@JTT,
In the case I was referring to yes. It was informing people of something one would expect them to know which verges on a claim to have more acute observational powers than they do. Which is a bit crass really.
If I was to be honest about it I would say that continuous whining on and on about people being off topic from a person who has a marked tendency to be off topic him or herself denotes a level of narcissism and social ineptitude which would cause any sensible lady to take precautions concerning the avoidance of their company. It generally means that they are uncomfortable when not steering the conversation and being the centre of attention and that they find anything they don't already know to be uninteresting.
In the pub the conversation ranges over a bewildering array of subject matter from minute to minute and anyone who pompously declaims that "you've changed the subject" soon find themselves cut out of the loop. And I must admit that I see a lot of similarities between conversation here and in the pub.
People who habitually do that sort of thing cannot avoid finding their mind becoming narrower and narrower until it reaches the point where it easily slips through a crack in the floorboards and disappears from view. There is a whole mine of useful information to be gleaned from off-topicitis from which they deliberately exclude themselves so I suppose it is just another variation of the Ignore syndrome which I assume is derived from burying the face in Mom's apron during childhood at every frustrating setback and being rewarded by a petting. Some psychologists say that it is caused by fear of the incomprehensible complexity of the nasty world and encouraged by the sort of thing Philip Larkin was considering when he wrote This Be The Verse--
Quote:They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Such people easily come to believe after many years of practice that there is no such thing as irreducible complexity because as they think they understand everything in their own experience they believe scientists can understand every other experience if only there are enough of them and the funds are made available. One only needs to hear them pontificating about an object like Libya to see how silly they are. They think that a sperm fertilising an egg is all they need to know about conception which leads them to convenient, for them, anti-evolutionary mechanics of the simplest sort which leads them to attack Christian teaching which leads them to atheism. (I bet you thought I was off topic.)
Rabbiting about off-topic and recourse to Ignore, with its range of obvious variations to avoid the post they are pretending to respond to, an insult to our intelligence, is infantile, self-defeating and stupid. If atheists do it more than most it is a very good reason in itself for being wary of the belief.