Eh. I’m leery of internet diagnoses of this kind of thing. A lot of those Aspie symptoms are also symptomatic for being an argumentative blowhard jackass. “Contrarian dick” is not a point on the spectrum.
Besides, he doesn’t seem all that narrowly-focused. He’s an argumentative asshole on a wide variety of topics.
That rules out Asperger.
He’s an argumentative asshole who doesn’t bother to vet Google results. 
If DrDeth hates the pit so much that he refused to even read this thread about himself until he was more or less forced into it (personally I think he’s been reading it all along and loving it) why did he start a big long pit thread over Game of Thrones spoilers? Not only that, but calling someone stupid and illiterate because they don’t want to talk about the books in a TV show thread?
I believe his attitude toward the Pit changed in the past 8 years. At any rate, they’re both jackasses in their own ways.
DrDeth has been posting here in the pit all along, too. I admit that it’s not very often but he doesn’t ignore it completely by any stretch of the imagination.
What a wonderful trip down memory lane. My favorite part was where he spent like 10 consecutive posts declaring victory because Beef hadn’t shown up, then Beef shows up, says that DD never told him he was pitting Beef, and then DD never shows his face in the Pit ever again for the rest of time.
I agree completely, but I will also confess that I have had basically the same thought. @DrDeth reminds me very strongly of a guy I used to work with — reasonably intelligent, but obsessed with being perceived as smarter than he was, constantly barging in on office conversations to assure everyone he had facts and opinions on every topic; quick to draw conclusions, and even quicker to fixate on them, with no ability to adjust his thinking once he’d made a decision; incapable of reading the subtleties of social situations, and no understanding that people’s emotional relationship to their thoughts and opinions is just as important, in terms of getting along with others, as the bare facts being expressed in the conversation; and so on. This fast-processing information-first approach made him a very effective IT specialist, but he had difficulty making and keeping friends; everyone in the office held him at arm’s length except when they really needed his (narrow) expertise.
Looking back, this guy was clearly what we would today call “neuroatypical,” but I hesitate to draw any more specific conclusion than that, even though I knew him pretty well. And as strongly as the subject of this thread reminds me of that guy, as much as I want to draw a connection and make an assumption about what’s driving his behavior, I tell myself I’ve never met him in person, and that it would be irresponsible and uncharitable to try to impose my constrained guesses on him. I also think back to that other guy, and however much he drove all of us crazy, I remember the moment I realized how frustrating it must have been just to be him — he was clearly wired in a particular way, and was endlessly irritated that the world refused to cooperate with his (off-center) understanding of it. From that moment, I tried to be more patient and sympathetic, but I still didn’t want to be friends with him.
The same kind of situation applies here. I would like to think he’s making progress in the other thread where his irritating behaviors are being catalogued, and he’s reluctantly conceding the issues one by one and promising to think about them and make adjustments. And, per the above, I don’t want to make the offensive mistake of saying “he’s clearly behaving according to (DSM V label).” Nevertheless, I still think there’s some kind of underlying commonality that could unify everything, and if he could just get a handle on it, he’d make a significant leap in understanding himself and why his behavior is so abrasive to others.
Very well said - I wish I had put it this way.
It’s been like two days and he’s hijacking and shitting on the McDonald’s ice cream machine thread. The Mods did put a stop to it.
It’s kinda the problem.
Discussing other aspects of McD’s or other fast food corporations control over the operations of franchise owners is relevant.
But it shouldn’t rise to consume the thread. It’s tangentially related, but he wants to take off on that tangent exclusively, and argue an irrelevant point, even after he has been shown that it is wrong.
Sez who?
The French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once famously said, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. But perhaps a more relevant observation here may be less pithy but more accurate: once a fucking jackass, always a fucking jackass.
What a fuckin’ jackass.
What an fuckin’ jackass.
Yes, he am.
Ahem, ‘Wht n fuckin’ jack ass.’
Sez who?
‘Stop hi-jackin the thread! I’m right and we should drop it.’