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Adieu, TMS:

You’re right about one thing. There’s no point in continuing this, whether or not anyone continues to read the thread.

Regarding my “ad hominem” attacks, if you paid attention (which you evidently do not) you’d notice that with one exception they’re all directed at your debating style and your arguments rather than at you as a person. You, however, wasted no time in calling me personally a “stalinist,” whatever that means in your tortured lexicon, following that up with even more explicit suggestions about my character. You even thought to catch me out by challenging my scientific credentials, but dropped that like a hot rock, when it turned out that I actually do qualify as an expert in science.

Calling you sloppy is actually a bit too kind. You’re one of the poorest debaters I’ve ever encountered, careless with words and concepts, misquoting, exaggerating, and even fabricating statements that you attribute to your opponent and throwing out masses of unconnected thoughts as though they actually mean something. Your extended exegesis regarding stalinism begins with the equation, “Communist = Stalinist”, which is flat out wrong. There were and are many forms of communism, only one of which could be called Stalinism and that considered an aberration by most historians. You state that the terms are “all inclusive,” when you probably meant “identical” but this is typical of your slapdash style. Then you go on to describe characteristics that are common to all tyrannical regimes as if they were unique to Stalinism.

Like a blind squirrel, rooting around in the litter of your posts, you finally come up with a more appropriate insult – at least more in line with your previous attacks on me, by calling me “authoritarian.” However, you neglect to explain how someone who states “I agree wholeheartedly with the principle of free and open debate,” and that everyone has a right to decide the goals and outcomes of public policy can possibly qualify as authoritarian. My point, which you might have recognized, if you weren’t so focused on your own exalted self-image as the “Defender of Freedom”, is that there is a valid distinction between debates over goals and outcomes and debates over implementation of policy. Your position seems pretty clearly to be “What the hell, it’s a free country, let the passengers run the ship.” I say, let the passengers decide where to go, but let the crew (experts and elitists all) decide how to get there. That’s why we don’t let people without architectural training put up public buildings, why we license health professionals, why we require pilots of commercial airliners to satisfy rigorous requirements. In fact, the list of instances in which society requires elite training as a qualification for making decisions affecting the common welfare is almost endless.

The education of our children clearly falls into this category. And, while anyone has the right to express an opinion about the end result of that training, when it comes to imparting scientific understanding, people who have no scientific qualifications should not be allowed to determine what children are taught. I imagine you still don’t like this, because it is admittedly elitist and that seems to offend you. (Actually I've begun to understand why.) However it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination authoritarian, except perhaps in your imagination.

It may seem that I don’t like you and that’s a fact. I called you a jerk, not because you’re a sloppy thinker, not because you’re uninformed, not because you have an inflated opinion of yourself – all of which is true – but because from the outset you took it upon yourself to insult me, for instance by calling me “Comrade ajhil”, rather than by addressing the substance of my posts.

And with that, I’m done with you.