Is Shodan more retarded lately, or has he maintained a consistent level of retardation all along?

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, so he’s always been a worthless partisan hack whose entire purpose on the boards was to say “oh you’re criticizing something conservatives did? well someone liberal did it in some situation with a vaguely similar context 2-80 years ago, so gotcha ya!”

Worthless, could be replaced by a fox news talking points bot, doesn’t ever actually contribute anything to the threads, etc. But lately his sniping doesn’t even make sense. He’s gotten lazy or senile or something.

In the Romney/taxes thread

The OP says

Now Shodan replies with this non-sequitor

The thread is about Romney talking about the Job Creators being burdened with high taxes and yet paying very little himself. The word charity isn’t mentioned in the thread up to this point. Obviously no one is criticizing Romney for charitable giving. There is no way anyone could reasonably take away the OP and think “oh man, that guy just hates anyone who’s charitable!” - it’s such a bizarre response that no one could seriously take that as the point of anyone’s argument in that thread.

I give him a WTF in the form of:

to which he replies

What the fuck? No one in the thread, especially the OP, at any point said tax deductions are wrong. It’s a complete non-issue. Romney’s tax numbers change 1-2% when you factor in charitable deductions. No one has said anything that this could remotely be a response to.

So again I try to figure out wtf his thought process is, and ask:

And his reply…

That’s not even sniping. It’s just mind-bogglingly juevenile. He’s not only inventing straw men, but they have nothing to do with anything anyone said, and they’re so comically stupid that they could never be anyone’s real position. It’s just spraying diarrhea over the thread. He’s not even the Fox News robot spouting vaguely related talking points now - he’s like a 6 year old with a keyboard.

The only thing I can think of here is that he thinks that a “write off” is something you pay instead of taxes, and so by giving 3m to charity, he took 3m off the taxes you can pay. This, of course, is stupid - why would anyone ever pay taxes if instead they could choose where their money went and not pay taxes? Charitable income becomes a deduction - meaning you don’t have to pay tax on that income, meaning that if you give $1m to a charity you don’t have to cough up another $200k to give to the government to pay tax for that charitable gift. It doesn’t subtract the amount from your net tax burden.

I also gave him an out if this was his line of thinking when I said “Or are you one of the people that thought charitable deductions means you deduct it from your net tax payments?” and he didn’t take it.

But even if he thinks that, his summary about how I arrived at the conclusion that charity is bad is nonsensical, since I didn’t say anything remotely like that. So even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s retarded rather than malicious (I think it’s both!), and misunderstood the role deductions play in taxes, he still created the idea that I was opposed to deductions because I hated republicans, a statement that has nothing at all to do with anything I’ve said in that thread. He’s still lying.

I can’t reply to him in that thread as if he were making serious points to be addressed, so I took it here instead so I can call him a retarded partisan hack who can’t even put a cohesive bullshit argument together.

He normally spews shit, but I can at least usually see the thought process that got him there, regardless of how stupid. Lately though it seems more and more like he’s just picking random tangents to go off on. The worst part is that you just know how smug he feels whenever he does that. Telling himself “another day of kicking liberal ass!” and patting himself on the back.

On the other hand, you can see some of his work from a while ago in this thread. So maybe he has been this juevenile all along.

By all means, I welcome this to become a general Shodan-bashing thread, so post away with whatever is on your mind.

Regards,
STFU

2

It is unseemly to bash the mentally deficient.

3

To add, I’ve only done 2 pittings in my decade on the board, so I don’t do this shit lightly. Shodan is the least valuable member of this board. The entirety of the content of his posts are just the sort of juevenile partisan snipes that make our political landscape so contentious, hostile, and stupid. He is the distilled essence of what is wrong with partisans, and all that is negative in our politics. He never contributes anything useful, and you’re lucky if his attempts at threadshitting even make sense. Whenever I see his name above a post, I can predict what the content is going to be, and that’s never a good thing.

4

Shodan is exactly as mentally challenged as he always has been as far as I can tell.

5

One of the things that keeps me coming back to this board is the fact there are is a contingent of conservative posters that do a pretty good job of explaining and arguing positions I, as a left-leaning individual, don’t agree with (or necessarily understand).

Shodan is not one of them.

6

People read Shodan’s posts? Why?

7

Yup. I don’t have any particular beef with him though. Except that “Regards” thing. I think that should be taken down to the quarry and thrown in.

8

Entertainment.

9

I think we have a lot of good conservative contributors even if they don’t always bat 1.000

Some of them are rabidly partisan but its not like we don’t have rabidly partisan liberals on this board.

10

I have on occasion seen Shodan say something interesting or helpful in non-political threads.

I have never seen him do so in a political thread.

I can happily name conservatives who have done so, and I can name leftists who are in the same category as Shodan, so this isn’t a left/right thing. It may be a tries-to-communicate/revels-in-his-half-wittiness thing, though.

11

Exactly. Read one, read 'em all. “Liberals are hypocrites, and here’s a straw man argument I just made up to prove it”. Yawn.

I will say I feel a bit bad for anyone who, like ol’ Shody, seems to have little better to do than spend the better part of a decade spewing sarcastic vitriol at people he’s never met and probably never will, who happen to (maybe) be identified by a political label he doesn’t like. Just seems like a colossal waste of time, is all.

12

Ok, this made me LOL. :slight_smile:

13

It would not be possible for his posts to get stupider or more vapid than they already were. The ignore list was made for posters like Shodan. You will miss his posts like you miss the whine of a mosquito in your ear.

14

I agree that Shodan missed the boat in that thread, but on the whole he is a bright guy and a good poster and an asset to the board.

He does seem to a be a bit more focused on conservative/liberal comparisons than he might be, but that’s to be expected from a member of a small minority constantly under attack from ideological enemies. Case in point: this thread. (While I agree with the OP about the specific posts in question, they are completely ordinary in terms of standards of posts to this MB, and are being singled out for being illogical posts from a conservative, versus the standard illogical posts from liberals.)

That’s MHO. Most on this board will differ. It’s virtually impossible to divorce one’s assessment of another person’s arguments and logic from one’s agreement or disagreement with the other’s conclusions.

If you took a viewer survey after a Republican/Democratic debate, you will inevitably find that assessments of who had the better arguments is closely correlated to whether the people surveyed are themselves Republicans or Democrats.

People who think they are above this are nothing but arrogant fools.

15

Over the last few years his mullet has slowly transformed to a skullet. It’s quite sad, and he feels he needs to lash out because the girls at the diner no longer bum cigarettes off of him and flirt.

16

I was going to post a long refutation, but you wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway.

Regards,
Shodan

17

Mmm hmmm…

18

Shut up, you fucking troll.

19

Good guy, even when I disagree.
A conservative voice in this liberal-dominated board.
You’re pissing off the right people, Shodan.

20

This post combined with the one that immediately preceded it made me laugh. A lot.