El Pibe

Scince catches up with SF. Interesting interview with reknowned neuroscientist on the possibility that the internet could (in principal) be concious, an idea floated by the likes of william gibson, dan simmons among others. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/the-nature-of-consciousness-how-the-internet-could-learn-to-feel/261397/?single_page=true

Bill Fay - Life is People. Beautiful. And really needed something of this ilk to stop me overkilling King Creosote so mercilessly.

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Oh my god mrben, you could be right.

She probably suffers from low self esteem.

Noted MrBen, noted!

*whoosh*

Hello yet again BITE? *waves again* If you are BBW then I'm very dissappointed, wholly vanilla trolling lacking your usual humour and, dare i say, bite. Those examples above are mostly pretty funny though.

Ha! Brilliant, and fine work by the lovely Badger. Thanks for highlighting that :)

You might be right Bob, you might be right. It's like a bruise, it hurts but I can't help rubbing it at a time I'd more or less decided to give up on the forum altogether.

The rub is that noone feels the slighest urge to create one about you atticus. The participants in this thread are long-standing members of the forum and have a long track record of being reasonalbe, thoughtful, measured and friendly. Yeah there can be clashes and I guess a slightly acerbic sense of humour dominates but compared to many forums I've encountered this strikes a terrific balance between being welcoming and tolerant whilst generally avoiding being dull. The fact that it has come to this, and that this is the only example of such in almost exactly 7 years of this forum (oh dear god has it been that long) and that the poster in question has been dealt with more harshly on other forums (it took him less than a week to get put on close moderation here after joining specifically to carry on an intractable argument on here with another poster and was banned from this one) should speak volumes.

Ha ha Nashoi thaks, that was the chap, inspired entertainment. Fine Champ, you registered today just happened to go to the lounge and read that (a place many quite long term regular users of the community forum are barely even aware of) and felt the need to express your ennui, four minutes after registering. Yeah that's pretty typical behaviour.

For the record it was the jrussel reminiscence that got me thinking, i guess we could file him under 6. The pointless prankster - Often highly entertaining and mostly harmless obsessions: anything and everything MO: obscure and oblique complaints designed as much to bemuse and confuse as to provoke.

For the record a first time poster, posting on a thread about someone who's just being banned, on being accused of being said bannee, saying "I've no idea who you are talking about" is about as schoolboy a trolling error as you can commit. You need to cultivate a new persona by starting in the items offered section, have a spat over plumbing skills with someone in the business section, before having a couple of innocuous musings about bus timetables in the general issues and make sure there's at least 1 month between your previous ban and starting to troll in the new incarnation. I give champ about an hour before he's banned.

Hello again BITE? *waves*

I think playground bullying is where the troubled externalise their problems by taking it out on the weak and defenceless. This to me looks like the natural inclination of people upon seeing someone persistently shouting "I'm brilliant and better than you" to (fruitlessly) get them to take themselves a little less seriously.

Hello BITE? *waves*

:-O Strafer Jack is SeanMcghabahanh?!?!?

And another one BITE?s the dust. Given the recent(ish) news on trolls, the chap who harangued grieving relatives of suicides, the Tom Daley idiot and this bbc piece saying we're too harsh on trolls in this country, I'm just wondering what the attraction is. I guess I can just about get some pubescent kid thinking they're clever, or an angry child expressing their anger in an oblique and unhealhy fashion in a relatively benign version of going postal. But why anyone beyond the realms of the confusing changes of pre-adulthood would indulge, I'm afraid I'm at a bit of a loss. We seem to have a few categories here. 1. The obvious WUM obsessions: yummy mummies, three wheeled prams, kids in pubs, poncey pubs, poncey food, cookwank, smugness in general MO: howling at the moon as their slice of London changes before their eyes without apparently having the common decency to ask their permission. 2. The anti liberal agenda obsessions: see above, also add any form of toleration of things they don't approve of, usually any or a mixture of gays, women's lib, muslims, anyone who's a bit different MO: it's PC gone maaaaad! Links to Daily Mail articles peddling half truths and innuendo designed to boil the tempers of octogernarian conservatives. 3. The Conspiracy Theorist obsessions: sheeple, The united states, hidden agendas, the media, nothing can EVER be what it appears to be MO: random links, liberal use of non sequiturs, refusal to enter sensible debate, a complete lack of internal consistency 4.The Free Speecher obsessions: cliques, conflates sensible moderation with oppressive censorship MO: use of accusastion over debate, accusations of bullying when others views dont coincide with their own, prone to starting deliberately inflammatory threads 5. The Grey area not a troll as such, just difficult. BBW is the obvious here, a popular poster who could be insightful, witty and very funny, but would always have to test the limits of patience, and thus removed about 30 times under different guises. THen there was MikeCG, very difficult to tell how much wa personal opinion and how much was a construct, but veered between sincerity and trollish activities. Ultimately too angry and confrontational to be allowed to continue. Can anyone add any more or remember any fine examples or shed any light on the phenomenon? Are any of them missed? I think my all time favourite was the chap from Blackwater, what was his name again?

jrussel, it's all coming back now, good times http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?20,517301,page=1 Naa, he was rather obvious wasn't he. Yay, it was the trees http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?20,144087,page=1

Jack russel, was he the trees guy?

Oh god no, that wasn't my point!!! Just reminding myself of snorky's BITE reviews. Not sure who BITE is, though there's a whiff of a few past bigots on here, I suspect it's just any old common or garden chap who sits somewhere on the depressing sliding scale from UKIP -> EDL. ANd for the record I'm pretty sure BITE (the site not the user) would be pretty upset at having their views expressed by this man and would take issue with the EDF if they found out. For that alone I suspect a ban is forthcoming, so I really shouldn't have bothered with lengthy refutations as hiding the first message will cause the rest of the thread to dissappear in a puff of smoke.

BITE's finest hour http://www.beerintheevening.com/user_comments.shtml?username=snorky

"Please, try not to be such a liberal queef(sic)" Setting aside your casual homophobia for a second, it's interesting that Mathias D?pfner who penned your editorial considers himself a liberal, though doubtless a muscular one. Of course he advocates defending our freedoms by coming up with some sort of solution for the islamic problem, as a German I would have thought him a little more sensitive to history, but then given his complete lack of understanding of history I'm hardly surprised.

Eastern Europe, I'd like you to explain to me how anything that happened there amounted to appeasement. The Potsdam agreement was simply an acknowledgement of the facts on the ground, that being that a devastatingly effective fighting force of over 11 million men were in control. What are you suggesting the western powers should have done, given they had electorates overjoyed at peace after six years of warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of their men and cripppled their economies, with disintegrating empires*. The British government had been handed a mandate for social justice and the French were simply trying to put together a political framework to function as a country again, hardly great starting points for another total war. This bloodthirsty idiot is saying we should have kicked off a war that could have killed millions more to try to move the western sphere of influence over an area it had never had much clout in anyway? I've no idea who was glorifying the communist states, but it's a bit rich to talk about how the west should have been doing its utmost to stymie or topple repressive regimes given how many of themn we installed and or supported. Doubly ironic given his uncritical support of Israel and equation of any criticism of Israel's murderous policies with anti-semitism whilst simultaneously conflating the rhetoric of a few individuals with the desires of the entire muslim populace of Europe. He's a demagogue, a disingenuous rhetorician and a tw@t. *well, France and Britain, the US was just about to embark on building a new one.