He doesn’t have the guts. He’s a spineless coward who never wants to face the music when he fucks up. He’s like a variation of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a creature that believes that if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you. Except in handy’s case, it seems that if he doesn’t own up to mistakes, then he must not have made a mistake in the first place.
Oftentimes, when he is corrected on one of his grossly inaccurate posts, he either tries to justify the error, or ignores the correction completely. I cannot recall ever seeing a single post from him where he said anything similar to “I screwed up. I was wrong. Sorry.” No, he just merrily continues traipsing from thread to thread, marinating in his own stupidity.
For someone who has the most posts on a message board ostensibly devoted to fighting ignorance, handy is unusually resistant to being called out when he makes a factual error. And he’s made errors like this numerous times. I’ve long regarded it as an absolute wonder that he is still allowed to post here, given his history.
He may get a few answers right every now and then, but I just regard that as a real-life example of “even the blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.”
handy is not a troll, nor is he a spammer or actively encouraging harm to a fellow Doper. But his chronic inaccuracies, falsifications, misinformation, bullshit, and total lack of willingness to be accountable for his actions is a severe detriment to this board.
Actually you got it backwards. If he can’t see you then he thinks you can’t see him.
FWIW, I always cringe when I see these handy-bashing threads. He seems like a pretty nice and easily likable guy and you all know that he never shows up to defend himself.
It’s not like no one else does this. Sometimes, the answer is shrouded in a morass of verbage, making it not so clear and easy to overlook on first reading.
Othertimes, a person just skips it.
What I find annoying is someone posting a patially right answer but asserting that it is THE answer. I’m not poiinting a finger at anyone, nor am I going to join a pile on, but many GQ posts fall into this catagory.
Q.E.D., how’s the new place? You fittin’ in? Happy? (just wondering)
Sometimes I wish a mod would go in to one of his posts where he is blatantly wrong and edit the entire fucking thing out and replace it with “Pay no attention to this buffoon. He doesn’t have a clue.” Or something evident like that.
It’s like arguing with a child, really:
Child: The moon is made of cheese!
Adult: No, here, see? It’s made of dust and other non-cheese matter. Here’s a book on the subject, an online article and Neil Armstrong’s words on the matter.
Child: Nope, it’s made of cheese.
Adult: See here, kid, read the stuff I’m showing you.
Child goes on believing moon is made of cheese despite plethora of information to the contrary.
At least he doesn’t post in GD (does he? I rarely go there).
Sorry, but I lost my last ounce of respect for handy when he said that he called those with cochlear implants the “FrankenDeaf”, seemingly equating those deaf children and adults with cochlear implants to freakish monsters. He never said anything on the board in response to my criticism of this appalling and abhorrent statement.
And for the record, in that Great Debates thread which inspired my Pit thread of handy last year, the little lackwit never answered my challenge to provide a single cite for his baseless and erroneous assertion that cochlear implants can sever the auditory nerve. He never answered at all, period. That’s his style: leave behind a steaming pile of lies behind in a thread, and then never accept accountability for it.
He’s the antithesis of Cecil Adams. Cecil rarely posts, and primarily appears on this website through his columns, provides well-researched, no-nonsense answers to myriad questions. handy has nearly 17,000 posts as of this writing, and does the exact opposite of everything that Cecil does.
He’s not the bane of civilization. He’s a bane of the SDMB.
I agree. Some people love to get worked up over minor issues. Makes you wonder how they’d deal with an actual problem.
I disagree. It’s stupid to defend yourself against people who certainly wouldn’t be swayed or assuaged by anything you have to say. It would be an exercise in futility.
I also fail to see how not responding to attacks from anonymous people on a message board equates spinelessness; rather, it seems to equate prudence or, at the very least, a sense of priorities.
But children will be children, and some will throw their temper tantrums when they don’t get their fight.
Yeah, I totally see how calling someone “FrankenDeaf” and not bothering to defend yourself is a matter of priorities from someone who has nearly 17K posts on this board. And to get worked up over such a name, particularly when one has an intensely personal history with the matter involved, just reeks of childishness.
I mean, Gosh, Atreyu, can’t you just get over yourself?:rolleyes:
People give false responses in GQ all the time. In fact, one very prolific poster in this very thread does it with alarming frequency.
What I don’t quite understand is why people would implicitly trust the medical or legal questions of anyone on here without a cite. And if you don’t get a cite, then why wouldn’t you just dismiss the information? Why become aggrieved over it?
Factual answers without cite support are nothing more than opinions, and there’s nothing implicitly wrong with opinions: You either take them as helpful, or you dismiss them entirely. Quite frankly I don’t know why anyone would come to this board for legal or medical opinions from people who may not know what they’re talking about without getting some kind of cite to back up those opinions.
IOW, if someone wanders into a GQ thread and sees an answer that he or she believes to be true (with no substantiation) and takes it as gospel, then perhaps they deserve whatever consquences they get, to a degree. Posting on this board isn’t the same as due diligence, after all.
What is worse than drive-by answers are answers from people who brag that they are experts in some field or another, only to be proven wrong on multiple occasions. That’s much, much worse, because over time people will assume they know what they’re talking about, even though they’ve been proven wrong.
I don’t know. If Bricker or Jodi answer a legal question and don’t provide a cite, I’d be very likely to take their word for it. Or if Polycarp answers a question ablout something biblical. But that’s only because they’ve been around and been right so much.
Other folks, yeah, I’d need the cite to really trust it.
I’d take their word for it to a degree - but from what I’ve seen on here, they’d provide the cite OR note that their response is basically an opinion or educated guess, and that too is perfectly fine. It’s the person who manages to look generally knowledgable just often enough to give people the impression they’re an absolute expert in most subject areas who’s the problem.
Anyway, because the people you’ve mentioned have been around a while and have been right so much, you trust them. handy has been around, although he’s not right so often. So don’t trust him without a cite. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
In the legal world, a cite is often only as good as the authority offering it.
If I come along and say that an anonymous tip about a man with a gun, standing alone and with no indicia of reliability, is sufficient to justify a stop and frisk, I might offer as authority cites like U.S. v. DeBerry , 76 F. 3d 884 (1996) and U.S. v. Clipper , 973 F. 2d 944 (1992) in support of my claim. And if you read those cases, sure enough, that’s exactly what they stand for.
But what those cases alone don’t tell you is that the Supreme Court overruled them both in 2000, in Florida v. J.L.. Unless someone knows how to Shepardize cases, that’s hard to discover.
It’s good practice for anyone making a claim to offer a cite – but don’t underestimate the value, and power, of a reputation for integrity. Either you resolve to independently investigate every cite offered by every person, or you accept a certain level of good faith and attention to detail from known posters.