Spotlight on Erik Simpson

[Peter Nyikos]

In his interactions with me, Erik has consistently behaved
like a loyal henchman of John Harshman. For instance, he has never
uttered anything negative about Harshman in any of the
threads in which the three of us are participating,
while being recklessly free and easy with unsupportable
negative comments about and to me, usually in a way that supports
Harshman's own disparagements.

None of this would be worth starting a thread on, were it not the
case that Erik Simpson is one the most insincere, para-xenophobic,
and hypocritical regulars I have encountered on talk.origins,
and these reprehensible traits often dovetail perfectly with
Harshman's own dirty debating tactics.


These are serious charges, I know, but am prepared to fully justify them.
For instance, the following post, done just before Christmas, has so
many layers and varieties of insincerity and hypocrisy that it would
take at least three posts to lay them all bare:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/EYBV-L1QGs4/1trt1DHbCAAJ
Message-ID: <eae60900-5936-4cf4...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Games Harshman Plays I: Snip-n-Domineer
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015 21:20:12 -0800 (PST)

However, a lot can be gleaned from all that is left above his words--
Erik is a habitual bottom-poster, and the words he left in, most
of them by me, give the reader a good start already; note that he
doesn't try to address a single specific challenge by me. Note, for
example, how he acted as though I had accused him of lying to ME, when it
was to Harshman that he lied about what he had told me.


The following, though, is a much better example of him working
hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
take another post just to explain how that worked.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> The following, though, is a much better example of him working
> hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
> take another post just to explain how that worked.
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
> Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
> Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)

Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
year and a half old, but the fact is that I completely missed its
significance until last December, due to the New Google Groups
habit of hiding long text which is not interspersed with newer text.

Up to last December, I thought that this post of Erik's was in
reply to Harshman, and it was only when I had another look at it,
and clicked on "- show quoted text - that I saw that it was in
reply to a post in which I showed how Harshman had deceived people
about on that thread.

Harshman had been indulging in one dirty debating tactic after
another to exonerate his fellow anti-Feduccia fanatic, Richard Prum,
of having written an article attacking Feduccia in a thoroughly
incompetent (AT BEST) way.

I had kept showing Prum's grounds to be spurious, and Harshman
indulged in sneaky evasion of the plain meaning of what Prum had
written. He even lied about what Prum had done, as I wrote in
the post to which Erik was replying:

___________________repost____________________________
On Tuesday, July 1, 2014 7:07:56 PM UTC-4, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:

> More relevantly as far as the substantive issues go, Harshman made
> an indefensible claim about Prum's 2003 article:

> "Prum is pointing out that not only is Longisquama not a very
> informative fossil, it does nothing for Feduccia's ideas
> even if it's the closest relative of birds."

> Prum made no such "pointing out" as that last clause. He
> baldly states that Feduccia thinks it is the closest relative
> of birds, and lets it go at that. See the bottom of page 557:

> http://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/prum_2003_auk_rebuttal.pdf

What's more, I have repeatedly shown that it DOES make a huge
difference to Feduccia's ideas, and Harshman has produced a steady
stream of dirty tactics to avoid facing up to this issue. And so
I wrote:

> This was the last straw and a clear thumbing of Harhsman's
> nose at my warning not to engage in any more silly games.

Peter Nyikos
__________________________end of post archived at

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/6MRD1kEOACMJ
Message-ID: <8e543af9-6c06-427c...@googlegroups.com>

Erik's reply would read much more naturally if he were "talking" to
Harshman, which is why I was fooled for so long:

I have serious doubts that Feduccia would recognize 'his' theory
in the unlikely event that Peter would ever explain what Peter's
concept of that theory actually is.

As it is, it is surrealistic in the way it completely ignores
what I wrote; in fact, if one were to replace "Peter" with "Prum"
in both places, it just might be spot on.

But be that as it may, the fact is that Erik was aiding and abetting
Harshman in Harshman's unrelenting campaign to blow smoke on what
Prum was actually doing in his article.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics
U. of S. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--

[John Harshman]

On 4/28/16 5:50 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

Here, did some editing to eliminate superfluous verbiage:

> None of this would be worth starting a thread on

Hope that helps.

[Peter Nyikos]

It helps you, temporarily. The more damning the evidence against
you and your henchman Erik, the more you call it 'garbage' without
lifting a finger to disprove or even DENY its incriminating nature.

It took me a long time to see just how close you are to being
a complete ethical nihilist, but the above paragraph is an
outcome of that realization.

