If you believe the OPs post was sincere your trolldar is on the fritz big-time. Sorry. There was no obvious hypersensitivity by troll hunters here --just absurd denial on your part IMHO.
But fine - if you think someone used their first SDN post to see if talking about their abortion in a med school essay was a good idea, by all means feel free to answer. The rest of us are totally within reason to say "epic fail and pretty weak trolling effort". As mentioned, the better trolls look at it as an art form and keep us guessing, the bad ones get called out in the first handful of posts. This was a bad one. You really need to pick your battles and not burn your credibility defending one of the bad ones if you hope to win your point.
I will always defend ALL of the question-askers, 'good ones' and 'bad ones', because I think that calling out trolls and turning threads into a condescending 'pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-being-SO-smart' fest is 8000x worse than the worst trolling. I don't bother assessing whether the person posng the question is a troll, because it doesn't (and shouldn't) change my response. The answer to the question doesn't change just because it doesn't actually apply to OP. It may be relevant to
someone, so why not answer it as posed? That has the added side benefit of not being a jackass to someone the day that your troll-dar
is mistaken.
OP wasn't the problem here. The responses were. And, let's be clear...my first post was not actually about trolls or troll-hunting at all. My first post was aimed at those who were making unnecessarily harsh judgements of someone based on nothing more than that his gf had an abortion. People jumped in to
defend judgementalness "because OP is a troll"...which is ridiculous.
First of all, if the posts I was responding to were actually judgemental solely because they thought OP was a troll, I'll eat my shirt. Those were real attitudes, and now they're 'valid' only because we've decided they maybe probably don't actually apply to OP. So basically, you can perpetuate whatever problematic attitudes you want as long as someone (doesn't even have to be you) claims the person you're addressing is a troll. Great.
- Is OP serious? I don't know. Post count isn't really helpful; it's perfectly natural that they'd make a throwaway account (which may also explain the username) to ask about something that could be controversial. And it's perfectly reasonable that a pregnancy scare
is the most stressful thing that's ever happened to an applicant...so to me it's perfectly reasonable that someone would ask, and make a fake account so that in the event that it turns out to be a bad thing, it's not associated with their real account.
- Does it matter if OP is serious? No. I explained above why this is a question
someone might want answered. Sure, maybe that someone isn't OP. But it could be the next person ghosting these forums, and having real responses would help
them.
- Either way, do I stand by my original statement? Yes. My first post was simply saying "look, we're judging someone hardcore because their gf got an abortion. Let's not do that; we don't know how they acted/reacted, whether they wanted the abortion to happen, etc." I think we should avoid that sort of casual judgement
regardless of the context. It's just not an attitude I want to see become part of the background noise. It's not something we should accept in our posts, and it's not something someone who has actually faced a difficult decision related to abortion wants to see, man or woman. So let's not post that kind of ****, regardless of whether OP is a troll. And let's stop using troll-hunting as an excuse to say whatever the hell we want; it makes the forum more toxic.
