Yeah, I should have swapped moron for troll.
But trolls are dishonest, lying sacks of shit.
I do think that there’s an alternative that doesn’t depend on the hypothesis that he’s a moron. He could just be lazy and/or careless.
“On a quick scan this article seems like it backs up what I am saying, I’ll go ahead and cite it. No need to read it all carefully, I must get in my post now before somebody posts something else.”
I’ve seen people use a cite and admit later they didn’t read it enough to realize it didn’t say what they thought, or that there was context to make their point moot.
Not that this is a defense. Not taking the time to read a cite is just as bad as deliberately misrepresenting it. Whether he’s doing it through negligence or dishonesty, it’s the same result and just as much his fault either way,
A person can do stupid things without actually being stupid.
This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of “lying by omission” from him (although please don’t make me go back through all his posts for specific examples).
He’s a dishonest, lying sack of shit. He’s only “stupid” in the sense that he keeps being so when it never works for him.
When I took the trouble to explain why he was wrong about Chat-GPT’s supposed inability to utilize source data when determining output and he slid right past it, I was miffed. I was more miffed (miffter?) that I’d forgotten about this thread before I wasted my time responding.
Bravo to this post, by the way. Marvelously well done.
Yup. I’ve done it before myself. When I do, it’s humiliating, and I grovel.
@Sam_Stone, in a thread about Musk a week or so ago, made an egregious error. Defending Musk against snark about his apparent ignorance of electric rockets, Sam cited a “follow-up” Tweet to Musk’s “LOL No [electric rockets]” post in which he explained his thinking.
The problem was the that “follow-up” Tweet was from several years earlier.
Sam did admit that he was wrong–but had the chutzpah to claim that his case was made stronger. And then he doubled down to claim that Musk was strictly accurate.
When I cited NASA to show he was wrong, the silence was predictable.
@Sam_Stone is a profoundly lazy thinker, and blames the disagreements on the laziness of others instead of engaging in some real introspection about why he keeps making so many mistakes.
My favorite post of this recently in thread was when he said he was no Musk fanboy. It is funny how somehow despite not being a Musk fanboy he always manages to post the most optimistic viewpoint of Musk’s supposed genius. Tesla cutting car costs? This isn’t because of potentially softening demand (as reported by numerous outlets), no, no, no, this is because Musk has the advantage over other EVs and is cutting them off at the knees by dropping prices.
Sam, if you’re seeing this, you are absolutely 100% a Musk fanboy. Sorry dude.
Now, now.
Sam isn’t just a Musk fanboy but a fanboy of all “self-made” billionaires and both would-be and actual right wing autocrats.
An equal opportunity fanboy of several types of scum and not just Musk in particular
The title of his cite was “West Virginia Woman Sentenced for Willful Retention of Top Secret National Defense Information and International Parental Kidnapping”. So if he didn’t read enough, it means he didn’t read to the end of the title which is some next level laziness.
Plus the part he used to bolster his point (97 months) came after the title.
I think he figures that people will not actually read the articles he cites, and just take his word for it.
This might work elsewhere in his life, but here at SDMB, he crashes and burns with this technique.
The interesting thing is he keeps doing it. He does not learn; “Don’t do that bullshit here, people will read your cites and discover you’re full of shit.”
@ITR_champion used to be the worst at this. Literally every single time I followed one of his cites, I found that it either failed to support his summary, or actively contradicted it. I suppose @Sam_Stone is following in that tradition.
A legacy of smeg.
A smegacy.
I suspect he also falls afoul of believing that what his chosen news sources tell him is true and will be borne out by evidence. Repeated examples of this not being the case (and indeed of the opposite often being true) have yet to disabuse him of this approach.
I don’t merely suspect he does that. I know he does.
There’s too much evidence he does exactly that - unquestioningly accepts preferred news sources.
It kicks the can down the line - rather than not reading news articles and coming to bad conclusions, he uncritically accepts bad news sources.
There’s a meaningful distinction there, i.e. being part of a misinformation ecosystem rather than a lone nutter, and it speaks ill of both his judgement and intelligence that he continues to think he is winning some sort of internet points by posting those here without performing even minimal due diligence on his sources and then by doubling down when anybody calls out the BS. Occasionally falling for bad sources happens to most people. But when it happens every single damned day, it’s something to fix.
if it ever makes you feel better Johnny I have learned much over the years from many people’s corrections of Sam’s errors.
Soon hopefully I’ll learn from my own as well!
What a lovely way of looking at it.
I find the above funny (although 100% correct) in light of Sam’s own defense of himself in this very thread.
And this is why I can’t take Sam seriously - he clearly claims to research both sides, but his research is normally opinion pieces, and he gives the conservative side every benefit of the doubt, while any ‘liberal’ source is scanned to support his acknowledged bias.
So it’s unthinking credulous acceptance of right wing sources, and then reading left-wing sources only to cherry pick a piece or two which he can debunk 1% of, which ‘confirms’ he’s right. Previously (and I stated this to him, and will again) I advised that it’s not just sources, and that if he spent as much time picking holes in his preferred bias as he does against liberal sources, he’d be doing better.
To this day, he is the perfect example of complaining about the mote in his neighbors eye while ignoring the beam in his own. The best thing I can say about him is that I don’t think he’s a troll, I think he is so emotionally involved in ‘winning’ for his side that he blinds himself to his contradictory behavior. And that he’s consistently lazy in his internet research.
He was called out in that thread for seriously misrepresenting a cite.
And then he slinks back in the thread a week later and pretends that that shit never happened.
Standard Operating Procedure
Typical of the lying shitstain known as @Sam_Stone. If he gets called out in a thread with solid evidence of his lies or smacked by a mod for something, his MO is to run and hide like the spineless weasel he is until it blows over. He may be silent or make innocuous, non-controversial posts in other threads for a week or two. But he always returns to the scene of the crime and starts smearing feces all over just like normal. I suspect this behavior is how he has avoided any serious consequences from the mods for his trollery over the years.