[Animal House]
…the Germans?
Forget it man, he’s rolling!
[/AH]
I’m sorry but the word, “epistemological” is my Niagra Falls. I immediately stop reading anything that contains that word and go to my garage to curse loudly while violently kicking the garbage cans.
What do you say instead? It’s a fancy word, but it covers an important thing. Knowability?
It’s been my experience that anything containing the word, “epistemological”, is going to be insufferable sophistry, written to obscure an idea rather than reveal it.
I’m sure it’s me; My wife often reminds me that I graduated university with a vocational school education.
(To wit: I probably just use the semi-colon wrong.)
Another casualty of applied metaphysics.
Nah, the semicolon is great. Just don’t capitalize the beginning of the next clause and you’re golden.
You’d think they’d have mentioned it when I was signing for all those student loans.
Did he(?) do another thread on the theme of ‘if life is optional, why live’? I seem to recall a thread on that but the one you linked too is really short and I thought the one I was following was longer. If it’s the same guy then, yeah, I agree with your original assertion in the OP…the dude needs some help.
This has now descended to Luciano700 levels, just without the hostility and blatant narcissism. What is it about this place that attracts these infants? Are we giving out free candy?
I would guess it’s because no matter how obviously trollish or just plain dumb they are and no matter how many repetitive threads they start, people here keep engaging with them.
For a message board that prides itself on having intelligent, skeptical posters AND has a maxim about not feeding trolls, we have a lot of posters who can’t seem to stop giving these idiots the attention they crave.
Hey, the dude’s threads give me a chance to wax philosophical without me looking like the douche in the turtleneck. Sue me if I like to waste my time on nonsense now and then.
Some of the discussion turns out to be interesting, if you just ignore the OP. He rarely comes back anyway.
He’s just feeling un-loved. Bless his little ole heart.
You can waste your time however you like. But if people are wondering (as wolfpup did) why the SDMB is a magnet for a certain type of idiotic narcissist, it’s because they get showered with attention here. I personally wish people would do less to encourage these trolls, although I understand it can be difficult to just ignore people who post things that are obviously stupid or misguided…especially when they do it over and over again.
I’m not convinced that he’s a troll. He might be fairly thick, and unwilling to budge from his preconceived notions, but that’s hardly unique to him.
I would recommend not giving him so much attention even if he’s “just” a remarkably stupid and unpleasant person rather than a troll.
However, people who are both sincere and inflexible in their beliefs don’t typically start one thread after another asking other people to change their minds about these beliefs. That sort of person might start a bunch of witnessing threads, or even a “This is what I believe, go ahead and prove me wrong if you can!” threads, but they wouldn’t play Machinaforce’s game of saying “I find the rantings of this lunatic I found in the dark recesses of the Internet to be strangely compelling. Won’t someone try to persuade me it’s not true?” It’s an act calculated to get a response here, and thus far it’s been working for him.
It’s not the “preconceived notions” part that’s the problem, it’s the “what is the meaning of life?” type questions being asked by an infantile moronic obsessive thread-starter apparently determined to turn the board into his own tedious personal blog.
There are plenty of folks here that I vehemently disagree with on a variety of issues and I’m under no illusion that I’m going to change their minds (or that they’re going to change mine) but at least we can exchange something that passes for actual discernible information that rises above the level of the babbling of a street-corner lunatic.
He’s an obsessive fucking twat.
Definitely. With his interminable pseudo-intellectual, life-pondering ‘queries’. You can basically give the same answer for all of his threads: “just fuck it all man…”
How does love work? Who is this fucking stupid? Love is a woman kissing frogs until she finds her prince. If he’s a frog, it’s not a woman’s fault.