Heh. I’d say two trolls and a jerk. I got all three of them on ignore too.
I have no interest in scrolling through a bunch of posts addressing the same shit crapped out over and over again with moving goalposts. I do occasionally come across an interesting article posted by someone replying to their posts. With them on ignore, I can find those articles easier.
… I’ve disagreed with FigNorton about a lot in covid threads, but they aren’t a denier and not like SayTwo At all. The stuff SayTwo says is dangerous. The stuff that FigNorton (sometimes) says is merely (IMHO) annoying 
.
I’ve only recently returned to the boards, so I don’t have the months and months of frustrating interactions y’all have clearly endured with @SayTwo. But even coming into things cold, it was immediately clear that something is seriously off with him. (Assuming a guy.) First, I noticed that most of his comments get zero response from anyone. And then I read a few of them.
Danger, Will Robinson, danger.
His posts read as manipulative and dishonest, like there’s an unspoken agenda, a desired endgame, and these seemingly rational arguments are merely entry points, attempts to get rhetorical traction, in order to lead to the actual destination. He’s like a sea lion on steroids.
More than anything, they feel like the consciously contrived opening gambit of a cult recruiter, something that sounds superficially reasonable but that is designed to lead you point by point into a separation from reality.
Scientology: “You seem frustrated. Would you be interested in a more scientific way of understanding your own personality, so you can have more control over your relationship to the world?” ( … two years and a hundred thousand dollars later … ) “Congratulations, the meter shows you’re making progress detaching yourself from the volcano spirits.”
Qanon: “Don’t you think we should be concerned about children going missing, and what might be happening to them?” ( … six months and a hundred YouTube videos later … ) “And that’s why we have to get into the basement of the Smithsonian and disrupt the adrenochrome extraction labs!”
I don’t know what this guy’s endgame is. But he clearly has one. He’s methodically sifting through various strategic arguments, looking for a crack in the scientific consensus he can wedge open. But that’s just step one. He’s not interested in examining these questions for their own sake; he obviously wants to get a toehold so he can pursue intellectual vandalism on the topic on a much wider scale. And it’s to the board’s credit that, so far, not much has worked for him, and he’s still looking for that toehold.
Regarding some of the other COVID skeptics who have come up in the thread, I don’t have beef with most of them. They say and appear to believe some dumb things, unsupported by science, but their beliefs seem sincerely held, and (with a couple of exceptions) they seem receptive to argument and engagement. SayTwo is a denier on a totally different level, dishonest and evasive and slippery and calculating and shifty, and criticisms of him should be addressed separately from the others.
Did you see Magiver’s contributions to the 737 Max thread? He was adamant that, based on his vast knowledge, there was nothing wrong with the airplane whatsoever. The accidents that happened – and the ones that nearly happened – were just simply pilot error, that’s all there is to it. Case closed. The fact that the 737 Max was grounded worldwide for a year and a half by order of the FAA and the aviation regulatory bodies of every civilized country in the world, with the concurrence of Boeing; and the fact that Boeing had dismissed numerous safety concerns, violated regulations, and endangered the lives of passengers through secretive efforts intended only to maximize profit, is irrelevant. The fact that Boeing acknowledged many of these wrongdoings and ultimately ousted its CEO is also irrelevant. What is relevant is that the grounding was stupid, and happened only because the world’s aviation regulators lack @Magiver’s deep knowledge of the facts, that it was all pilot error, and that foreign pilots in particular are untrained morons who were solely responsible for everything.
This is also how Magiver carries on in virtually any other conversation.
Another vote here in favor of @FigNorton despite a mild swipe made in my direction above.
We do have some severe overreactors on the board who literally have not left their residence since February nor been within 20 feet of another human being. By any rational standard that’s excessive caution bordering on mental / emotional illness. It’s certainly self-harm at this point.
We have active trolls such as Saytwo on the other extreme, as @Cervasie just so explained so well. The sneering one-liners that you can’t tell which sentence of which paragraph of which of the last 4 posts it was aimed at are my personal dead giveaway.
There’s one hell of a lot of daylight between those two positions. There is room to say some degree of risk, and therefor at a societal level some degree of illness, morbidity, and mortality is acceptable, if still regrettable.
Fig’s sometimes aways farther down that spectrum than I am. And sometimes not.
