Trolls love the attention, so making the poster disappear deprives them of that attention and, IMHO, is the right course. Sucks the oxygen right out of the fire he was trying to set.
Yeah, i was treating it as an actual new poster, not a troll. Real new posters should get guidance. Trolls should just have their posts go away.
I’m gonna miss ol’ Horny Puppy.
But he didn’t use any undefined acronyms - maybe we should have let him stay to raise the level of discourse?
You, I like.
@ASL_v2.0 has created an entertaining thread where an OK-ish poster is totally giving us an unwitting masterclass in the mental processes of somebody starting out OK-ish (for ishy values of “ish”), becoming a clueless fuckstick, and gathering speed on the downhill slide into becoming a glorious flaming fail of a spluttering troll.
Great fun. But the crowd is about to lose patience so this is gonna go brown pretty soon.
This search url will find the thread for you without connecting this post to that thread or alerting anyone we’d rather not alert:
https://boards.straightdope.com/search?expanded=true&q=%23the-bbq-pit%20%40ASL_v2.0%20in%3Atitle%20acronyms
Yes, you are being very careful, and so cryptic that on looking at the last 50 posts on that thread I have no idea who you are talking about, unless it’s the target of the pitting. And if it’s that poster you’re talking about, they may be about to go down in flames, but I don’t see anything trollish about it.
I believe he means the target of the pitting, and I agree that the pittee is committing a massive self-own. He may or may not be trolling at this point, but clearly can’t stop himself. We are all wrong. Only he is right. etc etc
But it’s far more complex than that… The great majority of us secretly agree with him, but our deep psychological flaws, our need to be loved, are preventing us from speaking up in support. Peer pressure and weak-minded obedience to authority are leading us to torture him in this Pitting, in a recapitulation of the Milgram experiment.
(This is not exaggeration or satire. He has literally said all of this.)
@Roderick_Femm : @Sunny_Daze and @Riemann nailed it.
My mission here was to point our readers at that thread. Reading it to enjoy the self-owning (thanks Sunny; great phrase) is up to the reader, such as yourself.
That’s surprising to me. When I left the thread, he was getting what I would consider decently positive responses, with people saying the OP was being too harsh. I could tell by the number of replies that something had gone down (which is why I noped out) but this was not what I expected.
Is this their first pitting? I know that, when I was first pitted, I freaked out with unexpectedly strong emotions which clouded my judgement. (I call it “angry logic.”) And, while things are getting better out there, we all still have a lot of emotion built up due the pandemic and such.
I’m always impressed that so many of you can read that sort of thing and get entertainment out of it. I find I usually cringe, get angry, or both.
Exactly, I made this comment later in the thread. Most people’s initial reaction was that the Pitting was over-the-top harsh. Then there was some productive discussion of the underlying issue. Then the Pittee started posting… and posting, and posting, and posting.
He’s obviously getting heavy snark in response, but the tone is really not one of “entertainment” like it would be with a ridiculous troll. It is indeed cringeworthy, and most of the responses are more along the lines of “get a grip, for fuck’s sake”.
I will say that we’ve got a couple of trolls hopping into the thread now stirring the pot. One of them is a box.
That’s not “angry logic”, that’s “angry stupidity”.
This is “angry logic”:
What would you say to the fact that Milgram was one of the founders of the Dope?
I’d go along with it, if Cecil says I should.
Like any Doper worthy of the title, I’d say “Cite?”
Also, “NITPICK: assertion.”
Well, obviously, there is no cite, since I made up that “fact”. I just thought it was funny.
Had me worried there. With the post modded that links to one of my posts! I thought my subtle 20 year trolling career was at an end.
If this is a troll, he’s the most boring troll ever. What kind of person trolls with physics questions that most people don’t even understand well enough to reply to?
Yeah - and he’s gone quiet. Not convinced myself - but hey, that’s what a watch list is for…
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