He’s a plague on this board. Every contribution makes a thread worse. He is either extremely dumb or is great at playing dumb, which is why he gets away with his schtick. Being an idiot isn’t against the rules even when it becomes a neverending problem.
He can’t be banned but I’ve put him on ignore long ago, so he’s banned to me.
Responding to him is dangerous, because he’ll “misunderstand” you until he twists what you say so badly that he acts like you said literally the opposite of what you said and argues against that. Or he just ignores what you wrote and assume you said something else. It’s difficult for even the most patient person to put up with it for long.
Anyway, he has the “idiot shield” so he’ll continue spraying idiocy like projectile diarrhea into every thread he pollutes with his participation. The only defense is putting him on ignore. I strongly encourage everyone else to do the same.
What’s odd to me is that sometimes he’s exactly as passive aggressive / obstinate / deliberately (?) obtuse as you say. And other times he’s fine, with posts as benign and useful as the average bear around here.
Is it drink? Is it whether he just turned off Faux news? Is it a Jekyll / Hyde troll-lite act he sometimes enjoys playing?
Is he just congenitally unwilling to say “I was wrong” so on the occasions his first post in some thread is ill-informed he just can’t admit he goofed and so doubles down again and again on defending a mistake until everyone tires of ‘rasslin’ with him over it?
Hellifino. But I bet a strong dollop of the latter.
ETA: A mod has now stepped in to quash that hijack.
If only we routinely tested posters around here – maybe some kind of persistent stupid asshole, or PSA, test we could use to detect the plague earlier.
Sorry, I missed that post or I would have replied in this thread instead of the Magiver pit thread. Regardless, the guy pisses me off and I had to vent somewhere.
Incidentally, has anyone ever seen Magiver and the departed but definitely not missed SamuelA in the same place at the same time? The number of individuals who can solve all the world’s problems must be very small indeed. If they are not the same person, the mind boggles at what could be accomplished in scientific advancement and world peace by putting them both in the same room together and letting their combined brainpower cogitate. Special cooling might be required, and brain nutrients provided.
SamuelA didn’t come across to me as dumb, just not nearly as smart as he thought he was. Then again, I’m not sure any human being in history has ever been as smart as SamuelA thought he was. SamuelA literally thought he could solve any problem ever posed just by employing the most ridiculous solution ever.
SamuelA was like someone who fantasizes about drawing a cartoon showing a ridiculous way to solve an issue, like “duct tape an aardvark to a velociraptor and it will solve your ant infestation”. Like, something you’d see in a Far Side panel. Except he believed it really would work and insisted that everyone needed to believe him.
Delusional, yes, but he came across as someone who was reasonably intelligent, just maybe not taking his meds the way the instructions are written on the bottle. Magiver is just dumb, or comes off that way. Rather than tape an aardvark to a velociraptor, he’d assume a velociraptor is a model of motorcycle and argue about gas consumption, then get confused when people ask why he’s feeding petroleum to a dinosaur.
ISTM SamuelA didn’t quite get the distinction between science fantasy, science fiction, early stage tech angel investor hype, real science, and real engineering.
Once you can costlessly deploy treknobabble in service of any solution with zero human opposition, yes indeed every human problem becomes trivial.
I don’t think the comparison with Magiver goes very far. Both annoyingly convinced but very different. Paraphrasing a more elegant politician from a more civilized age 40 years ago:
Magiver, I posted with SamuelA. I knew SamuelA. SamuelA was a friend of mine. Magiver, you’re no SamuelA!
But it would be fun to set up a cage match between them on a topic they’re both mostly ignorant of. I wager 500 quatloos on the newcomer. Whichever one that is?