All of us are deeply frustrated that both our government and our populace refuse to take the lessons successfully demonstrated in other broadly similar countries. Both the lessons of how to mitigate disease and the lessons of how to mitigate economic damage.
But if each of us chooses to label as troll or jerk anyone who’s one iota to the “right” for lack of a better term on COVID than we are, well, we might win the shouting battle but we’ve lost the intellectual war.
And yes, that is a cool name. And a cool icon that gives me an idea I just might bother to hack together today.
As I said earlier here, doctrinaire and blinkered. Not always useless, but usually smugly irritating. Far below my threshold for banning from my world.
I was away from the boards during the whole start of the MAX fiasco. So I have not read any of the threads that must have been written as the events unfolded.
Boeing pulled a stupid. For which they already had a fix in the works before the global situation spiralled out of their control. Taking your explanation of his (unsurprising) POV at face value, Magiver wasn’t right but he wasn’t as wrong as all that.
This NY Times magazine article from a year ago may be behind a paywall. But I’ve shared it with a lot of people, as have umpteen other 737 drivers around the industry. The author is a noted aviation author and puts a lot of information into perspective for the layman.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html
As it happens, on Saturday upcoming I’m going to the sim to do my mandated MAX return to service training, and I’ve been in the books this week. What strikes me most about the official Boeing training materials is the degree to which they are reminding the audience that “you need to remember how to fly an airplane by hand. You cannot rely on the autopilot to save you. When things get confusing, revert to the basics.”
Any pilot, certainly including me, can become overwhelmed by a nasty enough combination of aircraft malfunctions, terrain, weather, and startle/fear. The guys driving those two jets, and especially the second one, were a far more defective feature of the total aviation system than the MAX design was. Boeing and the regulators have now fixed the MAX design problem. Time to see what the worldwide regulators do about the other problem.
Thanks to those who put me in a different basket and I will now leave this thread to its original purpose. 
Thank you for this post, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was and it was kind of an itch that you scratched.
Saytwo is simply an online groomer whose specific agenda is not clear but is using techniques familiar to those who deal with these things.
The username pretty much says it all Saytwo = doublespeak, so nothing stated by that poster is in good faith and everything has an ulterior motive.
Says one thing, but means something completely different. This is not the classic troll at all but does employ sometimes trollish behaviour when it suits.
Welcome back, by the way. I’ve missed your posts. Your response to the Telemarketer is still a thing of beauty.
I’ve only interacted with him on COVID threads, and I stopped doing so a month or so ago. I suspect that part of the reason his posts often don’t get responses is that a lot of us have stopped taking his bait. As you describe, he’s slippery, elusive, and not really interested in an honest debate.
As for Magiver, I concur with how he’s been described here. He’s clearly smart, and extremely analytical, but he also seems to be convinced that his analyses are always perfect. His entire strategy for beating COVID is:
In one of the COVID threads, over the past couple of days, I’ve had a back-and-forth with him, which amounts to:
Thanks for the response. As for the “hijack”, I do care, and I read your comments with interest. I also looked at the referenced article, which I think I’ve seen before and I do agree that it’s excellent and seems authoritative (it’s only semi-paywalled – you have to be registered to read it, but you can register with a free account). I think it could be summed up as “it’s complicated, and better trained pilots might have been able to handle the situation better than those of Lion Air or Ethiopian, but the 737 MAX nevertheless had a serious safety flaw and Boeing screwed up in a very big way”. To the best of my understanding, among many other things, the MCAS suffered from the double whammy of being both undocumented in the flight manual and poorly implemented.
Anyway, enough of that hijack here. I always greatly appreciate your comments about all things aviation (and for that matter, most other things, too). Which is more than I can say for Magiver, whose comments I don’t appreciate about anything. His intransigence and arrogant smugness makes me completely uninterested in whether he might actually know something about what he’s talking about, or just bullshitting as usual. If anything he said in the 737 threads (I think there were at least two) had any validity, I attribute it to the stopped clock syndrome, the one that’s right twice a day, and wrong all other times. And Magiver has as much credibility to me as that metaphorical stopped clock.
Yes, you jumped to personal insults. I am talking about your very first post, which was to call the poster an asshat. That would clearly be against the no personal insults rule if said outside the Pit, hence it is a personal insult. Said poster had just said that you were a fan of a particular poster (and even indicated this was unusual for you, suggesting you normally don’t agree with trolls like that.)
