Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
 | Follow-up on the "Outed!" Series
Jim Vineyard has gone off to Israel, and apparently his entourage of trolls has followed, as Dissenting View (who may be Vineyard himself, in my opinion) and Supporter have not been heard from on the Oklahoma Baptist College forum of the FFF. They disappeared within hours of Vineyard and co. leaving for Israel. In their place, two new posters have arisen, an odd follow-up, if you like. They are Cochise and Inspector. |
Cochise claims the regulars on the OBC forum are not doing enough to get Vineyard out of the pulpit. This would sound to you like Cochise doesn't like Vineyard. But until today I could not find any post where Cochise made any hard, fast statements that Vineyard is a fallen preacher. He focuses instead on how those who oppose Vineyard are not doing enough.
I've seen this before: counter-accusation. One goal in such a strategy is to take over by getting the adversary off-track into defending themselves against the accusations. The counter-accuser uses accusations as a means to consolidate power for himself or herself. A strategy of counter-accusation also gets the topic diverted from the real culprit. I'm not sure if he really intends this. He has difficulty coming to a point. Cochise's method is to ask questions but not to define what he's saying. He's been stuck for days on a concept called "precepts and promises," and has yet to really explain it, but he wants others on the forum to either agree or disagree with it. So Cochise more or less fell flat. At first I thought he was a troll, but now I think he may just be person who wanders in what he says and never makes a point. Except he does resort to counter-accusation (for whatever purpose), and it's a distraction from the main point when you're dealing with a pastor who said lewd thngs to a young lady and then called her pastor a fart and pip squeak.
The other prong of the lame follow-up is Inspector, apparently a woman, who mounts lame arguments and then uses them to sidetrack the issue. She tried to sidetrack focus from what JAV did by blaming the pastor who outed him for having secret motives. She also tried to get focus off Vineyard by raising possibilities that the girl he cornered "for counseling" had placed herself in serious moral danger in her dating life. When these failed to shift focus, she tried to get more theological and somehow pulled the group into a discussion of legalism. Her huge gaff in confusing the definition of legalism and then saying Galatians was written to unbelievers (Maybe her bible doesn't have Galatians chapter three in it) cut short that sidetrack. So she tried to sidetrack again by directing an attack against people who object to legalism. But that didn't work either.
