There seems to be something fundamentally broken about people who do these kinds of things (when you are unfortunate to run across them in meatspace then you will truly know what I mean). I mean, the individual in question was given more rope on this site than pretty much any other Doper in the history of the board-and simply used it to hang himself. So, whither free will, learning from one’s mistakes, becoming a better human being/more worthwhile member?
“No, I’ll just keep trolling the libtards, constantly dancing back and forth on the line, daring the mods to ban me, until they finally do. It’s all utterly inevitable.”
This isn’t a case of someone with a few personality quirks or blind spots (as someone in one of the closed Pit threads who had met Clothy in person tried to justify). We must needs be talking about a person who is lacking some crucial thing or quality which compels him to do and say these things, over and over. I mean, he doesn’t have anything better to do with his time than to come here and constantly jerk off in the manner described by Budget Player Cadet upthread?
Well let’s say that one day, there’s a thread on Trump’s move of the embassy to Jerusalem. You come in and say, among the conversation going on, “I think this was an excellent move, well done by Trump. This will help strengthen our allies in the region.” Then, when people call you on that phenomenally bizarre statement, you do nothing to defend yourself - you merely pick out the one or two people who put as much effort into telling you you’re wrong as you put into the post (that is, none) and complain about how they’re being mean to you.
Then, the next day, you go into a thread on global warming, and say, among conversation going on, “Ha, this is all a hoax, and I can prove it.” Again, when people call you on that phenomenally bizarre statement, you again pick out exactly the weakest responses and complain about them, while doing nothing to make your case - or maybe throwing out a handful of bizarre buzzwords like “Well, there’s climategate. They hid the decline!”
If you just keep doing this again and again, past a certain point I don’t care if it’s intentional or not - you’re acting like a troll. Your behavior is indistinguishable from that of a troll. It’s not about ont engaging. It’s about a consistent pattern of throwing bombs, then refusing to engage in any more than the most shallow, petulant way. It’s about how every conversation the person joins, they either get ignored, or the conversation goes to shit. If the absolute best-case scenario for someone engaging in a discussion is “everyone ignores what they have to say”, that person is probably a troll.
If my theory is correct, then he was suspended for behavior that he didn’t actually do but which he admitted to for other reasons. So he didn’t really do the same behavior again because he never did it the first time (and he didn’t confess to it the second time). It’s not hard to see where a guy warned against trolling might do something which is not trolling, forgetting that he confessed some time ago to having done this particular thing in a trolling manner on another occasion.
That said, I agree with you that he “can’t complain” about it. For whatever ill-advised reason he did confess to it, and can’t blame anyone else for taking him at his word.
**Budget Player Cadet **has proven to me that I’ve been ignoring a chronic pattern. I admit, while I don’t have anyone on ignore, I got into the habit of skimming past comments by Clothahump in politically themed threads so I really hadn’t noticed any patterns.
I can see now why the mods made their move and why many posters have strong opinions about this particular case.
I don’t think that there’s much more to be gained by continuing this thread on a banned member…