In all fairness that’s the point of a debate. He presents his citations, and then you rebut and point out your citations. The result is that multiple perspectives are brought to bear and the confirmation bias that each individual labors under is weakened if they are willing to peruse the evidence provided by others. So while in scientific experimentation it is necessary to look at both sides, that’s not the proper way to form a debate. You are trying to diminish his point by saying that he didn’t have the debate all by himself and then present you with the results, when what he wanted was for people to participate. It was shown to him that the requests for ‘cites’ were actually disingenuous because those who did the requesting did not actually read his cites, so they were not willing to reach beyond their own confirmation bias in order to have a serious debate. What SmashtheState is upset about is that people pretended like they wanted to have a debate with him, but they really didn’t they just wanted to make fun of him for believing something different from what they believe. They didn’t even give his viewpoint enough respect to actually try to understand what he was saying before they dismissed it, and that’s what upset him.
In most cases he provided simple names of books without bothering to provide a single quote. In at least one he admitted that the claim had pretty much been pulled out of someone’s ass and once he was caught at his game, he dropped it (but of course, not before). Then it was pointed out that the sources for several of his cites were hardly authorities or, for that matter, people who should be cited at all.
Smashy could have, at any time, proven that he wasn’t just bullshitting everybody and given links to peer reviewed research. It didn’t exist, of course, because he’s full of shit. And when people pointed this out, he got huffy. It’d be like making claims and then linking to Carlos Castaneda and getting upset when someone asked for a real cite.
We all understood him quite fine. It’s just that he was stupid and spouting new-age bullshit pablum and expecting people to choke it down. He was called on the carpet for bullshitting in GD. He offered some truly weaksauce support for his woo bullshit with shitty quasi-cites. And when he had his cites challenged, he went off to the Pit to have a good angry cry. Like a whiny little bitch.
Well clearly there is a disagreement about what a ‘real’ cite constitutes. It’s a minority but others like Kimmy_Gibbler who are familiar with the works cited didn’t think that this cites were full of shit. What resulted was people jumping on Kimmy too.
Postmodernist bullshit pablum. Calling it New Age is stretching it a little.
Der Trihs, you stupid fool, didn’t you read where he says he was just testing us to see if our minds were open enough to not be sheeple? Obviously, you don’t measure up to the brain capacity of our resident state-smasher.
But even better than that thread is the “I think it should be legal to drive drunk because only maybe they’ll kill someone” followed by “I think we should only punish people if they kill someone”, and the coup de grace post of “Punishment is stupid. It’s only a tool of the state to appease the masses.” You gotta love that trifecta of stupid right there.
I, for one, would love it if Smashy stayed around. I mean, one more person bringing down the average means I’m relatively closer to being the smartest person on the SDMB! But can we settle this once and for all: Is it going to be Smashy or the boring StS? A house divided cannot stand.
Dear SmashTheState: I was going to reply to your brilliant post, but I’m afraid I must fix my Dean Drive so I can visit the Bermuda Triangle with Count Dracula.
It means someone with Asperger syndrome. Many people with Asperger syndrome believe that it’s simply a different brain configuration that provides a legitimate alternative view of the world rather than a disease that needs to be cured, which is the exact same argument that SmashTheState is making about schizophrenia in the other thread. In that light, it seems kind of hypocritical that he would use the term “aspie” as an epithet to imply mental defectiveness in people who disagree with him.
Actually in internet speak “aspie” means the sort of people who obsessively edit wikipedia and write erotic fan fiction about Sonic the Hedgehog and weigh 400 pounds and don’t bathe and claim they’re poor at interacting with others because they’ve self-diagnosed themselves with Aspegers after reading about it on the internet.
