Shit - you too, eh?
Excalibre is right. If you, or any other normal, everyday poster starts a couple, three threads in a day, nobody will care. But if you do it everyday, sooner or later someone will say something about it.
I love this description.
I’ve known Hungarians who could get upset by pretty much anything.
Oh, have a heart. Coberst’s sins are neither so obnoxious nor so uncommon that they deserve more than a little good-natured sandpapering, and they provide the opportunity for a fair amount of fun which s/he’s accepting, it seems, with pretty good grace. The board has always made room for empiricism, existentialism, pragmatism, idealism and dorm-room bullsessionism, and it’s good that it continues to do so. If Coberst gets gobsmacked by a book and comes here in his/her secret identity as BuberVerboBlender to Tell Us All, it’s a relatively harmless form of secular humanist witnessing. Except instead of speaking in tongues, s/he’s…typing in fingers, or something. I counsel a relaxed attitude. On our journey to wit, few of us bypass the half-way point entirely.
On the other hand, if s/he ever gets hold of Barthes or Marcuse, I may get all stabby with my computer monitor.
Coberst may be a bit less obnoxious than our other One-Trick Ponies, but he’s still a One-Trick Pony. He’s never posted in any thread that he hasn’t started, and all of his threads are pretty damn similar.
Look…you’re the one who turned a rant into a debate. If you wanna play “I know something you don’t know” go right ahead. I asked for a cite. Logic would assume that the number on an IQ test would change if the person’s intelligence changed. If that’s not the case, why not cite it when asked? General Intelligence may be controversial, but it hasn’t been discounted altogether as far as I know.
Has he actually started to respond to people yet, instead of lecturing? He didn’t in GD.
Why? Because I already freaking explained it to you.
It’s not like how IQ tests are scored needs to be the subject of intellectual debate and evidence-gathering. If you don’t know, go read about it. It’s not the sort of thing that you can “cite” like you can offer up evidence as to the mass of the moon.
“We switched coberst’s Philosophy for Dummies with Jacques Derrida: Let’s see what happens…”
coberst=JustThink Jr. To me, at least.
(my bolding)
Well I also frequent the James Randi Educational Foundation forums, and he’s posted lots of overly verbose OPs there too.
And in unrelated news, I seem to be having inexplicable blackouts which last a few hours at a time… and I wake up at the computer screen… :eek: 
Heh. I was referring to “read it [or not],” but “here first [or not]” seems equally plausible. I mean, now that he’s figured out all this shit, it does behoove him to exhort the rest of us, doesn’t it?
I’ll say this of coberst: I only need to read the first line or so of a post to know it’s by him without checking the username. Of course, since I then exit the thread without reading further, this is not exactly a compliment.
Now I could be wrong, but after reading two or three of coberst’s posts, I have the distinct impression that she is a remarkable woman and not a man. Just call it a hunch.
And I like her posts! There’s nothing out-dated about Buber. And those who haven’t been exposed to him before – and many here have not – might find him interesting just as you did, twister, thirty years ago. Now you find it to be “woo-woo philosophical shit”? What happened to your perspective?
coberst, Dopers tend to like applied philosophy best. Give them a real life dilemma and suggest that you may have had an emotional response to it and we will be all over you telling you whether you had the right to feel that way or not. Then we will determine the merits of each other’s responses and the rights of each poster to post whatever we’ve posted. Someone will devise scales to measure worthiness of emotional responses and of rights. (Three empathies is equal to eight sympathies, isn’t it? And I do have four rights to say that!)
I hope that you continue to probe with your questions. But I also hope that you will give us a chance to get to know you better on a more informal and mundane level.
Randi not only gives real-life examples, but responds to readers. He conducts experiments and takes the investigation of psychics seriously
Although Coberst is harmless, he simply waffles in vague terms and never debates.
I could be wrong, but I think Nancarrow meant that Coberst has posted such messages on the forums over at the JREF site … not that Randi’s messages there are similar to Coberst’s posts here.
Yup.
God bless you. Seriously.
No, there’s nothing outdated about Buber – but, as I pointed out in the thread linked to in the OP, I and Thou was published in the '20s – it’s not exactly cutting edge.
My objection is not his (and that’s how I see coberst, so I’m gonna stick with that set of pronouns – my apologies if I got it wrong) quoting Buber in and of itself. My objections are:
[ol]
[li]That despite his “footnote,” he’s not really making clear which words are his and which are from the source quoted.[/li][li]That the source quoted is a secondary source, not Buber himself; I’m always in favor of going back to the horse’s mouth.[/li][li]That it is contrary to Dope culture to merely present some chunk of [whatever] without some reflection or commentary by the OP. This is no different than someone providing a link to a news story or the like without any additional remarks – a practice that is frowned on here, and that will get a thread closed by the mods.[/li][li]Regurgitating such stuff, unmediated by one’s own take on the material, consitutes philosophical woo-woo – if you don’t rephrase the material in a way that indicates you understand its significance, then, yeah, you’re just going “woo woo.” (This from someone with three degrees in religion who taught at the college level for several years. I’ve heard sophomoric* woo-woo.)[/li][/ol]
If coberst were to write an OP where he said “I’ve been reading X. My understanding is that the author is saying Y. Thinking about this, it occurs to me that Z. What do you think?” I would have no problem with what he’s doing. Coming in and spewing his woo-woo without carefully indicating his sources or demonstrating any evidence that he’s processed the material in any way – well, shut the fuck up, coberst.
*I am repeatedly, and deliberately, calling coberst sophomoric. The word means, literally, “wise fool” – as in someone who parrots the words of others without understanding what they mean.
Thanks for clearing that up!
Not just there. If you do a web search on “Would you be interested in some disinterested knowledge?” (the title of one of his early threads), you’ll find that he started the same thread on several other message boards, with the same OP. And my guess is that he’s also posted to other boards that aren’t searchable by Google.