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Tim Daneliuk

wrote:
On Apr 8, 10:07 pm, Andrew Barss wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:

: But the essential claim was that they are dangerous
: precisely because they accumulate weapons.

No, the point was, and is, that you said something wrong,
a useful online data source was given that, had you read it,
would have shown you to be wrong, and yet you persist.

No surprise.

I once directed Mr Daneliuk to the section of the UCMJ which addresses
the persons who are subject to its provisions. In his reply he

And were essentially wrong in your argument as I recall.

informed us that he did not have to read it in order to know what it
said and proceeded to (incorrectly) lecture us on its applicability.

Because I relied not on the source document, but summaries found in
other books I'd read. (Your intimation here, of course, is that I had no
firsthand knowledge of the question at hand, which is incorrect. I just
got it from something other than the single source document you clung
to.) In this case, summaries I'd found at some distant point in the past
that contrasted military and civil laws in the US. IIRC, my inability to
produce the cite (a favorite FF debating tactic) caused you to dismiss
my understanding of the topic under debate out of hand. Nevermind that I
was actually more-or-less right about it, *you* read the UCMJ and
(apparently) *only* the UCMJ and were thus to be trusted even absent any
coherent analysis, relevant history, and, in this case, correctness.

I had also erred on the subject but the difference is that I checked
my information, Mr Daneliuk refused to do so even when all he had to
do was click on a link and read the webpage.

IOW - You claimed to have read the source document and were wrong. I
relied on summaries and synthesis of the source documents and was right.
That's the difference between an insecure mind craves affirmation via
pedantry and an inquiring mind that wants to ascertain the best
understanding of a topic. Your constant squealing about the source
documents without any real deeper understanding of what they mean
betrays the former.

I do not have enough lifetimes to read every source document on every
topic of interest. Moreover, I have sufficient judgment to generally
know which overviews and precis of complex topics I can rely upon.
Educated and thoughtful people learn from other educated and thoughtful
people. This means we read books that summarize, compile, annotate,
interpret, contextualize, and otherwise school us in complex topics.
That is one of the means that modern man has been able to accumulate and
harness knowledge gained over the ages in the face of the insurmountable
task of reading every or even a portion of the relevant source
documents. People who do not do this are simply not well educated. They
are self-important pendants that cannot wait to breathlessly engage in
verbal jousts for the sole purpose of trying to demonstrate how smart
they are. Smart they may be, but educated they are not.

It is the task of the subject-matter specialist to arm themselves
deeply with knowledge of the source material. These people go
on to produce the syntheses that I prefer to read. I do not, for
example, need to be a US Constitution scholar to have a general
understanding of the intent and purpose of the Framers. That's
because the aforementioned specialists have produced a body
of work - some of which is approachable by the interested layman -
to educate the non-specialist.

After all, he is also able to ascertain both the content of books and
the motivations of their authors without reading them, and

No - I am capable of studying a writer's work in context. This means
reading more than just single source documents and interpreting them
with simplistic literal-mindedness as you do. Context is achieved by
looking at a body of writing and comparing, contrasting, and analyzing
it in light of other, similar documents and/or summaries of the topic at
hand. Your arguments are largely puerile because you mostly refuse to do
this (at least as evidenced in our many debates), choosing instead to
trumpet pedantic demands for citation and/or relying almost exclusively
on single sources for your "analysis".

Really, if you're going to be consistent, you ought to reduce all of
your idea combat to a single foundational debate about epistemology,
language, and semiotics. These are the heart and soul of almost all
debates and ought to keep you busy for years reading the source
material. I will give you a big head start: No system claiming to
produce knowledge (i.e., an epistemic system) - whether it is science,
mathematics, religion, meditation, or quivering with transcendent
understanding - actually "proves" the delivered "knowledge" is "true". A
given epistemology can only be judged on three metrics: 1) Is the system
internally consistent, 2) Do the results correspond to observed Reality,
and 3) Do the results have some utility value whether absolutely "true"
or not. 1) was demonstrated to be ultimately impossible to achieve
completely by the work of the mathematician Kurt Goedel - at least for
those systems of knowledge that depend on logic. 2) only works
if you concede that Reality can, in fact, be reliably observed and
analyzed - an unprovable axiom in its own right. 3) is claimed by
adherents of *all* epistemic systems, and cannot ultimately be proven or
disproven completely or absolutely. In short - what you "know" finally
depends on what you *believe* in the first place.

even is able to read our minds so as to determine out motivations and
to clarify what we meant to write, when we make the mistake of writing
something different from what we really mean.

No - I am able to spot a conflict junkie that uses intellectual fraud to
feed their habit. One can pretty much always come up with skepticism of
any argument, position, document, source, or author. This is not deep
thought, it is argument for its own sake. Your motivations are as
irrelevant and uninteresting to me as your person is. It's the ideas you
flog and so artfully disguise as deeply thought out that I've attempted
to refute. I do not claim that I am always or even mostly right. The
topics we debate are too complex for that simple a taxonomy. I merely
claim that your analysis is bogus, your claims to understanding
fraudulent, and your manner of argument and counter-argument a sham.

Other than that, I find your commentary compelling ...

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Tim Daneliuk
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