It’s pretty damned marvellous watching the latesters and the check-kiter (pre-revelation) dig themselves in deeper as they try to argue their positions. Again, it was a very small point, but I think an interesting one, at least to me: a moderately self-aware person would have realized that every further word defending an indefensible position represents grave danger, but many posters are rather un-self-aware. It’s sort of like watching a war movie as a hapless soldier ventures into what appears to him to be a deserted fortress but which is, to us viewers, known to contain a heavily armed and extremely hostile enemy battalion. I salute that character, as he walks into death’s face, and I salute those Dopers, defending chronic lateness, and check-kiting, and belief in God, and belief in no God, who don’t realize they’re getting closer to, not further from, getting blown up. (If this strikes you as a supreme irony–“Oh, prr, you’re describing yourself, man”–I’m not claiming any sort of exemption, and am sure that I’ve provided such a spectacle myself many a time, so please, fold your irony six ways and insert it where the moon don’t shine.) That’s my simple point, and one that I’m mildly surprised hasn’t been allowed to die its own unremarkable death many posts ago. Minus the personal hostility to me, and a few intervening posts where people like Bryan have interjected posts pointing out the blandness of the OP, I’m sure it would have died that death.
Really? Poly volunteered to be my bitch? Whenever I need to act superior to someone, or to vent unreasonably, to just to dish undeserved crap, Poly wants me to unload on him? Wow, what a guy. That’s very generous, Jim, but I hope you don’t mind if I wait for Poly to confirm his availability for such unwelcome duties. If that’s truly what he’s offering to do for me, I have to say, that’s extremely kind of him, if pretty superfluous. I mean, I’ve got personal friends, coworkers, my family already to unload on, but if he wants me to channel all my abuse his way, that’s quite an offer.
What a day. First Liberal offering to shower me with money, and now Poly offering to absorb my condescension. You guys are great! Love ya!
I thought he was being gently chiding at first, but rereading it more closely, I have to agree with What Exit?'s interpretation: he’s just that kind of guy.
I don’t think that is quite what his quote meant or what I thought it meant. Feeling superior to and dumping on should be separate things. Do you not think so?
Now we will both have to wait for **Poly ** to clear this up, but I think he was making a nice offer, mostly in jest. I do not feel **Liberal’s ** offer was in jest and I feel it was rather questionable to make such an offer.
Jim
I’m afraid that isn’t very convincing, unless I’m grossly misinterpeting the “…and (eventually) Pitters!” stuck on the end of the thread title. Doesn’t that suggest you anticipated a negative reponse to the thread and not a rapid plunge into oblivion?
Well, I can feel superior to **Poly ** any tme I choose (though those moments may be shockingly rare to you) but it’s only by informing him of the illustrious heights from which I look down on him (which I’m calling “dumping”) that he can ever find out when those moments occur. I await his clarification, but if he’s simply offering to allow me to feel my emotions–thanks, but I’ve already got that covered.
Some of the threads I alluded to in the OP were not in the Pit, so it would have been inaccurate for me to have addressed those threads and posters as “Pitters” but by including them in this Pit thread, I was allowing for their having made that (eventual) leap.
Dude, buy a small sense of perspective at the corner store. 
**Poly’s ** post appears to be good-natured and fairly friendly. It could even be interpreted as a Peace offering.
Get all righteously indignant over **Liberal’s ** bad faith, bad taste and stupid offer. You deserve to, but how are you reading so much negative into Poly’s post. What has he actually done to you? He spends most of his time on this board making good posts on a multitude of subjects. I am not comfortable with his religious beliefs, but I still think he appears to be a good guy and a good poster. Poly is a pretty righteous dude.
Bryan Ekers, if you believe **pseudotriton ruber ruber ** had ulterior motives in making this thread based on his title, then you fully fed these motives by posting to it the way you did. Reread his Op one more time and try to separate your current feelings for **Pseudo ** from it. Imagine **Poly ** posted almost the same Op. Does it sound so bad now?
