Allow me to deal with some of what you have raised in your post. i have not asked the moderators to stop others from going after me. i fully well exected the type of responses my mocking posts have received. What i pointed out is that they are most inconsistent in how they lay down the law; providing examples. i even asked them why they chose not to remove my response to Invention's post given that it was every bit as harsh as 2 of the other 3 that they did remove. And in further pointing out their inconsistencies, i asked why they had removed Hart's rather harmless post while letting stand things with other posts that were meant to be as offensive as my own. And i further pointed out that there seems to be a power struggle going on between the moderators over what to delete and what not to delete. As for my desire to go on mocking others, i have no such desire. If that was my desire, i would be very pleased to have them continue to allow comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with precious metals, finance, investing, government policy and similar matters.
In terms of responding to Hart, in case you missed it, i already have. Numerous times actually. Let me do so one more time for your benefit. A discussion of whether or not God created the world and man is completely inappropriate to this forum. If that is what i wanted to discuss, i would do so on a different web site. Insofar as i gave any more of a response than that, i did on one occasion allow myself to state that the origin of the universe can be explained without recourse to God and that Occam's razor states that we should accept as being true that which requires the fewest statements of contrafactual definiteness. Beyond that i have not ventured, nor will i do so. i will not allow myself to be drawn into a protracted discussion of matters that do not properly belong on a web site such as this. But i will allow myself to mock those who would try to turn this site into 24 hour Jesus in the hope that they can be shamed into giving up their inappropriate behaviour.
With respect to Jim C., you are correct in pointing out that i have yet to challenge him over his antics around slavery and JHK's articles. i have not done so because i have only so much time and others have done it for me. But on other matters where i have believed that Jim missed the mark with his comment, i have responded; even drawing his ire once with a curt remark telling me to get lost.
In terms of the language i have used, i have used the f word once with Tom B. and nowhere else. And do you know what? It was effective in that since then his comments have all been on topic and made respectfully. Heck, i've even agreed with many of them.
i do not object to being called a sewer gas, vermin, uneducated, or anything else. As i said, i knew quite well that such descriptions of me were going to be coming my way before i hit the add your comment button. My sense of self is not so fragile that i get bothered by it. Truth be told, i rather enjoy it in that it tells me that my words are hitting their mark. If my mocking comments failed to elicit such a response, (unless they had succeeded in stopping the fundamentalist Christians from pushing their views on us in this inappropriate forum,) i would feel like i was not being effective. And that would be far more difficult for me to deal with than disparaging comments made by nameless, faceless strangers.
To answer your question of just how often i have derailed a thread, the answer would be never. Not even once. i go after those who have done precisely that. i never try to start a dialogue on matters not even remotely connected to precious metals. i was not the one to make the claim that the Holocaust is going to occur any day now nor did i attempt to claim that it makes no sense to believe in evolution. If i wanted to divert the conversation away from precious metals related topics, i would be asking others if they agree that a transactional analysis of quantum mechanics can tell us more about the universe than is offered by the Copenhagen interpretation. But i do not do so because that is not what this site was designed for and i have other places where i can do just that.
You are free to believe that i did not graduate, much less attend university, that i do not play go, that i was never a cruciverbalist and that a good part of my lumbar spine was not removed. But know this, with the latter claim i was not looking for sympathy, merely listing one of the few things Boston Prof managed to guess correctly. To have expected sympathy would have made me delusional. And just to straighten the record, i did not wish for anyone to believe that as a result of the lumbar lamenectomies i went through that i am now confined to a wheel chair. i am not. There are limitations imposed as a result, but none are nearly as severe as those faced by your friend.
If you are correct about me not being special, which i believe you are, then like me, you do not believe in God. As for not being remarkable, that is true and something i have striven for since 1974. Receiving the sort of attention i got back then with newspaper and magazine reporters and television news crews parked outside my door for 5 weeks, to say nothing of receiving death threats from law enforcement, was more than enough to cause me to want to be unremarkable. But as for not being worth enduring, there are those who not only endure me, but love me.
As for your final point, i too welcome different viewpoints on the metals and those things which have a bearing on them. However, there is no plausible connection between those things and whether or not we come from slime or if Jesus is coming to kill all but the tiniest fraction of humanity. Such matters are well beyond the scope of any sensible discussion of what is going on with the metals. As i noted in my response to Boston Prof, if the bible has any place in this discussion, it would be in how the moral teachings it contains can inform capitalism.
And while it was good of you to respond, it is not your response or that of any of the other people who comment here that i was attempting to elicit. It is the moderators of this form who are the only ones capable of responding to the questions i posed. Only time will tell whether they do so or if they remain too conflicted to offer a coherent response, or indeed, a response of any sort. Perhaps each of the camps could respond if they remain unable to agree among themselves. But beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is in all of our interest that they get their act together.
Commented 4268 days ago |