JackT
Posts: 4 Joined: May 2008
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Mike,
Wow. You are either being willfully blind to counter-evidence or you are being outright dishonest. You failed to mention that most of my posts were *not* made from an anonymous proxy.
I do use a proxy when I post from work. I would advise everyone to use a proxy when posting from work. Given the ideologically charged nature of the subject, it is not unlikely that a deranged kook could launch a DoS (or some other) attack on the originating IP address. This does not matter so much for an anonymous residential ISP, where one can either ask the ISP to block the attacks or obtain a new IP by resetting the cable modem. But for a work IP address the problem is huge, causing loss of business while threatening one's job security in the process. If it is not commonplace for people to use a proxy from work, then it should be.
Now if I had *always* used an anonymous proxy then the situation would be completely different. There would be no anchor point at all, no unique signature. But you do have a unique signature: the Comcast Cable IP address used for the vast majority of my posts, which is obviously not a proxy. By omitting this fact you have willingly made a fraudulent argument. How many of my posts used a proxy? One? Two? Shame on you.
So that explains the proxy. No case there. Next:
Quote | 1. If we go back to the thread where you ask your multiple questions, many of us immediately recognized the disrespectful nature of that posting. You tried to spin it differently by portraying the questions as follows: "The questions certainly are direct, and they constitute a challenge." A couple of weeks later, anon9 is the only one to repeat this very spin: "His last posts were challenging Mike directly."
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As I said previously in email, my questions were no more strident than what a British journalist would ask a British politician. And as olegt said, it seems that it wasn't just my tone that offended you. My tone is a different matter, however, which may be set aside for the moment.
Wait! I just mentioned olegt, and I used almost the same phrase as he did: "it seems that it wasn't just my tone that offended you." Does this mean I am a sock puppet of olegt? No, I referenced olegt by name and attributed the quote to him. In the same manner, anon9 referenced my post directly and repeated the same phrasing. That you we see this as suspicious is odd to say the least.
Quote | 2. Bilbo makes an understandable mistake in his OP – he refers to JackT as Jack T. I myself made this mistake in my early replies to you, as it comes from not paying close attention to a new person's screen name. anon9 neither makes the same mistake nor follows Bilbo's lead from the OP. He gets this trivial detail right – it's JackT from the start.
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In anon9's post, he or she made reference to a weeks-old post. If you do not assume what you are trying to prove, namely that anon9 is me, then the conclusion is that anon9 is a lurker. He's talking about a post in the past! He was lurking and he knows about JackT. The vast majority of posters have *not* made the "Jack T"-instead-of-"JackT" mistake. This puts anon9 into that vast majority. Again I am quite amazed that you would view something like this as "evidence."
Quote | 3. Mostly importantly, anon9 knows JackT’s very last posting: “His very last one embarrassed Joy (though deservedly so).” How many lurkers could accurately cite the very last posting of another TT member that was a couple of weeks old, especially a member who is new and hasn’t posted much? At the time, JackT wasn’t banned and no one had reason to think he was banned (anon9 is the first and only one to make that accusation). It gets even better. JackT’s questioning of Joy is buried in a thread with close to 200 comments and no one else seemed to notice that brief line of off-topic questioning (at least no one commented on it or followed it up). I noticed it only because I was looking for JackT while I was waiting for JackT to reply to my questions and answers. And then there is the fact that Joy shows no evidence of being embarrassed, but one might imagine the giggling JackT thought he had embarrassed Joy (JackT: “No results found in the standard legal databases. *giggle*”). Again, anon9 seems to be the only one who agrees.
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Again, if you do not already assume what you are trying to prove, then the conclusion is that anon9 is a lurker. And again I am in near disbelief that I have to point the following out to you. The thread was about JackT. It was an apology to JackT from Bilbo. But Bilbo does not link to or reference what he is apologizing for. Before the days of google, you *may* have had a point. But since we do not live in the early 90s, and since anon9 is probably motivated to find the wrongdoing on behalf of Bilbo, he conducts the simple search:
http://www.google.com/search?....+Search
And with that he sees the complete history of JackT at Telic Thoughts. Whether I made a post in a thread with 200 comments, 20000 comments, or 20 comments is immaterial. My comments are all in plain view. As you mentioned, there aren't many of them.
Joy made an extraordinary claim: that she witnessed "the only legally established miracle in American jurisprudence." Just pause for a moment consider how significant this would be. If there were such a "legally established miracle," it would be made famous by apologists and trumpeted ad infinitum.
When asked for a way to verify her claim, Joy did not answer. A skeptical person would conclude that in all likelihood Joy is mistaken. Thus your argument here boils down to: "JackT and anon9 are both skeptical, ergo they are the same person."
And Mike, I *hope* you did not mean to imply that anon9 made his post *after* I was banned. That would indeed be suspicious. But in fact I anon9 posted *before* I was banned. Big difference.
Quote | Okay, we’re supposed to believe you stumbled upon this blog and were simply perplexed, wondering "What the heck is going on here?" But go back to one of your disrespectful questions: “Will you still be wagging your finger at Dawkins and PZ Myers?” Do you notice the problem?
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I need only quote the first sentence of the first post I made at Telic Thoughts, http://telicthoughts.com/the-rabbits-eye-view-of-the-duck
Quote | Hello Mike,
I've skimmed through the archives here in order to get some bearing on your point of view, but frankly I haven't been able to get a clear picture.
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Most or many of my posts at Telic Thoughts were focused on trying to understand your position, up to and including the last questions I asked you. As you see above, I said at the very beginning that I was reading the archives.
And again you are operating under early-90s assumptions. Google is your friend. A key ingredient in assessing a person's point of view of ID is his attitude toward religion. If you google "site:telicthoughts.com MikeGene religion", Myers is the third hit and Dawkins is the tenth. Both are on the first page. Since I read Dawkins and Myers, my curiousity was piqued. You may choose not to believe me, but you cannot claim that your argument has merit, especially when I told you explicitly that I was rummaging through the history of Telic Thoughts.
The rest of your response consists of the proxy red herring, which I have already covered.
JackT
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