It's mutual.
This is probably my most recent nemesis- although it seems like he's one of those people everyone despises. Basically, I'm doing a music degree, and as he plays a "rare" instrument he acts as if he's entitled to treat everyone else as common. Which would be fine if it was just in performance (because you get used to a certain amount of dickery from most musicians after a while...) but for some reason he thought it would also work during music aesthetics debates.

He would invariably swan in two minutes before the lecture/seminar when we were all discussing our research, ready to begin the debate. He would listen for these two minutes, and at the end of it would join in the debate like so:

-Your point is wrong. I know because I can make exactly the same point in a louder tone, while talking about the research I overheard you'd done.
-I don't know what you're talking about, but I can turn around the debate so it looks like I came up with the idea, and the fact that you want to explore it is evidence that you don't understand.
-Plato/Lacan/Barthes may have been respected philosophers, but they will crumble before the force of my opinion!

Anyway. At the end of the course (eight weeks) we were all pretty sick of this. The end of the course included a group presentation. The group that this guy was in had a wonderful idea- get him to do all the talking and let him dig his own fucking grave.

And that's exactly what happened. After ten minutes of him stumbling through his own opinion rather than the actual course content, you'd think the lecturer would have put him out of his misery. But no. He turns to the rest of the class, smiles, and asks us if we have any questions. One of the points the guy had made involved a cow- specifically, the theory was that if you had a picture of a cow, it didn't mean it was really a cow, it was a representation. He hadn't explained this one too well, so we all jumped on it.

"Why would anyone have a picture of a cow?"
"Would you prefer to have one cow, or a herd?"
"Do you know this cow personally?"
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 29 Apr 2010, 21:57, 1 reply)

Well you sure showed him.

(Vlad the Inhaler forgot his password, Mon 3 May 2010, 10:05, closed)