Oh dear. :eek:
Sorry Meatros 
It’s all true. He’s been doing this for eight years or so on usenet and he founded his website and “message board” some time ago. Now he mostly pops over to usenet to spam for his board(which is extremely heavily moderated, by him).
He’s got more experience dodging questions than Bill Clinton and Miguel Estrada combined. He’s got his own entire worldview in which Science is a belief system instead of a method of obtaining objective knowledge. Let it go, stay out of his world(I noticed you have the second-highest post count in that thread). It’s just not worth it.
Enjoy,
Steven
You’re probably right Mtgman, after all, it took him 22 pages to even concede that James Randi might not have coined the term “cold reading,” even though history of the practice had been pointed out to him pages earlier.
It has been kind of fun though, in a picking-at-a-scab sort of way.
Don’t worry, he’ll forget that he conceeded that Randi might not have coined the term by the time the next thread rolls around and whoever is unfortunate enough to butt heads with him at that point will have to start from square one again.
It’s quite amusing(in a “watch the train wreck” sort of way) to watch him with each batch of new people though. He has learned a lot in his years on the net and he’s quite good at selectively quoting, sounding eminently reasonable, and making people believe he’s acting in good faith. The truth is that he has never acted in good faith. His interpretation of his near-death experience completely polarized his life. Whatever conclusions he came to after examining that experience are set in stone and he simply won’t budge. Unfortunately they’re either right(in which case we live in a world we can’t hope to understand or change and science as a tool to understand our world is completely worthless. We might as well just drink, wench, and live a life of debauchery because we’ll have eternal bliss in a spiritual afterlife no matter what), or completely wrong. His views share virtually NO common ground with an objective understanding of our world.
Personally I don’t have a problem with him. He seems harmless enough, his worldview is pacifistic and tolerant. He’s got his own little world and he’s happy in it. We just need to be sure that whenever he pokes his head up and starts with his expounding of his worldview that we fire off a warning bouy so any who haven’t come into contact with him before realize they’re entering uncharted waters.
Enjoy,
Steven
I agree, he seems harmless enough. I’m actually a little concerned now though. 8 years is an awfully long time to be arguing the same way. It makes me wonder why he feels he needs to justify his position so extensively. I have my guesses of course.
I agree with you that Lekatt’s NDE has polarized his life, I’m speculating that his need to try to gather adherents is based on a subconscious (or maybe conscious) fear that he hallucinated the whole thing.
I think he needs other people to dismiss science and their findings in order to further validate his. This is the only reason I can think of why Lekatt would spend 8 years arguing around the same topic. I mean, I would understand if he was trying to gather information, share views, etc-but it appears that he isn’t, it appears as though he’s trying to validate his world view.
I had the the second highest? Gulp…
There’s an old saying: “He chased her and chased her and chased her until finally she caught him.”
I think that those that most vehemently argue a position fall into the category of “He argued his point and argued his point and argued his point until finally he believed it.”
By the way, how do you tell who has the most posts in a thread, besides just going through and counting them all?
I was watching a TV newstainment show the other night. It showed some club kids rebreathing nitrous from a balloon over and over. Does that cause NDEs? I know it occasionally causes actual D.
The number in the “Replies” column on a forum main page is a link. Clicking that link will spawn a pop-up window which has a breakdown of who participated in the thread as well as how many posts each made. It should be noted that this is a pure post-count based analysis. This does not take into account the content of the posts. It is possible that people with a low post count in a particular thread actually contributed far more than people who had a bunch of one-liners.
For the thread in question the clear current leader is lekatt with 198 posts(nearly 1/5 of the total reply count). Way ahead of second place Meatros, who has 107(approximately 1/10 of the total posts in the thread). Third place, 11 posts behind Meatros, is GOM with 96 posts. The next contender has some ground to cover. So, photopat, you better get posting, you’ve got 76 right now. You’re 21 posts away from the bronze, 32 away from the silver, and I don’t think you’ve got a chance at the gold. 
A breakdown of this particular thread, so you don’t have to go to Great Debates and look it up yourself if you don’t want, can be found right here. This page will be generated when you click the link, so if the post stats change, you’ll still get current info by clicking it.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t think it causes NDE, but it does cause euphoria 
Thanks Mtgman. I’m not concerned with the medal, participating is enough for me. One of these days I can say “I took part in the SDMB Psychic debate of 2003.” The first one anyway. Maybe not the 75 that will follow. 
(Cue Chariots of Fire music.)
Imagine that! I learned something new!
You know, I can’t believe I posted anywhere near that number of times in that thread…
Post counts sort of sneak up on you. I can’t believe I’m not very far from four digits. :eek:
Enjoy,
Steven
I think that’s relatively harmless. It only kills people when they get so carried away with breathing the nitrous that they forget to breathe any oxygen.