:smack: This is due to his reading what he thinks he wrote/what he would have liked to have written.
If only being an obstinate, unintelligible, arrogant prick was a banning offense.
The sad part is that if Scott actually listened to people this thread and took some advice, he’d be welcomed here. Instead he just alienates himself more and more. Right 100% of the time? Its both funny and painful at the same time. I cannot believe this guys inability to take a hint, even when its tied around a brick and lobbed at his head.
Soon he might alienate himself so much that nobody will even converse with him. Then it would be time for his Alter Ego! to continue the fight.
Wow! It only took 14 pages for this to finally come out!
I’m glad you wrote this because I seriously doubted your sanity there for a while.
Anyone else starting to suspect that scott_plaid is a paklid in real life?
jsgoddess: please translate the above.
I’ve never had any problems understanding anything you write. The offering above from Scott is beyond me. Since you understand him, perhaps you could translate.
I thought about that…but if only that were true, we could have given him something to make him go, and by now he could be far away.
I don’t know if I can translate, but I can say what I think he means, and he can correct me if I’m off base.
Proofreading your own work, either just for typos and grammatical errors or for logical content can often be extremely difficult. Some people are better at it than others. For those who are deficient in the skill, they look back on what they’ve written and they see what they meant to write instead of what’s actually on the page. They “remember” what they were thinking and fill in the gaps.
Scott is fessing to this particular blind spot. He’s posting what seems to him to be readable, intelligible posts. If he goes back and reads them, they make sense to him. He’s filling in the gaps. He’s translating both the posts he reads and the posts he writes into his own worldview.
Essentially, he’s seeing what he wants to see.
Tangent: In poetry, that’s why many people workshop. It can be hard to see where a poem fails, especially in the sense department, if you’re the author and you know what it all means. The choices are to wait until it’s not so fresh so that you can read with new eyes, or to workshop. In a way, the Dope is a workshop. The conversations move so quickly that you don’t have time, really, to do the “put it in a drawer and wait for six months” method. Eventually, many people move beyond the need to workshop. They learn how to read their own work critically. To an extent, this is learned, but some people simply will never be accomplished at it. They can be great writers, yet terrible readers. I’ve argued at times that some people’s memory of what they’ve meant is simply too good. If they had the neural sieve that functions as my brain, they’d be able to proof their own work because they would have forgotten, fifteen minutes after writing, just what they had intended to say!
Something has been bothering me for the last three or four pages and I feel the need to comment on it. This has gone far past the ability (or lack thereof) to formulate a point and present it in a cogent manner. Far beyond competent writing skills. Far beyond what are good debating skills and what are not.
Perhaps it’s my background clouding what I am seeing here but I am starting to question if something more serious is taking place. I was never a big fan of Scott , as I said earlier but his behavior and board demeanor were more an annoyance than anything else. What I’m reading now is lightyears beyond anything I’ve read in the past.
I’m wondering if he ever intimated to anyone here if he is or was ever under the care of a psychiatrist. IMO what we could be seeing is the result of a partial psychotic break from reality. There are clinical aspects of what I’m reading now that in the right setting would certainly send up red flags to any competent therapist. Thought blocking, word salad, inability to focus, etc. There are others but surely there must be more competent people than I on this board who could step in and offer an opinion. This may be an overeaction on my part but for the past few pages I have started to become seriously worried for Scott.
Perhaps some of the more experienced Dopers who have interacted with him more than I have could mull my misgivings over and tell me I’m full of shit and to forget it.
Dude, I was waaaaay ahead of you.
It’s nice that you’re defending him, but there’s no evidence that he proofreads his posts at all, and there’s evidence that some of the time, he doesn’t even bother to preview. Not that previewing would necessarily fix all his problems with intelligibility, but it certainly would help.
(I replaced slashes in his close-quote tags with backslashes so the outermost quote box would work.) He attempts to close quote boxes eight times, and actually succeeds in closing one once. Scott is quite obviously not making the slightest effort - admittedly, this was from a thread about a month and a half ago, but he had certainly been accused of incomprehensibility before that. It’s not only a pretty stupid mistake to make (I can understand a coding error, but seven? In one message? And really obvious ones, too.) but it demonstrates a certain contempt for his audience. When you don’t proofread your work, you’re saying that you expect the rest of us to read something that you weren’t even willing to read.
