He’s gives off that vibe of a guy who worships his father, but the father is an asshole. Like the character Corey Feldman played in Stand By Me. It’s sad.
@Johanna I just now had the chance to check that thread. Your response to the bad Dr was great. PIE was a pretty important point in discussing linguistics when I was majoring in the field. There’s really no credible source, AFAIK, to dispute it. And the cites DrD posted don’t qualify as credible.
I’m almost, but not quite, sorry I put him on ignore a day or two ago - just so I could follow along at home. Actually, now I’m even more certain I made the right decision! I’d rather read @Johanna school him any day.
Just as a linguistic sidetrack - the term comes from the Afrikaans term for a train guard/conductor. The etymology there is from the diminutive of gat, a hole or perforation, because train guards physically punched the old cardboard train tickets to validate them.
This is my problem with him too. He lies. And he misrepresents what others say on purpose to try to win arguments.
It’s a shame because I notice that he shares a lot of the same interests and opinions that I do, so he’s the kind of guy I’d like to chat with. Until he pulls this crap. It sucks. If he was just an overall loathsome person with nothing interesting to talk about, it wouldn’t bother me at all to put him on ignore, but instead I do it regretfully.
I think it is safe to assume that if someone had determined a conspiracy to hide a French declaration of war, it might have made actual news. If you were a contrarian who evaluated your sources purely on how heterodox you thought they were, and then did not read those sources, you might conclude that Germany’s role in the outbreak of the Great War is overstated. Believing that France and Russia declared war on Germany and then lied about it crosses over into weird “not even wrong” territory.
Realistically, yes, it crosses beyond that into the realm of deliberately arguing in bad faith by citing a 736-page book you hope people won’t look at because hey, after all, you didn’t.
It is known that a nontrivial subset of the “official” records from the period—particularly that summer—are altered. That has been an acknowledged, understood issue in scholarship for a century. No points for guessing that: “nowhere was suppression or destruction of records, diaries, and the like carried out so widely throughout the following decades as in Germany.”
Thus all records of telephone conversations and notes of other verbal communications are missing for the period in question from the German foreign office. On the German side the two key turning points were the July 5 conversations with the Austrians, resulting in the “blank check,” and the discussions among German leaders the week of July 27 that led to the decision to go to war. All records of both are missing from the foreign office. Missing, too, we are told by a leading researcher in this field, Imanuel Geiss, are all records of the Kaiser’s conversations with military and political leaders during July. For that matter, there are no records of Germany’s conversations in Berlin with foreign powers.
(David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, p. 255-256)
Or we could just look to Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Chief of the German General Staff who turned Alfred von Schlieffen’s spec-fic into an operational plan. Writing to his friend in 1915, after having been replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, Moltke reflected:
It is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated.
I do, sort of. He’s obnoxious and dishonest and disruptive and idiotically stubborn, not to mention more than a little racist. But as I’ve said before, I don’t think he’s a gleeful troll. He doesn’t take pleasure in malicious provocation. I think he’s just as frustrated and unhappy with himself as everyone else, just in a different way. He doesn’t choose to be a pigheaded jackwagon, he just is, and it isn’t fun for him either. To that extent, yeah, I do feel a little sorry for him. I said basically the same thing four years ago, and I hold to it.
My sympathy has limits, of course. He totally deserves it when people scream at him and tear him a new asshole for his relentlessly obstinate ignorance and his pathological inability to admit error or let an argument slide. I don’t feel so sorry for him that I don’t cheer when, as periodically and predictably happens, he gets a well-earned smackdown.
But, yeah. I do think he’s broken, miswired, however you want to describe it, and it is sad.
He took a small step in the “it’s X not Y” thread
Very small. And after @solost corrected him a second time he hasn’t been back.
I swear, that thread is like catnip to him. Might as well have added “Paging DrD” to the thread title.
Right now the only poster I have on permanent ignore is @Gatopescado, who is incurably ignorant and incessantly hostile, and has never made a worthwhile post that I’ve ever seen. I can tolerate almost anyone else, even including the Doctor.
I’ve only ever seen him doing drive-by snide posts.
Also, and this is just a nagging feeling, I sometimes think that a certain bad, bad poster is a sock or vice versa of GatoP. They supposedly know each other and he will sometimes show up to defend her.
Yeah, he’s what I call a functional troll. He’s not trying to troll, it’s not a performance; it’s just how he is.
What does it matter, when the effect on the board experience for everyone else is the same?
Does he still post?
Yes, still the usual drive-by one-liners he thinks are funny, but mostly aren’t.
Well, dang, I guess you’re right. I just checked. What’s really astounding is that, despite how extensive my ignore list is, I somehow don’t even have him on it. I could have sworn I put him on ignore after the spammed the Pit, dragging up dozens of old threads with one-line shit-posts.
I guess he has reached a point where I instinctively recognize his posts as so uniformly inconsequential that it’s like he’s on the ignore list in my brain.
I won’t be too harsh on him, because I think he’s a hopeless, cynical drunk, and I rather feel sorry for him. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t get on my nerves.
Don’t get me wrong he’s annoying as shit and he derails threads until they die, but I find him pathetic rather than malicious. His hero worship of a very flawed father is right out of a Wes Anderson movie, but with less dollhouses (I assume).
He reminds me of those Young Earthers who can only come up with “Well, evolution is only a theory”, not understanding what theory means in this case.
His gatcha isn’t what he thinks it is.
And once he gets something in his head, he can never let it go.
Oh, they’re still saying it.
Well, I know, I wrote that in the present tense. 