Pretend? Quoting you back to yourself:

"It seems you're sounding like that little snowflake mentioned in the story.

Should they ban you? "

You weren't "pointing out the obvious", you were making no sense and you've gone on making no sense.

If you want the last word, Roger (and I know you do), it's yours. I don't have time for this.

Which supports my speculation that you're autistic. Anybody with so much as the faintest trace of emotional intelligence could tell that I was ridiculing you, not ranting at you, in the comments above.

That, and the fact that you have almost a quarter of a million off-topic comments on your profile.

You're offended by a definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Roger? Who's the snowflake?

Mr. Powers is free to ban me if he wants to, but aside from a desire to please a compulsive butthurt crank, he'd have no reason to do so. Take a look at how I entered this discussion.
http://dougpowers.com/2016/05/01/satire-declared-...

I did so with an on-topic cos playing joke, which you and your troll companions used as an excuse to talk about the same off-topic things you've been talking about in a repetitive manner. Do people ever talk to you about Aspberger's syndrome? How about Autism?

Either way, I'm an applied mathematician, not a psychiatrist, and this is beyond my pay grade. A mildly amusing joke that could have been played around with was been stomped to death before it had any chance to get going, because of your compulsive behavior.

It's annoying. It's not fun. Until Powers does something about the problem - and you are the problem - I'm not even going to bother to read or post here any more, because what would be the point? No matter what we say or talk about, the discussion is back to Roger, the man with no life.

247,127 comments! I just went to your profile and that's how many comments from you were listed. Are you a man or a bot? Who has time to post that much c**p?

If that isn't enough to convince the owner of the blog that you are too crazy to be reasoned with, I don't know what would be.

BTW - read the "long rant" Roger wants to create drama about. It's roughly the length of the blurb on the side of a cereal box. That's our "serious thinker" for you - can't muster the attention span needed to find out why Raisin Bran is a good start to one's day (or whatever they have posted there) but will no doubt speak of his scholarship. Which will consist of his reading of books, each one of which will be briefer than a post of five very short paragraphs?

The guy has issues.

See : https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non%20...

and try to get a little class. That wasn't funny, that was just stupid and disgusting.

I just checked. Sadly, the answer is no, so I'm sure I'll get to watch Roger play the false equivalence game in the future, until he gets tired of being ignored.

Pettifoggery, Roger? Really?

If you can't see the difference between a doing a single post talking about the problem of off-topic posting and being the poster who has been submitting an endless stream of off-topic comments, then you are completely devoid of common sense.

Not that I have any faith in the sincerity behind your seeming idiocy. I think I'm just about done with you. Does IntenseDebate have a block feature?

On behalf of all of the STEM degree recipients who go worked half to death, watching a long line of their classmates suffer nervous breakdowns from the work load involved in working one's way through school, only to get boned over in the job market because credentiials and individuals don't matter, only identity politics and personal connections do, I'd just like to say "good job, Barack, you've been a blessing." Not to us, of course. To Al Quaeda and ISIS, because so many STEM degree recipients are getting so desperate and so angry that they'll work for anybody, literally anybody. Did I mention the practice of refusing to hire people because their "overqualified" or that of "capitalizing" interest on student loans during times when the graduates can't find work, compound interest on those loans being effectively charged, meaning that if one says "no" to the shady individual one approaches, one will be saddled with an exponentially growing debt that one can't escape through bankruptcy, acquired because nobody will let one have an honest chance at decently paying work? Without work, how are those who took out student loans supposed to pay them off? The graduates who took out such loans have been asking that very reasonable question and gotten nothing but bad attitudes and the reading of the usual scripts in reply.

Obama didn't create this reality on his own, but he certainly did his part to make it even more of a mess than it had been. I'll offer the very serious prediction that nothing will get fixed until the inevitable happens. A terrorist group will assemble enough of a team to build the weapons they want, and a few American cities will be vaporized. Judging from the discussions I've seen online, the American people will respond by turning on its scientists and engineers. The surviving members of the STEM community will emigrate, leaving America technologically backward and ripe for conquest within a generation or two. This is how Western Civilization ends, I think - destroyed by its own pettiness, a victim of its own growing cult of radical self-indulgence.

But I guess that must be the future people in America want, as they're making such an effort to make it real, so who am I to judge? Hail Obama, Hail Bush, and Hail Trump, let us all salute your good work, as some of us try to find our way out of this doomed country. Preferably before North Korea drops any bombs on it, because who knows where they'll land?

It's a wonderful system. We get out, live hand to mouth existences piecing together the odd jobs we can get, usually tutoring, often learning that is just a euphemism for "ghost writing", getting to watch the idiot children of wealthier (and more generous) parents put their names on our work, which is performed for not much more than minimum wage. As we hike home from these gigs, not being able to afford public transportation, we get to run a gantlet, swarmed by panhandlers and their "progressive" hipster allies who will be positively self-righteously indignant that we won't dig deeply into our not very deep pockets in order to buy booze for the panhandlers. "I'm using the few dollars in my pocket to buy dinner tonight, so which would you begrudge me - the rice or the beans?" I'll ask one of these people, getting nothing more than preaching from the oblivious in return.

The hilarious part of this is that the hipsters I know did get pell grants, despite having lower GPAs, degrees in subjects like "wimmin's studies" (sic) and parents rich enough to have been taking their kids on Carribean vacations every winter. The government keeps saying that it needs people with STEM degrees. I have a few of those (bachelor's in Physics, master's in Math, and a PHD in math and master's in Electrical Engineering on the verge of completion), as do so many of my former classmaters, and who cares? Everybody wants to be "sensitive" (read: cheap) and hire the H1Bs or illegal immigrants, outsource to the Third World, or keep the jobs unfilled as they look for the non-existent affirmative action hire with a real STEM degree. (Hint: "integrated science and technology" does not qualify).

What's a Pell Grant? I'm being a little facetious when I ask that, as I have heard of them, I just haven't met many poor people who got such grants, and wonder on what basis they were given.

I have (and had) a dean's list average and worked my way through school, because my parents had no financial help to give and neither did the federal government, which made the remarkable decision that there was no need in my case. Because zero dollars and zero cents per week in support is plenty to get through school on? Maybe they were given out to affirmative action candidates, like the very few poor people I knew who did get them, as if poor white people didn't exist or didn't matter? Or poor Jews for that matter?

If so, how beautiful. Should I ever rise up out of poverty, I'll get to pay to help support a program that I was not allowed to benefit from, in any way. Sounds fair. I might add that getting out of poverty is not so easy to do when one has worked so many hours per week putting oneself through school as to have never had the free time needed to make the personal connections used to get work, and when so many positions are given out to the affirmative action hires and so many to members of the old boys' club that no opportunity seems to be left for the rest of us, who are expected to magically get 2-5 years of experience before getting our first jobs, and to accept that the jobs we used to work our way through school don't count as "real jobs" because the visibly stoned narcissists working in the human resources offices say so.

40-60 hours per week before studies and that's not a real job? Really? If I take off time to sleep for eight hours per night, does that take my job out of the "real job" category? Apparently so.