But don't worry: your Usenet persona is so much more complicated
than Erik's, that it will probably be 2017 before I will have
amassed a sufficiently many-faceted series of threads on you
to be able to do a "Spotlight on John Harshman" thread.

The spadework will be done by threads like the thread
where I finally let Erik know what I think of him:

Subject: Re: Games Harshman Plays I: Snip-n-Domineer

That opinion was radically changed by my discovery of what
he was doing on his last post on the Prum v. Feduccia thread,
documented in my second post to this thread.

Oh, I didn't talk about that July 2014 post: the time was not
yet ripe for that; I talked instead about his Harhshman-toady
behavior on the thread where he tricked me into treating him
the way I would treat him in sci.bio.paleontology.

Peter Nyikos

[Bill Rogers]

On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 9:33:40 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
> > The following, though, is a much better example of him working
> > hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
> > take another post just to explain how that worked.
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
> > Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
> > Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
> > Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
>
> Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
> year and a half old,

What, a year and a half? Pffft. We've seen you dig up posts far older than that.

[erik simpson]

I am honored by your attention. However, I'm insufficiently honoered to
bother looking up whatever dastardly things I "tricked you into", or whatever
else it is that's bothering you. Please carry on.

[jillery]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:31:57 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
>> The following, though, is a much better example of him working
>> hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
>> take another post just to explain how that worked.
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
>> Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
>> Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
>> Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
>year and a half old, but the fact is that I completely missed its
>significance until last December, due to the New Google Groups
>habit of hiding long text which is not interspersed with newer text.

It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. You have free access to
real news servers and real news readers. It has been explained many
times right here in this NG how to use them. Apparently the only
reason you continue to use GG is so you have an excuse for your
evasions.
--
This space is intentionally not blank.

[jillery]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 19:05:45 -0700 (PDT), Bill Rogers
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 9:33:40 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>
>> > The following, though, is a much better example of him working
>> > hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
>> > take another post just to explain how that worked.
>> >
>> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
>> > Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
>> > Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
>> > Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>> Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
>> year and a half old,
>
>What, a year and a half? Pffft. We've seen you dig up posts far older than that.

And apparently he thinks doing so makes him look clever. In fact, it
makes him look like a pathetic clown.

[Rolf]

"jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:aqs5ib5st91mp1nvg...@4ax.com...

Aha, another newsreader abhorrent. Interesting that the other one of them
here is Ray Martinez.
A coinsidence? Hardly not.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 10:08:39 PM UTC-4, Bill Rogers wrote:
> On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 9:33:40 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >
> > > The following, though, is a much better example of him working
> > > hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
> > > take another post just to explain how that worked.
> > >
> > > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
> > > Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
> > > Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
> > > Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
> >
> > Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
> > year and a half old,
>
> What, a year and a half? Pffft. We've seen you dig up posts far older than that.

And there are those who regularly flame me for doing just that,
sometimes with wild exaggerations as to how often I do it, and how
long ago the post was, and who play "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil"
when others do it to me.

But that's just par for the course in this cesspool of a newsgroup.
Hardly something to start a new thread about. Erik Simpson is
far worse than the people I have in mind in the preceding
paragraph. For instance, one who used to do it a lot, Paul Gans,
is such a pale shadow of his former self, that he reminds me of
the last of the Merovingian kings.

Anyway, now that I've posted my excuse for being so late in dealing
with this nefarious post of Erik's, I am merely being flamed for not
subscribing to news feeds whose superiority to NGG has never been
adequately explained to me. [And one alleged superiority, that
"__________ is threaded" turns out to have been misleading. I can now see
exactly which post any given post is in reply to, right here in NGG.]

Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:14:00 +0200, "Rolf" <rolf.a...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>"jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>news:aqs5ib5st91mp1nvg...@4ax.com...
>> On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:31:57 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
>>>On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 8:53:42 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>
>>>> The following, though, is a much better example of him working
>>>> hand in glove with Harshman in a deceitful way, and it will
>>>> take another post just to explain how that worked.
>>>>
>>>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/d_Dnvlyve2MJ
>>>> Message-ID: <0934eb85-a377-475e...@googlegroups.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins
>>>> Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
>>>
>>>Some may raise their eyebrows over me dealing with a post over a
>>>year and a half old, but the fact is that I completely missed its
>>>significance until last December, due to the New Google Groups
>>>habit of hiding long text which is not interspersed with newer text.
>>
>>
>> It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. You have free access to
>> real news servers and real news readers. It has been explained many
>> times right here in this NG how to use them. Apparently the only
>> reason you continue to use GG is so you have an excuse for your
>> evasions.
>

>Aha, another newsreader abhorrent. Interesting that the other one of them
>here is Ray Martinez.
>A coinsidence? Hardly not.

