I've reluctantly asked Michael not to post in the Arena any more, and to remove my registration from his site. This is because while I don't mind being called stupid, ignorant, mistaken, or anything else of that sort, I am NOT prepared to be dubbed 'dishonest'.
If Michael, or anyone else, believes that because I disagree with their views I am dishonest, that is their problem. I can only envy someone who is so cocksure of their own world-view that they feel free to deal with disagreement in that way.
Anticant's Arena is, and will remain, an 'open' site on which anyone is welcome to post comments - as long as they are sincerely held opinions and do not launch personal attacks on me or anyone else posting here.
I may be old-fashioned, but I continue to believe, as I always have done, that to call your opponent dishonest, unless you have tangible proof, is a blow below the belt and breaches the Queensberry Rules of debate.
There are all too many perfectly sincere people whose views I consider lunatic, and criticise here and elsewhere. But the fact that they are barmy doesn't make them dishonest. Things might be simpler if they were!
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Not a problem, I have an aversion to debating with anyone who's unable to be honest, frankly it's a waste of time.
As Michael again says that I am "unable to be honest", I want nothing further to do with him. Dishonesty is about deliberate misrepresentation. If I have misrepresented Michael's views in an over-hastily written comment, it was not deliberate, and no dishonesty was involved or intended, whatever he may think.
Time to move on.
(I Am moving forward, rather off-topic, with some /additional/ observations on the matter of the epistemological problems /common/ to science and religion -- Wook)
A Great difficulty which science perhaps recognises better in a projected form is, precisely, /solipsism/; and, in such a connexion, the religious problem is increasingly readily perceptible. Alas, this insight into the fatal limitation upon religion can only arise when one has /first of all/ withdrawn their 'belief; and, our capacity in large numbers to-day, to 'see through' theology is a gift of the modern age which is now ended. So it is, that whenever I lecture on different aspects of the history of modernism, people are often startled to learn that, in the realm of ideas, there may be an irreducible element /always/ of the self-referential; it is, after all, in denial of this embarrassing circumstance that people so often claim 'superiority' for /their/ particular perceptual gambit. However, so far are we from any actual objectivity, the individual narrative-system in the last analysis is 'theirs' because it is most congenial to their particular natural capacities & emotional limitations/, all as conditioned by the experience of life in their particular familial & social setting. To /try/ to better understand this all as has been often noted before, in science we toil with the demands of, precisely, /material/ reality; my only contribution is to point out that 'thoughts' about 'God' hence are, equally precisely, materially real on the electronic scale -- and, to suggest that, as phantasy accumulates as a kind of static charge in the physical system, this whole mass of photons in Dr Hawking's light-cone /may/ attain to a point of critical mass. /Ie/, for me. /all/ of the /archai/ & divinities dwell in at least in one dimension in the futur; this includes the archetype of /scientire/. It may therefore follow that what both science & religion struggle to perceive is something more, over intervening time, of that future. Arguably, religion /is/ played out for a certain creative minority; and, to the extent that religion is a scientific fact about human being at least, copernican mediocrity /does/ mean that science as a system will likewise play out over time. Belief systems remainder contingent, and (perhaps thus!) entropy remains entropy. This is the dark side of veganism & epistemology:
THE Great terror of the scientific as well as the religious mind is that, of necessity, /all/ of the 'final solutions' by the way must inevitably become just so many rusty & cracked pots full of dead spiders....
You have the same problem that Altrui had when he started his blog.
He lasted only three days before throwing in the towel - after Szwagier and I posted things he didn't agree with.
Yet, I had pointed out the fact that someone claiming to be a libertarian should not be surprised to encounter people who didn't agree with him.
I am making no comments on the merit of the case between you and Richard but know that you have 'an interesting view' as to what should be censored.
I have no such problems in practice despite posting highly contentious articles from time to time.
Look within for a while and be refreshed.
ANYONE Been having a look into Trollope? I just got into a new one (for me), /Sir Harry Hotspur/. The good old stuff, I think. Which brings /you/ to mind, Aunty...did you ever know Mervyn Peake, I wonder?
Nothing whatever to do with a difference of opinion. I don't wish people who accuse me of LYING to post here.
MERVYN Peake, God damn it, I asked about Mervyn Peake and NOT these flagitious other posters! Christ Almighty, Secret Jesuit....
No, I never knew Mervyn Peake. But in the 1960s I had a lot to do with J.B. Priestley and his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. I remember Priestley once saying to me "This country is going through a nervous breakdown". [It was during the Harold Wilson premiership, which ended up with Wilson having one!] I wonder what JB would have said about the times we are living in now, or about his beloved Bradford today. And Maggie Drabble, who wrote Angus Wilson's biography, is a friend of mine.
Oh dear - name dropping again. All a pack of lies, of course, like most of what I write according to some.....
Thanks for moving us on, Emmett.
I am happy to say that Michael and I have now kissed and made up over on the Gatwick Forum, so this unfortunate episode is done and dusted and can be relegated to the recycle bin.
FROM Whence one does, indeed, suspect that you two /will/ re-cycle it all again, hmm? 'Tis only a matter of 'when' & HOW SOON?, that's what we suspect (jaded habitues!). I wonder, thusly, if any of the others should care to have a flyer with me on the side...a pinch to a pound, I call it! I'm putting fifty guineas on 17 to one, myself....
Well said, Emmett - 'tis only a matter of time.
OH, It's just the God-damn shadow...Jung got awful sick of the endless shenanigans, too. Not to mention a chap has his own pet lice which, of course, I'll tell you are /gazelles/!
Not ferrets?
NO Sir, by God...MY cooties are at least OTTERS!
I know a little about Mervyn Peake, Emmett - he lived not far from here. He drew a cartoon caricature of CEMJ = a man AC loves to hate !
I don't hate anyone, Richard. But, yes, I dislike Joad because of his conceit and hypocrisy, and I don't consider him nearly such a brilliant and original thinker as you do. He had the 'gift of the gab', but most of his stuff was derivative and mediocre. He was a puffed up bullfrog.
We all know Michael is a self opinionated prat so why let it bother you?
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