RW Lemay probably had a hand in bombing lots of Chinese AND Koreans during the Korean War, and I’d bet he would have been delighted to nuke them both if MacArthur had his way.
I appreciate it, but it wasn’t necessary. I would have taken your word for it.
Maybe he’s just curious as to what people think about things. Nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, almost inhumanly curious… eh? Eh?
Possibly one of those unearthed terra cotta warriors, reanimated?
I confess that there are often topics that I would love to hear both sides of and often think to start a debate so that I can. I don’t really debate, and usually the topic is one that I’m trying to get a feel for - one where I would like to hear intelligent discussions from both sides.
But I get why people are annoyed when the OP doesn’t come back, so I usually don’t start a thread - and I see now that this is wise. (Although I have done so a few times.)
The original skinhead movement was multi-racial and based around reggae and ska music in post-war Britain. The neo-Nazi skinheads were a later subculture-within-a-subculture that was loathed by just about everyone who called him/herself a skinhead. So, yes, there were and are Asian skinheads as well as black, hispanic, jewish, gay, etc etc etc skinheads.
Speaking as someone who, when he starts a thread, in most cases also does not post a second time in the thread, I’d like to defend that behaviour. In most cases everything that I want to say/ask is in the OP (barring cases where clarification is needed later), so I just monitor the thread and profit from it the way mere lurkers also profit from the SDMB.
Usually when the thread yields useful information I don’t post a thank-you because that would just bump the thread and would make people view it again to no profit for them - is that so wrong? I’d take it as a given that the OP will lurk in a thread.
Qin Shi Huangdi, what is your purpose?
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
I currently assume that he’s being raised in a very conservative atmosphere and is rarely exposed to new ideas, to liberal ideas and to people who are smart and also disagree with him. I figure the dope might be his equivalent of ‘smart friends he can argue with’, combined with ‘people who challenge his ideas’ with a soupçon of ‘girlfriend from Canada’. This model allows me to pretend that we are actually helping him come out of his shell and question his assumptions. This pretense in turn allows me to not rip into him whenever he says anything arrogant. I’ve been much better since I developed this idea.
(Plus now that AT is posting again, I’m not as cheesed off about that other thing.)
Perhaps the objection is that he is fifteen, and, no matter how hard you bait him, he won’t blow up and get banned. He seems quite mature for a teen-ager - perhaps more so than a lot of Dopers.
Is it really true that he starts threads and doesn’t post? Or is that just a throw-away accusation?
Regards,
Shodan
No, it’s true. He does it constantly.
I haven’t seen anyone trying to bait him, by the way. If anything people make more of an effort to be patient with him because of his age. Basically, they just want him to come back to his threads and acknowledge replies.
I don’t think you need necessarily be concerned about this. Just make your intent clear at the outset and occassionally check in to show you’re listening.
What Curtis Qin does is completely different. He posts an OPmfull off fallacies riding on some standard conservative memenand ends it there. It seems he has nominterest in the replies but rather his purpose is really just to repeat his meme.
This is my take as well, and I admit to being annoyed by it from time to time. However, I had no idea about the Asberger’s, and if that is an affliction Curtis is struggling with, I’ll be much more mindful and patient in my responses to his OPs from now on.
Clothie’s posting over at the Giraffe Boards now. Strangely, I don’t find him QUITE as annoying and stupid over there as I did when he was here.
Don’t know about Lissener.
Offered without comment.
Okay, maybe with a bit of a snigger.
And Asperger’s really isn’t an excuse. It’s a useful diagnosis in understanding why a person may act the way they do, which can help in deciding how to react to a post, but it doesn’t absolve the afflicted of responsibility. They still have full control over their own actions, actions which are made with the knowledge they have Asperger’s provided they’ve received a legitimate diagnosis. It’s entirely possible for someone with Asperger’s to still act in bad faith, and it’s entirely appropriate to hold them accountable for that.
I have nominterest, too. When’s lunch? 
That’s a fair question, and i admit that my comment about it was based on the impression i had from a few recent threads, rather than from any sustained and methodical observation.
So i went and had a look at his last 50 GD threads and his last 50 IMHO threads. It seems that he does, in fact, participate in most of the threads that he starts, especially in GD, which is where i think it’s most important.
Here are the numbers of posts made by Qin Shi Huangdi in his last 50 threads.
Great Debates:
1 post - 8 threads
2 posts - 6 threads
3+ posts - 36 threads
In My Humble Opinion:
1 post - 16 threads
2 posts - 8 threads
3+ posts - 26 threads
In GD, he was often the most frequent contributor, and in quite a few of his threads he had 10 or even 20 posts. He was was prone to making an OP and never returning in IMHO, but i don’t think it’s really a problem in that forum, especially because that is where polls go, and polls often don’t require the OP to return.
So, it appears my impression was wrong.
I should add, though, that i still tend not to participate in his threads, because in many cases it seems to me that he’s merely looking for people to confirm his worldview, or he’s offering up stupid hypotheticals. I’ve only participated in 3 of those last 100 threads that i looked at, and in each case i was criticizing the OP for setting up silly or senseless situations.
For example, in Who would You Kill, john MacArthur or Raul Castro, he made clear that the only reason he posted the thread was to confirm his ideas about the bigotry of atheists.
In Artificial Morality - Better than no Morality at all? he was asked to explain what artificial morality was so that we could debate the issue, and came back with an answer that failed to address the issue in any substantive way. After that, his only posts in the thread made unsubstantiated assertions that had nothing to do with the topic of this OP.
In the threads of his that i’ve participated in, and that i have observed, he really never engages on the substantive issues raised by his OP, because he always seems more concerned with Making A Point rather than actually having a discussion. That sort of thing just doesn’t interest me, especially in GD. If you just want to sound off about something, take it to MPSIMS or The Pit.
He irritates the hell out of me but I’m willing to admit that I’m of the “get off my lawn” persuasion towards kids, if he really is a kid. He does sometimes open a thread that is genuinely interesting but I get the strong impression that it is more by accident than design. I have openly asked of him the same question that is being asked here: What’s the point in this madness? And, I’ve asked questions of him that are relevant to the point(?) that he is trying to make; those questions are usually ignored although not always. Even so, I nearly always read his threads on the off chance they will contain interesting questions; at best, they do and at worst, he gets my adrenaline flowing and my blood pressure up: I’m bored most of the time and any excitement is better than none. I favor letting him run free, with a smack down as needed.
That’s my impression, too - he doesn’t really engage in any back-and-forth here as you do in a true discussion, and it is irritating. It’s like he doesn’t get what we’re doing here, in spite of it being a fairly simple formula.
Yeah, I wouldn’t even notice it myself, unless I specifically asked the OP a question. Seems odd to me that other people care.