The thread and the post are still there. Nothing was cornfielded, only the thread locked. (And that was probably more because it was a empty bump of a 20-year-old thread and not because the iriginal question wasn’t cromulent.)
I’m hope Beck was making a joke that fell sorta flat (for me at least).
What is with the poster in the Aviation thread who made an off-hand suggestion about how a camera that would allow pilots to see the wings might have prevented the UPS crash in Kentucky?!?
And when all of our airline pilots and our resident insider on aviation regulations insider politely explain, in excruciating detail, over a couple dozen well-written and authoritative posts, that, no, that wouldn’t be practical solution, he just keeps doubling down and insisting he’s right and knows better than them.
Wow. Just wow.
That sounds entertaining. Got a name, and a link to the post that started it, and some Junior Mints?
I don’t think links to specific threads are allowed in the forum.
Before looking at that thread, I had a very short list of people who could have been the poster in question. That person was, indeed, on my short list. He thinks he’s smarter than he probably is.
They’re allowed, so long as the thread you’re linking from doesn’t have a personal insult in the title. When you link to another thread, Discourse automatically creates a link in the other thread that leads back to the original. If someone links to another thread from here, for example, the other thread will have a link in it tht says “What were you THINKING?” that leads back to this one. This can be a problem if you’re linking from a Pit thread titled, “Bob is a stupid asshole,” because that creates a link in a non-Pit thread that says, “Bob is a stupid asshole.”
If the Pit thread title is neutral (“I pit Bob”) or non-specific (such as this one) then its not an issue.
Since it is the current mod trend to make thread titles in The BBQ Pit about posters non-insulting in nature, then I guess I was wrong about such links. Sorry.
If you don’t want to link to the thread, even just a thread title and user name (without @-ing them) would be nice.
Here’s the first post
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-ongoing-aviation-thread-general-and-other/ 600499 / 8705
I have broken the link to the specific post in case there are other reasons posters prefer not to create a live link.
Not necessarily. While a Pit title can’t be insulting someone, it can still be problematic to link from. The most glaring one is the troll thread; if you link to a post from there, you’re effectively calling them a troll in whatever post you linked to. You could potentially have similar threads in the future; maybe a thread about people who are racists which is clearly stated in the thread title.
Thread titles shouldn’t insult a poster, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a general insult or accusation in the subject. This thread has a neutral title, but what if it was instead called, “How stupid can you get?” I don’t think that would be a rules violation (since it isn’t targeting a specific poster) but would absolutely be a problem to link from.
My tactic is include a url to the OP of the thread in question then say in my post something like:
See SoAndSo’s posts starting at post #234. IMO they’re being a goof.
Easy for any reader of my post to click the url to get to the relevant thread, then type #234 to jump right to the relevant post.
That does mean the OP post (not poster) of that thread displays a backlink to here. But that doesn’t reference who or where the problem is.
Sorry for any confusion. Like @Czarcasm, I thought one couldn’t link directly here, and assumed that my references would be sufficient for anyone interested to track down the posts in question. Thanks, @puzzlegal, for the broken link.
Oh, this is about Whack-a-Mole? I can’t make up my mind with him. Is he a braindead poster who really doesn’t know any better, or an exceptional (and extraordinarily long-lived) troll? Because that’s kind of his schtick. Put forward a really stupid idea, and then lure (troll?) people who actually know something about a subject into playing metaphorical whack-a-mole with his arguments. Like, he’ll just alternate between the same two or three really bad arguments. You knock down one, another pops up, you knock it down, and then he cycles back to an old argument that you’ve already knocked down, but he puts it out there as if he is oblivious to the shellacking he already took over it.
The fact that he actually named his character after his style of argument, and that’s it’s not the style of argument one should be proud of making seriously, has me leaning towards troll myself.
Yes..being silly.
Could be.
AIUI he’s some kind of IT guy. More ops/hardware than developer. His job is to whack the never ending supply of moles as the infrastructure at his employer fails and he’s gotta hustle to fix it.
But the worldview in that industry is just slap shit together and fiddle with it until it mostly works, then move on the slapping the next shit together. And it’ll all be replaced in a couple years with new shit, so longevity isn’t a concern.
So a milieu that’s professional skillful tinkering, not engineering in any sane sense of the word. And there are exactly zero exogenous regulations to deal with. You can be as sloppy or as thorough as you want.
When he encounters the hyper-regulated, over-engineered, 10-nines reliability, multinational, multidecadal nature of aviation engineering, he just recoils. Nothing of his expertise or worldview or intuition about acceptable means of problem-solving has any applicability to that world.
So his response is “Just do it like I would in corporate IT: slap it together in a long afternoon and move on.” Which in fact could be done if all those obstacles could be magic-wanded away.
His refusal to listen to expertise gets tiresome quickly. OTOH, from his POV, we (and our industry) are refusing to listen to his expertise: “If y’all stopped acting like a 1950s bureaucracy you could get a lot more beneficial stuff done a lot faster and many orders of magnitude cheaper. So get with it!”
As to how to complain in this thread (or other troll call out threads) about some post or poster without cluing them in, but with making it easy for your audience here to see the post(s) you’re talking about …
Quoting myself from upthread for context …
I tried a new technique today to point out a problematic post and poster. It seems to work great; even better than my technique quoted just above. Easy for the reader if a wee bit of work for the complainer. To wit:
Create an advanced search that returns just the post you want to highlight. Then include the url of the search in your complaining post in the complaints thread. Anyone who wants to see the problem post clicks your link, which produces for them a fresh search page with one result. Which result they then click to be taken to the offending post.
See here for my first such post as an example. And note there’s no backlink to there anywhere in the problem thread.