See, that’s where I are confuséd. To my mind, there is nothing that could possibly follow that phrase to form a sentence that is both coherent and consistent with what I have come to expect from Sam.
Sam isn’t stupid. He’s a right-wing nutjob. Not the same thing, not the same metrics.
Am I allowed to ask how that happened?
The two terms are not mutually exclusive…Sam is evidence of that…
Well, there’s this little wrench icon I see next to the thread title, and when I click on it, I can select “Open thread” from a drop down list.
I agree halfway. It’s true that Sam has been caught in lies multiple times. It’s a frustrating issue. And it happens a lot.
On the other hand, he can also sometimes be a fine poster and can contribute positively to a discussion.
That’s what is so frustrating. If he didn’t lie and misrepresent and all that, and just posted decently all the time, I’d celebrate him as a good board member. If he never did anything of value, I’d write him off as a useless asshole, maybe even put him on ignore.
But he’s in between so sometimes he’s cool and I like his posting and other times I wish he’d just go away for good.
You realize you’re describing a textbook abusive relationship, right?
…When you put it like that, it sounds pretty bad.
And unless you already know the facts, how can you trust that this time he’s posting without the lies? Thus, what possible value can you place on his posts?
I don’t get it. A habitual liar doesn’t fight ignorance at all. At all.
If Sam came here and apologized for the lies and promised not to lie anymore, that would be a different story.
So you’re saying I’m too kind?
Ha!
You realize that’s incredibly hyperbolic, right? An abusive relationship results in physical and/or emotional harms. Sam is just a poster on a message board who is sometimes deceptive and annoying and sometimes informative.
Because he’s very consistent in the things he lies about (politics and ideology) and is usually just fine when posting on non-controversial technical subjects.
I think he said something I agreed with about blackjack playing once.
I’m not describing Sam as an abuser, although he is a troll.
But “Sam does consistently does objectively bad things and of course I wish he’d stop and of course he’s said that he won’t, but sometimes he also does good things so why should he have to leave?” is the same bad logic that people in abusive relationships use to justify keeping their abusers around.
It doesn’t magically become a good argument just because the stakes are lower, and morality isn’t transactional. You don’t buy the right to be an asshole on Thursday because you were pretty chill and cool on Wednesday.
Well said!
I am fascinated at how he can be an OK dude when not in his political/polemic mode.
It’s a fascinating display of compartmentalization where he apparently just hates the absolute bejeezus out of everything to the left of Mitt Romney, complete with all the martyrdom and persecution fantasies,
But when the topic is completely nonpolitical, he can turn it off and be an OK dude, even helpful and knowledgeable at times. This is why (once again) I was frustrated at mods shutting down a long-running troll act by “getting him on tax evasion” as the cliche goes (a socking). Socking must of course be verboten but unless it’s a long-running windup, I don’t see perma-ban as the solution. Sam may well run afoul of the trolling rules one day, and I won’t call a penalty on that. But a one-off sock? nah, perma-ban is too much.
The problem is that those threads quickly become the Sam Stone show, and showing why he’s wrong instead of having the thread move forward. He derails virtually ever thread he participates in with his nonsense. The boards were better when he wasn’t posting.
Come on, this is a gross exaggeration. I get really frustrated with cites that don’t support what he says, and I’d love it if he stopped. But every thread? He does not derail non-political threads; he’s a good contributor in those. And in the political threads, there are plenty where he’s taking an extreme contrarian position, but not actively lying.
If his lies outweigh his other contributions for some people, I can appreciate that. Argue that point. Don’t blow it up into him “derailing every thread.”
I meant his contributions to the political threads. I figured that was pretty clear since it was the context we were discussing. I have zero interest in arguing with Sam. It is beyond pointless. He is intellectually dishonest, makes numerous errors (at best), repeats them ad nauseum, doesn’t read his own cites, etc. That’s why it derails the political threads. He posts garbage and the next 40 posts are showing that the garbage he posted last week is still the same garbage this week.
The best result for the board, and probably for Sam, is if he were given a politics ban.
I’d be happy with a Hunter Biden laptop ban. Take out those posts, and half the lies would be gone.
How do you know? A recent example of him lying about a non-controversial technical subject, which admittedly is tied to a political topic, was his fear mongering about the effects the war in Gaza would have on the war in Ukraine. In one thread in P&E he was wringing his hands about the alleged effect that ‘diverting’ supplies of Iron Dome to Israel from Ukraine would have before it was pointed out to him by myself that 1) Iron Dome is an Israeli system, not an American one, the US is a foreign user which has purchased a very small number of them essentially for evaluation purposes and 2) Israel refused to supply Iron Dome to Ukraine on the grounds of fear that it could be captured, supplied to Iran and reverse engineered.
Now it would be very easy to write that off as Sammy boy being ignorant on the subject and leave it at that, which is what I assumed to be the case when correcting him on his factual error. Lo and behold, it turns out that there was a question in FQ about how Iron Dome worked that he had replied to an hour before claiming the sky was falling in the P&E thread where he was fully aware that Iron Dome was an Israeli, not US system.