I have to agree with this, and I ought to have thanked you for them earlier.
Reading you explaining economics to LinusK is rather like watching someone describing algebra to a rhesus monkey, but other monkeys like myself sometimes pick up something. So thanks for that.
Regards,
Shodan
I do find it odd that the SDMB has vomited up not one but two combinations of loony-left economics with loony-right anti-feminism: der trihs and LinusK.
What an asshole.
What do you expect from LinusK, when your big sister’s as assholish as Lucy, always pulling out footballs and such? Of course he’d grow up to hate women
Goodness, how embarrassing. Thank you for the correction.
You should have thanked him for the coronation. 
Oh my… that’s a great party trick.
I knew a girl who could shoot ping pong balls. A football would indeed be a show-stopper.
Well, some kind of stopper, anyway…
You’d need a plunger.
Up to you to figure out which end to use.
Fucking kumbaya is the only kind worth having.
For those of you who are more familiar than I am with LinusK’s usual posting style, would you say that he’s an idiot and a liar or just a plain idiot?
I ask because in the current GD thread it sure looks like he’s blatantly lying about things he’s posted, but considering how unintelligent and uninformed he is I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that he genuinely doesn’t even understand his own posts. I get the feeling that he’s mostly just parroting things he’s encountered elsewhere on the Internet.
I have trouble telling LinusK and SlakerInc from each other.
I think his real name is John Dunning-Kruger.
In fairness, that is Linus V, not Linus K.
Hmmm. In that thread, he doesn’t engage in direct discussion and he denies statements that he has made until someone shows him the quote.
Idiot, not happy with his marriage, parroting things from others (possibly the Internet), and willfully prepared to ignore anything that doesn’t match his worldview.
hits it on the head!
He is deeply, pathologically, obsessive-compulsively sincere. He is a believer.
But that does not mean that you can read his posts and decipher what exactly he’s being sincere about. There is not any clear one-to-one relationship between the things that he believes and the things that he writes.
I mean, this is obviously true for all of us to some extent. It’s just much more true for him than for others. If he were an architect, his blueprints would be adorned with pictures of faeries and unicorns, and if you were to ask him what he hell was going on, well of course, that particular unicorn represents a standard steel girder. Of course. What else could it represent? I’ve criticized sentences of his in the past that were literally incorrect, or just abominably imprecise, and he’s cheerfully accepted the correction… only for him to start a new thread and breezily use exactly the same description again as if it were the most perfect way ever devised by humankind. But you can’t criticize him about that, either, because he turns you into The Bad Guy.
In other words, he doesn’t give a shit about clarity in his writing, and he accuses other people of double-standards and “academic” style writing as his empty excuse for not giving a shit.
My tentative theory at the moment is that there are certain expressions that he just really, really likes, and so rather than rewriting his thoughts to be more precise, he just uses the same basic phrase again, and inside his head the meaning of the phrase bends and contorts to fit any corrections he’s encountered along the way. So he can keep writing the same thing he used to write, without modifying his favorite description, but suddenly the same wrong phrase seems right to him because he’s aware of what the phrase is supposed to mean. And then he expects the rest of the world to understand this change, too. And not to criticize him for it.
There is something deeply wrong with his internal notion of communication.
And no exaggeration: His reading comprehension is even worse than his writing. The situation below is that he was having problems understanding the (pdf) Guide to the National Income and Product Accounts. And I want to state, for the record, that I don’t blame him for not understanding it. The NIPAs are incredibly tough, damn near impossible to decipher if you don’t have the background. But then he says this:
Except for the fact that they explain on page one of that pdf that he himself quoted in the OP: “Definitions and Classifications Underlying the NIPAs”. The guide has ten pages providing their special definitions, and it lists on the table of contents where to find those definitions.
So he literally cited the pdf, and literally cited one of the BEA’s own definitions in his OP from the proper section, and then didn’t understand that that definition was in the same section as the other definitions, and that those ten pages of definitions were deliberately included in the guide precisely because the BEA was using its own peculiar terminology. And when other posters in the thread point out that he can’t use his internal notion of what those words mean, he tries to defend himself by claiming that BEA didn’t explain any of this.
I imagine you could pick any LinusK thread at random and find similar examples of obtuseness. Anything that doesn’t fit his worldview just bounces off, unless it’s repeated several times. Just no initial comprehension at all from what he reads. Zero.
I’d guess he has a firm internal understanding of what he’s trying to say.
Moreover, I’d say that his internal understanding is mostly free from contradiction. The pieces more or less fit together, at least as well as the average human being can manage it. But his interest lies neither in exerting the slightest bit of effort to make sure his own sentences will be understood, nor into digging out the meaning of other people’s sentences. Even worse: he’s more interested in telling his story, again and again and again, than in checking whether his story conforms to actual reality.
He has all the equipment to reason, he just doesn’t bother to use it because he thinks he doesn’t need it. I wasn’t lying in my first post when I said it will take multiple attempts at making the same point in order for it to register. It will take five different posts of repeating the same thing, with minor clarifications, just to squeeze an acknowledgement out of him. But it’s possible. It can happen. One post by itself won’t be enough, though, because he won’t pay attention. He won’t pay attention because he doesn’t think he needs to. He doesn’t think he needs to because he thinks he’s clever enough to have already unlocked the big secret.
Treat him like your deaf grandpoppy whose hearing aids don’t work. Speak very loud and repeat yourself as often as it takes.
That is what it takes. Nothing else will work. Don’t trust that he heard what you’ve already said. Especially don’t trust that he can hear what he himself has said. His deafness is profound. Assume that it extends even to the words out of his own mouth, and you won’t be far off the mark.
If it’s any consolation, I’m actually feeling a little bad now about his recent shift in interest because there’s one vitally important difference between his econo-threads and his new anti-feminism threads: he is a lone voice when he talks about money. Nobody else joins him. In that sense, his econo-threads are very clean.
It should’ve been obvious to me that that wouldn’t be the case with his new hobby. Dumb of me not to realize it.
Thanks, Helestal. I’m not up to writing an equally thoughtful reply right now, but I appreciate your taking the time to share your experiences with LinusK.
I am just so tired of the anti-feminism threads where he APPEARS to solicit other views…and then he ignores or steamrolls over those views. Feminists believe this…but al of the feminists in this very thread don’t count. Women say this…but the women in this thread (or are cited)-- well, they don’t count. It does seem like he has this very narrowly bounded view of life and he doesn’t accept that his view may not actually be accurate.
It’s the “one trick pony” of the American right wing at this time, and has been since Rush Limbaugh barfed his way onto the scene.