--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <sparaig@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > ...and I have never > > > > > > > been nominated for Usenet Kook of the Year. :-) > > > > > > > > > > > > By Sherilyn, one of her more desperate moves. > > > > > > > > > > I wouldn't worry about it that much. You only > > > > > got about 40 votes, mainly from your "fans" on > > > > > alt.meditation.transcendental and sci.skeptic. > > > > > > > > Um, I never worried about it at all. But > > > > apparently it was a big enough deal for you > > > > that you actually had to go count the votes. > > > > > > Nope. Someone on sci.skeptic kept track. They were > > > quite amused by you. > > > > > > I presume they were all "angry and usually dishonest > > > critics of TM," too? :-) > > > > In general, yeah. Non-angry and usually honest critics > > of anything don't indulge in ad hoc web-sites, ad hominem > > attacks, etc., on proponents of what they are critical of. > > You're trying to pull the same propaganda stunt > that Judy runs here. These people didn't come > down on Judy because she was a "TMer," ferchris- > sakes; they came down on her because she's JUDY.
Ah, no, in fact they came down on me--and Lawson-- first and foremost because we were defending what they considered a pseudoscience and a scam. They go after *anybody* who tries to argue for anything that is not, in their view, scientific. That's pretty much the purpose of the group, as its name implies. Secondarily, they came down on me and Lawson because we were able to demonstrate that they were largely uninformed about TM. > I followed sci.skeptic for a while. They did NOT > rag on TMers because they were TMers. They ragged > on abusive, arrogant posters because they were > abusive and arrogant. That's where Judy fit in. Not true. If you had really been following the discussions, you'd know we were polite at first. They were not, from the start. Any aggressiveness on our part came only after they'd been insulting and abusing *us*. (As to "arrogance," it's hard to think of anything more arrogant than dumping on something one knows virtually nothing about. The sci.skeptic posters were among the most arrogant and abusive I've ever encountered, not just to me by any means, but to anyone who dared espouse a nonmainstream view.) > It's all about her personality, and how she > wields it. It wouldn't have mattered to those > people if she had been a member of a cargo cult > from the South Pacific; they'd still have found > her tactics repugnant. That would be the "tactics" of pointing out that they didn't know what they were talking about. Yes, they sure did find that repugnant. (Barry gets tangled up in his rhetoric again above; he didn't mean to cite "cargo cults", of course; he meant to say they would have found my "tactics" repugnant even if I had been arguing with them about something respectably scientific in which I was well versed.) *That* is what you're > trying to obscure by claiming that they reacted > to her as they did because she was a "TMer." Lawson was referring to the Web site owners-- specifically Skolnick, Kellett, and Sherilyn, not the members of sci.skeptic. (This post of Barry's is an example of the non- sequitur slamming of TMers I mentioned earlier, by the way. He knows Lawson wasn't referring to the sci.skeptic folks, but he hoped others would not, so he pretended he didn't in order to irrelevantly slam Lawson and me.)
