Cite: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10315753&postcount=1
I think he might be the stupidest poster we’ve got here.
Shodan, he’s gunning for you! 
I find your lack of effort in writing the OP disturbing.
Oh yeah, I find your lack of effort in panning my lack of effort equally disturbifying.
Srsly.
Also, I felt it was succinct.
Meh.
Dumber than lekatt? That’s just crazy talk!
I have to agree that the OP is “meh”.
However, on the thread there is growing evidence that **magellian01 **is a moron. Currently the best evidence is his maneuver of assuming no one in the thread will notice his stupid obvious subjective early declaration that a cite was invalid just for being from Media Matters (ignoring on purpose that the links in the article pointed to proper counter evidence) only to later claim his objectivity is the “bees knees” in judging a cite coming from biased Right Wing uncited commentary.
Sorry, but there is no one on the Dope as stupid as Shodan.
I’m waiting for his explosion of rage at McCain hiring a corrupt Saddam Hussein lobbyist to run his transition team. Given his raging hatred of Obama for his distant and tenuous ‘associations’ his head is bound to explode.
Or he’ll hypocritically hand wave it away.
One of the two. I’m sure we’re all agog.
Shodan isn’t stupid. He is just a brutally cynical right-tard who simply has no concern for honesty or truth. It’s all about his ‘side’ winning. I don’t believe he is anything but a professional viral lobbyist.
I put them in different categories myself.
lekatt’s brain simply doesn’t work. There’s just nothing there to engage with on any level whatever. The poster could just as easily be writing about the purple-footed space monsters come to eat our pineal glands so that they can finally complete the last rites of their Triangle Shirtwaist ceremony, which will allow them to achieve their ultimate goal of castling in chess after already having lost both rooks and moved their king. This sort of thing doesn’t bother me. lekatt is obviously a lunatic. What both bothers and perplexes me is that people actually try respond to this bullshit as if it were somehow vitally important to correct the record, when the “page down” key in front of them is the only reasonable response.
magellan, on the other hand, is capable of stringing together words into sentences that, at times, make potentially factual statements. What’s bewildering about him is that those statements are about as close to uniformly false as any other poster on the entire SDMB. Worse than that, the logic that he puts forth to support these statements would often be better suited to the exact opposite conclusion that he mysteriously manages to draw. Even so, the context of his statements do reflect the world in which we live, even if he is continually at odds with the facts around him. And this relevant context makes his stupidity that much harder to bear, because the basic accessibility of his statements belies their inherent vacuousness, which when displayed on my screen has damn near sucked the skin right off my face on more than one occasion. magellan’s writing is like some twisted joke that tempts us to engage on an intellectual level, when his own intellectual depth is roughly equivalent to the water ring left on the kitchen table by a cold drink.
So is magellan stupider? Of course not. And to his credit, he has in the past held fast to some laudable principles, even though his given plans to realize these ostensible principles would be more suitable to a person of diametrically opposite beliefs. So, no, he’s not the dumbest around. But I think a great argument can be made that he’s the dumbest of his kind, his inanities the most insidious of his league. The thread linked in the OP is another great demonstration of that, even if the OP itself was lacking.
That sounds like a perfect description of Fox News Channel.
I go back and forth between thinking Shodan is a bot, and thinking that he is actually a brilliant parody. I’m leaning towards parody. If he were really as stupid as his posts make him appear, there is no way he could have mastered the English language to the extent that he has, and he wouldn’t be able to participate here.
Yeah, when you add in the likes of Starving Artist and Clothahumper, magellan01 is just a moronic right-wing semi-troll. Nowhere near their level of stupidity.
-Joe
Hey, don’t pick on Shodan. He’s actually one of my favorite posters. I really enjoy what he writes here. He’s not a total moron, he only closely resembles one when he talks politics. It’s a subject he should stay far away from.
If we were to start a poll, ranking the SDMB’s tighty-righties, what should the specturm be? I’d suggest
the out-and-out off-the-scale insane, such as Lekatt (if his posting could be IDed ideologically)
the trolls (making problems doing this poll in IMHO)
the hard-core, inflexible, extreme-on-all-issues ideologues
the sporadically reasonable but mainly irrational and hateful right-wingers
single-issue righties who are more moderate on several other issues
and maybe a few more designations until we get closer to “moderate Republicans who cheerfully accept that their party sometimes disappoints even them”
Such a poll would actually be extremely helpful to me, in that I often think “Oh, this nutjob again,” and then realize that maybe I’ve confused him or her with another nutjob altogether (ranting sounds very much like ranting, after all.) I often confuse xtisme with starving artist, for example, and I really have no idea who I’m insulting grossly there, but I’m pretty sure I’m being unkind to one or the other, because I often don’t bother reading either one to the end of their posts, and often skip a post because I’m pretty sure I could write it myself, so well do I understand the position in advance of reading it.
If we did such a poll, I’d think it would be helpful if the nominees refrained from arguing in the poll, for a while at least, about the designations. In fact, I think it would be good for them just to sit back and see the impressions they make, relative to the other tighty-righties on the Dope. I also think it would be interesting if they would do the same for all of us in the communist-atheist-traitor-collectivist-mind-hive.
magellan often says dumb things, but he occasionally says smart things too. Very smart, in fact.
I’d rather argue with them than argue amongst ourselves. Stupid or not, they get to have their say.
And now back to the abuse. 
I don’t think it would be helpful to anyone.
Yeah, a poll calling out posters based on their ideology!
That way we have a handy guide by which to consult before we take someone’s idea seriously. If the poll has deemed them unworthy we can dismiss their input entirely. Streamline the dope! Efficiency! I need another echo chamber!
Why don’t you just write everyone’s name on the wall by your computer, and put little check marks next to their name every time they piss you off? Than you literally can have a wall of names, and you will be completely sane and organized with your hatred.
Well he seems to have picked up the lekatt debate method