wrote in message
oups.com...
DEAFENING SILENCE

NMnot Taylor Kingston has lost interest in
whether his ally Edward Winter has engaged in
repeated serial lying when claiming copyright for
photographs that are either in the USCF photo
morgue or owned outright by the USCF after its
purchase of Chess Review. We knew NMnot's
attention span would wander. As for word from
ChessCafe, the silence is deafening. -- - Larry Parr

Dear Phil Innes,

Taylor Kingston's attention still wanders. No doubt.

The deafening silence about Edward Winter's
claim at the ChessCafe to own many hundreds of
photographs would test any hearing aid. Our NMnot
does not wish to discuss the subject, and as a
libertarian, I support his right to silence.

Dear Lawrence H. Parr,

You mean silence now, rather than then? Do you support the right to be
other-than-silent about stating unsubstantiated 'facts' when the goal is
actually to render others silent on the subject?

Nor, Phil, need Mr. 2300+ Elo discuss his career
under false names on this forum, when he then praised
his own postings! If he were to speak frankly, I imagine
the explanation would run as follows: "I regard
myself as an honest man. In a moment of weakness,
caused by constant attacks from evil agents such as Sam
Sloan and Larry Parr, I took to adopting false names in order
to praise myself. This was wrong, but my fundamental essence
remains sound."

Well, sure. But it seems we are ever conflating topic and personality, as if
usenet discussion of chess were following Saul up that old road, until we
come to Paul. But this is a philosophy - and a biblical but untestable
factor would be to assess Saul's and Paul's chess games and see if we can
tell any difference. grin

Perhaps a more modern analogy would be Wagner - is his music less
interesting to you after you discover Herr Wolfie liked him?

What I can't determine about Lord K is if he can determine anything about
his Self, from his behavior, or if these are synonyms to him - and further,
some measure of looking at chess histories as necessarily collaborative
efforts where it is more important to qualify how you know something, rather
than advocate the same thing. Nothing wrong with advocacy as such, but
advocacy ain't history.

Something like that.

It helps to place oneself in the other guy's
shoes. By the way, my response to NMnot and the above
would be that no fundamentally sound moral personality
would be knocked from its moorings by attacks on these
chess forums -- of all places.

I think an exception is that if usenet rhetoric was your actual base of
sense. And any rhetoric is a form of self promotion and attempt to influence
other people. This comes to grief when we discover that other people
actually have a different basis, one we cannot understand, and while we can
see their ideas are imperfect, or not perfectly represented to us, we can't
tell one from t'other! [ROFL]

If NMnot were facing ruination, if he were
struggling to keep family together and the like, then
lapses would be far more understandable. None of us
can say with certainty what we would do in similar
circumstances. But when one permits ego to prompt
serial lying about one's identity here, then one is
not, in truth, a rock-ribbed personification of ethics.

In truth, contra NMnot's claim, he does not
entertain "standards." Except, to be sure, low ones.

I am not minded to be so severe [albeit, trashing other people in every -
yes, every post ain't likable, unless you likes your likings on the
dark-side]. I think the difficulty with Anons or pseudo-identities seems to
be this: that general readers attain a sense from real posters who own what
they say as emerging from their own experiences, as a natural perspective.
If you cannot refer to your real life then you are perforce reduced to
rather hypothetical representations of what you don't admit or even know
['pathic' discourses], and an abandonment of personal verisimilitude
entirely, and you hitch-hike on other people's lives, which is indeed to
live a ghostly second-hand and even vampiric form of existence.

But mostly I find this absent-persona stuff so boring! It so rarely contains
any natural feeling for the game, certainly not enough to talk about it
directly with other adults - and this eliminates real conversation, and only
allows satirical interrogation as means of public discourse.

That word 'standards' is interesting. It is similar to 'morals' the real
sense of which emerges from [L.] MORES, which means custom - and in fact
indifferently represents both high and low custom - and had no 'moral' sense
to it at all! But was a reflection of what people actually did, rather than
eg, what they said they did, and any rhetoric of preference or
interpretation.

Perhaps significantly in order to find our modern sense of 'standard' we
have to regress from Rome to Greece, since the Romans had not much need of
ETHICS when force would do! And Greek ethics were of 2 types - the lowest
standard was called the Law. Other and higher standards were required
elsewhere, either as specific agreements to enter some realm of life, or as
elected standards for personal life.

It is only in sacred writings of all cultures that we see a concinnity; a
conjunctio of these two factors, and what happens then! Such writings are
reflected in religions, but essentially I use the term 'sacred'
deliberately - with the sense of its zyzygous relationship to profane - and
indeed one cannot exist without the other!

Interestingly I have tried some of these [simple, sure, but simple is hard!]
ideas on people from differing cultures, and with religious people too. They
can agree that it would form what they understand to be the basis of their
own deep culture - and indeed, they would further agree to accord with
anyone on such a basis from other cultures.

That, Sir, I suggest is a significant agreement.

Meanwhile, the very modest arena of chess does form one social function
which is /also/ socially valuable in all cultures. It is a form of
engagement of aggression into a /ritual/ conflict which stands between
tensions and sending the bombers, or blasting away with the Saturday-night
special. One struggles to think of other cultural intercessionary activities
which are available to anyone the same way.

Cordially, Phil Innes