The bottom of Larry’s mutualism argument has been pulled out by Kevin’s explanation that the traits don’t have to appear simultaneously. This seems irrefutable.

As so often happens with biology, fact is stranger than fiction.

But enough gossip.

Thank you again. I feel understand the situation much better. I hope that Larry one day gets treatment, and that you get your friend back. He is clearly intelligent. I think he could make some contribution if he gets well.

I understand your stake in this, Bill C. I am curious, though. How did you, Kevin, get into this? Are you someone who knows Larry in real life at all, or did you just run into him online like I did? Same thing with you, Theobald, and you, Voice in the Urbaness, if you are lurking here.

Yes, that’s the book I was talking about. When I follow your link, page 100 is visible. Must be some weird Google thing.

Larry was a good friend for many years and I would like to return to that status but I don’t see it happening. As his brother said in Ed Brayton’s blog “I would like my brother back.” I sometimes feel guilty about heckling him but it is often done out of frustration. I kid myself into believing that if he is driven farther over the edge it may force him into a situation where he could get medical help.

Ed dropped his discussions of Larry stating that he felt it was unwise to pull the chains of the clinically insane. Ed did have a pretty good analysis of Larry’s problem:

“His obsessive compulsive nature subverts any chance his mind has of forming even a mildly accurate picture of reality. He creates these bizarre legal theories, none of which have ever won anything in court, and he sits in his house all day long desperate for people to listen to him. So he spams every blog and forum with his lunatic ideas and gets banned, then in his mind he is converted into Don Quixote, bravely tilting at all the dragons windmills that do him such injustice. He doesn’t have delusions of grandeur so much as he has delusions of relevance. And he convinces himself that he’s on the verge of winning against we who torment him so.”

I think that Ed pretty much hit it on the head. Incidentally, Larry often claims that many of his tormenters, Kevin, his brother, me, etc. are actually Ed Brayton using assumed names. You may have been added to this list.

His Don Quixote attempts to stop the smog fee on cars brought into California from out of the state were bizarre. He had a good case but had no clue as to how to persue it. His bull in a china shop activities were not at all appreciated by others with the same goal. One asked Larry to take him off of his email list. Larry reacted with outrage. He believed that the only reason anyone would ask this was to intentionally annoy him. He couldn’t conceive or any other reason.

When the smog fee was dropped in spite of Larry’s failures, he considered himself the world’s savior. Once I was with him at a restaurant and he got fired up and started shrieking at the other patrons because they didn’t appreciate the great blessing that he had given them. I left before he was thrown out.

In the last ten years or so he has really fallen off the edge. At one point he predicted his own death in the next 48 hours. He said that his tendons would start snapping one by one and even pointed out in which order this would happen. His next kick was that there was no way that the information that is published daily in the Los Angeles Times could be gathered without supernatural aid. This would be the same aid that managed to print and distribute it. He claimed that to print that many copies the gears in the presses would have to run at supersonic speeds.

The final proof came when the Times reported that Dupar’s Restaurant was changing hands. How could the Times know about this. Even more suspicious was the fact that when the reporter went to the restaurant they found regulars to interview. As far as Larry was concerned, the odds against finding a regular at a restaurant were astronomical.

I can’t help but believe that Larry could be helped but since he doesn’t believe he has a problem, no help can be obtained. He goes into scraming fits at anyone who disagrees with him.