No, no it’s not. It has nothing to do with the truth value of your statement. It is presumptuous to suppose that because you (may) actually be right, it gives you a license to be an overbearing ass. Arrogance is a bar to communication and understanding because people, consciously or not, will continue to argue with you for argument’s sake because agreement with overbearing, arrogant asses is personally intolerable.
In order to be presumptuous, you presume that you are entitled to talk down to another person based on your perceived merits. This is the very definition of arrogance and presumption.
Obama can say that he is the most powerful man in the world in a neutral or even pleasant way or he can be an arrogant, overbearing ass. Arrogance has nothing to do with whether his ass can cash the checks his mouth writes but purely has to do with how he treats people.
But don’t worry, some of my best friends are arrogant pricks. waves to Maeglin
The past five years spent working for the Man has changed a lot for me. Now, when I am being a condescending dick, I am usually aware of it and do it intentionally.
I only asked to see if you had anything to say that made sense. If you don’t think your philosophy can hold up under scrutiny on a message board, oh well. I’m not a part of any clique here.
If your response is “I’m not going to answer because the meanies will make fun of me” you might want to consider that you might be, you know, wrong in whatever your answer would have been. If you had one in the first place.
There is nothing more frightful than an active ignorance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Sir William Osler
Smashy is an anarchist idiot without a basic understanding of politics (but who’s perfectly willing to stereotype everybody with different politics than him). He also is an uber-credulous woo-salesman who claims thins like shamans are schizophrenics who can directly intuit archetypes and are superior to normal humans. He lied and claimed that most anthropologists in fact believe that the shams of the past were schizophrenic and when called on his fiction, refused to back it up because he invented the claim. Evidently, much like Lekatt, he dislikes science when it shows he’s full of it but tries to use scientific inquiry when he thinks it can support his position.
Also, he thinks that Nutra Sweet’s metabolites can be really dangerous to people. The source of much of his trouble is that he objects to the scientific method and has argued that “revelation” is the equal of epistemology and reason. Part of the problem, of course, is that he objects to the scientific method because he’s very stupid and doesn’t understand it. For instance, even though peer reviewed cites have already been presented, he maintains that we need (yet another) peer reviewed study to demonstrate that the metabolites of Nutra Sweet are safe, he doesn’t understand that the null hypothesis has to be falsified (and that the null hypothesis isn’t the positive claim he’s arguing), and unfortunately he doesn’t grok the burden of proof or how intellectual inquiry proceeds.
He also believes that he’s a genius and he hates the vast majority of Dopers, how threads on the Dope go and the general commitment to scientific inquiry and rationalism over his habit of simply making shit up if it sounds good. In fact he seems to be posting on this message board solely to pick fights and cause problems and has spoken at great length about how the posters, tone, and ethos of the board is personally offensive to him.
He’s got a couple of bootlicks, too, who are about at his level of intelligence and who, also, think that the board is just a horrible place (and yet they refuse to go away and will keep posting in order to tell us how horrible posting here is).
This here cite states that, “All of the panhandlers’ union dues are paid for by the Industrial Workers of the World through donations and various organized events.”
Umm, that’s not a change. In my experience you were always mostly aware of it and did it intentionally. Maybe you are just that much suaver these days.
Ahh well I am not privy to the goings on within the dark tower. Office politics are bad, or so I hear. I always worked tucked away in IT where I could more or less avoid the politics. Otherwise that’s pretty much why I can’t work in the corporate world. I have a hard time believing in the value of the product (Not that what I do on a daily basis is more valuable) in a lot of cases, and as such find myself having trouble taking life seriously. Though at this point in my life I have mastered avoiding work, and now I need to reverse that trend, though it probably still won’t be within such an environment.
And we should make some effort to turn that first sentence into a lie.
For what it’s worth—not much at this point, I imagine—I have the DSM-IV Casebook in hand. I think STS is probably referring to a case concerning a woman from the Dominican Republic, pages 74-76. A woman developed psychosis (odd behavior; auditory hallucinations telling her to kill herself) due to the stress of her ex-husband remarrying. When those issues were resolved, her symptoms evaporated almost immediately. In the discussion section:
I don’t know that this really jibes with what STS said. This does not seem to be an occasion of some behavior being normal to one culture and abnormal to another; the symptoms presented by the woman in question seem pretty universally negative. Rather, it is a case of a specific pathology that only seems to occur at all in a particular culture.
Finally, although I’m not a psychiatric professional—this is my girlfriend’s DSM—I can say with some certainty that neurodiversity is not an idea held by most practicing psychiatrists.
Paranoid Randroid I have to say that your handle is one of my favorites on these boards. I’ve been thinking about it for the past couple of days after reading the Rand Rover thread.
Thank you very much, it’s worth quite a bit. It’s been a while since I thumbed through a copy and didn’t remember anything of the sort. From what you’ve quoted, it doesn’t look even close to Smashy’s claim. I’d still like to see him try to support it, but with his disdain for providing cites for his claims, I don’t think that’ll happen.
Yeah, if that was the original claim I’d have been fine with that (but I still find it interesting and would like to read up a bit more on it). But the claim that hallucinations of conversations with dead people are the rule in Latin American culture(s) is still strange. That there’s a culturally mediated expression of distress is one thing, that millions of people hallucinate ghostly conversations is quite another. The first doesn’t seem to me to require a statistical study as one only has to demonstrate that the belief exists within the culture that some people might emulate, the second sure as sunshine does need something more tangible (if Smashy is even talking about a quote that exists).
P.S. And thanks again. Malthus got it pretty much right and it’s been amusing me to point out how Smashy’s reach has exceeded his limited grasp rather comically but kicking a sophomoric twit in the teeth gets old after a while. Even if he is so full of himself that he’s prone to explode by getting needled a bit over a cite. I appreciate you doing the leg work as I’d considered heading out to the library, but Smashy really isn’t worth it.
Actually back at the beginning of all this he provided copious cites, you rejected them all. At least be consistent in your criticisms. Either his cites are bullshit or he doesn’t provide cites. It can’t be both.
It apparently takes you DAYS to get bored of kicking a sophomoric twit in the teeth.
The part before the comma is bullshit an irrelevancy and the part after is deceptive.
He provided cites that did not address his claim!
Much like his claim that there’s been 20 years of (actual, valid) scientific controversy over Nutra Sweet’s metabolites and then provided a cite that had nothing to do with anything and by the most charitable interpretation, was simply non sequitur dig at Jack.
He provided zero cites for the prevalence of any view among anthropologists. In fact, many of his cites weren’t even from anthropologists.
It should also be noted that the cites he provided were really just the names of books with no quotes, at all. And at least in one case the very author of the book publicly refuted the woo-meisters who were attempting to misuse his work, sstrongly uggesting that Smashy’s word on what the books said wasn’t even valid.
Come on, think this through.
I tell you that cotton candy is made of fiber glass. You dispute that.
I provide a cite saying that butterflies are pretty that’s a 12 year old girl’s angelfire page. Have I provided a cite for the original claim? No. Have I provided a bullshit cite? yes.
Maybe you are just that much suaver these days. 
