I’m torn between entirely agreeing with you both (thinking the guy needs help and should be banned for the sake of his own health and ours), and being attracted by the amusement factor. Once you’ve stopped attempting to debate him and just learned to laugh at him, he’s pretty funny. In fact, from a liberterian point of view, perhaps the best approach would be to allow him freedom to post but insist he come with a health warning!
But it did annoy the hell out of me when DocC was getting warned about his EtherPsychology thing. There seemed to be a double standard. Doc, as an acknowledged sane and clever person, was getting warned off by the admins on the basis that his satire was misleading to Lekatt because Lekatt was incapable of getting the point. Meanwhile, Lekatt appeared to me to be held to a lower standard because the admins tacitly acknowledged that he was such a fruitcake he knew not what he did.
It comes down to sincerity, I think. It was pretty clear to everybody but lekatt that DocCathode wasn’t sincere. That’s trolling, albeit incredibly entertaining trolling. lekatt, on the other hand, does seem to be sincere.
I don’t make fun of Lekatt here for the same reason I’m not rude to the young man with Down’s Syndrome who tries to rob the store where I work every so often with a handwritten note.
I agree, and said so when I reported one of his more egregiously stupid posts, but the mod/admin response I got disagreed, and made a reasonable case, so I didn’t press it.
However, it occurs to me that his refusal to enter the Pit may provide a means of dealing with his nonsense. We should create a Generic Lekatt Response Thread here in the Pit. Any time he posts in GD or wherever, the reply would be added to the Generic thread, with a reply link in the original thread: [see here for my response to you](not an actual link, chuckles). No actual discussion of his points in the original thread. If he wants to see your response, he has to come to the Pit. He’s of course free to continue posting in the original thread, but if he wants to conduct a discussion, he has to read the other side in the Pit thread.
I don’t know if that would be kosher, but it sure would be fun. And as a bonus, maybe the frustration would make him leave (yay!), or at the very least drive up his blood pressure and cause him to collapse and drift into a premortem state where he’s floating down a long, bright corridor with tinkling music and the love of— er, I mean, the Love of God and All That Shit surrounding him and the voices of departed relatives urging him onward, and then he emerges into a huge glowing cathedral with trumpets and autoharps and stuff, and a hugely imposing yet gentle and reassuring figure strides forward and says “Lekatt?” and he says “Yes” and the figure says “I am the Father of All” and Lekatt falls to his knees and the figure opens his robe and says “say aah” and Lekatt does and then the figure pisses right in his mouth with its enormous holy veiny dong, and then Lekatt wakes up face-down in his own bed to find that he has spurted endless gallons of projectile diarrhea up onto the ceiling that is now dripping slowly onto his own back and he knows the whole thing was a stupid, pointless hallucination, and he cries, and cries, and cries.
Ah, much like Liberal, wouldn’t you say? They both hijack threads to death with their own little agendas, then whine and cry like preschoolers when they get called on it.
Monty, I’ll see if I can’t find it. I just seem to remember him trying to convince her that God was a loving God, and she having none of it.
In case anyone doesn’t remember, His4Ever changed her name to lynn73. Took me a while to figure out where everyone in one of those threads was getting H4E quotes from, when I hadn’t seen a single post from her in the thread yet.
That’s the first virulent and debilitating stage of Lekattitus.
You know you’re on the mend when you make the subtle but important move of boggling over the idea that anyone would be enough of a fuckwit to suggest that kindness and compassion are betrayals of Jesus.
You’re fully healed when you start laughing at the very idea that any twerp who would sign every post “love” while suggesting that kindness and compassion are betrayals of Jesus is worth replying to.
I will say this for lekatt: his posts are usually correctly spelled and more-or-less grammatically correct. We’ve all seen posts by functionally illiterate folks, posts that are painful to read even if one agrees with the point being attempted. With lekatt, you can take in the absurd logic, arrogant intolerance for any other viewpoint, and obstinate, willful ignorance without being distracted by poor spelling.
And I do think it’s willful ignorance, not innate stupidity. If you tested lekatt on basic intelligence skills, using abstract problems, he might do fine. It’s just that when it comes to his attempts to communicate with others who disagree with him on the subjects dear to his heart, he’s narrowed his mind down to a few well-trodden, dead-end paths, and erected big rocky mental barriers blocking access to more fruitful directions of thought. Also, he’s a fucking idiot.
The difference is that Lekatt’s condition is self-induced. For decades he hasn’t questioned whether he’s found the Truth, or considered the validity of anybody else’s position. Since that fateful night, he’s had his fingers in his ears and chanted his holy mantra ‘I had an NDE. You are all against me. Science knows nothing. I am not listening.’
He was past middle age. He’d trained for decades in a print shop, and new
technology made him and everything he’d learned obsolete. He was feeling old and useless, and that he’d wasted his life. Then, he has a dream. Rather
than being inspired to do something- study and become clergy of a religion, devote his life to charity, or make any kind of radical change, he embraces the dream as proof that God exists and that He has chosen Lekatt as his special messenger. That is why Lekatt is impervious to logic, and why he can’t see our arguments and cites. To admit that NDE’s might not exist, or that his NDE was just an ordinary dream would be to admit that he is still that man who spent decades in an obsolete job. Worse, it will be admittting that he has wasted even more time chasing an illusion. Don Quixote’s madness elevates him and causes him to do noble and heroic things. Lekatt’s delusions keep him small. Why chase grand truths or try to grow wise and enlightened
when God has given you a divine mission that requires nothing more than posting on message boards and running a website?
It was just one of those “what the holy Christ on a pogo stick” moments. I mean, I’ve seen some weird crazy stuff from time to time, and I’ve gleefully torn into lekat more than once myself but DAMN. :eek:
Nope; he’s hit a nerve because people here like to think they’re fighting ignorance and he’s a case of ignorance fighting back. It isn’t that he doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree; it’s that he isn’t even trying to listen.
Similar scenarios have been played out around non-religious themes, such as the lunar conspiracy thing (with a fellow calling himself SeeThruArt). On a much smaller scale, the two mailbag forums often play host to this sort of behaviour - where someone will argue black and blue that the wild opinion they pulled, freshly-steaming out of their ass has every bit as much validity as hard, documented fact.
That Lekatt’s ignorant behaviour happens to centre upon his particular brand of religion is pretty much incidental.
That’s the most infuriating thing about Lekatt. If he could just stop clinging to his ‘NDE’ and screaming that he has all the answers and is doing important work, he might be able to go on to a truly illuminating study of questions and actually doing important work. Look at the many believers on the Dope- the Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans etc. How many of them have been driven by their faith to clothe the naked, house the homeless, feed the hungry? Even if their is nothing more than this world and only oblivion waits for us, these people have accomplished something worthwhile. What has Lekatt done? His beliefs keep him from ever finding wisdom. His preaching keeps him from ever doing any real works of charity.
If he would only open his eyes, he could see a world much more wonderful. If he could give up his lies, he could become a man whose passing we would weep for. But, he won’t listen to us and he fights anybody who attempts to remove his blindfold. He claims it is a view of heaven.
