Sometimes the troll will confess, either here or on some other board. Sometimes all TPTB need is the troll to establish a pattern of behavior, especially if the troll is also a sock. IMHO, most of the trolls that come here are repeat offenders.
It’s possible to actually believe the things you’re posting, and still be trolling. The main requirement is posting in such a manner as to deliberately piss people off (or otherwise provoke an emotional response).
It can be a fine line between advocating a highly unpopular position and trolling; likewise between just being an annoying and incompetent debater and a troll. While the most blatant trolls are banned instantly, otherwise in the interest of allowing free discourse even on controversial topics we tend to give the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while.
This is the Dope so …
<nitpick> You’re mixing up impunity and pugnacious, two words with different Latin roots. Impunity < Latin, punire, to punish, and pugnacious (or impugn) > Latin *pugnare
*, to fight </nitpick>
As a relatively new poster myself, I had wondered about this also. My experience has been that the moderators give a pretty wide margin to voice whatever view you have. There are rules, they are not complicated so if you read them and follow their intent then there is no issue as far as I have seen. I think it might be helpful - it was for me anyway - to try and find some of the threads where a poster got banned. Doing that was really eye opening for me; I was actually surprised by how long some posters were allowed to prattle on before they were banned. I think the way **Chronos **is describing things is pretty much what I have seen. I’ve been called a jerk on 3 occasions, and told I was half educated etc. on a few more, so I wouldn’t say I’m particularly popular, but the mods have never issued a warning etc. against me - and they did against one of the posters who used a personal attack against me. I feel that there are certain people who want their status as long time posters or who have established friendships on the board to give them more clout than it does. Generally, this is a really good board for discussing any number of ideas; and if you’re like me and sort of enjoy being told what an idiot you about something by people who know much more about it than you it can be lots of fun.
I’m warning you… 
I think a lot of the problems come when, after debating A versus Not A for several pages, it’s quite clear that nobody is going to convince anyone on the other side to change their minds, yet nobody is willing to let the other side have the last word. “Agreeing to disagree” seems to make many people feel their dick will grow shorter or whatever the female equivalent of that could be.
Which is why I occasionally earn some ire when I close threads with ‘you’re accomplishing nothing’.
To the OP, don’t worry about the complaining.
Yes, there are people who complain that the mods are brutally unfair to conservative posters.
There are plenty of conservative posters here who’ve rarely if ever butted heads with mods and plenty of liberal posters who have.
For that matter there are plenty of people who insist this board is unfair to left-wingers.
Don’t worry, if anything this board is far less strict than most places, and I admit that has someone who in the past incurred several warnings(most of which I deserved).
My own personal advice is just try and remember the golden rule, “attack the post not the poster”.
1a. A related problem is that rhetoric is still an imperfectly understood art, even after thousands of years of study. And most have never taken a rhetoric class at the college level. For example, a particularly powerful tool for both persuasion and ignorance fighting is to concede your adversary’s point - and then show how in the broader sense it doesn’t matter. This technique also sharpens your own thinking. Bricker for example understands this at least in part, but too often his debating partners do not.
1b. (Bricker disagrees somewhat with this characterization: he seems to think this is an aspect of anti-conservative bias as opposed to conceptual fail.)
- We never settle anything on this board, and its ludicrous to think that we will. There are too many members, the great majority of whom don’t interact with each other IRL. What we can do here though is identify and lay out the main lines of argument. We should be disappointed not if there’s no resolution, but rather if we miss a large, worthwhile and relevant strand of argument (and dispatch it as appropriate).