I don’t think they should be banned; I think they should be mocked.
(The threads, not the tragedies. Usually.)
I’m in favor of ALL tragedies being mocked, except those that affect me. Brooks’ difference between comedy and tragedy and all.
AMEN! I don’t really want to read about the molested and murdered infant of the day and I would like to avoid those threads, but a lot of the time the vague titles make it hard to do.
Other than that, if people want to read about that stuff and be outraged, let 'em have their fun.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I exactly understand RO that well. I’ve been here for four years, and I normally avoid the pit. Ninety percent of the posts here seem to be based on crap I don’t really care about. Bitching about crap on TV? Is that RO? What about bitching about bad parkers or drivers? That seems to be what the pit is about anyway. I can’t really see the need to ban those types of posts. Half of the time I post a pit thread, it’s about some crap in society that I’m pissed about that you couldn’t mention in normal life.
So do a better job of defining RO and maybe a few hypothetical examples and then I could possibly get behind it.
Merkwurdigliebe, the RO posts are basically outrageous things like children being murdered, puppies being burned, things that jump out from the headlines. “Man drowns 40 kittens” or “Recently released pedophile murders child.”
Outrageous items of the day. Many Dopers think that some people just post them to get a rise, as opposed to personal or “closer to home” type things. They are less weighty than world events, or commonly Pitted issues like the war, politics, etc…
It’s a “bad shit happens every day, you don’t have to point it out, we fucking realize that” kind of thing.
At least that’s my understanding.
You know, banning RO threads would really help me out. Today alone I burned 40 puppies, performed 20 abortions of fetuses produced from rape, ran over 90 elderly women, sent 2000 troops to Iraq, called 15 people niggers, slaughtered 42 Jews, and spit in 3 people’s coffee. Getting rid of these type of threads would really help in lowering my negative publicity.
You mean like this one?
Damn you, I mock thee from afar.
I don’t like those threads either, but I don’t support banning them. It would be nice, however, if people would voluntarily consolidate them into some sort of Oh The Humanity! thread, kind of like the thread for tiny rants.
Good idea, make it weekly RO thread. Kinda like a MMP for the Pit.
Hmm. I feel like this would lead to a kind of morbid oneupsmanship; a series of escalating You Ain’t Seen Nuthin yet links.
Yeah, but I’ll bet you were slacking, and just called 15 of those Jews “niggers” before offing them… 
AND spit in the coffee of those who had any. You really have to try harder!
(There’s probably some overlap between the 90 old ladies and the 42 Jews as well. Slacker. Count Padder!)
Personally, I don’t get the outrage some people show about how people these days are ignorant and apathetic about what’s going on in the world. Me, I don’t know why they’re so mad; and I don’t care!
(Oh – and to address the OP seriously? I don’t care for these RO threads much, either. I avoid them by not opening them – just like I avaoid all kinds of other threads I’m not interested in!)
Yeah, but they would all be in one thread. And that could get interesting in itself.
Quoted for necessity.
Heh, sorry for stating the obvious, I meant that they would be confined to one thread, and not randomly all over the Pit, and all of that RO in one thread could well blow up into a massive entertaining righteous indignation fest from hell.
Kill all naggers!
Hmmm. Nope, still tense and obnoxious.
Wow, is it that hard for you to not open and read (looks at the current list in The Pit) a total of three (maybe four, depending on how you define RO) threads? If you don’t like the thread, don’t open it. It’s not like the majority of Pit threads of of this type, most of them are the types of things that the OP seems OK with posting Pit threads about.
This is the equivalent of saying we should ban all posts about food in CS, because you personally don’t care at all about food, and all those damn posts about food detract from the quality of the literature, theater, tv, movie, and music threads. The fact is, they don’t. The percentage of food threads in CS seem to be on par with the percentage of RO threads in the Pit, and based on the several threads we’ve had on food and the many people who said they would eat nothing but a “human chow” were it invented and mass marketed, there are clearly lots of people who don’t give a flying fuck about all the food threads in CS, yet are they starting a pit thread? No, because they just decide to not fucking read the thread, and you can easily do the same with the threads you don’t like.
I don’t know, my ex-wife was pretty good at nagging, and I thought it was obnoxious and it made me tense.
I don’t get the impression the OP seriously wants to ban RO threads, but wanted to throw out that some people think they are irritating, and to open a thread where people can bitch about them.
But at least you don’t drive an SUV while talking on a cell phone.