IMO, and of course, I may be wrong, I think it was a flipant remark that got out of hand. Again, IMO, Lib has some history on this board and some here are hostile towards him (justifiably? I dunno.)
He had at one time been on probation (if I recall, I don’t follow these things well.)
Anyway, once he made the remark, and then once PRR accepted, he was kind of backed into a corner. If he said he was kidding, he would have been hounded by it for quite a while. So it esculated. And kept esculating. Neither gave in and it ended badly.
This is just my opinion. I’ll be honest though, I only skimmed all of the relevant threads, so I could easily be full of it.
If you apply the same to HAL (the runaway computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, you get IBM. Arthur C. Clarke was reportedly surprised when someone pointed this out.
Given that there is a real life human being named Quentin S. Smith (an instructor or professor at Western Michigan U.) who is a proponent of atheist thought, (although I am pretty sure that the poster is not he), I would consider the retrograde initials to be a coincidence before I ran out and thought “sock” or “troll.”
Many things are possible, of course, but we conservative types* prefer to take our time before we rush to judgment.
You’re missing the obvious: rearrange the letters in tomndebb and you get “bombed TN”.
That’s right, the infamous Tennessee bomber, right under our noses this whole time! And he would have got away with it too, were it not for these meddling threads.
QSS, I have some comments and questions for you, if you’d like to address them.
You read really fast. To read this thread in half an hour, at the time you say you did, is to read about one post every three seconds. That would include changing pages, and this server sometimes does that pretty slowly. I’m just curious, because you said in Great Debates that it took you forever to read.
Your very first post, when you registered yesterday, was to open a thread asking why believers in God get a free pass. That is remarkably similar to the observation made in this recent post (and others) that “Xians are given a pass on the SD” while other supernaturalists are not.
In your new thread, you mention your friends in the science department with whom you deal on a daily basis. Do you teach? If so, what, and at what level?
The usage of “this” in what did this “prr” do triggered a Homer Simpson image for me, such as when he tried to hide from Lisa the fact that he was Pie Man. Why would you say “this ‘prr’” instead of simply “prr”? A rather odd construction, to me, not unlike someone feigning ignorance of such a character.
In your first-day-first-post thread, you say that we gave you the impression of promoting skepticism and rational thinking, which implies to me that you had checked out the board enough to become familiar with it. But shortly thereafter, you confess a lack of familiarity with this board. So basically, I’d like to know why you would open a thread specifically citing the board’s promotion of skepticism without having become familiar with the board’s skeptics?
I couldn’t help but notice certain grammatical quirks in your posts, such as hyphenating gerund phrases like “well-meaning”, similar to how it’s done here. No big deal in and of itself, but when combined with everything else, and being a pet peeve of mine, I just wondered.
You mention that this is the most active and interesting board you’ve seen. Did your less active and interesting board(s) use this same software? You’ve done quite well, hitting the ground running, with all your formatting, quoting, paragraphing, and whatnot. You are to be commended as an unfamiliar newbie for posting in the community’s standard style. just as though you’d been doing it for years. Even geniuses take some time to acclimate sometimes. You should see some of Apos’s early stuff. I’ve often done a practice post or two in ATMB, and I’ve been here since '99. But these things may just come easy to you.
Would it be your opinion that a person can choose to have faith in God? If so, could you make such a choice for yourself?
Depending on your responses here, I might have some follow-up questions or comments. Thank you.
This is the thread that never ends… It goes on and on my friends… Some people, started posting without knowing what it was… and the thread goes on forever and forever just because…
The rules on calling people trolls were enacted precisely to avoid this situation – established posters playing message board detective to try to out new posters as socks or trolls. Every time someone is wrong, a new poster gets harassed for no reason. Not cool.
We’ve let quite a bit of casual “is guest X a sock?” speculation and innuendo pass uncommented upon since the troll-calling rule was relaxed in the Pit, but out-and-out interrogation is over the line. If you believe you have that much evidence that a new poster is a sock, email it to the mods.
This thread has gotten off course enough that I’d going to go ahead and close it. People still wanting to discuss the Liberal vs. pseudotriton ruber ruber affair (or any of the other discussions spun off of this thread) can start a new thread.
