MORAL COWARDICE

The Rev. Walker has asked for a definition of "ratpacker."

This writer coined the term in its current usage on
this forum, and it was predictably copied by Greg Kennedy
(masquerading as help bot). Many of the phrases now used by
Greg and the full ratpackers originated with yours truly. I would
feel flattered except that we are, after all, stranded on Tinytown.

My reference was to those who are too cowardly to buck
Edward Winter's claims (Louie Blair and Taylor Kingston plus
several who used to infest the censored ChessCafe bulletin board)
even when Winter's claims were refuted or, yes, shown to be
fabricated.

The Rev. Walker has recently seen how our NMnot
handles evidence that, say, Eddie Winter fabricated a
mistake that was not made by Larry Evans so as to
compound a minor error made by GM Evans re the
Borochow-Fine game from Pasadena, 1932. There is
no comment from Taylor Kingston.

Louie Blair's technique is to ask endless questions,
many of them weakminded. For the Rev. Walker to know,
my deal with Louie was that we would trade questions.
He would answer one of mine, I would answer one of
his. The old boy could not handle that arrangement,
and we have since been two ships passing in the night.
I write essays, he writes idle questions, some of which
make no sense or cannot be answered as asked.

The battle over Keres that the Rev. Walker is
currently following really began with a review that I
wrote of the Oxford Companion to Chess. Ken Whyld,
one of the Companion's authors, told GM Larry Evans
that he had never been praised so highly (I wrote that
the Companion superseded all previous works of the
type -- which is the highest praise possible in this
kind of endeavour) and damned so heatedly (I noted a
politically scarlet thread running through the entries
on subjects Soviet) in a single review. Indeed,
several of th Soviet entries were evidently dishonest.

Taylor Kingston, among other ratpackers, attacked my
review. I offered to walk the gent through each such entry,
and we could then examine them line by line to discover
whether my charge was accurate.

One of the characteristics of ratpackers is moral cowardice.
They praise themselves under false names (other ratpackers and
semi-ratpackers have adopted false monickers) and they cannot
stand the intellectual heat in the kitchen. They beg off.

For the Rev. Walker's edification, help bot is a chappie
named Greg Kennedy, who works in some factory in Indiana.
He is angry most of the time about not being a grandmaster,
and there was a period on this forum when he argued that he
coulda been a contendah if he had not been marooned among
the cornstalks. He called Indiana a cultural wasteland, and blamed
everything and everyone except himself for his practice of reading
comic books back in the 1960s rather than studying, say, the Roman
comedies of Plautus in the original Latin. Greg left us for many
months to study a bit, and he has since returned as help bot.

He loathes GM Larry Evans for his excellence, detests Fischer,
Kasparov and Keene, and in general envies his intellectual betters.
For the record, he contacted me privately when the intellectual heat
began to scorch.

One of his most outrageous claims wsas that GM Evans "brainwashed"
the American public into supporting Fischer's conditions against
Karpov
in 1975 when, in point of fact, GM Evans was virtually the sole voice
in
Chess Life opposing Fischer's conditions.

Yours, Larry Parr


J.D. Walker wrote:
SBD wrote:
On Nov 20, 4:32 pm, "J.D. Walker" wrote:


Why does he enjoy this? There was a time that he was an award winning
orator and debater at the scholastic level. I know because I tried my
hand at it at an opposing school. I believe that this controversy is,
in large part, a sport to him.

Perhaps you can settle an old question here Rev. Some years back it
was debated that Larry was the way he was because he had (a) his ass
kicked too much in high school; (b). he didn't get his ass kicked
enough in high school.

Larry went to school in a region of more prosperous folks than I. I
doubt that he had to contend with a lot of ass-kicking there.

I, on the other hand, was a bookish, slight fellow with poor eyesight
and a wiry frame. I made the stupid mistake of challenging a fellow who
was a star linebacker on the high school football team to a boxing
match! That was my sole experience with ass-kicking. I needed no more.

If ass-kicking was a more prominent part of Larry's educational
environment, he would have to say... Maybe his biographer will answer
that question in years to come.
--

Cheers,
Rev. J.D. Walker, MsD, U.C.