Jim
Why should feelings for posters start from neutral with every post? Just as in real life, posters here are informed by their past interactions with another poster. If the OP had been written by Polycarp, people would have read it as if written by someone with Polycarp’s past. As it is, the OP is read as if written by someone with pseudotriton ruber ruber’s past, and the reader’s interpretation is quite different. That’s life.
Yes, how very Christ-like of him.
Well shit, I have no answer to that. But, if I followed your method, how could I ever reply civilly to someone like you.
I keed, I keed. 
In my bad joke there is a kernel of truth. There are several poster I interact with on this board that if I let my prior experience always influence me, I would be acting towards them the way **Bryan ** acts towards PRR.
Jim
I’ll chip in $20 bucks towards the cause if it helps.
It’s actually a combination of What Exit got out of it and Captain Carrot’s first take, and not at all (predictably, I’m sorry to say) what PRR got out of it.
Like this:
"I am pretty sure PRR had me prominently in mind among the people he alluded to in pg. 3 of the OP, and I have a pretty solid hunch he expected to get some vitriol back, which would prove one of his points about Christians to his satisfaction. And he’s right: Getting supercilious remarks about how stupid one is and how intelligent atheists look down on superstitious yokels like myself does tend to joggle my equanimity a bit. But that’s not what I’m supposed to do, according to Jesus: turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, give him my second cloak, and all that bit. Trouble is, they’re duckbilled platitudes these days.
"Ah, I know. Remember Kris’s old song about how the Establishment types were welcome to look down on him – same as they did to Jesus back in his day? I’ll use that – it says what I want to, and in a way that’s light-hearted and witty, not platitudinous and BOMFOGesque or snide.
“And it has a second level of meaning: ‘Hey, PRR? You know all those churchgoing Establishment types that this song slams for looking down on people like Kris? Hate to tell you this, bro’, but from my biased perspective, your attitude seems pretty much cut from the same cloth.’ But it does that in a way that isn’t rude, but purely allusive and with enough humor to blunt the sting.”
That’s all I set out to do with it. What PRR himself makes of it, in his own little worldview, is his own issue – I’ve tried to bridge the gap, make peace, enough times to know he’s not going to let up on his egotistic attitude. Exactly once, and that in private, did he deal with me as equal to equal. Otherwise it’s been, “Bring out your delusions so I can sneer at them.” And I will answer him or not depending on whether what I have to say is potentially of benefit to some third party, because it surely is falling on deaf ears with PRR.
Which people are you concerned about? Do you mean the ones in the threads that the OP mentions? If those people aren’t already hurt by what people have said in those threads, nothing that can be said here would change that.
Could you or anyone else in this thread please explain what caused this change to the OP’s reputation?
For those of us playing at home, this thread is really hard to follow because I’m agreeing with all of PRR’s points in the OP and what he has said about the OP in this thread, but the rest of the thread is reeeeealllllly confusing.
Badchad was coming under attack for his relentless Polycarp stalking, and for some reason PRR seemed to take it personally. PRR goes ballistic, then he starts claiming that tomndebb and the whole board is completely biased against atheists but he won’t give evidence because no one would believe him even if he did, and this went on for pages and pages and pages. Then he keeps starting threads like this, and that’s about it.
I will try. pseudotriton ruber ruber was a relatively quiet poster who did not make waves for years. Recently he got fed up with the “The Religiously deceived” and threw his support in various threads behind an unpopular poster Bad Chad. Bad Chad had already built up a lot of ill-will by constantly attacking **Polycarp ** and only posting about/against religion and skirting the rule of “Don’t be a jerk”. As pseudotriton ruber ruber supported him in a series of threads and is a very militant atheist, he has now pissed off many people who either think he is too rude, a jerk or actually just hate him for being a militant atheist. Compounding the problem is **Polycarp ** is a well liked poster who has long history of positive contributions to the SDMB.
So pseudotriton ruber ruber has gone from a poster that was either unknown or mostly liked to a poster that has ruffled many feathers. A few of his “fans” leapt into this thread to find offense at his title.
