Yeah, that’s the particularly aggravating part. What Sam claims is a good-faith instance of “hoping to start debate” is often just a pigheaded assertion of his own preferred interpretation of reality, regardless of how drastically it may exaggerate or pre-judge or misrepresent the actual facts.
So he harrumphs his way through a thread stubbornly insisting that, say, the Capitol rioters “weren’t trying to start an insurrection” and “basically just milled around acting like tourists”. Or that, say, Germany planning to re-open coal plants as a temporary measure in the process of phasing out coal power generation counts as a straight-up “total disaster”, energy-policy-wise. And an unambiguous indication that “the world is going mad”.
In those debates and so many others, Sam jumps straight to the (highly questionable) conclusion that he wants to believe and talks about it as though it were an obvious truth. When one of his wishful-thinking conclusions later turns out to have been actually extremely far from the truth, he doesn’t bother revisiting it.
To be fair—since you voluntarily espoused an unPitly concern for fairness here and I might as well try to keep up—that first linked thread does contain an instance of Sam voluntarily admitting he was wrong about a specific misreading of energy-use statistics that I pointed out to him. But that doesn’t affect my basic point about his tendency toward forensic well-poisoning in general.
Sam could easily get a lot more of the multi-viewpointed “rational debate” and “free expression” that he claims to want around here if he would just be a bit less arrogant and dismissive in his sounding-off about highly complex issues whose current implications are by no means definitively resolved. If he could ease up a bit on his baseline assumption that Anything I Consider Plausibly True Or Probable May Be Asserted As Though It’s A Self-Evident Fact.
But he doesn’t, and so his overconfident assertions often subsequently blow up on him, and he conveniently ignores it. And then when other posters make fun of his gratuitously showing his ass like that, he gets all huffy about their “personal attacks”.
This is typical “conservative snowflake” thinking: “I don’t have to be accurate or fair in my aggressive denunciations of policies or positions that you support, but you have to be courteous and welcoming towards my participation while you do the work of rationally rebutting my inaccuracy and unfairness. Because FREEEEE SPEEEEEECH.”