And that's not the only thing Ray and rockhead have in common. The
correlation of their common characteristics is compelling.

[jillery]

Then quit your bitchin' and comment in a timely manner.

[Peter Nyikos]

In this, too, you behave as though Harshman were your role model. See my
first paragraph in the post to which you are replying.

You, too, strike me as flirting with ethical nihilism where your insincere,
irresponsible behavior is concerned. Your use of "dastardly" when you know
damn well that you tricked me into treating you with kid gloves,
like I do on s.b.p., is highly symptomatic of that.

Of course, YOU did not treat me with kid gloves on the thread where
you tricked me. A mailed fist is closer to the truth.

Also like Harshman, you can dish it out, but you can't take it.
You lacked the minimal backbone to reply to my post where your
support of Harshman's dirty tactics wrt Prum are described, preferring
to reply to one where Harshman is more in the hot seat than you are.
Was it done to deflect attention from him, the way he deflected attention
from you with his post?

> Please carry on.

I did. I revived that old thread where you and Harshman teamed up
to deflect attention from Prum's illogic and its central role
in his screed against Feduccia. I did it by replying directly to
the post of yours that I mentioned in my OP and talked at length
about in my second post, the one neither you nor Harshman has the
backbone to reply to.

I added some more details to bring your and Harshman's deceitful
shenanigans into sharper focus. See:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/X_sZoDz1dpA/yQ_MQy3PMQAJ
Message-ID: <0fc399d7-71b2-4116...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: How Prum tried to discredit Feduccia on bird origins

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:24:13 -0700 (PDT)

Enjoy.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics
U. of S. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--

http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

[erik simpson]

On Friday, April 29, 2016 at 12:48:36 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> <snip ranting>

>
> Enjoy.
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor of Mathematics
> U. of S. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

I am. Is there anything else You need?

[*Hemidactylus*]

No. Just putting your name (or any name) in a thread title is sufficient
(paging Pagano). What did you do to earn such an honor? Oh yeah you are
Harshman's henchman. Allegedly I am a minion who is tasked with emailing
Harshman with negative stuff about him except when Harshman starts
annoying me, like when I talked about my Gould and Coyne readings. I
guess I cannot serve as Harshhenchman after those heresies.

I offended Nyikos by posting an exploding head from a cult horror movie
called Scanners. He after that went on the Hemi is certifiably nuts
trope. Consider yourself lucky.

Ironically Nyikos is capable of putting together a stream of coherent
sentences in long-winded succession, which proves he's not a bot. I am
not so sure of others here such as Steady Eddie, Otangelo, and Glenn.
The latter might not be a bot, but maybe got taken by the Singularity
(odes of Terminator). Ray isn't a bot. He strings together sentences
that to his credit haven't been copy/pasted. Actually Otangelo has been
absent of late. My guess is he broke the ability to Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on his
keyboard and had a meltdown.

One wonders what the Nyikos family dinner table rules are. For the past
couple years he must abide by the no-Harshman rule imposed by
significant others, but you might recently have slipped into between
passed salt and ketchup requests with annoyed eye-rolls. You should be
dinner conversation banned soon enough.

Hemi (not Harshhenchman)

[Peter Nyikos]

Don't be ridiculous. I didn't *need* for you to enjoy being exposed as
a willing cooperator in deceitful behavior by Harshman. Nor did I
*need* for you to label damning evidence against you as "ranting."

But it IS nice to see some indications that when you claimed to be sincere
in everything, back in December, you enjoyed posting a claim you knew
to be insincere.

But my conscience impels me to let readers know you aren't ALL bad.
You have actually been behaving according to our agreement all week
in sci.bio.paleontology. I am referring to our agreement to treat
that newsgroup as a kind of embassy, where we lay aside our personal
antagonisms and behave like good ambassadors.

Harshman, on the other hand, has been flouting that agreement more
and more strongly. I caught him in a serious violation earlier
this week:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/sci.bio.paleontology/mZ5FiNsecRg/YW5Zo_o0BgAJ
Message-ID: <b46cce89-b35f-4d78...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Temnospondyl phylogeny correction to Tolweb
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2016 16:47:33 -0700 (PDT)

And just today, I caught him in a serious misreading of
something Romer wrote in his classic _Vertebrate Paleontology_:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/sci.bio.paleontology/hobXNAaPGQ0/0WvMeBzLBgAJ
Message-ID: <072144d0-3b81-47ef...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Mammal-like reptile found living with mammals for millions of years
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:38:49 -0700 (PDT)

So far from acknowledging his mistake, he indulged in one dirty
dirty debating tactic after another in his reply to the post
I linked just now.