I think this is a fair summary,
Jim
Thanks for the summary, both of you. I’m vaguely remembering this since it happened when I first got here. I don’t think I got involved because I didn’t understand it then, but don’t quote me on that since I remember putting together a post in my head about it, but I don’t think I posted it.
So both of your summaries are somewhat similar. They both seem to indicate that PRR got a bad reputation from defending someone with a bad reputation. If that’s so, I’m not understanding. If you pick the wrong side in a debate and side with a person with a bad reputation, you’ll get one also? That doesn’t seem right.
I vaguely remember the whole issue of stalking. If it’s stalking to show up in threads where you disagree with a person just to disagree with them and not because you have anything substantive to say about the OP, wouldn’t this thread qualify as that for many of the people that showed up here?
As far as there being a bias against atheists, What Exit? has just pointed out and I’ve seen a few Pit threads on this that militant atheists are not appreciated here. The line between atheist and militant atheist can be a fine one in debate I suspect as the line between Christian and fundamentalist Christian is sometimes a little hazy. Is PRR in the militant atheist camp because of the way his posts are written or for some fundamental belief he has about atheism–like perhaps that all theists should be eliminated or something like that?
Does Polycarp being a well-liked poster here mean that his posts are not open to criticism? I know you’re not saying this. But isn’t that implicit when you use that as a reason that one person got ostracized and the other didn’t? This is happening in GD and not in MPSIMS, right?
Thanks for helping me to understand this better.
Although this offer has already been settled, I would like to clarify something that you said. Hypothetically speaking, if you already had another user name, that would also make you a troll by definition, correct?
For most people that would be discouraging. For others, negative attention is better than no attention at all.
Nothing that I have seen has convinced me that he is a member of the teaching profession. A certain level of language arts skills are expected of English teachers. And 100% of the academics that I have met remember what their doctrates were in. That isn’t something that slips the mind over two or three decades unless they suffer from dementia or brain damage.
He is considerably naive about the responsibilities and powers of department chairs. He doesn’t seem to know how classes are selected, organized, funded, etc. He reminds me of the students who think that faculty meetings are for the purpose of talking about the individual students themselves.
His responses to criticism and even correction (example: Bryan’s correction on spelling his name) indicate to me that he would not hold up well in an academic setting where criticism from peers is expected and even encouraged. Criticism from students might provoke a very unprofessional response. Over time, I don’t think he could deal with the reality. Therefore, I don’t think that he has ever been a classroom teacher. That’s just my opinion as a twenty year veteran of “the front lines.”
I agree with you and you own posts serve as an example. If your sentences were not so frequently poorly constructed, I might believe your claims that you are the chair of a large English department.
I think there is some truth in that, but I don’t know Liberal’s motives.
ruber, you have a flamboyant style and a good storytelling ability if you would just exercise a little control. Have you ever looked into oral storytelling traditions, folktales, etc? They seem to be growing in popularity. Theater is another possibility. You do have the gift of gab. It just doesn’t translate well to the written word. I would think that you would make an entertaining host but a difficult roommate.
First off, you are welcome.
Defending someone with a bad rep will not get you a bad rep most of the time. Picking the wrong side usually will not either. You need to ask some of the others why **PRR ** was earned this level of dislike. He seems to have crossed some line however.
Part of fighting ignorance would in theory be a willingness to listen to other opinions and learn from them. So fundies and militant atheists are scorned more than most. I lean towards atheism, so militant atheists do not offend me while fundies do. Toleration of fundies appears to be lower than even the most extreme atheists from what I have seen so far.
Polycarp’s being well-liked and respected does contribute to the attacks on him by **Bad Chad ** being taken extra negatively. However, his posts are open to criticism. It was the stalking that was that caused the ostracizing.
Jim
Speaking of stalkers, why doesn’t this stalker get the negative reaction that Bad Chad did. Zoe you act like as much of a stalker as BC did. You should probably just put Pseudo on your ignore list. He obviously irritates you too much. I could nitpick your so-called language expertise based on the paragraph above.
doctrates?
Jim {Please note I openly acknowledge my lack of mastery over the written word.}