#@pourmecoffee

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Hell yes. Hippos save gnu from croc. Very exciting photos by Vadim Onishchenko http://t.co/jZvigQxlz4 #teamhippos pic.twitter.com/Ettji8yHtR — pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) March 12, 2014 http://dlvr.it/57580Z

Here is @realDonaldTrump from his CPAC speech earlier today http://t.co/LJnhNc1BBp — pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) March 7, 2014 http://dlvr.it/55K8bT

Anonymous Twitter star Pourmecoffee thinks we’re stupid. When we turn out not to be stupid, he calls us stupid anyway. On January 27, he posted a link to a Bloomberg article correlating Iceland’s plummeting unemployment rate with its failure to rescue its failing banks. His comment: “Iceland let banks fail and is trending towards 2% unemployment rate”. The implication is obvious: bailing out banks was not necessary; in fact, letting them fail might have been a good thing for the US economy. Such an implication is strengthened by Pourmecoffee’s clear Occupy Wall Street sympathies, his general favoring of the arguments of the economic left, and the fact that he is apparently a Washingtonian with a predominant interest in US politics. His post led to an exchange with Contrabassist, which I am preserving lest Pourmecoffee eventually repent and delete it: ― Pourmecoffee: Iceland let banks fail and is trending towards 2% unemployment rate ― Contrabassist: comparisons with other countries are ridiculous, Iceland has a mere 320K population, smaller than Albuquerque, New Mexico ― Pourmecoffee: That’s why I didn’t make a comparison, dumbass. ― Contrabassist: sorry, I was speaking of the article, not you personally. ― Pourmecoffee: No problem, but the article doesn’t either. In fact, “United States” doesn’t appear in article -- not once. Zero times. ― Contrabassist: You are right, neither did I. Greece and Spain are mentioned in the 2nd paragraph, not an apples-apples comparision. [sic] It’s easy to guess what happened here. Pourmecoffee likes to make insinuations without taking responsibility for them. He made a fatuous insinuation; he was called on it. He immediately feigned a different intent, as though the Bloomberg article was just meant to be generically “interesting”. It wouldn’t be, though. If the story has no comparative value, then it is a minor detail of Icelandic history alone. Pourmecoffee didn’t just disavow the implication in his original post, though. He called a thoughtful follower making a good point in a civil manner a “dumbass”. Having a bad day? Likely not; when Contrabassist apologized (for using ‘ridiculous’, or for the supposed misinterpretation), Pourmecoffee didn’t apologize in turn, but merely accepted the apology and made a new logical mistake. Note, as Contrabassist did, that it was Pourmecoffee, not his interlocutor, who explicitly brought the US into the discussion. He accused Contrabassist of leaping to conclusions by assuming that he, Pourmecoffee, was making a comparison. But Contrabassist never mentioned the US; the person leaping to that conclusion was Pourmecoffee. He falsely accused someone of a mistake while making it himself, and accompanied that accusation with a school-yard insult. Both individuals are practicing an embarrassing form of debate. Each is caught saying something whose intention can be argued with; each defends himself not by supporting the intention but by offering a different (but probably misleading) interpretation that could arguably be right. Contrabassist does so twice, in fact. The pretense is far worse on Pourmecoffee’s part, though, because it covers up a greater logical error ― the logical error that Contrabassist first pointed out ― and because it is accompanied by an ad-hominem attack. Contrabassist didn’t stand his ground, unfortunately, but I’ll stand the ground for him. Pourmecoffee doesn’t really understand how the world financial system works, or he wouldn’t suggest that Iceland’s current unemployment rate tells us anything at all about bailout policy, in the US or anywhere else. He denies making such a suggestion. But à la Robert Bolt, “the world must construe according to its wits.” Which is more likely: that Pourmecoffee posted something that had no meaning whatsoever, or that he posted something that was wrong? Pourmecoffee is a clever wit. I’ve read him for years in admiration of that. But he is also formulaic, with his calendar framing and mock pride. He admits to his partisanship, but it’s still relentless and tedious. His ridicule is frequently directed at actions he himself otherwise performs. And he is not really much of an analyst of policy or events. And though he’s clearly not a dumbass, he’s also clearly beyond a simple smartass. Jackass, maybe. ― O.T. Ford

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 30, 2013