And so, the only reply he'll get in s.b.p. from me is an announcement that
a reply has been posted in talk.origins.

But that all that can wait until Monday or maybe even later.

The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

[The original, by Epicurus, had "the gods" in place of "justice," but since
the two of you are proudly atheistic, I substituted something to which you
two at least have to pay lip service.]

Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

Stuff it, Peter. I was considering apologizing for ny last post on the grounds
of snarkiness. However, I won't. This is my last reply on this thread.

1) I have NEVER tried to "trick" you into anything,

2) I have NEVER "come to the defence of Harshman when you had him on the ropes",
or at any other time. I don't recall any necessity for that when you've been
arguing with him, for that matter.

3) I don't know what you consider "insincerity" unless you mean joking. For the record, I believe (sincerely) that you are a self-aggrandizing, pompous
jerk. Now you can ignore it or brood over it, it's of no importance to me.

[Peter Nyikos]

Oh, please, Br'er Erik, don't fling me into that briar patch! :-)

> 1) I have NEVER tried to "trick" you into anything,

Tell me another.

> 2) I have NEVER "come to the defence of Harshman when you had him on the ropes",

You are misquoting. I wrote "in the hot seat." You may not be
sufficiently acquainted with colloquial English to know the
difference, so I'll tell you.

"On the ropes" is bragging of a near-victory, a claim that the opponent
is in dire straits. "In the hot seat" simply means being vigorously
attacked.

"Keeping his feet to the fire" is intermediate between the two expressions.

And with you as his loyal henchman, and people shying away from
supporting me because of you and others [1],
it is a safe bet that I will never have Harshman on the ropes in the
foreseeable future. [2]


<snip of things to be dealt with in separate reply>


[1] This includes at least one person who is frequently at odds
with Harshman, but who hates me far more than him. With so many
people repeating scuttlebutt against me, anyone who is not a troll
could not be expected to risk offending them, but would be concerned
that some of that scuttlebutt just might turn out to be true.

[2] I am, however, keeping his feet to the fire in the thread
I set up yesterday,

How Close Did "Prince Michael" Come to Describing John Harshman?
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.origins/l9H1BPTH3BA

So far, I am happily alone in that "briar patch". You and Harshman
didn't think I'd be disappointed if you kept away from that thread,
did you?

Anyway, that thread has so far been focused on his s.b.p. travesty
that I referred to above with:

But that all that can wait until Monday or maybe even later.

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, April 29, 2016 at 10:48:37 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

Repeating a bit, for continuity:

> 2) I have NEVER "come to the defence of Harshman when you had him on the ropes",

I dealt with that misquote in my earlier reply.

> or at any other time. I don't recall any necessity for that when you've been
> arguing with him, for that matter.

Yet you indulged in it many times. The Prum v. Feduccia thread was
far from the only one in which you backed Harshman to the hilt
when there was not only no necessity to do so, but was a clear
demonstration of your admitted love of mischief.

> 3) I don't know what you consider "insincerity" unless you mean joking.

Only a dishonest, insincere person would label all the flaming you
did of me as "joking". Just look at the post by YOU that I linked
in the OP:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/EYBV-L1QGs4/1trt1DHbCAAJ
Message-ID: <eae60900-5936-4cf4...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: Games Harshman Plays I: Snip-n-Domineer

Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015 21:20:12 -0800 (PST)

In the OP I had the following to say about it, *inter alia*:

For instance, the following post, done just before Christmas, has so
many layers and varieties of insincerity and hypocrisy that it would
take at least three posts to lay them all bare:

You didn't even have the minimal backbone to reply to my OP;
you spinelessly replied on a sub-thread where Harshman
had cut out everything that could reflect badly on you.

> For the record, I believe (sincerely) that you are a
> self-aggrandizing, pompous jerk.

Claiming to believe something for which one has no evidence,
could easily be a prime example of insincerity, and adding
"(sincerely)" would only make it worse.

Of course, you may be sincerely deluded into thinking
I fit that description. You do strike me as someone
who is dysfunctional in many ways.

> Now you can ignore it or brood over it, it's of no importance to me.

Me, brood over your rantings? No, I will simply continue documenting
what a self- and Harshman-aggrandizing, pompous jerk you are, right on this
thread.

I hardly know where to begin. A series of detailed follow-ups
to that 17 Dec 2015 travesty of yours may be as good a place as any.

