User:NguyenBao

(tag removed) mergeto|Flatlanders}}

Nguy&#7877;n Ba&#777;o is a dirty rotten scoundrel who lives in a fantasy world of his own creation, in which he believes he actually knows something about pre-WWII Vietnamese history, consensus reality, logic and logical fallacies, healthy multiplicity, and monkeys. In truth, he... well, he can't actually tell you the truth, because he's actually writing this section himself in the third person. But he's fairly certain that his genuine expertise extends to post-Renaissance art history, the English language, monologueing, the difference between multiplicity and sockpuppets, and making random enemies because he is a horrible awful jerk who excuses outrageous behavior with a documented diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome... unless said enemies are actually hallucinatory products of his paranoid mind, which is  independent of his Asperger's, which was probably misdiagnosed anyway because rar rar rar goat marathon beach towel ad nauseum.

See? Total transparency. Plus, if all the stupid drama is self-directed and limited to this page, why bother making more of it?

Seriously speaking, though, I'm not a troll. I'm just some guy who has the crappiest social skills in the world when it comes to things like figuring out if people are bored or enrapt, sarcastic or serious, whether someone needs to be left alone or talked to, or what, and I'm completely blind to certain types of subtle interaction, like saying one thing and meaning another. I've pissed people off because of this, perhaps rightfully so, perhaps not. I'm a Livejournal ex-patriate by choice, for reasons that have to do with not one, but two separate drama messes.

I'm mentioning this here because I recognize that bad mojo follows me like a ball and chain. Whether that's because I'm an emotionally manipulative crackpot or the unluckiest guy on the internet, that's your call. A pseudonym would get blasted open upon discovery, and pretending I've never been the butt of any controversy would probably be inviting some kind of retaliation for trying to get on with my life. So, total transparency: I'm Astaroth and flatulence and Satan and bologna. Okay? Now let's get to wiki-ing.

Useful Information
I only use my full name in this user page to avoid confusion with User:NguyenHue or with Nguy&; in talk page signatures and most other places on Wikipedia, I intend to go by Ba&#777;o. (Bao, without diacritics, is okay, too; I just spell it with them so that my name isn't "bag" all the time.) I'm not related to the last emperor of Vietnam. I'm not impersonating anyone, and if there are any edits from this IP that aren't under this username, comment on the talk page.

My sense of humor tends towards the absurd, especially non sequitors and reduction to the absurd. In debates or controversies, on the other hand, I focus on pointing out logical inconsistancies in another argument. For example, most debates I participate in look like this:


 * Guy: Dr Michael Persinger has developed a helmet which stimulates the brain's temporal lobe with electrical impulses, based on findings that temporal lobe epileptics have hallucinations similar to mystical visions. Therefore, the supernatural does not exist, because it is not observable by methods that cannot be reproduced by non-supernatural means.
 * Me: Arguing that the supernatural can't exist because you have not observed evidence of it is not a valid platform. If stimulation of the temporal lobe results in mystical vision-like experiences, that still does not necessarily prove that all mystical vision-like experiences are a result of stimulation of the temporal lobe. A series of double-blind studies with both control and experimental subjects would be necessary to even begin to successfully research the topic.
 * Guy: If something can't be shown to exist anywhere but in the mind, and can be induced into the mind by relatively simple means, the chance of it actually existing outside the mind is rather slim. As to the article being my sole basis for this, that is far from true. I have myself had experiences of mystical/divine nature, and learned to induce them myself in various ways. This article is just an offshot of research performed for at least thousands of years by shamans and mystics.
 * Me: Absence of proof is not proof of absence.  Self-experimentation without control groups is not a viable source of research. Not only are the results not objective, but the "researchers" were not intentionally conducting research, and therefore were not holding themselves or their procedures to any common standard.
 * Guy: So many fallacious analogies and strawmen my head hurts...


 * The Swede (2005). The god part of the brain. Retrieved May 12, 2005.
 * The Swede (2005). The god part of the brain. Retrieved May 12, 2005.

Not the best arguments I've ever made, I'll grant that; I find holes in them now that embarrass me a bit. However, I still don't think any are straw men or false analogies.

Either way, I generally don't present positive arguments until after I've determined whether or not the person in question can admit and/or correct such inconsistancies without flippant dismissal or resorting to countering with ad hominem attacks. In the cited example, I actually agreed with the idea that supernatural experiences are probably the result of stimulation of the temporal lobe, but disagreed with the argument that this automatically lead to the one conclusion that all such experiences are not supernatural, or that the idea did not need to be tested at the same level of standards as any other control experiment. In such situations, I'm usually assumed to have a personal bias that I often don't actually possess.

This sometimes leads to the confusing situation where I am assumed to have beliefs that turn out to be a hodge-podge of my humorous writings, the assumption that I totally disagree with everyone whose arguments I question, and guilt by association.

Articles I admire

 * Ph&#7903; and ramen, though I wish that ph&#7903; made more mention of the "nationalistic" reputation of ph&#7903; (similar to apple pie in America and miso soup in Japan). Of course, this reputation may only be the result of hype by politically inclined poets, rather than a genuine history, but that's a point of discussion&mdash; and probably worthy of brief mention because of that.

Current Editing Mini-Projects
I'm new to contributing to wikis, though not to perusing them. Veterans, have mercy. I registered because I plan to work on the following articles:


 * Matantei Loki Ragnarok - no information on the manga series is in this article, Matantei Loki doesn't redirect to it (despite being the original manga series name for 7 volumes), the content is not much more than a list of characters from the anime version, frequent misspellings, and I have no clue how "Reiya" became renamed "Linye". I plan to work primarily on adding manga information right now, including information on the ADV release on the second half of the manga series without the first. Ba&#777;o 17:04, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

A Little Bit of Nonsense

 * Blue is the cockatrice
 * Blue is the basilisk
 * Blue is the color of my one true love
 * Blue is the manticore
 * Blue is the wild boar
 * Blue is the color of the sky above


 * Chorus and more horrible verses to come.

These are not the lyrics to A Cockatrice is a Blue Bird, by the way. In fact, they're totally unrelated. (And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.)