I wouldn’t call that a trolling thread at all - he lays it all out in the OP, and not fighting the hypothetical isn’t an unreasonable request for that kind of thread.
He’s right, and “there is no god” replies would be threadshitting. And I say this as someone who thinks Velocity is generally crap. If you don’t like his thread setup, just ignore the damn thing. That’s what I did.
I do think it should be in IMHO, not GD, though, because it’s just opinions, not witnessing.
I agree that Velocity has a habit of starting threads that, while not crossing the line into trolling, are clearly designed to rankle. Lots of “Let’s talk about how terrible the Democrats regarding this particular metric are BUT YOU CAN’T DISCUSS HOW COMPARATIVELY BAD THE REPUBLICANS ARE ON THE SAME METRIC” threads, delivered with a “gee golly gosh I just want to have a polite conversation” faux-innocence in the OP. Any one of those threads might be perfectly fine, but as a trend it starts to look a wee bit like they may not be being posted in good faith.
As I said, I wouldn’t classify it as trolling and I certainly have no objections to honest discussions about the failings of the Democratic Party, but I’m not buying the wide-eyed shtick that has been going with them.
…don’t forget the time that Fiddle claimed that they wasn’t defending stop and frisk but perhaps it wasn’t really racist and Mike Bloomberg was just:
That’s how Fiddle_Peghead contextualised a racist policy that terrorized the lives of hundreds of thousands of people of colour in New York for a decade. Fiddle thinks the guy responsible should get some credit for it.
I agree that Velocity starts tons of ridiculous threads like that and they usually result in various reasonable people fighting each other. He screwed up this thread though – the discussion has been fun and interesting to me, with no in-fighting. I’m sure he’ll try harder next time to get us all to fight.
I think Velocity is a very young guy with very little life experience who is assuming he can just “reason out” all of the big difficulties in life and society, relying on stereotypes and the “common wisdom”, while missing the vast majority of the nuance of most issues. I think he means well but comes across as extremely naive and gullible to me.
I don’t think he’s trying to troll.
I agree he’s not trying to troll, but is extremely naïve. He also has a strawman view of liberals in his head.
What most pisses me off about him is that he doesn’t engage in his own threads in any significant way, even to just say, “this is an interesting point” or “I still disagree, but this really does give me something to think about.” In his religious bigotry thread, he never really came back to let us know whether all the posts that disagreed with him affected his thinking, and he never came back to defend his view. That’s why it sometimes comes across as trolling to me – he drops some bomb and then runs away.
And don’t forget the time that Banquet_Bear put words in my mouth. Here, where he suggests black lives don’t matter to me. You see, when Banquet_Bear can’t win an argument with evidence, he just makes shit up. 
Wait. The guy I mentally called ‘For Unwanted CarnalKnowledge’ was banned?
…but black lives don’t matter to you. You defended the man who continued and escalated a racist policy that terrorized the lives of hundreds of thousands of people of colour in New York for a decade. I didn’t need to put the words into your mouth. You defended Bloomberg. You defended stop and frisk. The thousands of innocent people of colour abused by the system (and who continue, to this day) didn’t matter to you.
You never stop doing it, do you? Anyway, I felt it necessary to respond to your earlier post to defend myself, but I’m not interested in revisiting that thread here. I’ve said all I wanted to say on the matter.
Promises, promises.
I’m confused. Banquet_Bear brought this up again, not me. But rest assured, like all my promises, I will keep this one too.
<obligatory “get a room, you two” comment>
Short of coming out and saying “I’m just trying to get you people riled up,” I don’t know what else he could say. Only noob trolls straight up admit to trolling. Pretty much every “question” he “just asks” in GD in the form of a thread seems like a calculated effort at trolling, and often phrased in a way that seems calculated to force the discussion away from what ought to be the real issue.
Of course I suppose I could start my own thread in which I invite Christians and other believers to come together and strive towards some sort of agreement, to all get their shit in once sock before they try and convince me, a nonbeliever, that I should believe in their god but not all the others, but then if I did that, I know I’d be trolling. So I wouldn’t. Even if I could phrase it in such a way as to abuse forum rules to force discussion down that particular path with impunity.
I hate bad faith arguments. I hate JAQ’ing off more. At least a bad faith argument puts forth a position which can be assailed directly. So there’s another layer of dishonesty to the kind of JAQ’ing off @Velocity appears expert in.
Right, trolling.
Well, that’s true. And, I guess someone can be sincere and still be a troll. And, not reengaging in your own threads, except to stir the pot even more is certainly trolling. So, OK, I’ll concede defeat and agree that, while he may not mean to do it, Velocity’s threads are troll-y.
I do, too, but they’ve been allowed here forever. You’re expected to explain why they are in fact bad faith arguments. Trolling is restricted to trying to piss people off, not being insincere, or trying to force the direction of a thread.
People loved @Bricker, but insincere arguments were his forte. I also even caught a mod making a certain bad faith argument: the one where you argue that people can have different opinions, which doesn’t in any way establish the different opinion as correct.
It’s kinda why GD isn’t a fun forum to participate in. And why I hated that trans thread, where posters would make up shit other posters didn’t say.
You’re close, but @urbanredneck2 is the apex troll at this point in time. He’s allowed to take massive shits wherever he pleases, and he gets the usual suspects to engage to try to “correct” or “teach” him.
Which begs the question: who is the greater troll, urbanredneck or urbanredneck2? Yeah, the fucker is too dumb to have got his accounts merged four months after the move to discourse 
.
octopus is shitting all over the “woke” thread with ridiculous assertions about the left. His over-the-top rhetoric is distracting from an otherwise reasonable conversation.
I’ve always been biased toward him because I love octopods, but that shit is just bonkers.