What would Smapti say? A Q&A thread. Or, yes, we can read your mind.
Can you look at a thread and immediately know which side Smapti will be on? Can you look at a thread and know what Smapti’s response will be before Smapti does? If you answered yes to those, then let’s take some facts and make our own Smaptisms.
So, what would Smapti say if:
Cop shoots woman in head while cleaning gun in restroom stall.
The shot probably came from the grassy knoll, not the cop’s gun.
Waitress runs over patron who refused to tip her.
She probably couldn’t see him, it was dark and he wasn’t wearing a suit with flashing lights on it.
Cop shoots boy in park for brakedancing with a gun.
Officers have to protect themselves from crazies brakedancing. Besides, brakedancing leads to criminal behavior in teenagers.
Terminally ill patient asks advice on end-of-life therapy.
I’ve had worse pain, I got up one morning and my knee was sore so I took an aspirin.
Wife stabs husband who refused to eat her tuna casserole.
Most likely she had been abused and raped over and over by him.
5 cops beat handcuffed suspect to death with nightsticks.
He should have just sat there quietly while they beat him instead of trying to get away.
Martian spacecraft lands in Central park.
Yes, I’m going home!
Look, Smapti changed his mind when faced with overwhelming logic and facts.
Ha, trick question. Gotcha.
None of this makes Smapti a bad guy. I mean, tedious and monotonous isn’t being bad.
Brandishing a gun in public is not a good idea in general.
The most important thing is to stay positive and take it day by day. You never know what tomorrow will bring.
Nobody should ever be forced to eat tuna casserole.
Insufficient data.
Neat!
I think you’ll find that I was rather passionately anti-transgender about a year ago. I’ve learned more about gender issues since then and, while I still don’t understand entirely, I’ve concluded my stance then was misinformed.
It might be best for you not to get into arguments on this board. Clean debates about matters of taste, especially in the Café forum, sure. Entering into political, drug-related and psychological debates isn’t going to benefit you.
Also, seek therapeutic help. Anyone who had been through what you’ve been through would need it and the fact that you improved your lot while starting out so disadvantaged is impressive. You can improve your life further with therapy options. If money is an issue, you could start a thread asking people to suggest affordable options.
To be fair to Smapti ( gaspchokegag ), there was that thread I started pitting those zillion cops for turning their backs en masse on De Blasio, and he came in to vociferously agree with that!
Smapti is pretty consistent about this stuff. He seems to be an old-fashioned statist totalitarian. In just about any situation, his first question seems to be: Is someone questioning or disputing the authority of the state?
If the answer is yes, that will dictate his response. So, civilians need to defer to police, but police need to defer to their boss. No exceptions. His deference to governmental authority seems to be almost absolute.
This means that he is, on some issues, in line with modern liberal thought. For example, on many policy questions, he looks a lot like a New Deal Democrat: supporter of taxation, a social safety net, public health care, etc., etc. On other issues, such as police and civil rights, he looks a lot like an apparatchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Show Trials.
I gotta say, I can’t get behind this pitting at all. Not because Smapti doesn’t espouse some truly reprehensible positions in the encounters-between-cops-and-civilians thread, which he does, but because this sort of mockery just makes the mocker look like they don’t have anything of substance to say.
If Smapti says ridiculous things, then the actual ridiculous things he actually ridiculously says are sufficient to make him look ridiculous. Make up other similar ridiculous things and pointing at laughing because of how clever you are at putting words in his mouth just makes it seem like you didn’t actually have ammunition for pitting him so you had to make some up.
Also, the whole “Smapti would love to give blow jobs to cops” thing was tasteless and puerile to begin with, and now it’s tasteless, puerile, and totally played out.
Holy shit. I truly never thought of it that way, but damn if this doesn’t pass Occam’s Razor on explaining things re: smapti. Well done, mhendo, well done.
Smapti is a traumatized child who does well in some situations (his CS Threads on Top Song of the Year were brilliant and well researched) and miserably in others.
I only have one person on my Ignore list - it is too bad the Ignore list doesn’t allow selection by Forum - I just note that ‘yep - selecting death is never, ever acceptable’ - must be Smapti, and ignore the post.
So: Can we selectively edit Ignore list by Forum?
Because there are too damned many people who rise to Smapti’s ravings and try to debate the point.
Never try to debate with a lunatic - you just get the thread moved to the Pit, and a promising topic dies because we don’t do the “Selective” Ignore.
Maybe the mods could try with him what was tried with another poster (long since banned) - tell him to NOT post in ‘these’ topics.
Anything involving human death would seem the most obvious starting point.
“Authority figures v everyone else” seems to be another.
Smapti -
I really do appreciate some of your contributions to these boards, and would like to see you continue to contribute.
Just realize that, on certain topics, your “facts” do NOT agree with the “facts” commonly understood by rational adult humans.
You will not change my opinion, and I will not change yours.
Why don’t we just leave it at that?
Other than discussions about the police, Smapti is pretty reasonable, intelligent, and generally on what I consider the right side of things. I disagree with him most vigorously on police issues, but I think it best just to completely ignore that when reading posts on other issues. So he’s got one area where he seems utterly illogical and unreachable. I just accept that and move on.
I’m sure he did. I didn’t open that thread. I was simply pointing out what i think is a fairly straightforward assessment of his worldview, based of reading a bunch of his posts over a period of time.