Heaven help us if he asserts that hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water in a ratio of 2:1. That will become untrue, and life as we know it might end.
Or possibly the truth of an assertion is found in the assertion itself, and not he who makes it.
You are very charitable. Feel free to dig through SA’s mouth turds until you find that golden nugget.
Are you really offering that up after what you said to Hentor? REALLY???
Come on, man.
I’d glossed over that. Awesome.
Keep fuckin’ that chicken, Bricker.
I have never put anyone on ignore on this MB, but I must admit that I almost never read any of SA’s posts. He’s obviously infamous around here, but he’s pretty much an unknown to me, except for this thread and maybe some other Pit thread about him.
That summary post by Kimstu was spectacularly well done, and I think I learned all I care to know.
Band name, if The Creepy People isn’t already taken.
You were Ninja’ed yesterday.
There was a thread about Lolita a few years ago where Starving Artist came in to defend Humbert Humbert from accusations of pedophilia. To his credit, he quickly admitted that he read the book as a teenager and didn’t understand or even remember it very well. However, he went on to make several IMHO disturbing posts in that thread about how it’s normal for grown men to be attracted to adolescent girls and “I can tell you that there was a 13-year-old girl dancing at the birthday party of one of my neices who had moves that most strippers would envy.”
I think it’s going too far to say that Starving Artist is himself a pedophile, but he does have a history of making rather creepy posts.
I played lead guitar, we sounded like shit.
If he ever does, it will likely be only in the context of how excellent this ratio was in the fifties, before the liberals screwed it all up.
As a general principle, this is (or should be) true.
One problem is that, in many conversations, we’re dealing not with questions that have simple, incontrovertible, factual answers, but with questions where an understanding of the truth is arrived at through a process of examination, analysis, debate, and reassessment. In debates like that, honesty involves not simply an accurate statement of basic factual issues, but an earnest effort to evaluate evidence and draw rational conclusions from it. When dealing with complex issues, truth is as much about process and method as it is about basic factual statements. It is possible to make a series of accurate factual statements and still draw an inaccurate and, more importantly, dishonest conclusion from those facts.
It is precisely in such cases where Starving Artist demonstrates his complete and utter contempt for honesty. He would be very unlikely to assert that water is not made up of a 2:1 combination of hydrogen and oxygen. But, as El_Kabong’s latest and somewhat tongue-in-cheek post correctly suggests, he would not be above torturing the facts in order to arrive at completely distorted conclusions about the significance of the hydrogen-oxygen ratio.
Starving Artist himself is apparently unable to understand (or, perhaps, deliberately misconstrues) this difference between an outright lie and dishonest debating. When i’ve called him dishonest before, he’s asked me to point out where he has lied. The problem is that you can debate dishonestly without ever telling a direct lie. His inability or unwillingness to grasp what constitutes an honest use of evidence means that he will never accept that he is, in fact, being dishonest.
And this comes back to the issue of whether he should be taken seriously in debates like this. In my opinion, he has been dishonest so often, and so egregiously, that no assertion he makes about any complex historical or political or social or economic issue can be taken seriously.
In order to debate topics like this, the participants need to be able to rely on one another to evaluate evidence honestly, and to draw rational and defensible conclusions from evidence. This doesn’t mean that a given body of evidence can only ever lead to a single conclusion, and it is perfectly possible for different people to draw different inferences about the significance of a particular piece of evidence, or reach different conclusions about how much weight to give a particular set of facts. But even when they disagree, a proper debates requires them to inhabit the same rational sphere, and requires them to understand that there are limits beyond which the evidence cannot be twisted and tortured. Starving Artist simply isn’t in the same sphere of reason.
Starving Artist, come on over. I’ll make you a sandwich.
Ok, that’s creepy as fuck. He’s perfected the “No true pedophile” defense. Yes, pedophiles are awful, terrible people. But any actual instance of something someone else might call pedophilia must be explained away as different, or impossible, or not what it looks like, or something. I mean, he even managed to twist *Lolita *in his memory to be not about “true” pedophilia. Humbert Humbert loved her despite her age, not because of it?
That’s all quite disturbing.
In every discussion, especially high level ones about society, culture and history, there’s a requirement that you trust, in some degree, the other participants: That they’re not lying, that they’re not omitting something crucial, that they’re not simply laying traps, that the discussion can be reasonably advanced (meaning that the person you’re discussing with isn’t absolutely and dogmatically stuck on a particular point), and that continued discussion with them offers some possibility of a fruitful outcome, maybe of learning something or of at least understanding another’s perspective.
Contrary to SA’s expectations, what was demonstrated by the cardboard tube was that he can’t be trusted, in the way I’ve described above.
Sure. In fact, didn’tt subsequent events show precisely how true that was? I snarled at Hentor that he was probably wrong because of his past record and had to chow on crow. What better example?
So, just to be clear, are you now saying this:
Yes, it was foolish of me to base my belief of a poster’s claims on past performance, and in the future I will strive to never do that again. We should always let each individual assertion stand or fall on its merits, not on the track record of the poster.
It seems that you might be saying that, but it is not at all clear that you are. If not, then my question still stands.
Starving Artist reminds me of the guy Montel Williams interviewed in prison for impregnanting his mother’s roommate’s daughter. He stated that “She dressed like Britney Spears and sat in my lap and had a crush on me.”
In other words, it wasn’t my fault. The girl was a sedductress. And 10 years old.
Montel told him to cut the crap cause there’s no way she could make him upzip his pants.