstein, too!"

..with thanks to Aratzio, Dr. Flonkenstein, Dan Baldwin, Cujo, CJ Osterwald, Jade, Bookman, and John Henry, of AUK. Meow. Original thread at http://tinyurl.com/3fsho - some posts may not appear due to x-no-archive headers.