It bothers
me because I see people like Blender as crippled- genuinely emotionally disturbed - whether he believes he is a clever troll or whether he believes he is serious.
It's not the obnoxiousness of his posts that bother me, it's the glee with which everybody joins in and gangs up to beat on him. The perfect match to his masochism is the sadism that greets his posts. I'll just say it: Troll-feeding is a form of bullying.
I got sucked into the Walters thing and I am now ashamed I ever posted on one of those threads.
It's not that I don't get the joke, it's that I have heard the punchline already. Many times. Doesn't the very appearance of a Blender call forth cries of "Walters" or that 22 guy or whoever? Don't people immediately speculate that they are one and the same person? What's
new here? Maybe they appear to be similar because they represent the same pathology. What's so hilarious about mental illness or someone pretending to be mentally ill?
Screw it, if there are going to be separate "Blender threads" where this goes on,
have at it, and
don't mind me. I will just skip those threads. Not a hardship.
But if
every thread that someone like Blender participates in turns into a troll-baiting beatdown, it's poisoning the forum. Time for him to be banned. Too bad people couldn't simply resist the urge to feed the troll, then banning wouldn't be necessary.
If you all love it SO MUCH, the next time a Blender or a Walters appears, remember to
download the thread to your hard drive so you can enjoy it over and over and over.
