Googling produced this discussing it as a sympton of bipolar (first hit) and some laypeople’s thoughts (second hit).
There’s 407,000 hits so I’ll stop now.
boofuu: Sorry - I didn’t mean to sound as if I was diagnosing Scott based on message-board postings. I certainly wasn’t trying to do so - it was mere speculation, due to the somewhat distracted quality of his posts.
No offense taken, really. Perfectly honest, I totally write like that when I am in an episode, so it was not far off. You do not even know the hell it was writing papers in college; GREAT ideas, if I could keep them long enough. When I did get them down my professors marvelled at the lyric poetry of my musings on William Blake. Imagine me trying to induce another state when the big paper was due. For an A+, anything, baby. 
Manic depressives have a bad enough rap without having Scott’s ramblings being used as an indicator for the illness. I would like to think he is like that for another reason. Like space aliens, cosmic rays, food poisoning.
Brain damage from lack of oxygen due to his head being up his ass…
Just kidding.
Last night I was mentioning to another doper (who is reading this thread but hasn’t commented) that I felt Scott had to be developmentally challenged or something.
Might be a good topic for a IMHO thread, “Should you Pit a poster that’s mentally deficient?”
I don’t know.
I didn’t get the impression that she was defending him at all; rather, she was merely attempting to “translate” his claims (at Bricker’s request).
Should be. MHO.
I don’t think he’s particularly bright, but I doubt he’s developmentally disabled. Supposedly he’s a university student; perhaps he was at the bottom of their admissions heap but he’s probably not mentally retarded, if that’s what you’re getting at. I would not be shocked to learn he has a learning disability that interferes with his ability to read and write, though. He won’t admit it if he does - I’ve brought it up. I just can’t imagine how he could possibly write an essay and earn a passing grade. Either some sort of accomodations are being made for him as a student, or he only comes on here when drunk or under the influence of something that removes his ability to write properly. His writing is not just unrevised, it’s largely unreadable, and it’s miles away from what would generally be expected from a university student.
Well, she suggests that he merely has a problem with proofreading, when other instances make it clear that he literally doesn’t so much as glance at his work after writing it, let alone bother to read it. And earlier she said she thought he was smart - a matter of opinion, to be sure, but we’ve seen in the past and we see once again that Scott will construe the slightest hint of approval as carte blanche to continue acting intolerably stupid. It does no good to give Scott even the most limited affirmation, which is why I worried when Bricker made that wager earlier on.
Being smart is something that is expected at the SDMB, just as regular personal hygiene is expected at a job; once again, out of dozens of people one or two suggest that Scott is meeting the bare minimum standards for posting here. Earlier in this thread, he took some Doper’s statement that he made a factual claim (which I haven’t bothered to verify; Scott could well be stretching the truth) as some sort of signal that his presence is generally approved of or desireable. And I tried to explain (with, as is typical, no response from him) why making a factual statement is no special achievement. Being smart, on the SDMB, is also no special achievement. But if one person in a hundred suggests that he complies with our most minimal standards, in Scott’s confused thought process this is reason to ignore the other ninety-nine that agree that he doesn’t. He’ll even construe it as suggesting that he is in some elite category here, which is almost painful to see. It’s like a kid at an elementary school getting one of them new-fangled “everyone’s a winner”-type rewards, and taking it to mean that not only is he actually a winner (because, let’s face it, some children are not winners) but he’s somehow superior to all the other children.
This is getting almost heart-rendingly pathetic when I examine it further. I think I feel rather sorry for Scott. One dreads to imagine the day his world of self-deception falls apart and he realizes what people really think of him. After all, if he thinks he’s found social approval on the SDMB when the truth is the opposite, I wonder whether any of the people he considers his friends in real life would agree with him.
Wow. I never noticed that before, but it’s true. If you read his posts in the voice of George W. Bush, they almost make sense — in the manner that you better understand a man once you know that he’s neurotic.
I’m not seeing it that way. He is suggesting he merely has a problem with proofreading. She is giving the requested translation.
Thats her translation.
Bolding mine.
This is her defense of him and I think there is some validity to it. Especially the bit I bolded.
I don’t think he always proofreads his posts, in fact judging by what I see there are times that I doubt he is even reading it as he is writing because of a overwhelming desire to get his obviously(to him) right answer out there. Still the posts where he seems to have slowed down and probably glanced back over it have a convoluted logic to them that leads me to agree with jsgoddess that is at least part of the problem.
Miller , Pressured speech is commonly defined as rapid, virtually non-stop often loud and emphatic and usually hard to interrupt speech. By itself, it means nothing. We all know someone whose nick-name should be “motormouth”.However, when taken in conjunction with a number of other very identifiable behaviors we are seeing here, it takes on a very different connotation.
And boofu please don’t read into this, something that is not my intention. The list you cite is very comprehensive and perhaps, were we given the opportunity to sit down with Scott IRL we would see more. It is not my intention to diagnose anyone, it’s not my job, never was. I’m just sayin’, based on thirty-five years In the psychiatric field, my hackles are up.BTW, mostly everything on that list can also be attributed to something else other than Bi-polar Disorder(Manic-Depressive Illness). A severe anxiety state, for instance.
I don’t want to set myself up as someone who has some inside information that no one else is privy to, I was just starting to have some rather untoward but reliable feelings about what I was reading and wanted to get someone else’s POV.
I still believe it’s a possibility. No disrespect meant to any Dopers out There.
