C’mon, we all have our favorites! Not being involved in all discussions, I only have my few, but I’d love to know who to watch out for in other threads should I encounter them (and, of course, to know who lists me as one of their own).
I’ll start by saying there are a few who have redeemed themselves by starting off as flaming trolls, but managed to turn themselves around and post intelligently - notably Pashley and CalifBoomer (who has at least made a thought-provoking start).
Some have disappointed me by starting off as intelligent, but then fell apart under the strain and revealed their true colors; alas, I have to put Rousseau in that category.
My current favorite, however, is… {drumroll}
ORION***********************************ORION!
C’mon folks - vent away!
Esprix, who no doubt will make many enemies by starting this thread… {heh heh heh}
Rousseau, a troll? Tell me where he exhibited trollish bevaviour. I’d love to see it - I like him, personally.
My favourite play-troll is bj0rn. He’s a bit like a ragdoll-meets-parot-meets-well. Meaning that:
a) You can throw him around all you want;
b) he keeps repeating himself in almost unvaried responses;
c) No matter what you shout at him, there will always be an echo.
He’s just great for blowing off some steam. What can I say, I love the little fucker!
No, Rousseau’s not a troll, but, IMHO, he fell apart after a while when pressed. You’re in the right place - go check out my “What’s wrong with these homophobic bigots” thread. In the beginning, we were both flaming each other; then we settled into a nice, lengthy discussion without much bile; then, somewhere, he just fell apart, and his argumentative style went out the window. It was sad, really, as I was enjoying the discussion until he lost the ability to reason.
And then there’s DIAMOND, who makes every Christian look bad!
I think you guys are abusing the “troll” label. MM and jayburner were clearly trolls. Each of them even went so far as to admit that they had been screwing around and promised to reform–following which they went back to their childish pranks.
To quote myself from the What is Coventry? thread in General Questions,
To some extent, Rousseau fits this category. (I don’t actually think of him as a troll, at all: he simply has a fixed and passionate view regarding recreational drugs and homosexuality and they are hot buttons for him. Esprix encounters him often in discussions of the second topic. That, to my mind, does not make him a troll. Whether he is at all correct in his views is a different issue.)
I have to vote for Phus. (I don’t want to invoke him by saying his name). There can never be a troll quite like that again. The meglomania, the obscenly long posts, the rapid personality shifts, the refusal to admit when he’d made a fool of himself, the pride in the post counts of “his” threads, the blatant lying that he would not acknowledge when caught at, the fawning, sycophantical ass-kissings which bordered on stalking, the constant appeal to pathos because of his hard life and the hard life of his “ancestors”, the obsessive inablity to let someone else have the last word, the fact that he started a pit thread about himself when none of us would oblidge (and how I wanted to. . .DFTT DFTT DFTT was my motto). And the worst thing of all about him was the way the trollishness sorta snuck up on you. I mean, he was well spoken and could punctuate. The first time, you think you are getting into a rational discussion, but post by post you are seduced into the dark side, until you wake up 1200 posts later to fiind that you have wasted a month trying to battle with sonmething that, in the end, is revealed as nothing but a twisted little troll. So why is he my favorite? Because he was totally unique. Most trolls I can put a face too; I went to middle school with some other incarnation of them. Phus I could not. At times I was sure he was truly mentally ill. In my private collection of wacky personalities, he remains a special case. But I still thank god he went away.
as goes for the questions or statements i am responding to…am i supposed to change my opinion just because someone posted the same question i answered a few days ago?
why thank you kindly. for everything but the troll lable.
eh…wait a minute. didnt you just call me and a couple of other posters trolls?
as much as i agree to your statement i just quoted, i dislike what you posted just after it in the thread you provided a link to(all but the thing about me not being steriotypical, thanks a bunch for that :)).
its a strange thing (or perhaps not), that when we are kids we call others names to their faces. but when we grow up we cant do that any more, because now those whom we are calling names can answer for themselves. so them namecallers go somewhere else and call people who are far away names(partially excluding tomndebb here).
now, this is a debatable subject of course, but as tomndebb said(sort of), and i hope he means, people are stuck in calling someone who is different a troll. generally its like a kid calling another kid names. and generally people can answer for themselves. but i, as others, shouldnt have to open a thread and find out that i am being called a troll or worse. thats going off topic(talking about a poster who is not present).
bj0rn - just try being nice to everybody else, youll end up being nice to yourself, as will everybody else.
Errrm… huh? You’re here now, aren’t you? What are you saying? That we talk behind your back when you’re not here and then ask Lynn to delete all bj0rn-gossip-threads five minutes before you log on?
Furthermore: does it surprise you, at this stage, that people call you a troll?
Also: do not label our behaviour “off topic”. You didn’t even answer the OP.
Why don’t you start by trying to be nice to the average American poster, instead of starting all sorts of stories about the USA occupying Iceland all the time? I’m sure that would make a huge difference in how people will treat you, bj0rn.
**bj0rn[/n], your reading comprehension is every bit as incompetent as your writing is unintelligible.
You quoted me as saying
(bolding mine)
You replied
You then quoted me
And responded
The answer is NO. I did not call you a troll. While it might be possible, (if one follows the bj0rn method of reading, in which each word is simply looked at for its denotative value and context is always ignored), to think that I was including you in a list of exceptional trolls, the context actually indicates that I do not consider you a troll. (I might consider you an incomprehensible, historically ignorant, America-basher, who insists on viewing the world from a perspective of cultural and historical omphaloskepsis but I have not called you a troll.)
The context of the post was to challenge the general tendency to label every PITA poster a troll. The use of “stereotypical” was to indicate that the named posters do not have the full range of characteristics associated with being trolls. (And, therefore, that they should not be named trolls.)
The words troll and twit begin with the same consonant, but they are not the same word.
“I don’t have to listen to these WILD allegations!!!”
Everybody has a breaking point, brother. Otto drove me nucking futs in that thread until I just exploded (and I had a right to…it was the Pit). You correlated this with a “decline” in something you call my “argumentative style” (whatever).
Yes, the strain of trying to contend with an intellect such as yours was just too overwhelming for me. Right. What essentially happened is that you and I came to a point where we had some mutual communication barrier: I was trying to make a point that you apparently couldn’t understand, and I’m sure that the reverse was also true.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill
I have to agree with you on that one! What a moron! Did you notice he just started another thread about homosexuality? What is his deal? Why oh why is he so obsessed with gays? He seems to have nothing else on his little mind! I’m being a really good girl right now and resisting the temptation to reply to that thread - I’m hoping it will just fade away. So far it has no replies - let’s keep it that way OK?
“The analyst went barking up the wrong tree, of course. I never should have mentioned unicorns to a Freudian.” – Dottie (“Jumpers” by Tom Stoppard)