This is not a thread to complain about the banning, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people thought he was full of crap and some of the mods did too. This is simply an inquiry as to whether you thought his story was plausible.
My Doper BSoMeter goes off pretty readily, and yet I was really undecided on joecool1983. His stories were way out of the realm of most dopers experience, mine included, but the straightforward way he told his stories had me half convinced they were true. Usually a troll starts tweaking the drama and you can easily see the strings being pulled for the dance puppets dance attempts, but joecool1983’s affectless descriptions struck me as just the way someone who did that sort of behavior would talk about it.
He was a posterboy for bad decision making, but I’m not at all sure he wasn’t real.
I don’t have too much trouble believing that people like that exist. It’s a little less plausible that they’d unashamedly describe their lifestyle on a general-purpose message board like this, but not impossible to believe.
I did wonder, if he’s for real, what his purpose was in starting that thread. Was he seeking validation for his choices? hoping we’d talk him out of what he knew was a dangerous and self-destructive activity?
Almost nothing surprises me anymore. And some people live some pretty fucked up lives they see as perfectly normal. Then throw in some less than average intelligence, desperation, “love”, denial, and lack of shame and bingo there’s that thread. Reasonably believable IMO (as far as it got at least). Now maybe if Vampires or Time travel started showing up we might have had a better idea of its realness.
Is there something specific that he said that made his story unavailable? Because if it’s just “nobody would talk about going to hookers online” then I can’t believe you guys don’t believe it.
An interesting question. There was the palpable sense from several posters in the thread that it couldn’t possibly be true because his attitudes and activities offended and disgusted them so viscerally. The squalid things that he was talking about go on everyday in the big wide world, but they did not want to believe the world was that casually hopeless and vile and stupid. Saying he was a fake put the world right again.
And that’s what made me think it was possibly real. How *casual *his attitude was. There was no typical hurry or fevered urgency of the troll in relaying his activities. It was just “ask me”.
Well, there was his constant referencing the fact that he wasn’t lying. Typically, if you aren’t lying, you’re not going to mention it almost every single post. It could have been a scribal tic, I suppose, but after about the 4th assurance people started to notice. And then there was the way his life became more involved with hers and her pimps every few posts. It manifests more as storytelling than in relaying of actual fact.
I see your point, but I’ve got a bunch of lazy writing “tics” myself so that part didn’t bother me so much. His antics with the pimp astounded me at first, but if he was really infatuated with her that’s exactly the kind of thing he would to get closer to her. There would be no common sense distance.
I think the stories were true. I base this on the matter-of-fact tone and details that lacked the exaggeration of a troll. I think he posted, in large part, as confession seeking some catharsis.
I’ve never met anyone like joecool1983, nor heard such stories, but I’ve had second-hand experience with related cultures and find his story not overly farfetched.
The idea that he might’ve been BSing didn’t occur to me, but I only read his first couple of posts in the thread. From those, he just sounded like a guy who didn’t realize how clueless and pathetic he was.