For the last time, THAN! THAN, you talked about how you believe you are always right! Just learn this one simple rule!
Daniel
[sub]who, already having given up on him, is having a bit of fun[/sub]
Pssssst! LHOD, I hate, I say I HATE to do this to ya, but…
Scott used “then” correctly that time:
Sequence, my friend: first Scott gave an example, then he talked about…
Kee-rist – the one time in a hundred he gets it right, and you… 
Now, if you’d jumped on “what he would have liked to wrote”, I’da been right with you.
While jsgoddess is correct about one aspect of Scott’s posting style[sup]*[/sup], I think his post was saying more than that.
This part is pretty straightforward. He now knows why he thinks he is always right.
I think this part means that he has found a problem with the logic in threads in which conservatives participate, but he isn’t going to tell us what it is because it would be considered insulting, and then no one would listen to his second point.
This might be related to what jsgoddess parsed out of his post, because then it’s clear to Scott where conservatives are wrong, but since he hasn’t mentioned it, the rest of us remain in the dark. Thus his posts remain obscure to us, who have not had the glaring hole in conservatives’ logic pointed out to us.
Here’s where (IMO) things begin to break down. He says that he (Scott Plaid) is guilty of reading threads and seeing what he wants to see in the posts of others. Unfortunately, he mentions an example of a thread where Sauron supposedly did so. Even more unfortunately, it has already been demonstrated that, in fact, Sauron was right and Scott was wrong in the example mentioned.
Which likely says more than Scott might like about the reasons that he feels himself to be right all the time and everyone else wrong all the time. Even when he is wrong, he believes himself to be right, and even when it has been demonstrated that he is wrong (for instance, about the “social mores” thing), he persists in the notion that Sauron is still arguing a point that has been disproven.
Which, I believe, is a complaint Scott has made in the past - the kind of “why are you arguing when I have already refuted you?” whine he makes about Bricker, me, and now Sauron.
Here he seems to be saying what jsgoddess mentioned - that he “knows what he said”. Again, the trouble is not that his argument was incomplete, and not necessarily only that it was badly expressed, misspelt, poorly coded, and a mishmash of incomplete sentences and dangling modifiers.
There is something to be said in thinking thru a post to make sure it is clear. This is (again, IMO) one of the best parts of the education one can receive on the SDMB. Clear thinking begets clear writing, and habits of clear writing tend to reinforce habits of clear thinking. IMO.
I know, I know - “Physician, heal thyself”.
Well, it took thirteen pages, but at last, here we are.
Another problematic statement.
Argument from authority is not a logical error, unless the authority is unreliable. People make appeals to authority all the time on the SDMB, which is why you get so many cries of “Cite?” And I suspect you didn’t mean that arguments from authority were errors, since you immediately went on to make an argument from authority. You appealed, in other words, to the authority of “some people” to establish that you must be pretty smart. And therefore, you must be right some of the time.
Which has a number of problems.
[ul][li]No one, except by hyperbole, would argue that you are wrong 100% of the time. The percentage of time where you are annoying might approach unity as a limit, but you are correct that some posters have mentioned some points or examples you made as valid.[]You have not, however, established the authority of “some people” as valid to show that their opinion of you as smart is sufficient. Someone said “even a stopped clock is right twice a day”. []Your argument does not follow inescapably from your premises. Unintelligibility, mania, smartness, and being completely wrong or absolutely correct do not exclude each other. You could be a highly intelligent fruitcake and be completely right about some things. You could be a complete mouth-breather and be wrong about a lot of things. Or you could be an intelligent, sloppy, hyper-excitable nut case with poor habits of thought, zero rhetorical skills, a hugely over-inflated opinion of your own opinons, a blithely pig-headed refusal to take other people’s opinions seriously, and be right about some things and wrong about everything else. [/ul]And if you were, with a little adjustment, you could fit right in on the SDMB.[/li]
Again, I think the problem here is that you meant to say that you only post unintelligibly when the issues involved have pushed your “Full-steam ahead!” buttons.
Regards,
Shodan
[sup]*[/sup]Mine too, on occasion - posts that seem perfectly clear to me sometimes get misinterpreted. Sometimes this is my fault for not being clear.
Would you have been right with me if the last line of my post hadn’t been very, very small?
Daniel
I took no offense. I mean, the point of on the mark regardless of whether has a mental illness or not. But I would rather people think about Patty Duke than Scott when they think of manic-depression. She’s soooo cute.
Now, I don’t want to be thunk a party pooper. I am hoping they let me into the tent set up over yonder. I will even sit at the kiddie table if someone slips me a beer and some ribs. Maybe a stripper.
It was a gamble.
I had hoped that a reader might realize Scott’s tendency to take the slightest hint of approval as affirmation to continue his ways, realize that such affirmation would be more hurtful than helpful, and frame a response accordingly.
I lost.
I see. So you’re saying that you hoped that no matter what I thought of Scott, I’d either lie or refuse to answer your challenge in the hopes that he would be cowed into silence by the weight of the majority.
I didn’t get the memo.
Of course, had I gotten the memo, I still would have posted as I did because you asked for an opinion and I gave it.
What’s the old line about a lawyer should never ask a question in court that he doesn’t already know the answer to?
I believe he simply meant that he hoped that there was no one on the board who actually had that sort of sympathy for Scott, not that anyone would lie about it.
Now this was a point he should have considered.
Only in Texas.