Word. I’m still massaging my temples after trying to parse
Speak for yourself. I just want to taunt him a second time.
Shhhh! You’re scaring him away.
EastUmpqua hasn’t ever been on my radar as a RW troll before, but they’re doing such a convincing sealion impersonation in the demographic shift thread that they are now.
They are definitely something. I’ve had interactions with them that I felt were very trolling, and it’s not been necessarily anything about politics or race. They just seem to be very stubborn, and about as equivalently ignorant.
The latter is curable, if they can get over the former.
Or they could just be a troll, but they seem to be putting more work into it than most.
That’s an odd egg I never quite figured out, myself.
My impression is that EastUmpqua believes themselves to be a razor sharp mind, with fascinating insights into a variety of topics and think they are asking thought provoking questions that spark interesting debate. The first two might just be true, but if so they are masked by a complete inability to communicate them to most others and 95% of the “debate” they spark is people asking them to clarify, which they never really do, being unable to understand that they weren’t crystal clear to begin with.
You’ve probably forgotten this thread from January of last year. EastUmpqua wasn’t the OP – it was his later appearance in the thread that first brought him to my attention and earned him his first nomination for Most Annoying Troll in a Supporting Role.
Briefly, the OP was a pile of steaming bullshit written by a complete gibbering moron trying to deny anthropogenic climate change. It’s just stunning in its abject stupidity. The poster is blissfully unaware that he hasn’t the first clue what he’s talking about, and everything he claims is so completely wrong that it’s pure comedy.
About 50 posts later, EastUmpqua chimes in with this (emphasis mine):
I studied Atmospheric Science at Oregon State (at least our baseball team is good). rboyce understands atmospheric science better than most.
Hilarity ensued. Like others here, I have no particular hypothesis for what’s going on. Maybe rboyce is a troll (or a mental defective) and EastUmpqua is another troll. Maybe they are both the same trock. Maybe they are both mental defectives. At any rate, that’s what put EastUmpqua on my radar.
I still think that OP might have been a bot. Posted like one.
I think you are mostly correct. Except I don’t think I have a razor-sharp mind. I wish I did. One thing I guess I don’t get is why me asking stupid questions has created such a following. All you have to do is ignore my questions. Don’t you all have better things to do?
Maybe it’s because you ping the trolldar so strongly.
I’ve been learning stuff on SD - politeness, all kinds of cool stuff about physics, and my Calvin and Hobbs post earned me some kind of “popular link” badge. Recently I started a link in general questions about the definition of zero. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that I don’t respond to posts. So I’ve been trying to respond better.
And the entity formerly known as JustALoner was wiped out by the mods while I watched. Bravo!
Sadly @Sunny_Daze will get no more joy in poking.
sigh
Sorry, the new diatribe was too much and deliberate trolling.
And I missed it, damnit.
I revise my opinion then. But here are a few other things you could potentially learn. You don’t have a “following”. The board does. Answering questions is why many of us are here. Many of us even have better things to do, but this is more enjoyable than those things, or at least gives us a kick we come back for.
And it’s not that your questions are stupid, but you don’t follow up on simple questions that would improve our ability to answer. Instead you drop additional stray thoughts in. Which happens to be a behavior common to scatterbrains and trolls. Another things trolls do is post “how have I gotten such a following? Don’t you have better things to do?”, but again it is not unique to trolls.
I’ll keep giving you the benefit of doubt, but if you have been working on responding to posts you have a ways to go. Starting narrow and only going wider once you’ve made yourself understood would be a great improvement. Jumping from how physics deals with subtracting one apple from another to zero-point energy, is certainly not it.
Huh. We’re evidently polite, then. Well how 'bout that!
Before giving him too much benefit of doubt, let me refer you back to the comment that I cited before, and then read the further dialogue that he has with me and others. Do not be misled by the fact that when challenged, he’ll sometimes back off with impeccable politeness. That’s learned behaviour. Observe his behaviour in that old thread:
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He defends the blithering moron who wrote the thread’s OP as some kind of expert in atmospheric science, even though virtually everything the OP is wrong (in fact, extremely, stupidly wrong) and moreover, doesn’t even directly have anything to do with atmospheric science.
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When I explain why he’s stupidly wrong in accusing climate science of being “political” and hence “not good science”, he accuses me of deliberately misinterpreting him.
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When I explain in detail (based on decades of interest in and reading about climate science) why axial tilt is irrelevant to discussions of post-industrial climate change, his response is (I quote): “Nice Wikipedia search. Unfortunately you don’t understand any of it.”
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When I post an article from NASA Global Climate Change corroborating exactly what I had said, his response is: “It’s cool that you did another google search, and found another article on Milankovitch cycles.” Then he goes for the digression gambit: “Can you explain why the Earth’s axis changes its tilt?” When I once again address his arguments and questions, he stops responding.
I must admit that this encounter left me with a very bad first impression. Maybe it wasn’t a completely fair impression, but it sure as hell was annoying. I particularly don’t appreciate a trollish moron accusing me of copying Wikipedia and not “understand[ing] any of it” when I’m writing on a subject that I actually know something about.
I appreciate this explanation. I am learning, but as naita pointed out, I have much more to learn. I think you were the first to bring me to the BBQ pit. The pit felt combative, and I admit I was disrespectful. I am trying.