Post #235761 by Thomas on Sat, Jun 3, 2006 7:43 PM

The same notion, to post an absurdly off-topic comment, occurred to me as well, right off the bat. I refrained from doing so, but I can't criticize something too harshly when I came close to doing it myself. I think I thought to myself at the time, "well, that's too obvious, too predictable -- and therefore not really that funny." I think I was right.

A few of them seemed inevitable and no problem but I kept waiting for an unstated consensus along the lines of, "OK, we get it ... now, about the issues raised in this thread..." to emerge. I'm not sure it has, even yet.

Maybe attempts at constructive criticism and reform raise suspicions that the initiator is putting himself in a position of moral authority of some sort, and an irreverent spirit emerges to kind of resist this. The off-topic posts might be a manifestation of this.

For the record, I think these suspicions are unwarranted in the case of woofmutt's post.