A normal person might feel a sense of regret over something like this. A dedicated troll like MH seems more likely to project a sense of regret onto others by trying to make them feel it. Nor would it be out of character for that person to return to form sooner rather than later in another manufactured ID that has been kept waiting for just such an occasion.
Imho, of course.
handy?
Why believe that tale he’s telling about it all being a big troll? His posts on many issues were well thought out valuable contributions. Most of the conflict arose on certain issues (guns, LGBT) that are common blind spots or moral failures for otherwise intelligent right wingers.
Based on what we objectively know - the content of his posts over many years - I think he was a genuine serious poster with some major character flaws, obviously including fabricating some parts of his personal life (but perhaps not total fabrications as he now claims).
He may have been guilty of debating in bad faith on a couple of controversial issues, but I think this story that his entire posting history was a deep troll is bullshit. He’s pissed off that he got kicked out of somewhere that was important to him, and he thinks this “it was ALL trolling” story will make SDMB look stupid.
Yeah, given the time he spent and the number of posts he made here I too get a
:Martin wipes tears out of his eyes:
‘Well I didn’t want to be part of your stupid club anyway!’
vibe.
Exactly. He wants it to be like the end of a heist movie, where it’s revealed that the audience was in the dark and everything was perfectly executed behind the scenes.
The reality is much sadder. And that’s a feat, because “I’ve spent 18 years of my life trolling a small group of internet strangers” is already pretty damned sad.
For me, it’s because he’s admitted to trolling before. That whole thing about being here to slap liberals. The way he would constantly pretend I said things I didn’t.
Sure, maybe he didn’t actually start out over here as a troll, but this has been at least a couple of years where he’s been pulling this shit, while telling us exactly who he was.
Oh, and because the very lie you are mentioning would be a form of trolling.
Sure, he was being deliberately antagonistic on certain issues, unoriginal “trolling the libtards” stuff when he held a (deplorable) minority right wing view.
What I’m challenging is this narrative that every reasonable contribution that he posted was always insincere, with the sole objective to generate some fake persona as a long con. As @Johnny_Bravo put it:
The reality is that he put a lot of sincere time and effort in here in much of his posting; but engaged in mundane trolling on certain hot button issues, inadvertently went too far and got kicked out for it. He’s fabricating this narrative post hoc of the trolling genius with a decades-long secret master plan who eventually tired of toying with the gullible fools at SDMB.
This assumes the nonnie who posted on the giraffeboards really was MH, of course.
Let assume the GB post was posted by MH.
In it he claims to have been “trolling” AND that his “trolling” perfectly aligns with his actual views.
Is that trolling?
Is being a pathological liar to give weight to lightweight thinking the same as being a troll?
I don’t see it.
We need a new name for this kind of behavior.
“Being an asshole”
Is the best I can do.
It is when the lies serve to reinforce a stance perfectly designed to get people riled up e.g. the infamous “I am 100% willing to trade more deaths for gun rights.”
No, those are his actual views.
He was bragging he “got away” with spewing his actual POV.
(Talk about knowing yourself 
)
How can you know?
I would say it’s trolling if your goal is to piss people off and start bullshit fights and such. Whether you believe what you say is irrelevant. A huge number of MAGA trolls are actually MAGA supporters, for example.
The idea that trolling must be insincere just gives trolls an out, as they can always claim they really believe what they say.
Yes, true.
I believe trolling always has an element of deception to it, but it’s not as simple as “saying things you don’t really mean just to upset people”. Yes, that’s often the case, and that’s often the example used when defining the behavior, but that’s not the actual definition.
Let’s say you hate salmon. You see a thread in Cafe Society about salmon, the best way to prepare it, the best wine to pair with it, what your favorite experience was eating it, and so on. You post about your disgust with salmon and link to articles about people poisoned by it, or allergic to it, how it’s often not sustainably farmed, and on and on.
Nothing you posted was insincere. You honestly hate salmon. You’re trying to back up your opinion with cites. How is that trolling? It’s trolling because you went into a thread for salmon lovers to derail it. You made a major threadshit. You did it on purpose because you hate that people love something you hate, and despise the topic.
The deception in this case is that you act like you intended to contribute to the thread in a meaningful way. You masquerade as a productive community member. You’re not openly telling people to shut up about salmon, but you’re intentionally sabotaging their discussion. That strikes me as underhanded, and that’s what makes this trolling. Just my opinion.
I can’t.
I said:
Who knows what goes on in the mind of a nutjob?
I’m not sure what to believe about Martin Hyde. I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with him though because of a post I saw by him not too long after I found the dope. I can’t remember the topic, but he had posted a long, fairly informative post, in which he just threw in the N word and I just never cared to read him after that.
I can’t imagine being so proud of trolling people for almost 20 years. This type of behavior seems like such an obvious mental weakness.
He certainly seemed (looking at his posting history) to have gone out of his way to insert the word into his posts as often as he could, while seemingly maintaining (what to me should be unacceptable) deniability by attributing it to others. As in, he has a lot of posts where it seems his defense would be using it in “academic discussion,” talking about “other people” using the word. Which is bullshit.
For example, in one thread he was giving examples of overt racism. One of the examples he gave? “Police beating a black suspect while calling him a [spelled out n-word]” (that’s an exact quote, less my bracketed redaction). Like… there was no need to give that example, let alone to use a specific racial slur.
He also seemed (now that I’m looking into it) to enjoy having those conversations about other people’s use of the word, and then unabashedly using it in un-redacted form at every opportunity, purportedly to discuss what this other person said, but pretty obviously (to me, anyway) trolling up to the line and getting away with it. Over and over and over again.
Which isn’t to say I don’t believe he’s a racist because he was doing it to troll, I just think he is the kind of racist who thinks it’s funny to be a racist. I think those who have suggested we saw a lot more of the “real” Martin_Hyde than he’d like to admit, less some biographic details, are pretty much correct. He really is a racist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, etc, etc loser. Not just “pretending” to be one “for the lolz.”
True, but it tracks. He wouldn’t be the first banned poster to go over there and - without the slightest understanding of the implicit irony of it all - smugly proclaim how little he cares. He won’t be the last.
Metatrolling?
Anyway, I agree it should be considered a violation. A little like how even just joking about bombs during airport security is taken almost as seriously as actually having them.