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, April 29, 2016 at 8:33:35 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> On 04/29/2016 05:56 PM, erik simpson wrote:
> > On Friday, April 29, 2016 at 12:48:36 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >> <snip ranting>
> >>
> >> Enjoy.
> >>
> >> Peter Nyikos
> >> Professor of Mathematics
> >> U. of S. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
> >> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/
> >
> > I am. Is there anything else You need?
>
> No. Just putting your name (or any name) in a thread title is sufficient
> (paging Pagano). What did you do to earn such an honor?

You know the decisive moment: when I posted my first really strong
indictment of Erik, in reply to which Robert Camp compromised his
integrity by posting a bunch of egregiously false attacks on me.
Each had the completely unrealistic assumption that Erik
was just another run of the mill person among the vast number
who asked me to clarify something.

And then you chimed in, with the highly unrealistic comment
that my saying talk.origins would be a better place without Erik
was the most hateful thing you ever saw in t.o.

> Oh yeah you are
> Harshman's henchman.

That ain't the half of it. Read my OP to this thread, if you have the
minimal backbone to do such a thing.

> Allegedly I am a minion who is tasked with emailing
> Harshman with negative stuff about him

Get real. There were a bunch of people dissing Harshman on a thread
where you were the only person who tried to defend him. I even called
one of them out for being too extreme in his accusations, but I did
say some negative things about Harshman myself, and also quoted the
following *bon mot* by Charles Brenner:

Challenged, you change the subject. That's
not sensible. I'd like to know who you are, what you have done with
John Harshman, and why you are posting in his name.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/yM3vszXTTTc/Uh54CtvUBKkJ
Message-ID: <4142bd91-bb59-47ef...@eh4g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>

Harshman was absent the whole time, and when you left my last
post unanswered, I sort of hoped that, being at loss for a defense,
you would do the decent thing: let Harshman know what was going
on behind his back, so he could defend himself where you were unequal
to the task.

I intended to let him know about it eventually, and I finally did,
and then he called me "paranoid" for expressing the hope that you
had already done the decent thing.

Apparently, Harshman grew up in an environment where anyone who
did a decent thing like that was denounced as a "tattletale"
and came around to thinking like the denouncers.

> except when Harshman starts
> annoying me, like when I talked about my Gould and Coyne readings. I
> guess I cannot serve as Harshhenchman after those heresies.
>
> I offended Nyikos by posting an exploding head from a cult horror movie
> called Scanners. He after that went on the Hemi is certifiably nuts
> trope.

I didn't even know it showed an exploding head until I had expressed
the view that you were mentally unstable. The reasons were quite
different, and I've told you about some of them, including your
egging on Mitchell Coffey when he was attacking me for a factual
statement that I had posted:

> Hold his feet to the fire and make it fucking burn!

Would you like to see some other examples?

> Consider yourself lucky.

Yeah, Erik could really intimidate anyone he wants to by threatening
to be as nasty to them as he was to me, and telling them that if he
carries out that threat, there is nothing they will be able to do about it.

And then he could give them a link to this thread -- without, of course,
hinting anything about just how unscrupulous that thread reveals him to be.

You should be so lucky. :-)

> Ironically Nyikos is capable of putting together a stream of coherent
> sentences in long-winded succession, which proves he's not a bot. I am
> not so sure of others here such as Steady Eddie, Otangelo, and Glenn.
> The latter might not be a bot, but maybe got taken by the Singularity
> (odes of Terminator). Ray isn't a bot. He strings together sentences
> that to his credit haven't been copy/pasted.

Unfortunately, Ray has used that ability to be far worse than a mere bot.

>Actually Otangelo has been
> absent of late. My guess is he broke the ability to Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on his
> keyboard and had a meltdown.
>
> One wonders what the Nyikos family dinner table rules are. For the past
> couple years he must abide by the no-Harshman rule imposed by
> significant others,

I never bothered to tell them about Harshman, and it's not on
account of such (nonexistent) rules, but simply because I don't
think any of them would profit at this point from knowing that
people like him exist on this planet.

The same applies to you and Erik, of course, along with the others
I have named. [Charles Brenner may be an exception, but I know next
to nothing about him.]

> but you might recently have slipped into between
> passed salt and ketchup requests with annoyed eye-rolls. You should be
> dinner conversation banned soon enough.

Dream on. At least it might make you a little less inclined to tell
others to make my foot burn.

> Hemi (not Harshhenchman)

I never said you were one, and your behavior never suggested you
were one.

Peter Nyikos