What is the matter with you people who continue to let HD hijack threads??? WHY do y’all engage with him?? Why do you let him dominate discussions when he brings NOTHING to the table??
HE will not answer a straight question, but I wish one of you would.
It is beyond pointless. When I’ve been out all day, I’ll click into one of the political threads and see page after page after page of useless BLATHER where people address “points” that HD has made in (I assume) the vain hope that he will see the light or even reply with something other than CRAP.
There are others of his ilk that y’all allow (you know who you are! :mad:) to take over threads. It’s like allowing a heckler from the audience to dominate the routine FOR NO PURPOSE that I can fathom. It’s not entertaining (except to the heckler), and it certainly isn’t informative.
So will one of HD’s sparring partners please explain it to me?
To say you can’t resist isn’t an acceptable reply, as this board has a function that you can employ to avoid seeing his (to you) provocative posts. (Yeah, if someone quotes him, you will see it.)
I don’t believe he and the other disruptors care one bit about the CONTENT of the discussion. They get a buzz from the attention. That’s it. If they did care about the content, then they would advance the discussion with their comments. But. They. Don’t. They just keep the ball in play with suckers who don’t have the willpower or self-awareness to IGNORE THEM.
ThelmaLou, I don’t think that HD does it just for the attention, I think he does it to very deliberately derail conversations that are detrimental to the GOP. He actively shuts down discourse and he is allowed to do it again and again. Remember when he was banned for a week? The Dope was a completely different place, people were able to have political arguments. Now that he’s back, any thread he posts in quickly becomes the HD show.
As for why people do it, I think sometimes posters who aren’t aware of his schtick get pulled in and then other posters who should know better engage to help the person who gets sucked in to HD world. HD’s mission is to shut down discussions he doesn’t like and he’s very good at it (and the mods are very bad at doing anything about it).
I engaged with HD yesterday – it was a slow news day in terms of impeachment updates and if you can get him going on enough tangents he’ll sometimes say stuff that cross a mod instruction. They’re getting less charitable in their rule interpretations regarding him. I’m hoping he gets banned, but both of my “successful” post reports yesterday only resulted in mod notes, not warnings.
I don’t intend to engage with him today since there are impeachment proceedings.
I agree with your assessment of HD. I view him as the asshole relative you have to see around holidays. He’s always invited because he’s married to your favorite cousin. So you have to deal with the son-of-a-bitch. In secret, you kind of look forward to antagonizing him and letting him hear just how big of an asshole you think he is. Even though you know he’s doing it intentionally and he’ll never change, it’s a matter of not letting him get away with it.
Once HD drops into a thread and begins throwing his feces at everyone passing by, I stop going back to that thread. For threads I really want to read, like the impeachment thread, I wait a day or so and HD drops out (I think the number of questions he refuses to answer finally gets to him) and I can then pick up the thread again.
And yes, I’ve been sucked into responding to him and every single time I’ve regretted it. My nightly prayer: Please god, give me the strength to resist wasting my time replying to DipshitDitka.
Maybe we need sponsors, so that if you have the uncontrollable (unconTROLLable ) urge to post to him or one of the <ahem> others, you can PM someone and get talked down off the ledge.
My most recent interaction with him was in the thread about moderates. I had asked bump and Yankee some questions, and he jumped in to, I don’t know, answer for them or something, but directly engaged with me, so I responded. I didn’t initiate contact with him, so maybe that’s better?
After a few times back and forth with him, I disengaged knowing it was pointless, but used one of his points as part of a direct question back to those other poster.
I’m not going to completely ignore a poster when he/she is asking me questions or directing things my way, at least not at first.
I don’t participate in the political threads but I read them. They are generally informative and they aid my understanding of many issues. I have to drop out once HD butts in because all discussion goes sideways, and it becomes a point-scoring contest between HD and whoever has engaged him. All reasoned discussion is lost at that point. It’s gotten worse the last 30 days or so.
On the other hand, the thing to remember about Ditka, is that he isn’t unique, or actually particularly unusual. He represents the 30% or so of the population who are hard core Trump supporters and will frantically twist logic into pretzels to avoid the obvious fact that the guy they backed is a corrupt, incompetent, loon. As faulty as it is, the claims Ditka makes is the best defense the right has to offer, and is accepted blindly by millions of Americans. We can go ahead and ignore him and pretend that those voters don’t exist, at some point we are going to have to deal with them, and having someone around we can use as a case study, documenting its response to various stimuli may be able to help us confront it out in the real world.
) urge to post to him or one of the <ahem> others, you can PM someone and get talked down off the ledge.