What’s more, that poster then explained how they’d come to that conclusion–that you’d started acting just like SayTwo by mocking people as “wanting to hide in caves” because they took the lingering symptoms of COVID-19 seriously. He then went out of his way to say he didn’t think you were “stupid” as part of a peace offering. But you still attacked back even worse.
I even directly asked you to clarify what makes you different from a denier: to expound on your beliefs that are different from that of someone who “has been against masks and lockdowns from the beginning.” You instead try to get into a debate over what exactly a personal insult is.
Yay, some people don’t consider you a troll like @SayTwo. Congratulations. But you were never accused of being a troll like him. You were accused of supporting his denialist positions. To me, it makes the most sense then to clarify what your positions actually are, and why you are not a denialist.
So, again, what exactly do you believe? What is your position on masks, social distancing, and lockdowns? (Note, these have objective answers.)
That was my second post. Game. Set. Match.
Look, maybe you don’t take your standing here very seriously. It’s not my life or anything, obviously, but if I want to engage in meaningful discussions then being lumped in with an obvious troll is detrimental.
I’m hawkish on reopening but I believe masks, lockdowns and social distancing have a direct effect on lowering transmission. If you want to see how I feel about SayTwo’s position and style, the search engine here should show you how we’ve interacted.
Nonsense. The rational action is to stay as safe as they can, balanced with what other needs they may also need to take into account. If a poster is already an introvert who feels they can get all their social needs online, and can order all their necessities–if they can stay locked up and feel fine, they should do so. If they find out they can’t do so, then they may do what they can to mitigate the issues they have, while trying to remain as safe as possible.
Since their actions harm no one but possibly themselves, it’s not really up to us to say anything. The whole reason why we do say something about some people’s positions is that their actions do harm others. Those who refuse to wear masks, fight lockdowns, spread false info about the virus, refuse to social distance, and so on–those people harm others, and thus are not entitled to their position.
It doesn’t work both ways: none of us can decide that someone is being too cautious or that their trade-offs aren’t worth it. But we can decide that someone’s lack of caution is causing harm to others.
I’ll be honest: I envy those who could remain in full isolation, without anyone in their house needing to go out. I envy those who didn’t get colds and such and worry that they could have it and might give it to someone who was at very high risk who lived with them.
But that’s my point. You weren’t making it clear how you were different from them. You were acting more like them, making people think you were similar. SayTwo also avoids directing answering questions, for example. SayTwo implies people are cowards or duped.
You do seem to be different, but I will say that “hawkish on reopening” covers a lot of science denialist positions. It has been shown that the US totally screwed up on the lockdown front. There was science to show how long each state should stay locked down, and it was ignored. The same science was used in other countries, and they got much better results. It seems pretty clear to me.
But I also don’t know how “hawkish” you are, as that’s a nebulous term. So no more discussion about that from me in this thread.
I will say one more thing though–I think most of you are being way too light on SayTwo.They’re not just a troll or “ignorant fuckstick.” They’re actively dangerous to society.
I’ve yet to get a good explanation for why people like them aren’t guilty of at least negligent homicide.
The asshole is at it again.
Gotta love that thread, get to ‘’‘political’’’ you get a warning, post bullshit you get to continue posting bullshit!
Since March I’ve only been out of my house once a week to get groceries, and I’m switching to curbside pickup because there are still assholes in those stores who wear masks in and then either remove the mask completely or only cover their mouths. I keep at least 6 feet away from anyone wherever possible when I’m talking to my neighbors when we both happen to be outside at the same time, but for the most part, I stay inside.
You wanna know why? Because I’m in my late 50s, which puts me at risk. I’m fat and I’m diabetic, which puts me more at risk. I have asthma, so there’s another strike against me.
I live by myself with two cats, so if I get sick there is no one to take care of me or them. I have no nearby family and my closest friend is 50 miles away and has a family of her own to worry about.
I am taking extra care in protecting myself because far too many people out there aren’t being responsible. Are you going to call me an over-reactor, also?
Well, how about you come to the Quarantine and see what I said. No offense but I don’t need to explain my covid philosophy to you. You can engage me in a conversation if you like
Back to the primary subject of this thread: SayTwo got his butt banned from the Breaking News COVID thread, for posting misinformation.