I don’t believe a word of that. Not even a little bit.
What I think is happening is that you’ve realized you’ve overplayed your hand, and you’ve worried about crossing that line and getting banned. So now you’re trying to play the unique snowflake card to avoid the negative repercussions of the deliberately inflammatory shit you’ve posted.
Brilliant trolling, but trolling none the less.
Agreed. Do that, and maybe people will change their mind. But you’re posting way too much to your own pit thread for me to think you’re not feeding off the attention.
Agreed. It’s just as much of a free choice as any other, or as “normals” choose whether or not to kill themselves ; which is to say it might not be one at all but it seems like it (be warned : further asking me about the nature of free will constitutes an implicit contract and duty to keep me in beer throughout the rest of the discussion, which will take us well into the wee hours ).
It’s just that the moving pieces that make up the choice in the first place and whose analysis allows one to make the final decision are weighted/coloured differently (or, for some mental disorders, wholly made up but convincingly so).
Read the second paragraph of my post again, the one you didn’t quote. I said that if you took your own advice and walked away, I might believe you. Instead, you’re back here stoking the fire and feeding off the attention like all good trolls do.
I’m not posting this for you, I’m posting this because it looks like other people are buying your bullshit. Sadly, there’s a lot of gullible people, and even more people who just want to believe the best of people. No one wants to think someone is lying about being a victim, and even fewer will call someone on it, just in case they are wrong.
So if you want to convince me that you’re genuine? Take your own fucking advice and stay the fuck out of the police threads for a while. Quit poisoning every fucking thread on this board about the police and/or authorities. It’s like the fucking Dio show all over again, except with you as the star.
Or because I, for example, think it’s both that his story is plausible and that it doesn’t matter. Someone can be lying their pants off and if it leads to good, intelligent conversation that’s all good. They can be the most honest and genuine person on the planet, and if it just leads to trainwrecks, that’s not good.
In other words, he doesn’t have to prove to me that he’s genuine. I’d like if he proved he can grow as a poster from someone who is an automatic trainwreck into someone with a valuable, different, perspective. You may think that’s impossible if he’s not genuine, and it’s true that if he’s lying he probably likes the trainwrecks. But they are not inextricably linked.
While I’ve occasionally seen good conversation come from liars, it usually is in spite of them, not because of them. Most of the time, it just ends up with a bunch of people beating up the straw-man. (See the recent closed Brittany Maynard thread for a good example of that.) I’d rather read a train-wreck from a poster I believed any day.
Almost certainly. My omniscience has been acting up lately, so it’s almost guaranteed that I’ve missed some. It doesn’t help that the best lies are partial truths, which tend to get past my internal bullshit meter.
Now what does that have to do with the fact that I think Smapti is a liar and a troll?
The dynamic in threads may look a lot alike, but by content I think this is unfair to Dio.
First, I think Dio was mostly sincere. He exaggerated sometimes, perhaps phrased things in deliberately provocative ways (hardly unusual traits, hereabouts), but my impression was that he was generally arguing views he really believed.
Second, whether you agreed with his views or not, whether you found his posting style intolerably obnoxious or not (and any combination of these was possible)–taking him seriously, as sincere in those views, did not lead to the inevitable conclusion that he was an entirely loathsome creature.
Neither of these is true of Smapti. If you’ve read enough of him, you cannot believe that he is neither a liar, nor deeply despicable. The most charitable reasonable interpretation is that he is somewhat damaged, but mostly a profligate lying troll–in sum, really annoying, but mostly pathetic. Any further tradeoff makes him look worse than that.
It has to do with whether I think being a liar matters. You can think he’s a liar and a troll. I think his honesty is irrelevant. We both agree that his methods have not been conducive to good conversation, but he doesn’t need to convince me that he’s honest to reverse that. He needs to improve his posting, honest or not.
You said others were gullible for not thinking he’s a liar. I’m saying that I don’t care if he’s a liar.
I agree fully, and it was only the dynamic in the threads that I was comparing.
The difference between the two shows the difference that authenticity makes. Dio had his faults, but I tended to believe that he was arguing in good faith. I knew people in real life much like him, and reading his posts gave me a feeling of insight into what their worldview was like.
In comparison, Smapti is a cartoon character twirling his mustache. If Dio was a controversial classic novel, Smapti is Twilight. One can potentially expand your world, the other just gives you a headache.
This reminds me of how outgoing presidents not of our preferred party look better in hindsight than the new candidates. Dio was awful (though I don’t think he should have been banned) about declaring things then never EVER backing down, no matter how ridiculous or far-fetched his statements. I think Smapti is a very similar poster.
