I don’t think Iv’e ever complained about the closing of a thread before but I find myself in a position of disagreement with the locking of Omegaman’sI Pit Satan thread.
I also disagree with the charge that he was trolling. I don’t think he was. I think it was a sincere Pit rant, it just came through a rather unorthox prism (by SDMB norms).
Omegaman was pitting Satan for a murder-suicide tragedy in Texas. I believe I understood where he was coming from emotionally and that it was not his intent to troll or cause trouble. Blaming Satan (or some other perceived supernatural evil) is a cognitive strategy that some people use for coping with and/or explaining otherwise incomprehensibly horrific events and reconciling them with their faith in a benevolent God. At the risk of sounding condescending, blaming “the Devil” is something which keeps some people from spiraling into feelings of nihilism and doubt.
I believe that Omegaman was venting a sincere emotional response to a news story and even though the paradigm he chose to contextualize it in (and how he chose to parcel blame) might seem irrational or silly to many on this board, I don’t think it was malicious and I don’t think it was insincere.
I also think that some of the posts he got in response were a little OTT and probably more directed at a perceived fundy “type” than at anything he actually said. He didn’t come into that thread bashing homos or atheists or the ACLU or anything. All he really did was say he had a literal belief in Satan. He got defensive in some of his later posts but people WERE calling him crazy from the get-go.
The only thing I think he probably did wrong was post it in the Pit instead of GD, but to him it WAS a pit thread. I believe it was his version of an RO thread, not an intentional troll and I think the closing of the thread should be reconsidered. I think this may be a case where the infidels and lefty Christians were too eager to pounce on one of “them” instead of trying to consider where he was actually coming from.
While I’ll not give a point-by-point defense (Omegaman’s posts are all the evidence you should really need), provocative, nutty, insulting and largely nonsensical responses tend to indicate a troll. I didn’t ban him or anything but, come on.
Is it deliberate? Debatable, but largely irrelevant.
I would have thought that trolling required an actual intent. That’s the point under contention; if Omegaman was deliberately trying to provoke, then he was trolling. If he was being sincere, then he wasn’t. Wrong, sure, and pretty odd, but not trolling. I think whether it was deliberate is very relevant.
This just supports the hive mind mentality others have said exists here. If someone believes other than the majority they are trolls. It’s good to see that the moderator was called on it.
To be fair, the decision to close the thread was the act of one mod, not the result of debate among many. And judging by this very thread, there’s at least five posters who disagree with that mod. Five against one - the only majority we have to judge from at the moment would support the exact opposite view.
You can add me too. I looked at some of his other posts and he didn’t seem like a nutter to me. “Rough around the edges” is a very apt phrase. But we’ve got lots of people who are rough around the edges.
I thought it was weird he was posting in that fashion at all, but I kind of understand where he was coming from.
I don’t have a problem with it being closed - it was going nowhere - but I honestly don’t feel he was trolling.
He said it was reference to a prison custom but I didn’t see it as homophobic. It was figurative reference to male-on-male sexual domination, but people do that all the time on this board without being called homophobic (referring to X as being “Y’s bitch,” etc.). This exactly the kind of thing into which I think people might be reading more than what is warranted because assumptions are being made about the poster based on an unrelated religious belief.
Here’s another vote for “not a troll”, because it didn’t seem like he was poking us with sticks. He seems to believe what he was saying.
I was enjoying that thread and really wanted **Omegaman ** and **DtC ** to continue the discussion. One of **Omegaman’s ** last posts in that thread was of the WTF variety. I would like to have seen where that was headed.