No, jsgoddess, this is something far worse than the simple inability to proofread. (If indeed he’s actually unable to discern the complete incomprehensibility of some of his posts, that’s not just a blind spot - that’s a learning disability. I can’t imagine how he made it through school without it being diagnosed.) Scott - despite knowing that people find his writing style somewhat lacking - simply doesn’t care enough to go to the effort of previewing. One glance would have told him that the quoted message was completely, completely wrong. Hell, one glance while he was in the editing window would have told him that he hadn’t opened any of the quote tags he was trying to close. Scott just doesn’t give enough of a crap to bother trying to write a reasonable post. He expects us to read something that he won’t even go to the effort of reading.
I’m not sure if that goes along with the contempt for his audience that we see in his attempts to define common words for us, or explain who the Pet Shop Boys are, or indeed in his overall refusal to acknowledge that people who disagree with him can sometimes be right. I suspect it does. But either way, Scott is more than just stupid (though he’s shown himself to be stupid in spades) - he’s a liar, or at least doesn’t care about the truth: he makes things up whole cloth in his religion threads, and he’s willing to link to “cites” without even determining what they say. (I’ve yet to even see him apologize for railing on the Catholic Church for denying the Theory of Natural Selection - which is not true (indeed, the Church officially endorses it.))
Scott has zero regard for the truth, and he’s got a childish unwillingness to admit that he’s wrong even when there is no doubt in anyone’s mind. He makes assertions about things he doesn’t understand, he tries to fool us into thinking he’s got support for his ideas by linking to nonsense “cites”, and he’s obnoxious in his personal style. Frankly, the writing troubles are a pretty small part of what’s wrong with Scott. I’m willing to chalk up his constant misstatements of his opponents’ points as pure stupidity and not malice, but it hardly makes him more of an asset to the boards.
I’m glad you’re trying to defend him, in much the way that I’m glad obviously guilty parties have defense lawyers during trials. Forgive me, though, when I suggest that you might not have seen enough of his threads to see just how obnoxious and worthless he is.
Yeah, I saw that. At that point I thought you were just ragging on him. I guess I’m glad now you weren’t.
Well, that makes two of us. Either we both have extraordinary insight or we’re both nuts!
Again…
Are you a mental health practitioner? Because this is an interesting suggestion. Come to think of it, many of his truly incomprehensible posts look (to my layman’s eyes) like the possible results of pressured speech pushed through the even slower filter of typing. Perhaps it’s something as simple as untreated bipolar disorder.
Incidentally, another internet community I hang out at had a posting today by someone who was clearly suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - she claimed that a mind-control device implanted by the CIA caused her terrible pain whenever she used metaphor (and it didn’t look like the work of a prankster, either.) Everyone else was laughing their asses off, but I was just saddened by it because it was so obviously the result of psychosis. That’s part of the joy of the internet, I guess - it’s brought me in contact with mental disorders that I’d only read about previously. 
Retired Psych Nurse Excalibre and I’m just learning the joys of the internet. And about posting on discussion boards.
Your layman’s eyes are excellent. I’ve sat through many an interview with patients who were certified and got much the same responses that you are now getting fromScott . I suspect if you were to talk to him IRL there would be evidence of pressured speech. The possible diagnoses are something I would feel uneasy speculating under the circumstances. I just have the very reliable hairs on the back of my neck telling me something is terribly, terribly wrong here.
Hmm. He also appears to be suffering from delusions of [del]grandeur[/del] adequacy.
Now that you’ve raised the point, though, I think you might be right. His posts clearly seem to reflect pressured speech to me. I guess there’s also some sort of impact on his thought processes that is affecting his ability to evaluate himself.
This is currently the 6th longest Pit thread ever, and is poised to move up a couple of slots if the weekend keeps up the posting frequency of this past week. 
If you don’t mind, what exactly is “pressured speech”?
Fuckin’ A, man, Scott could prolly move it up to #3 all by hisself–don’t tempt the boy…
The National Institute of Mental Health lists symptoms of mania as:
I will say as a person who, and whose family, struggles with bipolar disorder I tend to be leery of people diagnosing mental health issues (and learning disabilities) online. Just because someone is a nutjob does not mean they gots a mental problem; we don’t let just anyone in our club.
I mostly make the list for the edification of people who may know nothing about manic depression or have a false impression of people dealing with bipolar disorder. I’d just as soon not have Scott be the Board’s Bipolar Spokesperson. Because clearly I am the best woman for the job and will work tirelessly in the position. When I am not watching QVC.