I normally don’t pit people, but this cretin, this waste of bandwidth … guhhhhhhhhh!
Look, Small British Shop Owner, let’s take this in order:
The Cafe Society isn’t supposed to be “high brow,” by whatever fucking, in-bred notions of what you think appropriate. Feel free to avoid the place, or maybe start a sufficiently “high brow” forum of your own. And when you pit a forum, pit it, damnit. This is the Pit, moron.
Your threads are … irritating, irrelevant and petty. We could care less about your username, or any of the proposed alternatives.
Example. This is resolvable by use of a dictionary. And yet this is in GD?!
Example. Are you kidding me? CS is too “low brow”? And yet you’re loading up IMHO with this trivial nonsense?
This is actually appropriate for MPIMS, but really?! I’m breathlessly waiting for a thread by you about how you’re late changing your car’s oil.
To be fair, you have, on occasion, produced a useful thread, and at times produced reasonable posts. But you seem to have not absorbed any significant amounts of SDMB Culture, and seem intent on irritating the posters round you. You don’t even bother to do the most basic self-study in how this board is administered.
Didn’t you see the post in his pit thread? He’s subscribing, to use the anonymity of the internets to post contentious topics and FUCK DAMN what other people think.
This is all part of his master plan, you’ll see. We’ll all see.
Here’s what I don’t get: Isn’t there a board convention that you don’t post controversial topics for controversy’s sake? I have the feeling that that was mentioned in a thread a long time ago as evidence for trolling, but I might be misremembering and I wouldn’t even know where to start searching for something like that.
'Coz it’s being a jerk. It’s one thing to post “Women should only be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, whilst I go out to a strip club and tell the strippers off for being fat and get my cat declawed after driving an SUV to the vet’s surgery” if you believe it and reasonably expect to be able to defend your position (even if you can’t, but you think you can). If you post it just to get a rise out of women, strippers, anti-stripclub people, pro-fat people, anti-declawers and anti-SUV people and you have no intention of legitimately trying to defend the position, then you’re being an ass. You’re pissing people off just because you can.
Sure, people shouldn’t get pissed off about things. They should be able to discuss things rationally and calmly, even if those topics are taboo or contentious. But they can’t. People get angry. And tossing things out there just to get them angry for your own amusement is pretty much just being an asshat, and not conducive to the happy running of a messageboard. Everything descends into flamefests and everyone starts to hate the place, because the trolls are allowed to piss in everyone else’s paddling pools.
Well, I like our little Shop Owner. When I notice a thread he has started, I will normally take a look. Also, he has a rather odd sense of humor and is one of the few folks around here that can make me laugh on a regular basis; but alas, it seems that every few weeks a group of posters decide to start picking on someone at random. For being a message board for “smart” people there sure is a lot of bullying around here.
In this thread, the OP asks “How many conventional cruise missiles to sink the USS Missouri?”
In response, Small British Shop Owner asserts:
When asked to provide more information about his claim, he simply says:
I’'ve always believed that i bit of informed speculation should be tolerated in GQ, but this sort of thing is just bullshit. It’s almost literally “My post is my cite,” and that crap doesn’t fly.
I don’t know what every one has against Shop Keeper. I haven’t read all his threads (though I think I’ve read at least part of all the ones mentioned by the OP), but he seems sincere in the ones I’ve read. He sometimes gets a little inane, but a lot of dopers occasionally start inane threads, I don’t really have trouble ignoring them.
Honestly I get a little embarrassed for the Dope by the way people seem to be jumping all over him.
I have nothing against him in general. Where i’ve noticed him, it’s generally been in rather unremarkable circumstances. But his “answer” to that GQ thread—or, more correctly, his way of answering—was just bullshit, IMHO.
There is a bit of a mob mentality around here. It’s been brought up time and time again, and being “smart” has nothing to do with it. Sometimes there’s just someone or something that irritates people, and they feel the need to throw their hat into the ring about it. Because it’s usually the one against the many, thus the mob idea is formed.
But when you’ve got someone who starts their career on the board demanding people tell him why he should deign to spend his oh-so-precious money on a subscription here, then follows it up by all but admitting he’s going to use the anonymity of this board to troll and just be a jerk then sometimes the pile-on is not exactly unwarranted.
Sure he’s posted some inane things that everyone posts from time to time. Personally I’ve not got an issue with him as a poster for that reason. God knows I’ve posted some inane crap, both as OPs and in response to other threads. I’ve got an issue with him as a poster for the same reason that I think a lot of others do - he’s flounced in with an attitude that essentially boils down to “Dance for my entertainment”, thrown around his weight on topics that he actually doesn’t seem to have any factual knowledge of and then declines to offer cites to back up his assertations (as per mhendo’s post) and as I said, just about admitted he’s planning on playing troll for a while just because he can and nobody knows who he is around here so he thinks he can get away with it.
This guy’s started life as an ass. He may not always be an ass, but he’s not going out of his way to prove that he’s not going to continue being an ass. Which makes people more inclined to jump on the pile, because why do we want someone around in our sandbox when they’re going to be a tosser about it?
I think part of the problem is that there is so much of him. Right now he’s got 6 threads up on the various front pages. He’s started 31 threads in his 20 days here, has over one hundred posts just today. For someone who tends to annoy it doesn’t help that he turns up so often. SBSO, I think you’d get a better reception here if you just focus on one thread at a time (of your own threads) for instance.
I agree 100%. Isn’t a guy who calls himself “Small British Shop Owner” supposed to be quirky? I don’t see what the big deal is. We’ve had trolls here aplenty, but he doesn’t seem to fit that bill. I don’t necessarily want to defend the guy, per se, but the reaction to him seems awfully overblown. If you think he’s a troll, report the posts that support that and let the mods decide. Otherwise, just ignore him if you find him too weird.
Well, that’s a problem with the way this board is run, IMO. I think we should limit or revoke guests’ ability to start threads, and I think we should limit the number of threads members can start during any X period of time. This guy reminds me a little of ralph124c, if I had to compare him to someone already on this board. We can live with a few of those…
