james_nicoll

There are moments when I want to contribute to global warming by lighting up someone who attempts to disprove it by straw man argument.

--Hawk

the toxic strain of empiricism ?

wow. would have suggested that this needs an mpr warning, but it is such gobbledygook that I think it can stand.

I thought you killed excessively cross=posted stuff?

This is a special crosspost-of-five - one of the other local annoying trolls, Starmaker, uses the same exact nonsensical crosspost for every one of his posts, adding it back in if it's not there and he's replying, expressly for the purpose of messing up and overpowering conversations in all five, and too many people, including oriel, don't take at least part of it out again when replying.

Wayne and I are having some value of fun picking poor oriel to pieces, though Wayne is doing it more systematically. oriel isn't quite a bot, but he's about 2/3 of the way to being one.

--Dave

Either I have put too much schnapps in my snapple, or not enough, because that doesn't make any sense.

Oh good, I was wondering if I was simply too tired to find sense in that, but I'm reassured if there wasn't any to be found.

I feel obliged to address these points in detail by pointing out that wibble warble rhubarb snarf.

Definitely too much.

I'll see your wibble warble an raise you this!

What? Still makes sense more than the linked post.

This is one of those fine cases in which "context" does nothing to improve upon the original.

It is very often precisely this sort of person who insists that people who refuse to speak English should "go back where they came from."

Mind, with the end of the shuttle program this particular [useful minor piece of hardware not known for cognitive coherence] is safe from forcible repatriation for the foreseeable...

What?

Did the Time Cube guy discover Usenet?

That was who I thought of when he started in on the 24 hour day thing. Mind you, this yoyo is marginally better at grammar than the Time Cube guy, but it's not clear he's thinking any better.

Oriel36 is the one who's refusing to look through the telescope.

Your dystopian ideology requires that the Earth turns 1465 times in
1461 days so you have to convince yourself that one day doesn't keep
in step with one rotation and that is 2+2=5.

Tee hee.

This entity has decided that the sidereal day is a conspiracy?!?

I am not clicking through. No way, no how, not even after breakfast.

In the 19th century, there was a huge and extraordinarily inane flamewar in the letters columns of various publications over whether or not the moon rotated:

http://books.google.com/books?id=5whDAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=1856+moon+rotation&source=bl&ots=55Xt-SgQ8A&sig=SmWI3QpGgQqMXcwiKqhZWWgebs8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8X6iT5uCIeT66QGftsTdCA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=1856%20moon%20rotation&f=false
http://www.futilitycloset.com/category/science-math/page/42/

I don't know if conspiracy accusations ever came up.

Eventually someone compared their opponents to Nazis, thereby setting in motion the chain of events that led to the rise of Hitler.

Aha, that clears things up: the moon rotates around the Axis.

+1

This one reminded me of "Autymn D.C.", but looking back it seems he/she was in r.a.sf.science. And his/her hobbyhorse was that real true authentic correct English is (apparently, it's never explicit) one of the dialects spoken in one of the southern counties before the Norman Invasion. But Autymn is no monomaniac; he/she haunts physics boards and offers his/her ideas to an (alas!) uncaring world.

A gem of a post combining both:
https://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/browse_frm/thread/65ccda65df733f95/28d3d018168fd742#28d3d018168fd742

How...unusual. I hope nobody needed to try to learn physics by reading that.

what is this I don't even

"Fieldly whit"? Is he working on a sequel to "Uncleftish Beholding"?

I was reminded of that, too. But Uncleftish Beholding is a clever linguistic exercise. Why would anyone write like that all the time?

Oh, Autymn! I hadn't thought about them in a loooooong time.

I believe that Autymn and Jack Sarfatti got into an epic slanging match at least once.

You know who I miss? SOLLOG.

Sometimes I see these things James posts and wonder why. Sometimes I find I am unable to differentiate between a poster who is a troll and a poster who is a loon. Do the species converge in that place called USENET?

Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice?

That would be it. I had been thinking in terms of taxonomy but yours is a better description.

Yes, and not just one Usenet.

Yes.

Look up Edmond Wollmann on Google Groups and marvel.

Interesting. Is there no moderator on USENET? On any normal blog the ban-hammer would have removed him long ago.

Except for moderated newsgroups, no, there is no moderator.

This is what ultimately led to many people (like, myself) abandoning that medium.

No, it's Usenet; you have to provide your own moderation, in the form of killfiling people or subjects you don't wish to read about (or just skip their messages).

Real fun comes up if you mention killfiling someone, and he takes it to be your attempt to suppress his messages from the entire world. Or even better, if he takes it as a threat to life and limb.

For being essentially a hundred thousand million self-supervised comment boards running in parallel, Usenet is strikingly good.

At least on usenet it's fairly difficult for the killfilee to express his umbrage at the attempt to censor him by forging an "unsubscribe" message from the killfiler.

Yes, this did happen to me on a mailing list when someone I publicly killfiled thought I intended to prevent him from sending his messages to everyone else on the list.

Yes, the person who faked the unsubscribe message from me did insist that it was purely an accident and he had only meant to unsubscribe himself, honest guv, when the listbofh explained to him what "killfile" meant and further explained to him that his pre-emptive strike would not have been acceptable even if his interpretation had been correct.

Sometimes. Here we have examples of Starmaker, a blatant and unrepentant troll, androcles, an angry troll, and oriel36, a loon who is somewhat unintentionally trolling.

I did write a FAQ, a long time ago...

Dave, imagine the following in a monospaced font because I don't want to take the time to find out how to force LJ to do that
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru www.vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable
http://panacea.phys.utk.edu/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ/ I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

But but but it's not there anymore!

I used to have a copy but that was many harddrives ago

Gah, I knew that was an old .sig, and I fixed one part of it while posting, but missed another part. (Yes, that's a (BLINK) tag in there.) Moment...

--
\/David DeLaney posting from dbd@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

From elsewhere in the thread, and too good to pass up an off-topic riff on:

"from William December Starr

> > The Egyptians had something in abundance that none of you appear
> > to have -

> Yes: being dead, which sadly renders them unable to tell you that
> you're full of shit."

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

The avatar I'm using speaks for me here.

Oriel36 has been pushing his unique views for some time - he haunted the Bad Astronomy forums for quite a while (see http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/7701-Rotation-of-the-Earth-in-24-hours) for example